"Security detail will be in place from oh-six-hundred Friday morning," Helena said. Her voice was crisp and even, the kind of voice that briefed rooms full of senior officers and never wavered. "I've assigned a twelve-person close-protection team, rotating in three shifts. Perimeter is covered by motion sensors, thermal imaging, and four dedicated surveillance posts here, here, here, and here." She tapped each point on the screen. "All digital credentials have been revalidated as of this morning. Access codes refreshed. Any vehicle entering or leaving theestate will be logged and cross-referenced against the approved list in real time."
Erin studied the screen. The castle estate was easier to secure than the palace in some ways: fewer access points, more open ground, better sight lines from the elevated positions along the north wall. In other ways, it was a nightmare. The surrounding woodland offered cover. The neighbouring farms meant civilian traffic on adjacent roads. And the children liked to wander, especially Frank, who had an eight-year-old's conviction that walls existed to be climbed and fences to be crawled under.
"What about the riding?" Erin asked. "Florence wants to ride with Vic on Saturday."
Helena scrolled to a secondary map showing the bridle paths that wound through the estate's southern parkland. "Officer Jennings will accompany the riding party. He's qualified in equestrian close protection and carries a GPS transponder that links to our central monitoring. Standard protocol is a two-hundred-metre perimeter check along the route before departure."
"Jennings." Erin turned the name over. "I don't know him."
"Transferred in from the Met's Diplomatic Protection Group three months ago. Clean record. I handpicked him myself."
Erin held Helena's gaze. The younger woman met it without flinching, her sharp eyes steady, her chin slightly raised. There was confidence there, the controlled kind that came from competence rather than arrogance. Erin had been watching Helena Ward since her appointment six weeks ago. The woman was efficient, thorough, and appeared to understand that protecting the royal family was not a job that allowed for vanity or error. She'd come up through military intelligence before transferring to Royal Protection, and her recommendations from her previous commanding officers had been uniformly excellent.
"The plans look solid," Erin said. She pushed herself up from the chair and stretched, feeling the pull in her shoulders from the garden party, two hours of standing in heeled boots and smiling, which she had always found more physically demanding than any training exercise she'd done in the Royal Protection Command. "I want updates every four hours while we're at the estate. Anything unusual, I want to know about it before it becomes a situation."
"Of course, ma'am."
Erin paused at the door and turned back. "Helena. You've been in post six weeks. How are you finding it?"
Helena's expression eased, not into warmth exactly, but into a loosening of the professional mask. "Honestly? It's the most demanding assignment I've had. But I take it seriously. Your family's safety is my responsibility and I don't take that lightly."
Erin nodded. "Good. Because I was the family's safety before I was their family. I know what the job costs and I know what failure looks like. If anything ever feels off, a gut instinct, a shadow that doesn't sit right, you come to me. Not the chain of command. Me."
Helena held her gaze. "Understood."
Erin left the security office and climbed the narrow staircase back to the residential floors, the strip lights giving way to softer wall sconces and the clean industrial smell replaced by the faint scent of beeswax and the lilies that the housekeeper arranged in the corridors every Monday. She rolled her shoulders as she walked, letting the tension of the briefing drain from her muscles. The plans were sound. The team was competent. Helena was sharp. There was no reason to feel uneasy.
The unease lingered anyway. Some residue of the afternoon that she couldn't shake. The garden party had been fine. The garden party was always fine, because Alex made everything look fine, because that was what Alex did, because she had beentrained from childhood to make the impossible look effortless and the excruciating look pleasant. But Cecilia had been there. And Cecilia's presence was like a drop of ink in clean water. It spread.
Erin had stood beside Alex and said nothing while Cecilia dismantled her wife in twelve sentences. She'd watched the colour leave Alex's face. She'd seen Florence stiffen under her grandmother's hand. She'd felt her own blood pressure climb to a place that made her vision narrow and her hands want to form fists, and she had done precisely nothing because there was nothing she could do. Not there. Not in front of two hundred guests and a string quartet playing bloody Elgar while Cecilia smiled her sweet poison smile and told the heir to the throne she had bad posture.
Erin's jaw clenched. She made herself unclench it. Breathe.
The thing about Cecilia was that she left marks you couldn't photograph. No bruises, no scars, nothing you could point to and saythere, that's what she did.Just the slow, steady erosion of a person's confidence. A thousand tiny cuts disguised as concern.You look tired, darling. You wear blue rather a lot, darling. The cameras aren't kind to exhaustion, darling.And Alex absorbed it all, the way she'd been absorbing it since she was a child, with her spine straight and her face composed and the damage hidden so deep inside that sometimes Erin wondered if even Alex knew it was there.
Erin stopped outside the triplets' bedroom and pressed her forehead against the cool wood of the door for a moment. She could hear voices inside. Alex's, low and warm. Frank's, loud and indignant about something. The muffled thump of someone, probably Frank, jumping off a bed.
She pushed the door open.
The room was large but deliberately made smaller by the warmth of it. Three beds arranged in an L-shape, each onepersonalised in ways that made Erin ache with love every time she looked at them. Florence's bed was neatest, the duvet pulled straight, a stack of books on the bedside table with their spines aligned. Her bookmark, the ribbon from Matilda's hair, poked out from the top ofThe Secret Garden.Frank's bed was a disaster zone: Lego pieces scattered across the pillow, a football kit slung over the footboard, his duvet hanging half off the mattress as though it had tried to escape and given up. Matilda's bed was somewhere in between, tidy enough but with a nest of soft toys arranged in a neat semicircle that she rearranged every night according to rules known only to her.
Alex was sitting on the edge of Frank's bed, smoothing his hair back from his forehead while he protested that he wasn't tired. He was clearly exhausted, his eyes heavy-lidded, his voice taking on the high, strained quality it always got when he was fighting sleep. Matilda was already tucked in, her eyes closed, her breathing slow and even, one hand resting on the ear of a stuffed rabbit.
"Mummy Erin!" Frank sat bolt upright. "Tell Mummy Alex I'm not tired."
"You look knackered, mate," Erin said, and Frank's face crumpled into outrage.
"I'mnot."
"He's been yawning for twenty minutes," Alex said. She looked up at Erin and smiled, and even after a decade of marriage, that smile could still crack something open in Erin's chest. The tension from the garden party was there in the tightness around Alex's eyes, the slight strain at the corners of her mouth. But the smile was real. It was the smile she kept for this room, these children, this life they'd built.
Erin crossed the room and bent to press a kiss to the top of Frank's head. He smelled of soap and toothpaste and the faintesttrace of grass from the garden. "Close your eyes, Frank. The sooner you sleep, the sooner it's morning."
"Morning isagesaway."
"It'll come faster if you stop talking."
Frank considered this logic, found no holes in it, and lay back down with the aggrieved sigh of someone conceding a battle he fully intended to win next time. Erin tucked the duvet around him and gave the Lego on his pillow a pointed look, which Frank returned with an expression of pure innocence.
