Chapter Text
As soon as she woke up, Rishe felt like she was suffocating. The blankets were too hot and too heavy; she was drowning in them. Familiar and prepared for this, Rishe reached out blindly towards her bedside table and fumbled for the drawer. Tugging it open, her questing fingers quickly found a cool glass vial. She popped the cork off with a flick of her thumb and downed it.
The herbal remedy tasted tannic, but was cool in her throat and provided instant relief. Sitting up, Rishe set the emptied vial down and stretched languidly. It’d be a few years yet until the surpressant patch was available, but she’d finally been able to grow and source all of the herbs she needed to generate the less potent suppression tonic. Already her omega was silent, as it had been for the past few weeks since she’d produced the first batch.
Rishe got up and crossed the room in search for a pitcher of water and a glass. The stuff didn’t taste great, but it got the job done. She’d never had to dose herself quite so frequently before. Some of the alphas in her old lives – Chief Tully, Professor Michael Helvin, and her knight commander to name a few – she’d been in close contact with, but never quite as physically close as her and Arnold were, and never in the same romantic context. That was probably the root cause for the needed dose increase, she reasoned.
Washing her mouth thoroughly, she tried not to think of her wedding rapidly approaching, and what exactly that might entail between her and the crown prince. Even if we do… that… I refuse to go into heat. She’d endured quite enough heats before her first loop, when she’d first learned about the suppressants. And she’d sworn to never endure those torturous nights ever again. Especially here in her seventh loop; she couldn’t afford to be incapacitated like that here in Galkhein, not if she was going to successfully put an end to the war that killed her in every other loop.
A knock roused her from her thoughts. “Lady Rishe?” Elsie called from the other side of the door. She smiled and beckoned in her maid.
Walking across the palace grounds to visit Arnold’s office, something tingled on the edges of her sense. Rishe paused. What was that? A blip of malicious intent, there and gone, but she was sure of it. Casting her emerald gaze around, she tried to pinpoint the source.
“My lady?” Her knights were more than accustomed to her bizarre behavior by now, and knew to trust that suspicious look in her emerald eyes.
“… lets hurry to Prince Arnold.” She had a bad feeling about this.
When they arrived at the crown prince’s office, he and Oliver and a retinue of Arnold’s personal Imperial Guards were already in furious discussions. Everyone looked up as she entered, expressions grim.
“What’s going on?”
Arnold’s hard gaze softened at the concern in her voice, then flicked to Oliver in silent prompt for the beta to fill her in. The prince’s faithful aid brushed back his silver hair and proffered a tri-folded letter to Rishe, the wax seal already broken. “We found this among the paperwork today. It’s a ransom note, for Prince Theodore.”
Rishe’s throat constricted as she plucked the note from Oliver and skimmed it over. As she read, she spoke, “I thought I sensed something suspicious in the castle grounds on the way over here.”
“Where?” Arnold didn’t ask for elaborations on how she’d know – he trusted her senses by now. Rishe specified the location and where she thought the source might have been. With a wave of his hand, Arnold sent the knights out of the room to investigate. Chances are, the spy was long gone, but maybe they could find some clues as to where they’d gone.
Rishe stepped forward and handed the letter back to Oliver as the knights left the room. Concern and determination radiated from her. Arnold reached out and gripped her hand from across the table, a casual action intended by the alpha to soothe her, but her heart rate only skyrocketed as his thumb brushed over her knuckles. She managed to stammer out, “What’s the plan?”
“We were just discussing that.” Deep blue eyes rolled amusedly in her direction. “And I suppose you plan to help.”
It wasn’t a question, but a statement. Rishe clenched her fist in front of her and bobbed her coral head. “Of course. He’s my future brother-in-law!” And a priceless resource for information, she silently added.
An exasperated half chuckle left Arnold. “We could always just pay the ransom and be done with it.” But they both knew it wasn’t the best course of action. To do so was to show weakness in the royal family. Not only would it be unacceptable in the princes’ eyes, but it would elicit attention from the emperor.
“We can’t make any moves to recover Prince Theodore until we determine who the culprits are, or where they might be,” Oliver astutely pointed out.
“We could always try to draw them out,” Rishe thought out loud. “If they went after the second prince, they’re probably too afraid to go directly after Arnold himself. They’d likely jump at the occasion to capture his fiancé. I could bait them.”
“No.” Something fierce crept into Arnold’s voice, and a tremor lanced down her spine at the taste of his alpha. Rishe blanched as she fought the instinct to wilt into the command, even with the tonic suppressing her omega instincts. With a glance in her direction, Arnold let go of her hand, mollified. His voice was calmer and more controlled when he spoke, but still firm. “That may work, and I know you can handle yourself, but there are too many unknowns.”
