365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 10

365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 10 – The Reason

The King cleared the room.

Everyone. All of them. Except Kian, and Marek, who didn’t move and wasn’t ordered to, which told me something about Jaylen Marek that I’d file away and think about later.

“Sit down, Rowan.”

“I’d rather stand.”

“Sit down anyway.”

I sat.

“You’ve been on my campus for over a year,” he said. “Your family reported you missing eleven days ago. Did you know they were looking?”

“They called sixty-three times on the day I arrived. Zero times in the year before it.” My voice came out very level. “I’d been living in a boathouse on their property for eight months, Your Majesty. Two hundred yards from my mother’s window. Nobody knocked.”

Kian Sterling swore under his breath.

The King leaned back and pressed his fingers to his mouth for a long time.

“Marcus Vale,” he said finally, “requested a private audience with me nine days ago. He came into my house and he begged. Marcus Vale has never asked me for anything in twenty-six years.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should,” the King said. “Because he told me why.”

He nodded at Kian, who set a black lacquered box on the table and opened it.

Inside: a photograph in a cracked frame. A young woman, nineteen, in a high-collared dress. Black hair. My

chin. My eyebrows. My mother’s eyes.

“Marguerite Vale,” the King said. “Born 1889. The last daughter born into that bloodline before you.”

The floor went a long way away.

“She’s buried in a field between the Redmont and Silvercrest estates,” I said.

“Yes.” The King’s face was grim. “You closed her case last week without knowing whose grave you were

standing on.”

He told me the rest.

Every hundred years or so, the Vale line produces a daughter. Not often. Seven in three centuries. And every one of them woke up on the morning of their eighteenth birthday able to do something that no one is supposed to be able to do. Two of them heard thoughts. Two of them could sense a lie at fifty paces. One had perfect recall of any room she’d ever stood in.

“And Marguerite?” I said.

“Marguerite could hear a whisper from a mile away, and a thought from the next chair.” The King’s voice was flat. “Her family kept it secret. Then she married an Alpha of a great House who swore on his blood to protect her, and within three years he’d worked out what she was worth.”

Kian said, quietly, “He used her to strip nine Houses. Trade secrets. Adultery. Debts. He’d bring men to dinne

and sit her at the table.”

“When she resisted, he broke her. Slowly. When she was pregnant with a daughter – a daughter with the same gift – she cut her own wrists in a bathtub rather than raise a girl into that house.” The King looked at me. “That House still exists, Rowan. It’s called Hallow. And they have spent a hundred and eighteen years waiting for another Vale girl to be born.”

I sat there and listened to my own pulse.

“My father,” I said. “The morning after my seventeenth birthday. He shut his office door.”

“He called a meeting,” the King said. “Your mother, your brothers, and his two most trusted men. He told them everything. He told them they had three hundred and sixty-five days to prepare, because you would receive your gift the moment you turned eighteen – and that the second Hallow confirmed a Vale daughter existed, you were as good as sold.”

“So they stopped speaking to me,” I said.

“They stopped speaking about you,” the King said. “In every room, on every phone, in every message. Marcus discovered a listening device in his own study nine months ago. He didn’t know how long it had been there, or who else in that house was bought. So they scrubbed you. They scrubbed you out of the conversation, out of the records, out of the calendar. They struck your name from the filings and never wrote it again, and they never explained it to you because a seventeen-year-old who knows she’s a target behaves like a target.”

“They could have told me,” I said, and my voice cracked straight down the middle for the first time in a year. “One sentence. One. ‘Rowan, we love you, we’re protecting you, be patient.”

“Yes,” the King said. “They could have. They were wrong, and it cost them their daughter, and your father

knows it.”

“And the party?” I said. “The fabrics. The clearing. The bookings.”

“Eleven months of planning for your eighteenth birthday,” Kian said, almost kindly. “Every one of your brothers. on a task. Your mother had a list she started the week you were born. They’d invited my father as a witness. That’s the part they got right, actually – they were going to announce you to the Crown publicly, so that Hallow could never take you quietly.”

I thought about six men arguing over fabric samples at a dinner table while their sister ate in silence.

I thought about if I get a baby girl tomorrow, I’ll be over the moon, and my mother ‘collapsing after breakfast

the next day.

I put my face in my hands, and for about four seconds I let it hurt.

Then I sat up.

“None of that matters now,” I said. “Something’s wrong.”

“Explain.”

“Somebody’s been getting into my quarters. No forced entry, nothing taken. Two weeks, maybe less.” I looked at Marek. “Fourteen recruits were expelled from this campus last year, blacklisted from every House on the continent, with nothing left to sell but information. One of them screamed my name in a courtyard.”

Marek’s face changed. “Nolan Shaw.”

“House Shaw,” I said. “Who does House Shaw bank with?”

The King’s expression went to stone.

“House Hallow,” he said.

And then the door banged open, and Larsen was standing there white as paper with a phone in his hand.

“Your Majesty. Commander. It’s House Vale.” He looked at me. “They were ambushed on the coast road an hour ago. Two of her brothers are in surgery.”

I stood up.

“And Giselle Vale is gone.”