Alouette finds out that Harry is not in the palace.

The rooms and corridors are eerily quiet on this morning, so different from the loud activity that usually pervades the building. People quietly speak to each other in their offices, minding their own business and lounging around in the common areas with a cup of coffee. The tension and strive to always do more and more that seems to be the very essence of the palace is nowhere to be found, and neither is Harry's presence.

Alouette had never noticed it until now, but the president's existence usually looms like a dark ghost on everything and everyone, even though he spends most of his time in his office or studio. Even though they can't see him, they know he's there. They can feel him being there. Now that he's gone, it's like a weight has been lifted off of everyone's shoulders. The very air she's breathing seems different.

She doesn't know where he is. She doesn't know when he left. She tries to ask around, but she gets no reply. All she's told is that he left early in the morning and will be back by night. She's tempted to ask Nathan about it but decides not to, not wanting to raise any suspicions.

Alouette goes over last night's events over and over again in her mind, checking for any clue that can tell her more about his sudden disappearance, but finds none. All she knows is that he was with her until half past four in the morning, and then they parted ways. He didn't seem to be in any hurry. Did he sleep at all, or did he spend the rest of his night awake, getting ready to leave?

She hates not knowing. She also hates the way he managed to get past her defences once again, so effortlessly and naturally, as if they never were a match to him. If they are indeed playing a game, he's undoubtedly winning it. Alouette shouldn't be as surprised as she is, after all he has told her that he never loses.

He knows how to make people like him, and he knows how to make people hate him. She wonders if any of the emotions she's felt towards him since the first day is real, or if they're all the result of some very clever manipulation on his part. He's smart and skilled, and worst of all, he knows what he's doing. She wouldn't put it past him.

But he isn't here now, so whatever happened last night doesn't actually matter. Oddly enough, she feels lonely. At the same, though, she's glad she hasn't made any friendships, because it allows her to go around the palace mostly unseen.

The rest of the morning goes by quite plainly. She does everything Evie tells her to without ever complaining, because the secretary promised she won't tell Harry about her waking up so late. It isn't that she actually thinks he would care, but she isn't particularly interested in discovering whether she's right or not.

It's in the afternoon that things start getting more interesting. Evie lets her go for the rest of the day, stating that there isn't much to do when Harry's out of the palace, and all of a sudden Alouette finds herself completely free to do whatever she pleases.

It takes her only a matter of seconds to come to the conclusion that, considering Harry isn't there today, she should take it as her opportunity to explore some more.

Unfortunately she didn't get to talk to Nathan last night, but she doesn't need to to know what she has to do now. Her first little mission hasn't gone as planned, she hasn't discovered much if not the name of one of the people Harry sleeps with, which certainly isn't going to help her when the time comes. She should've expected it, though. Harry doesn't trust anyone, so she's unlikely to believe he'd leave any kind of information about himself in the room of someone he isn't particularly close to. She has to make better plans, and she just might have the perfect one.

It's clear to her that, if she wants to find out anything about him, she has to look in places that hold meaning to him. Like his bedroom, his office, his studio.

But even though she knows he isn't in the palace, it's still too risky. The doors are secured by codes she still hasn't been able to discover, and security cameras are pretty much everywhere. If Harry finds out she entered any of his private rooms, it'll be over for her. It's still too soon.

But there is another place he might not be keeping such a close eye on. The top floor.

Evie told her he had it closed off during her first days in the palace, a little over a month ago. It has always seemed a bit too personal to her— if you aren't interested in a room you ignore it, you don't close it off. Him doing that means he doesn't want anyone to go there. He himself doesn't want to ever go there. If there are cameras upstairs as well, they're probably off, or go unwatched.

What better place to discover more about Harry than the rooms he seems to be most afraid of?

Alouette knows that in the moment she enters that floor, there's no going back. It's the ultimate break of Harry's trust. Once she does that, she'll have truly sold her heart to the mission.

She also can't bring herself to care.

She waits in her bedroom for some hours, knowing it'd be too risky to go there while everyone is still roaming around.

When five in the afternoon comes around, she decides to strike.

She takes a flashlight and exits her room before walking to the lift and glancing around to make sure nobody is in the corridor before stepping inside and closing the doors. The button of the top floor is covered, but it only takes her a couple of seconds to recognise it and press it.

Her heart beats wildly in her chest as the lift goes up, the irrational part of her making her believe she'll somehow find Harry in there, even though she knows he isn't even in the building.

The doors open and she looks out without walking out, nodding to herself when she notices that the two cameras in there are facing the ground, their light off. She was right. Harry doesn't want anything to do with that place. Why would he go through the trouble of closing it off, and then not even bother to make sure nobody gets in?

He seems to be obsessed with safety when it comes to his bedroom and studio, so it's odd to see such a blatant disregard for it coming from him.