He really is upset by this. Not only is he worried about his younger brother, but it’s pretty rare for someone to get the drop on him. When was the last time Prince Arnold’s plans were reactive instead of proactive?
“The letter specifies a drop point for the money, so there won’t be an opportunity to recapture Prince Theodore at an exchange,” Oliver pointed out, brainstorming in a different direction than Rishe.
“Could Fabriana be behind this?” Rishe mused.
“… we suspect so, but there’s not enough evidence to support the position to other authorities,” Arnold answered, following her line of thinking.
She hummed, mind working a mile a minute. “… I want to look at the place I sensed that presence. Maybe Raul or I can pick up on any clues the knights may have missed.”
“Do as you wish.”
She determinedly raised her fist again. “I won’t let you down, Prince Arnold!”
Some time after the knights concluded their inspection with nothing to show for it, Rishe returned to the scene of the crime. She didn’t have high hopes for finding something that a number of Arnold’s personally-trained guards potentially missed, but it was important to her to conduct thorough due diligence. Arnold wanted for little; there was almost nothing she could do to help him with the immense workload of being the crown prince, or the trauma he’d endured at the hands of the emperor… but surely this rescue was something she could help him with! She wasn’t just some fawning omega wallflower. She had lived 7 lifetimes after all!
She frowned while overlooking the palace parapet, scanning every nook and cranny for signs she might have left behind in her hunter days. No unusual footprints or scuffs, no broken branches from the nearby trees. Again, something malicious glinted on the recesses of her senses. Rishe looked up and scanned in the direction it was coming from –
There! A glint of a spyglass on the town rooftops beyond the palace.
“Alert Prince Arnold,” she ordered the two knights flanking her. “I may have found something.” And with that, she placed one hand on the edge of the parapet wall and fluidly leapt down. The sounds of exclamations receded behind her as Rishe grabbed a branch to slow her descent, then slid easily down the rest of the tree at the expense of her gloves ripping against the bark.
Paying the gloves and her guards no mind, she took off with quick assured footsteps, kicking off her heels midstride for the sake of stability and silence. She wished she had her old brown cloak from Raul’s band of hunters to better blend in, but the sun was in descent and it wouldn’t be long until she could make due with the natural cover of darkness. At least this wasn’t some puffy ballgown this time, she’d managed much more in more restrictive clothing.
Rishe made good time, navigating the streets with a long loping stride when in out-of-site alleyways and with less attention-grabbing measured strides in the more crowded main roads. When she reached the heading where she’d sensed the presence before, she bounded up a ladder towards the roof to cast her senses out again. And so the game of cat and mouse continued, leading her further from the palace or the residential slums and towards the warehouse district.
By the time she found herself in the alley between a handful of large storage buildings, Rishe’s lungs burned from the exertion and the sunset cast the area in shadow. Senses on high alert, she wasn’t surprised when glinting metal shot out from the rooftop at her. Rishe sidestepped the crossbolt gracefully and looked up at her attacker.
He was clad in black and pitched expertly under the overhanging roof crossbeams. She couldn’t pick up his downwind scent, but she could see his sneer well enough. “Well well well, aren’t you a quick one! Not many would have been able to follow me all the way out here, you know!”
Rishe was at a disadvantage, having just the dagger strapped to her legs beneath her skirt and not a ranged weapon. Still, she glared up at him and matched the stranger’s smirk. “It would have been harder to follow you were actually trying to flee instead of leading me somewhere!”
“Ha!” The agent above her threw his head back surprise and glee. “Who are you? A lady alpha employed by the palace?”
“Who’s asking?” She flipped his question easily. On suppressants, her natural omega scent was less strong or sometimes outright blocked. With her demeanor, people frequently misidentified her as a beta or alpha, and it rarely was worth the effort to correct them.
The man fired another crossbolt at her, missing wildly. Rishe twisted further out of the way, looking to position herself somewhere to scale the wall and close the distance, when something audibly burst behind her. She risked a glance and saw green smoke billowing towards her. He didn’t miss, he was aiming for a trap!
With an unladylike curse she ran, trying to outpace the wind, to no avail. With no sleeves or mask to protect her face, the gaseous humor burned down her already struggling lungs. She coughed. Her eyes watered. Fire lit up her throat and spread through her chest. As her vision blurred, she tripped and went down hard. The impact jarred her shoulder and scraped her arms, but the pain bought her enough adrenaline to scramble back to her feet and keep going. Keep going!
Her senses narrowed as the heat spread from her chest to her belly. Rishe careened out of the goddess-forsaken alley and around the corner, palms leaving sweat on the building as she used it to guide her momentum. She heard a twang, ducked blindly to the side, then something wrapped around her ankles and she went down again. This time something in her shoulder popped. Agony joined the fire in her blood, and Rishe screamed. Arnold!