"Marcus didn't believe in miracles, but if he managed to survive another week babysitting Alaric, he might start."
MARCUS POV
If there is one thing I have learned in my many, many years of serving Alaric, it is this: when the Alpha King gets a certain glint in his eyes, you start drafting your will. This morning's glint came with the words:
"Marcus, I need you to find everything there is to know about Elias Blackthorne." Which is how I now found myself hunched over a desk in the villa study, surrounded by maps, parchments, and half-finished reports, feeling like a spy who had been demoted to gossip columnist.
The problem with Elias Blackthorne was not that he was dangerous. Oh, he was probably. The issue was that everyone I spoke to about him reacted like I had just asked them to recite the mating habits of a phoenix. One old contact in the trade district told me, "Elias? Heard he once stared down a rabid bear. Bear backed down." Another swore that Elias "never loses at chess," and that he "drinks his tea plain, no sugar, no milk, suspicious if you ask me." My personal favorite came from a smuggler who claimed Elias could "charm fish out of the water with his voice." By the third interview, I was beginning to suspect Elias Blackthorne was less of a man and more of a campfire story that got out of hand.
Normally I could handle two tasks at once: gather intel and keep Alaric from doing something regrettable. But this was like trying to juggle knives while someone behind you keeps adding flaming torches to the act. Every ten minutes, Alaric would stroll past my desk and casually say something like, "I'm just going for a short walk." Which, in Alaric-speak, meant, "I'm about to poke a hornet's nest and see how big the hornets are."
"Sit," I told him. "Eat something or I will have the royal guards tie you to that chair, your Majesty."
"Marcus," he said, with that infuriating smirk, "if you tie me to the chair, I can't go cause trouble."
"That's the point," I muttered.
He left the room anyway and followed him, muttering under my breath about occupational hazards and why my life expectancy had already dropped by ten years. Hours later, I left his Majesty Alaric in the villa, reading, and went out to the town to explore and gather more intel on Elias Blackthorne. My gut instincts told me I was being followed for half an hour, and that was when I spotted them in the marketplace: three men wearing heavy fur cloaks, even though the sun was shining so brightly you could fry an egg on the cobblestones.
At first, I thought, Tourists from the far north. Poor souls.
But then I noticed they were always about twenty paces behind me. And when I stopped to browse a spice stall, they stopped too suddenly extremely interested in cinnamon sticks. I ducked into a perfume shop. They followed, and I went into an apothecary and pretended to examine jars of dried lizard tails. They followed, and I walked briskly down an alley. They followed, although one tripped on a loose cobblestone, which would have been funny if I were not quietly calculating the odds of us being assassinated before lunch.
By the time I made it back to the villa, I was 90% certain they were from the Northern Shifter Kingdom. The cloaks, the build, the way they carried themselves like they could rip your arms off and then politely apologize for the inconvenience. On one hand, telling Alaric meant he would want to "handle it personally," which could mean anything from confronting them directly to challenging them to an arm-wrestling contest. On the other hand, not telling him meant he would find out anyway and be offended I had kept it quiet.
So, of course, I told him, during dinner, halfway through a plate of roasted venison.
"We've got company," I said casually. "Three Northern Shifter guards have been tailing us since the marketplace."
Alaric's fork froze mid-air. "Following us?"
"Yes."
"Armed?"
"Yes."
"Do they look like they could outrun me?"
"…What?"
"Because I'm thinking," Alaric said, leaning back in his chair, "if we charge at them full speed, we can find out exactly what they want before dessert."
"Or," I countered, "we could not cause an international incident before dessert, as no one can outrun you, your Majesty."
He sighed dramatically, as if I had just told him we were not allowed to have fun anymore. Later that night, I spread out everything I had gathered about Elias on the table. It was disappointing. Half the "facts" contradicted each other. One report claimed he was the illegitimate son of a noble; another insisted he was a self-made merchant. A third, my personal favorite, hinted he might be a retired assassin who now "specialized in herbal remedies and moral ambiguity."
There was no clear picture, only a man-shaped question mark surrounded by rumors and bad sketches.
I rubbed my temples, and from the other room, Alaric called out, "So, Marcus, when do you get me the actual information about Elias, or do you want us to walk to his home and ask him?" I didn't answer as some questions deserve to be ignored for the sake of one's blood pressure.
The next morning, I decided to tail the tail. Not because I am naturally reckless was Alpha Alaric's department, but because I needed to know exactly what we were dealing with. I left the villa early, slipped through the back streets, and waited near a bakery. Sure enough, the three fur-cloaked shadows appeared. They were good, not amateurs, but they were not subtle enough for me to miss the glint of steel under their cloaks. When I doubled back toward the villa, they did not follow me in, and they stopped at the corner and lingered, like wolves watching the edge of a clearing.
By the time I returned inside, Alaric was already up and stretching like a man preparing for battle.
"How fast do you think they can run?" he asked.
"Don't," I said.
"What if I—"
"Don't."
"Marcus, you have no sense of adventure."
"I have too much sense, that's the problem, your Majesty."
By the end of the day, my "Elias Investigation" had turned into a chaotic wall of parchment pinned haphazardly across the study. The intel was so jumbled up, "Possible link to Eastern spice trade?" "Defeated someone named 'Rook' in single combat — who is Rook??" "Either 34 years old or 47, depending on the source." "Owns a black mare named Shadow or possibly Dusk or possibly Jeremy???"
I stared at the wall, wondering if this was what losing one's mind felt like, and from behind me, Alaric said, "That's quite a collection you've got there, and this looks like the work of a man who's not losing sleep over it."
I did not even look at him. "One day," I muttered, "your curiosity is going to get me killed, your Majesty."
"And when it does," Alaric said cheerfully, "I'll make sure they carve on your gravestone: He complained a lot, but he was loyal."