The Rejected True Heiress (Liora and Callum) novel Chapter 533

Liora’s POV

I couldn’t stop thinking about the window seat.

The wedding was three hours out. The maids had finished with my hair and left me alone to “rest,” which really just meant a guard outside my door and nothing to do but lie there counting cracks in the ceiling and replaying my father’s voice in my head.

The window seat. There’s a board underneath that lifts. I’d turned the words over in my head so many times that they barely sounded like words anymore, just incoherent sounds stuck on a loop.

When the guard outside got pulled away to help carry something down the hall, I didn’t think twice. I just moved.

If anyone caught me out here, there’d be no excuse good enough. Not after yesterday. But I needed to know what he meant badly enough to risk it.

To my surprise, the door opened. The guard had forgotten to lock it.

I cracked it open and poked my head out.

The corridors were emptier than I expected, everyone thrown into wedding prep somewhere else. I kept to the servant passages my mother used to tell me to stay out of as a kid, and made it to my father’s study without incident.

His study smelled different; unused, too clean, like he hadn’t come here in ages. Every book on the shelf sat perfectly straight, like someone dusted them daily and nobody ever pulled one down to read. A cup of tea sat on the side table, stone cold, a thin skin formed over the top like someone still brought it every morning out of habit but it never got touched even though it was his favorite flavor.

I quickly moved over to the windowseat, where I ran my fingers along the underside until I found the seam. The board came up easily, just as he said.

The box underneath was small, the wood gone dark with age, the brass clasp green at the edges. I popped it open with both thumbs.

My brows shot up. There, at the top of the box, were what looked like four military medals pinned to a piece of velvet.

She’d been a spy. Royal intelligence, the highest tier we had—the kind of operative who solved problems before the King ever learned they existed. There were commendations folded into the back pages, citations for three separate attempts stopped on my grandfather’s life before she’d turned twenty-five.

One mentioned a poisoned blade meant for his wine glass, stopped with two seconds to spare. Everyone who’d worked with her, by her own account, had respected her. Some of them had been afraid of her.

Nobody at court ever talked about it. Not once, not even when people whispered about how strange it was that the Queen flinched at loud noises, or refused to so much as pick up a kitchen knife. I’d always just assumed that was who she was.

Then, there was the entry about me.

I was six weeks old. An assassin got into the nursery through a service passage nobody had thought to guard, and by the time my mother reached the room, he already had a blade out. She killed him with her bare hands while I screamed in my crib, and then she picked me up, and that, in her own handwriting, was the night something in her snapped.

“I couldn’t do it again,” she’d written. “I held my baby to my chest and I just… I couldn’t. If I hadn’t been on a mission, away when I should have been with her, this wouldn’t have happened. I need to be there for her from now on. No more missions. My baby’s survival is all that matters.”