Chapter 50- A mouse trap
Achille looked at me for a long moment after his apology, and the quiet that settled between us felt almost heavier than the movement filling the room.
Servants continued folding my dresses into trunks and wrapping my books with brown paper.
Lillian kept whispering instructions near the wardrobe while Veronica stood near the windows with her arms crossed, watching every person in the room as if she had already decided where she would hide their bodies if they made one mistake.
The rain outside had softened into a thin silver curtain against the glass, but inside the chamber everything felt sharp and urgent, like a blade held just beneath silk.
Achille moved closer to the bed, but he did not sit.
That alone told me how serious this was.
He remained standing beside me with his hand resting against the carved post, his shoulders tense beneath his dark shirt and his eyes fixed on my face with a focus that made my chest tighten.
He looked exhausted, yes, but not uncertain.
There was sadness in him, and guilt too, but beneath it lived something much colder and far more familiar. Strategy.
"The palace is not safe for you," he said quietly.
The words were simple enough, but they landed like stone in my stomach.
I looked past him at the room, at the walls I had once slowly learned to trust, at the bed where I had slept beside him, at the windows where I watched storms, at the desk where my reports were already being packed away as though someone had reached into my life and decided what pieces were allowed to travel.
"This palace has guards at every door," I said, keeping my voice even because fear had already begun pressing cold hands against my throat.
"It has checkpoints in every hall. My food is watched.
My medicine is watched. I am watched constantly. "
"That is the problem," Achille said.
I frowned.
He glanced toward Veronica, and she gave one brief nod, not permission exactly, but confirmation. "We no longer believe the original poison is the only reason you are not recovering."
The words moved slowly through me. For a moment I only stared at him, waiting for the meaning to rearrange itself into something less terrible. "What does that mean?"
"It means," he said, his voice tightening, "that every time your body begins to heal, something sets you back."
The room seemed to grow quieter around me, though the servants still moved in the background with deliberate care.
A maid passed carrying a stack of folded shawls and slowed near the foot of the bed, her eyes flickering toward Achille before she quickly lowered her head and continued toward the trunk.
I looked down at my hands. One rested over my stomach without my realizing it. The other gripped the blanket tight enough to make my knuckles ache. "You think someone is still poisoning me."
"I know someone is," he said.
My gaze snapped back to his. "How?"
His jaw flexed once. "That is what we need to find out."
I almost laughed, not because anything was funny, but because the situation had become so absurd that my mind tried reaching for humor before terror could sink its teeth in. "My food is tested."
"Yes Before it leaves the kitchen, after it leaves the kitchen, and again after it reaches you," he said immediately.
"The plates are watched. The cups are watched.
The cutlery is changed. Your food is tasted by three separate people who do not know which portion will be yours until the tray reaches the door. "
"Even with your water Stored separately. Sealed. Tested twice. Tea Watched from preparation to serving. clothes Inspected before they enter this room. bedding Changed under guard and checked for powder, oils, needles, residue, insects, and stitching irregularities."
I forced myself to think. If he had decided this much, then he had already turned the problem over from every side.
Achille did not make decisions by fear alone, no matter what he believed about himself.
He could be reckless in love, yes, terrifyingly so, but strategy was the language his mind returned to when survival became necessary. Everything is checked," I said.
"Also tested," Veronica answered before Achille could. Her voice was flat and precise. "Bottles are marked, sealed, and rotated. No one handles them alone. Even the physicians are searched before and after examinations."
My eyes moved toward her. "Then how?"
Veronica's expression did not change, but something in her stillness told me the answer would not comfort me. Achille looked at me carefully, and I hated that care before he spoke.
"We believe someone may be administering something directly."
I stared at him. "Directly?"
His mouth tightened.
My stomach turned cold. "You mean injecting me."
No one answered immediately.
That was answer enough.
I shook my head before I could stop myself. "No."
"Ophelia..."
"No," I said again, sharper this time. "I would notice if someone was shoving a needle into my body."
Achille's expression shifted in a way that made irritation flare through my fear. He looked reluctant. Almost apologetic. "Would you?"
The question offended me more than it frightened me. "Yes."
"You sleep like the dead."
