Chapter 4

Kaelvian's Pov

I hadn't opened these files in three years. I sat in my office long after midnight, the city lights bleeding through the window behind me, and stared at a folder I had buried the same week Elvara disappeared.

I told myself back then that reading it again would only make the wound worse. Tonight I didn't have a choice. Someone inside my own organization had walked into her apartment and left a warning on the wall. If I wanted to understand who, I needed to understand what happened three years ago, all of it, not just the version I had let myself believe.

I pulled the old messages first.

They were still saved on a private server, timestamped and archived the way everything in my life was archived. I read through them slowly, the way I should have read them the first time instead of letting grief blur every word together. I can't do this anymore. Don't come looking for me. We were never going to work. At the time, I had read those lines and heard Elvara's voice in my head, sharp and final. Tonight, reading them with a clear mind, something felt wrong.

Elvara never wrote like that.

She used full sentences even when she was angry. She never abbreviated words the way half these messages did. I pulled up an old email she'd sent me years earlier, back when things between us were simple, and set it beside the breakup messages. The rhythm was different. The punctuation was different. It was close enough to fool a grieving man who wasn't looking for the difference. It wasn't close enough to fool me now.

Then I checked the timestamps against the device logs.

Two of the messages had been sent from a phone number that was later deactivated within a week, a number that never appeared in any of Elvara's other communications before or after. Someone had used a burner device to send those final messages, then discarded it the moment the job was done.

My hands were shaking by the time I opened the second folder. This one held the accident report from the night I tore three ligaments in my knee during a routine practice session, the injury that nearly ended my career the same month Elvara vanished. I had always believed it was bad luck, a freak moment on the ice that could happen to anyone.

Reading the maintenance logs now, I saw something I had never bothered to check before. The ice resurfacing equipment had a documented malfunction that week, one that created an uneven patch exactly where I went down. The malfunction had been reported and then quietly resolved without ever reaching my desk.

Someone wanted me injured. Someone wanted me distracted, grieving, and unstable enough that I would believe whatever story I was fed about the woman I loved leaving me.

I sat back in my chair and forced myself to think clearly instead of reacting. Who had access to my private accounts that week? Who had clearance to alter equipment logs and bury maintenance reports? The list wasn't long. My management team. My head of security. My uncle Oryn, who had helped raise me and who I trusted with everything, including the parts of my life I didn't trust anyone else with. And Seralyth, who had access to nearly every system in this building by the time our public relationship began, only weeks after Elvara disappeared.

The timing had never bothered me before. It bothered me now. I didn't want to think about it. I pushed the thought away twice before it forced its way back in anyway. What if the woman I had publicly chosen, the one who stood beside me at every event for the past three years, had been placed there. Not fallen into my life by chance, but positioned.

I needed air before that thought swallowed me whole.

I found Elvara in the guest suite I'd insisted she and Vaeron use once I learned someone had broken into her apartment. She hadn't wanted to accept it. She only agreed after I told her it wasn't a gift, it was a security decision, and she could argue with me about everything else once her son was safe. She was sitting on the floor of the small living room, Vaeron asleep against her shoulder, one hand resting on his back like she could shield him from the world through touch alone.

She looked up when I stepped inside, wary the way she'd been wary of me since the moment I stepped out of that elevator.

I watched her for a moment before speaking. I watched the exhaustion carved into her face, the careful way she held her son even in sleep, the complete absence of anything in this room that suggested she had spent three years living off my money or anyone else's. She had built a small, quiet life for the two of them out of nothing, and she had done it while carrying a fear I was only beginning to understand.

Whatever anger I'd been holding onto since that morning had started to crack days ago. Standing there now, it broke completely.

"Did you leave because you stopped loving me?" I asked.

Her eyes flicked up to mine, startled by the question, and for a moment I thought she wouldn't answer at all.

"No," she said quietly. "I left because loving you became dangerous."

The words hit me harder than anything in those files had. I had spent three years believing she walked away because I wasn't enough, because I chose wrong when the cameras were watching, because whatever we had wasn't strong enough to survive one public mistake. I had built an entire version of myself around that belief, colder, harder, careful never to need anyone the way I had needed her.

And the whole time, she hadn't stopped loving me. She had been protecting me, and protecting our son, from something I hadn't even known to be afraid of.

I didn't trust myself to say anything else. I nodded once, turned, and walked back to my office before she could see what her answer had done to me.

I sat down at my desk and pulled up the last file in the archive, the one I had been avoiding all night. It was labeled with a date from the week Elvara disappeared, flagged confidential by my own security team years ago for reasons I no longer remembered. I clicked it open.

A single photograph filled the screen. It showed Elvara standing outside a building I didn't recognize, her arms crossed, her face tight with something that looked like fear. She wasn't alone. Someone stood beside her in the frame, mid-conversation, one hand resting near Elvara's elbow like they were guiding her through a door she didn't want to walk through.

I leaned closer, certain I was misreading the image, certain my exhausted mind was inventing connections that weren't there.

I wasn't… The woman standing beside Elvara in that photograph, captured on the exact night she vanished from my life, was Seralyth Vane…