It is indeed personal. Alouette realises that even before stepping out of the lift. The top floor has been the residence of the president and his family for decades, and yet he decided to move one floor down and completely rethink the layout of the entire building. It's too much trouble to go through without a very specific reason.

Not only he moved out of that place, but he also had it closed off and its cameras shut down. Its button is covered in the lift. It's like he wants to make himself believe that floor has never existed. There's something of so irrational in that decision that unsettled her deep inside. He's very smart, very calculative, very attentive. He always seems to be aware of everything going on around him, and he's always a step ahead of everyone— or better, almost always.

Alouette doesn't know how to reconnect that image of him with his irrational decisions concerning that floor— he's acting as a kid would, standing in the corner of the room and closing his eyes, foolishly believing that if he doesn't see the rest of the world, the world won't be able to see him as well.

It's in that moment that she wonders where his family is for the first time.

His father was president before him, that she knows, and he died some months before Harry took on his job. But what about his mother? What about his siblings, if he has any? Where are they?

She can't remember them ever being mentioned. Not only by him, not only in the palace. In the Revolution, too. Neither Ezra nor her father ever talked about Harry's family. How's it even possible? Harry has been in the spotlight ever since he was a little child, considering he belongs to such an important family. He grew up in the palace, looking down on the very country he now rules. She remembers hearing about his father, and hearing about him. She faintly remembers knowing his father had a wife, but there's no trace of her in the palace now. What happened?

Alouette walks to the heavy door that's on the opposite side of the room, letting out a sigh when she realises it's protected by a code, just like Harry's bedroom. The light on the screen lets her know it's active, and she doesn't dare to touch it. She doesn't know the right code, and someone could get notified if she tries to use it. She doesn't know why she's surprised, locking doors with codes is the bare minimum in the palace.

She goes back to the lift, a bit unhappy with the results of her impromptu mission. She presses the button to go back to her floor, her mind whirling to find a way to get over that obstacle. She needs to get in there, because if she doesn't find out anything useful about him soon, she'll have to enter his private rooms, and that's a thousand times scarier.

The doors open again and she gets out on her corridor, stopping in her tracks when she suddenly realises something.

The top floor was built to be the residence of the presidential family. It doesn't make sense for there to be only one entrance. If the only way to get in or out is controlled by electricity, all someone would need to do to trap them like mice is cutting off the power. There has to be another way to get in— possibly secret and with no codes involved. And if she's right, Harry inadvertently showed it to her a couple of weeks before while trying to escape from a stuck lift.

Alouette glances around the corridor to make sure she's alone and then presses the panel on the right of the lift, revealing the entrance to the emergency staircase.

She gets in quickly and closes it again, turning on the flashlight and making her way up.

The staircase ends on the floor above hers, proving to her that she was indeed right. She holds the little flashlight between her teeth and takes two of the bobby pins that are securing her hair up in a tight bun, bending them and using them to pick the lock.

It takes her way longer than she'd prefer, but after a few minutes the door finally clicks open. She puts the pins in her pocket and walks inside.

The first room is very dark but she doesn't dare to turn on the light, not knowing if anyone would notice. She moves the flashlight around, discovering it's completely empty, the walls white and bare.

She tries the first door she sees, smiling to herself when it opens easily. On the other side, a dark corridor welcomes her, and all of a sudden she feels oddly at home. Someone else would be too scared to walk down it, but the Revolution is a maze of dark corridors as well, dark corridors in which she grew up, in which she played and hid away when things got tough. Now, it makes her feel safe.

The corridor is much longer than she expected, and ends with another door. There's a touchscreen next to it as well, making her suppose it can be secured just like Harry's studio, but it isn't active. She tries to open the door, and it gives way.

There's a lot of light on the other side, and her eyes hurt. She blinks a few times, trying to get used to it, and then looks around, frowning as soon as she does.

For a moment, she believes she's standing in Harry's office.

The layout and floor-to-ceiling windows are the exact same, and only when she takes a step closer to the desk she realises that its colours are different and there's no couch nor tea table.

It doesn't take her long to figure out she's standing in what used to be the office of Harry's father— and of every president that came before him.

Alouette walks to the window, and the skyline is almost identical to the one she can see from Harry's office, making her suppose she's right above it. She takes a step back and furrows her eyebrows when something crunches under her foot.

She looks down and is even more confused when she discovers there's broken glass on the ground. Something must've been shattered at some point before she walked in, but she doesn't know what it is, nor she can tell by observing the room around her. There's only some basic furniture, but no ornaments. The desk is empty. There aren't books on the shelves, nor any kind of bottles or papers inside the drawers. It looks like Harry took his time to wipe any kind of information away from the office before abandoning it.

There isn't much to see there, so Alouette gets back to the corridor and closes the door again. She goes back to the first room and tries the other door, that opens with no issue as well. Another room is waiting for her there, with three doors.

She opens the first and sees some kind of living room— but it's hard to tell, considering the only thing in it is a couch. The room is big a little corridor separates it from a studio and a couple of other rooms that are completely empty.