"I do not."
"You have had entire conversations with me half asleep and remembered none of them the next morning."
My mouth opened.
Then closed.
That was not fair, because it was true.
I looked at my husband, but the certainty I wanted to hold onto had cracked.
I did forget things when I woke halfway.
Sometimes I mistook conversations for dreams. Sometimes Elias told me I had answered questions I had no memory of hearing.
Sometimes I woke with blankets arranged differently or a cup moved closer to the bedside table and assumed someone had done it for me.
If someone entered the room while I was deep enough beneath sleep, especially during one of the bad nights when fever and exhaustion swallowed everything, would I know?
Would I remember? Or would my mind fold the intrusion into dreams because the truth was too strange to hold?
Achille saw the question forming in my face.
"That is why you are leaving," he said, softer now.
"Not because I want you away from me. Not because I am sending you away.
Not because I have decided anything over you.
Because here, whoever is doing this has access to too many shadows.
Too many routines. Too many ways to reach you and disappear back into the palace. "
I looked around the room again, but this time it looked different.
The familiar walls became less familiar.
The doors seemed too many. The corridors beyond them too long.
The servants moving quietly through the chamber were from the manor, he had said, but the palace itself suddenly felt crowded with invisible hands.
I had thought being guarded meant being safe.
Now I wondered if being guarded simply meant the enemy knew exactly where to find me.
"So I am supposed to run away with Elias?" I asked quietly.
"No," Achille said.
The answer came so quickly that I looked at him.
Lillian stepped forward, carrying one of my folded shawls against her chest. "My father has to stay here."
For a second the words did not connect. Then I remembered.
Elias. Her father. Not by blood perhaps in the way people counted such things, but in all the ways that seemed to matter at Savannah.
The children there called him father with an ease that but the way she said it was stange.
it was casually, naturally, as though Elias belonging to her had never been in question.
"If he leaves," she continued, her tone bright but her eyes much sharper than before, "everyone will know something happened.
He is your guard. He is always near you.
If he vanishes, the entire palace starts whispering before sunrise.
If Mother leaves, people notice too. If Achilles disappears, obviously everyone panics. "
"But me? I come and go all the time. Half the palace doesn't know what I do, and the other half is smart enough not to ask.
A carriage leaving with manor personnel before dawn is normal.
People leave at night constantly with reports, supplies, messages, prisoners, bodies, whatever dramatic nonsense happens in imperial service. "
"Bodies?" I asked.
She tilted her hand back and forth. "Occasionally."
Veronica sighed.
Lillian quickly added, "Not tonight. Probably."
I stared at her.
She gave me a reassuring smile that reassured me of absolutely nothing.
Achille took my hand then. Slowly enough that I could refuse, firmly enough that I knew he needed the contact as much as I did.
"As far as the palace knows, you remain in this room with me.
The lamps will stay lit. Guards will remain posted.
Meals will still be delivered. Physicians will still come.
Elias will still move in and out as if nothing has changed.
The fewer people who know you are gone, the longer the person responsible continues aiming at an empty bed. "
My fingers tightened around his. "Wont they just simply follow me once they notice i am gone."
"Yes," he said immediately."That is the plan."
The answer made my eyes lift to his.
His face was grim. "Whoever is doing this has become comfortable inside my palace.
They know my routines, your routines, my guards, my physicians, my temper.
They know how to hide here because this place has become their cage as much as mine.
I need them to move. I need them out of this place somewhere i can control easier. "
Veronica's mouth curved faintly, not with humor but with approval. "Here, they are a snake in tall grass. At Savannah, they are a mouse in a room full of cats."
Lillian grinned. "Hungry cats."
Veronica gave her a look.
"What?" Lillian asked. "I am establishing tone."
I looked between them, then back at Achille. "You think the manor is safer."
"I know it is," Veronica said.
There was no arrogance in her voice. Only certainty.
"The palace looks secure because it is armored.
Savannah looks relaxed because it does not need to perform fear to function.
That is the difference. Every person there belongs to the network or is watched by it.
Loyalty cannot be bought easily when people were fed, raised, trained, and protected by the same house.
