Lyanna's POV
I was reaching for it.
In the dream, the letter sat exactly where I had left it — folded neatly on the table, the candlelight catching the pale edge of the parchment. I could see my own handwriting bleeding faintly through the fold. I reached for it slowly, fingers outstretched, certain of it the way you are certain of things in dreams.
My fingers closed on nothing.
I looked down.
The table was empty.
I reached again — patting the surface, sweeping my hand across the wood, searching. Nothing. Just the cold flat grain of the table beneath my palm and the candle burned completely down to a pool of cold wax.
Panic rose in my chest.
Where is it? It was right here. I left it right here.
Something shifted in the shadows at the edge of the room. A figure. Still and dark and watching me with an expression I couldn't read. I opened my mouth to speak.
Then, I woke up.
My cheek was pressed against the hard surface of the writing table, my arms folded beneath my head, neck stiff and aching from the angle. Grey morning light filled the room — pale and flat, the kind that comes after heavy rain has washed the night completely clean.
For one disoriented moment I didn't move.
Then I remembered.
The letter.
I lifted my head and looked down at the table.
Empty.
I straightened slowly, blinking the sleep from my eyes, telling myself I was still half-dreaming. That the letter had simply slipped to the floor during the night. I looked down. Nothing on the floor. I checked between the table and the wall. Nothing. I dropped to my knees and looked beneath the table, beneath the chair, swept my hand under the narrow gap beneath the writing desk.
Nothing.
I stood up.
My eyes moved to the door. The iron bolt was exactly where I had left it the night before — slid firmly into its bracket, the way I always secured it before sleeping. I crossed the room and checked it anyway, running my fingers along the bolt, confirming what I could already see. Locked and undisturbed.
The window next.
I unlatched it and examined the frame carefully — the outer edge, the sill, the corners where the wood met the stone wall. No scratches. No damage. No sign that anyone had forced it open and pulled it shut again from outside. The latch mechanism on the inside showed no tampering.
I stepped back into the center of the room.
Door locked from inside. Window sealed and undamaged. No other entry point.
And yet the letter was gone.
I pressed my fingers to my mouth and stood very still, thinking. The letter had been beneath my hand when I fell asleep. Not across the room. Not resting somewhere I might have forgotten in exhaustion. Beneath my hand. I had felt it there — the last sensation before sleep took me, the warmth of the parchment still carrying the heat of my palm.
Someone had slipped it out from under my fingers while I slept.
The thought landed in my chest like cold water.
Someone had been close enough to touch me last night. Close enough to feel the warmth of my breath. They had entered a locked room, crossed the floor without waking me, and removed a single folded letter from beneath my sleeping hand with enough care and precision that I hadn't stirred.
That wasn't a theft.
That was a message.
I moved quickly then — checking the small chest where I kept my important documents, rifling through the drawer of the writing table, searching every surface in the room for anything else that might be missing or disturbed. Everything else was exactly as I had left it. Nothing taken. Nothing moved.
Only the letter.
Whoever had come in the night hadn't wanted my belongings. They hadn't wanted to hurt me — if that had been the goal I wouldn't have woken up at all. They had wanted one specific thing. The letter. The letter that contained every detail of what had happened to me the night of the ceremony — the kidnapping, the eastern forest trail, the struggle, the names I didn't yet know but the facts I did.
Someone knew I had written it.
Someone knew what was in it.
And someone had decided, with cold deliberate precision, that Kaelor would never read it.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and pressed both hands flat against my knees, steadying myself. The mate bond pain was still there this morning — duller than last night but present, that low persistent ache that pulsed with every heartbeat like a finger pressing on a wound that hadn't closed. A constant reminder that something remained unresolved between me and the Alpha who had looked at me like I was nothing.
But the missing letter had shifted something inside me.
Last night I had been a woman destroyed by rejection, lying awake in the dark trying to understand her own pain.
This morning I was something else.
Because heartbreak didn't explain a letter vanishing from a locked room. Heartbreak didn't explain someone slipping their hands close enough to touch me in the dark. Heartbreak was personal. Private. Something that happened between two people and their broken promises.
This was something else entirely.
This was someone watching me. Someone who knew my movements, knew my habits, knew I had stayed up late writing. Someone with enough skill or resources to bypass a locked door and leave no trace. Someone who considered a single letter dangerous enough to steal.
Who are you?
I stood up and moved to the window, looking out at the grey morning. The pack territory stretched out beyond the glass — familiar rooftops, familiar paths, the distant outline of the Alpha Citadel sitting heavy against the sky. Somewhere in all of that, behind one of those walls or windows, someone was holding my letter.
Reading my words.
Deciding what to do with them.
The anger came then — slow and quiet and far more dangerous than tears. I had cried last night. I had stumbled home in the rain and pressed my hand against my chest and let grief have its way with me. I had written a letter full of honest desperate words and fallen asleep still reaching for the hope that Kaelor might read them and remember who I was to him.
And someone had stolen that!
I turned away from the window.
My eyes fell on the small desk where the candle had burned to nothing. Beside the cold pool of wax, something caught the morning light. Something small. Something I hadn't noticed in my frantic search of the room because it hadn't been there when I fell asleep.
I crossed to the desk slowly.
It was a single piece of parchment. Small, folded once with no seal and name.
I picked it up with steady hands and opened it.
One line was written in careful, unfamiliar script.
"Stop searching for what they don't want found."
I read it twice.
Then I set it down on the table, stepped back, and looked around the empty room with completely new eyes.
Whoever had taken my letter hadn't just been watching me.
They had been inside this room.
And they had left me a warning.