She goes back and tries the second, it brings to a couple more unnamed rooms, a couple of bathrooms and a master bedroom. Even there, the furniture is minimal, and nothing was left lying around.

The third door too leads to a similar layout— but this time the bedrooms are two. They're big, cold, only the beds are left in them. The walls of one are painted light orange, the other's are white like the rest of the rooms. Alouette wonders which one belonged to Harry.

Alouette enters the one in orange and looks around, checking every corner and every drawer, searching for any kind of information that could be useful to her, but finds nothing.

She gets in the other room and does the same, stopping in her tracks when she sees something under the bed. She kneels next to it and pulls the mysterious object out, frowning when she realises it's a shoe box. She opens it, and her mouth falls open.

She's just found a treasure.

Inside the box there are more folded paper artworks than she can count, all pressed together in the little space. There are animals, flowers, even little human forms or some figures that are only meant to be aesthetically pleasing. She's in Harry's old room.

She goes through them, trying to make sense of it in her head, but she's unable to reconnect them to the Harry she knows. If he hadn't left a paper bird right in front of her door, she would've thought that bedroom belonged to someone else. But it is his bedroom, with his odd little artworks.

Alouette can't imagine the Harry she knows sitting at a table and folding a paper sheet into a fox, just to put it in a shoe box and hiding it away under his bed. It simply makes no sense.

Who are you, Mr. Styles?

She closes the box again and she puts it back in its place, sitting with her back against the side of the bed and glancing at the rest of the bedroom. Aside from the bed and a wardrobe with nothing inside, it's completely empty. In the light coming from the window, she can see dust flying in the air or resting on the floor like a snowfall of desolation. Nothing is around, as if he purposely tried to erase part of his existence.

For some reason, it makes her sad.

She wonders what made him leave this floor. There's no denying he'd be much more comfortable here than he is in his current rooms— the floor below wasn't built to accommodate the president. She's never been in his rooms, but she knows they can't be bigger than two or three rooms put together. Up here, he'd have an entire apartment— a very big one, all for him.

And yet he lives downstairs, and had this part of the building closed off. Whatever it is that made him decide to get out of here, it can't be good. Looking around the room, Alouette can only make a statement.

He didn't move downstairs. He ran away.

It's in that moment that she understands she won't find anything here. It's only a bunch of rooms filled with bad memories— or maybe ones that are just too good. She can't tell exactly what Harry's running away from by looking at that apartment.

What she does know, though, is that there's no reason for her to stay there.

She gets up and walks back to the main room again, and then gets out on the staircase and closes the door behind herself, making sure it's locked before going down.

Alouette is about to open the panel in the wall when the lift stops on her same floor.

She immediately halts, waiting for whoever it is to get out, and then listens to the sound of their steps to make sure they're far away enough before opening the secret door and sliding out in the corridor, closing it again.

After taking a deep breath she walks back to her room, trying her best to look as inconspicuous as possible, telling herself that nobody can tell she's done something wrong.

Wrong. It seems the right word to describe how she feels about her actions, now. She's entered an important part of the palace, one Harry doesn't want anyone to visit. One he feels strongly about. One that probably was a big part of his life growing up.

She's broken his trust again and gone somewhere she should've stayed away from, and she hasn't even found anything interesting. It's been a pointless mission, but she knows that if Harry found out about it, he'd be hurt by it, and somehow that makes it even worse.

She's so lost in her own thoughts that she doesn't even recognise who's walking in front of her until he stops in front of her room.

Harry.

Alouette stops walking as well, her heartbeat ringing in her ears, staring at him as he glances at her door for a quick second, seeming to be deciding whether to come knocking or not.

How's he back already? It must be later in the evening than she previously thought.

It's over in only a second, and Harry goes back to walking. For a moment she considers calling out to him, but she doesn't. He leaves, and she goes to her room.

She's about to get in when Evie comes towards her.

"Guess what?" she asks, stopping next to her, and Alouette has never been so scared before. Does she already know?

"What?" She's about to puke.

"There will be a celebration soon."

Alouette raises her eyebrows, unable to hide her surprise. That's anticlimactic. "A celebration?"

Evie nods, giving her an obvious look. "To celebrate the president's win in the south."

"What win?" Dread fills her in anticipation.

"Against the Revolution! They tried to take over a bunch of his warehouses there, but he had them all killed." She doesn't seem to be particularly affected by what she's saying. "It's a big win, so we're celebrating it soon. It gets really fancy here when that happens, you'll love it. Trust me."

Alouette knows Elijah is too early in his training to be sent to the south of the country, but she can't stop the sudden sickness that washes over her. "That's amazing," she only mumbles, giving her a weary smile and walking into her room.

Amazing indeed.

Fucking asshole.

Thank you so much for the 60k reads on this story! I hope you enjoyed this chapter. x
Miki