Chapter 40: Father’s Reign

Naya stared at the parchment in her hands, the three words refusing to settle into anything she could fully understand. The child survived.

"What does this mean?" she asked. "Why doesn’t it say I survived? Why doesn’t it say the baby?"

Marissa didn’t answer right away, her eyes fixed on the folded paper as though it might dissolve if she looked at it too long.

Naya turned the wording over again, feeling the wrongness of it settle deeper. It sounded less like a birth announcement and more like a confirmation, the kind of thing written by someone who’d expected the opposite outcome entirely.

"Who was supposed to die?" Naya asked.

Marissa’s silence stretched long enough to answer the question on its own.

Finally, her mother spoke, her voice unsteady. "You were born during an unusual lunar event. Something happened that night that frightened everyone present. An old healer examined you afterward and told your father and me that you couldn’t remain publicly known."

"Known as what?"

Marissa shook her head, refusing that particular thread. "Someone arrived shortly after your birth. They ordered us to keep you hidden."

"You expect me to believe you don’t know who gave that order?" Naya asked.

"I don’t know their name," Marissa said. "But I know their authority. Your father obeyed without a single argument, and your father doesn’t obey anyone easily."

Naya absorbed that, the picture growing more unsettling with every detail her mother reluctantly surrendered.

She found Ronan waiting in the hallway a short while later and handed him the bracelet and the folded parchment without a word. He studied the symbol on the clasp first, recognition flickering across his face.

"This matches the marking from the village," he said.

"I know."

"Where did you get it?"

She told him everything Marissa had said, watching his expression shift from careful attention into something graver. He wasn’t looking at her with suspicion, the way he once might have. His concern was pointed elsewhere entirely, toward whoever had spent years keeping this buried from the crown itself.

"We need to look through the royal archives properly," he said. "Whoever ordered this had enough authority to make your father obey without hesitation. That kind of power doesn’t simply vanish."

"You think whoever gave that order could still be alive?"

"If they were powerful enough then," Ronan said, "we shouldn’t assume they’re powerless now."

He suggested taking the bracelet and parchment back to the palace for proper examination, and Naya’s first instinct was to refuse. She’d spent her entire childhood having decisions made about her without her knowledge, powerful people examining her life from a distance and deciding what she was allowed to understand about herself.

"I’m not asking you to hand it over and disappear from the investigation," Ronan said, reading the resistance on her face immediately. "I’m asking to look into this with you."

"You once made decisions about me without listening to a single thing I said," Naya reminded him.

"I did," he admitted, no defensiveness in it. "And I don’t intend to make that mistake again."

She studied him for a long moment before finally nodding, the bracelet still resting in her palm.

It was while turning it over one more time that she noticed something odd about the clasp, a seam too precise to be decorative. She showed it to Ronan, and together they worked the tiny mechanism loose, revealing a hidden compartment no larger than a fingernail.

Inside sat a minuscule strip of parchment, rolled tight enough that it had survived untouched for years. Naya unrolled it carefully, finding a date and a single name written in faded ink.

The date matched her birth exactly.

The name belonged to neither Ripley nor Veyr.

"Do you recognize it?" she asked.

Ronan shook his head slowly. "No. But given everything else we’ve found, it’s likely tied to the second bloodline mentioned in the old vault record."

Naya stared at the unfamiliar name, turning it over in her mind. Why had her mother kept something so small hidden for this long? And more troubling still, why had someone concealed this particular name inside a bracelet meant for a newborn, as though it needed protecting from the moment she was born?

The weight of it all settled over her at once, and she sank onto the edge of a nearby bench, suddenly exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.

"I’m not afraid of finding out I’m different," she admitted quietly. "I’m afraid of finding out my entire childhood was built on a lie."

Ronan sat beside her. "You don’t have to face that alone."

"Would you still say that," she asked, "if the truth changed everything you thought you knew about me?"

He considered the question seriously, not rushing past it the way she half expected. "I married you without knowing who you were," he said. "I learned to trust you without knowing where you came from. I don’t need your bloodline to decide what you mean to me."

Naya felt something in her chest loosen at that, the fear that had been tightening around her all evening easing just slightly. She didn’t need another kiss to understand what he meant. The honesty in his voice carried more weight than anything physical could have.

They returned to the palace the following day, and Ronan brought her directly to the restricted archives rather than making her wait for permission or explanation. Darius was already there, a stack of genealogical records laid out across the long table, prepared before they’d even arrived.

They searched for the unfamiliar name from the bracelet, page after page yielding nothing at first. Then Darius paused over a badly damaged section of an older record, the ink faded and the page’s edge cleanly cut rather than naturally worn.

"Here," he said. "This bloodline was officially declared extinct decades ago."

Naya leaned in, reading the fragment that remained. The document referenced an agreement involving the surviving child, and beside the entry, in handwriting that matched the vault record they’d found before, sat her own birth date.

Part of the page had been deliberately removed.

"Someone didn’t lose this," Ronan said, his jaw tightening. "Someone cut it away on purpose."

"Who had access to these archives?" Naya asked.

Darius pulled a separate list, scanning through names collected over years of restricted entry logs. "Several people, over time. Council members, senior aides, a handful of scholars given special permission."

Naya studied the list, none of the names meaning anything to her yet, though she suspected that would change eventually.

Just as she began to feel they’d reached another dead end, Darius went still, his eyes fixed on something further down the access log.

"This isn’t recent," he said slowly.

"What isn’t?" Ronan asked.

"The restricted genealogy wasn’t accessed when the pages were removed years ago. It was accessed the night Naya was born." Darius pointed to a faded entry beside the old record. "There’s a royal authorization mark here."

Ronan leaned over the page, and Naya watched his expression shift the moment he recognized the seal pressed into the corner.

"Whose seal is that?" Naya asked.

Ronan’s jaw tightened. "Someone from my father’s reign."

Naya’s stomach dropped, the implications spreading faster than she could fully grasp them.

Darius studied the entry a moment longer, then looked up, his voice careful.

"Your Majesty," he said. "The authorization wasn’t issued to hide the child."

He paused, and Naya felt her pulse quicken at whatever was coming next.

"It was issued to find her."