Page 98 of Undertow
I moved over to the picture of their wedding and ran my fingers along the frame. “You had each other. I only had me. You couldn’t even have had a sibling for me? Why did you let me live this way? What did I do wrong? Why did I deserve this?”
The pain and grief of my parents being strangers to me overwhelmed me and I found myself sitting on an ottoman in their living room. When I realized it was different than the last time I’d been in there, it took everything I had not to stand and kicked it away.
“Get it out now and let’s go fly,”Iris pushed.
She didn’t mean to break things. She meant take it all in and process all the changes I didn’t know about because my parents never wanted me around. She was saying to take the time I needed this once.
I snorted. This wasn’t going to be a one-time meltdown. Not even close.
People were more complicated than dragons like that.
I went to my mother’s huge closet and looked through the gowns and outfits I knew from social media—frompictures. My father’s suits and ties that I recognized even if sometimes they all looked the same.
The media commented on just about everything the royal family did, so even the ties were picked on sometimes. Silly, but right then it was painful. Not one looked familiar from when I’d been with them.
It felt intrusive to go through drawers and snoop around, but… That was what kids did, right? They were curious and wanted to try on their parents’ stuff or see their rooms?
“Funny how I get to now that you’re dead,” I whispered as I turned away from Mother’s nightstand.
I ended up in the study off the living room, impressed that Father had upgraded to have so many monitors on the computer there. He had three different mounted TVs for conference calls or—I’d known that from the video calls we had.
It was the only way I saw my parents most times.
I sighed and sat at the desk, not even being nosy now. I needed to see what was on the computer since there wasprobably a lot more hidden than the one vault in his main study. I frowned, this computer wasn’t on his private network. I already had access to that and I knew where those were located. They looped in with security and… This wasn’t listed.
It made sense actually to have some devices separate and hidden in case the castle was hacked.
But this meant I didn’t have the password or couldn’t call in the tech guy to get me in. No, that wouldn’t be smart.
I turned it on and it asked for a pin with **** listed. So four numbers.
Frowning as I put in his birthday, glad he wasn’t that silly. Then I put in Mother’s and it didn’t work either. I tried a few more ideas of dates I knew were important to him. I winced when it warned me I only had one more attempt before the hard drive was locked.
I snickered as I typed in my birthday. Yeah, the father who couldn’t seem to stand his own child would use that for a password.
Apparently, he did.
No, it’s not sentimental. It’s so you can always open it. Don’t fool yourself no matter the theories or ideas now.
I took in a deep breath and slowly let it out before opening the main file folders. Then I decided to check what he’d looked at lately. It was mostly basic things one would think a king should focus on. Requests and updates from Alphas. Plans for certain regions or even disaster relief responses.
I was about to close it all with a note to make a master copy just to be safe when one file caught my eye.
And then my heart was beating in my ears.
There was a file “Kole Conley – PI Results.”
It honestly wasn’t that he had Kole investigated. It would honestly bestupidif he didn’t when I was the heir of Thovudin.
It was that he’d done it and not told me and there wereresults.
And apparently over twohundredgigabytes of results. The folder was massive.
“I’m really sure I’m going to let Myriam win after this,” I whispered. She’d complained that she couldn’t get her favorite wine here since the country didn’t trade with Thovudin… But she could.
And I loved that wine as well. It was extraordinary.
I opened the main folder and then couldn’t seem to process all the files inside. Most were dates though. I decided to pick the oldest one which was over two years ago—a year or two into my dating Kole. I frowned.