A maid at court can be bribed. A maid at Savannah knows fourteen ways to break a wrist and reports suspicious behavior before breakfast."
Lillian nodded. "Sometimes during breakfast, if the eggs are slow."
Veronica ignored her. "Everything is inspected. Food, medicine, cloth, letters, gifts, flowers, soil, candles, animals, tools, grain, water, firewood. If a cow wanders through the property, someone checks where it came from, who touched it, what it ate, and whether it is actually a cow."
I stared. "Whether it is actually a cow? How the hell do you check if it's a cow?"
Lillian leaned closer. "It involves a delicious steak dinner after."
Achille's thumb moved once over my knuckles. "It will not be impossible for someone to learn where you went. I do not need it to be impossible. I need it to be impossible for them to touch you once you arrive."
I wanted to argue. I wanted to say no. I wanted to tell him I was tired of being moved because men decided danger for me.
I wanted to tell him that leaving felt too much like being sent away, like being removed from my own life again.
But I could not deny the logic. That was the worst part.
He had thought through every path before placing this before me.
Food, water, medicine, clothing, bedding, servants, physicians, visibility, secrecy, motive, misdirection.
It was all there, layered beneath the urgency.
"You cannot come," I said, and I hated how small my voice became.
His hand tightened. "Not immediately."
The word hurt more than if he had simply said no.
I looked down at our joined hands. His was larger, scarred, warm around mine. "I do not want to be without you."
"I know."
The quiet way he said it nearly undid me.
I looked up. His expression was sad, but steady. Determined. The face of a man choosing a wound he could survive over a loss he could not.
"I do not want you away from me either," he said. "Every instinct I have says to keep you beside me and kill anything that comes near. But that instinct already failed once."
My chest tightened.
His voice lowered. "You told me to do whatever it takes to keep our child safe."
I swallowed.
"This is what it takes."
I hated that.
I hated that he was right.
He saw it on my face and moved closer. "I will come in a few days.
Not weeks. Not when it is convenient. Days.
I need to keep the palace believing you are here long enough for you to reach Savannah and settle behind its walls.
Then I come to you, and I stay as long as I can without giving the game away too soon. "
"And if the person follows you?"
His eyes darkened.
"Then they would have taken the bats and made the last mistake of their life."
The room chilled around that sentence.
There he was.
My husband.
My emperor.
The man who could sit beside a bed with tears in his eyes and still speak of murder like a promise.
His hand remained warm around mine.
His voice softened again. "Trust me."
I looked at him for a long moment.
There was fear in me. Anger too. Grief. Exhaustion.
But beneath all of it, there was something else.
Recognition. He was not running from me this time.
He was not hiding in his office and allowing everyone else to make choices around my pain.
He was standing in front of me, telling me the plan, accepting my questions, answering every one.
He looked sad because he knew it hurt me.
Determined because he would do it anyway.
Not to control me. To protect the life I had begged him to protect.
I hated how much that mattered.
I looked at Lillian. "And i take it you are in charge of protecting me?"
Her expression brightened so quickly it almost startled me. "Yes."
"Should I be concerned?"
"Deeply."
"Lillian," Veronica warned.
"What? My honesty is my charm ."
I studied her, this girl with Veronica's face and none of Veronica's darkness sitting visibly on the surface.
Bubbly. Talkative. Ridiculous. Yet beneath it, I could suddenly see the training.
The way she placed herself near the door without seeming to.
The way her eyes tracked every servant. The way her hands remained free.
The way she smiled and spoke too much while noticing everything.
She was not Veronica.
But she was absolutely her daughter.
I looked back at Achille. "You truly believe this will work."
"I do."
"Not because you are desperate."
"No."
"Not because you are afraid."
"I am afraid," he said, with enough honesty to steal my breath. "But no. This is not fear pretending to be strategy."
I searched his face.
Finally, I looked at the trunks again. My dresses. My books. My reports. My life being packed away before dawn because someone inside this palace had decided my child and I were allowed only slow death.
My hand moved over my stomach.
Then I took a breath.
"All right," I said softly.
Achille's eyes closed for half a second.
Relief.
Pain.
Both.
The sadness in his expression did not disappear, but it softened.