Chapter 34: The Letter She Never Sent

You went to the village.

Naya read the line again, then forced herself through the rest of the letter, searching for any explanation of how her father had known. Godric offered none. He simply told her she shouldn’t have gone there, that there were things she wasn’t ready to know, and that she needed to stop asking questions about her own birth.

Then came the line that made her stomach twist.

Your purpose has not changed. Give me the heir.

She read it twice. There was no mention of Ronan’s death this time, no reminder of the second instruction that had haunted her since she’d burned his first letter in the fireplace. Just the heir, repeated with a kind of insistence that hadn’t been there before.

That struck her as strange. Her father had always tied the two demands together, the child and the murder, each one a fallback if the other failed. Now he seemed almost singularly focused on the pregnancy, as though the rest of his plan had quietly fallen away.

She was still staring at the page when the door opened and Ronan stepped inside. She folded the letter instinctively, tucking it beneath her palm before she’d even registered doing it.

He noticed. Of course he noticed.

"Another letter?" he asked.

She hesitated. "Yes."

He waited, giving her space to say more, and for a moment she almost did. The words sat right there at the back of her throat, get pregnant, kill him, everything her father had asked of her since the day she’d become Ronan’s wife. She couldn’t make herself say it.

"When you’re ready," Ronan said, and left without pressing further.

Naya sat there afterward, the folded letter still warm in her hand, feeling worse than if he’d demanded she hand it over. He kept extending trust she hadn’t earned yet, and every time she failed to return it, the weight of that failure settled a little heavier in her chest.

Rather than carry that weight to him, she went to the palace archives instead, determined to find out what her father could possibly want in that abandoned territory. She spent hours combing through old records, and eventually found fragments referencing a settlement that had vanished generations ago, an old bloodline nobody discussed openly, and a royal expedition sent into that region decades earlier. The Ripley name appeared alongside it, tied to the expedition in a way the records didn’t fully explain.

Several pages were missing entirely, torn cleanly from their binding.

Someone had deliberately removed them.

Naya sat back, turning that over in her mind. This wasn’t ancient history left to gather dust. Someone had wanted this buried, and they’d wanted it buried recently enough that the missing pages left obvious gaps rather than faded, forgotten holes.

She found Evelyn later that day and asked about the abandoned territory directly.

Evelyn’s expression sharpened immediately. "Where did you hear about that?"

"I went there. With Ronan."

Evelyn was quiet for a moment. "That region isn’t taught in royal education. It was tied to an old political conflict the crown chose not to revisit."

"Was my family involved?"

Evelyn studied her carefully. "Why are you asking?"

Naya didn’t answer fully, and Evelyn didn’t push for more. Instead she said, quietly, "If your family is involved in something the crown buried, don’t assume they buried it to protect you."

The words settled uncomfortably in Naya’s chest, forcing her to reconsider everything she thought she understood about her father’s motives.

Ronan, meanwhile, had begun his own investigation into the same territory, and what he found troubled him more than Naya’s discovery had. The missing archive pages hadn’t been removed decades ago. The edges were too clean, the dust patterns around the remaining pages too undisturbed. Someone had taken them recently.

That meant whatever secret they were protecting wasn’t simply old history. Someone was actively guarding it in the present.

He called for Darius and asked him to quietly determine who had accessed the restricted archives, and Darius agreed without asking unnecessary questions, already moving toward the task with the same steady competence he brought to everything.

Naya found Ronan again that evening, and though she still couldn’t bring herself to hand over the letter itself, she gave him something.

"My father knew about the village before I ever went there," she said.

Ronan’s expression sharpened. "How?"

"I don’t know." She hesitated, then added, "And he told me to stop asking questions about my birth."

That got his full attention in a way the rest hadn’t. Whatever this was, it wasn’t only political maneuvering anymore. It reached into something about who Naya actually was.

"Whatever your father is hiding," Ronan said, "you don’t have to face it alone."

"Even if it has something to do with my family?"

"Especially then."

The words settled over her quietly, nothing dramatic in the delivery, but she understood exactly what he meant by them. He wasn’t offering protection because she was his wife on paper. He was offering it because she was Naya, and that distinction mattered more to her than she wanted to admit.

Darius arrived not long after, holding a thin folder that he set carefully on the desk between them.

"Someone accessed the restricted records the same night Naya returned from the village," he said.

"Who?" Ronan asked.

Darius gave him a name, someone entirely unremarkable, a mid-level administrator with no obvious ties to the Ripley family or anything resembling a motive.

"There’s something else," Darius added.

He pulled a second, older document from the folder and handed it to Ronan. Naya watched his expression change as he scanned it, his jaw tightening in a way she’d learned to recognize.

He turned the page toward her.

The Ripley name sat printed at the top, exactly where she expected it. But beside it, listed as though connected by blood or history she’d never once heard mentioned, was a second family name entirely unfamiliar to her.

Ronan looked up from the page.

Then at her.