“Go get your mother up. She can leave with us tonight,” Dad orders, and I don’t hesitate.
I dismiss myself and walk as hurriedly as I can to the staircase and then up toward her bedroom.
They’re one hundred percent letting me stay home for Christmas.
15
ROYAL
CONFLICTED FEELINGS
What Leticia will do is moreimportant than what she agrees to with her parents.
I try to reassure myself, but while watching her, I slump back into my chair. I don’t want to believe what she’s agreed to do.She won’t do it. Right?
The truth is, I don’t trulyknowLeticia. And as much as I want to trust her without a second thought, I lock down her text messages to her dad and brother, so all the texts will have to be approved by me. The system I created runs off the phone I cloned when we did Late Nite Bytes and has the ability to override her real phone.
I go through the communication history back from last spring when they went to Italy for Easter and check to see if they used any other phone numbers.
Weirdly, they don’t use different lines when traveling.
Give our mate a chance.My wolf encourages me. He stands and stretches.
I should do the right thing. Informing Dad what I learned and telling Valor is the protocol-based response. It’s my job, working in technology, to share when there’s a potential data breach.
But I don’t know if she’ll breach confidentiality or not. She had every opportunity to tell them we have a family secret and that Valor promised to tell her what it is. Leticia stayed quiet on it.
My wolf pushes in my brain harder again.Our mate will be loyal to us.
Maybe he’s right, and Leticia’s loyalty doesn’t lie with the D’Medici family. Maybe she can be won over to our side.
We could protect her from her family.My wolf wags his tail.We can make her someplace safe here.
I’d previously flagged the cell phones connected to the D’Medici Wi-Fi, so I set up a program to track the ones I’ve attributed to Berto and Gregorio, who should be leaving the country, to make sure they get on their flight tonight.
I check that it’s working before looking back to Leticia’s room on the monitor closest to me. It’s still empty. The hallway camera shows her being rushed back from her mother’s room as Francesca D’Medici shoos her daughter out of the way, dragging a carry-on suitcase behind her.
Leticia ducks into her room, and I split my attention between screens, watching her family get into the elevator and down to their SUV, where my tracking software will follow them.
My phone buzzes, and I pull my attention from the monitor for a moment.
Leticia:
Please don’t be offended that I don’t know what those are.
Don’t knowwhat they are?I squint at the notification.
The conversation we were having comes barreling back all at once, slamming into me and shaking me out of the worry about whether Leticia will cause trouble, and I’m back to the terror that I showed something so intimate to another person.
But now the question of how to respond is begging to be answered.
If I tell her, ‘That’s okay, you don’t need to know what they are,’ and we keep playing the game, it’ll probably bother her like Valor not telling her the family secret.
On the other hand, if I do tell her, that means we’ll have to have a more sexually charged conversation.
On that same hand, if we have that conversation, maybe it will shut down any further communication between us altogether, and I won’t have to worry because there won’t be anything for her to tell her family.
I choose my words carefully.
