A storm like this will wake people.
This would be so much easier if the king’s laptop were in his office, but when I did evening rounds, I saw it was in here instead.
The laptop is sitting closed on the table in the back corner of the room. It’s connected to two monitors, and I remove the connection because they’ll cause too much light. I don’t know the king’s password, but I don’t need it to get into his system. I’m skilled enough to use other techniques to bypass it and gain access, which is what I do all the while throwing cursory glances at the door.
I do a quick search through the king’s most recent files, meeting notes, governmental emails, and drafted letters. I dig through his finances, and though I don’t have hours or more like days to spend doing this, nothing appears to be out of order at first glance. There are no large sums of money moved anywhere. No offshore accounts. Nothing that jumps out and screams sketchy or illegal. I realize this is his personal laptop, and he could store these things elsewhere. In fact, only an idiot would keep them on their personal computer, where anyone could gain access.
The king is a lot of things, but he’s not an idiot.
But as I’m digging, I uncover a folder in a private section titled S.B., the same letters I use for Signoria Batorini, though I already know it’s about Samil.
My heart hammers, making my throat tight. I check the door again, then click on it.
The file is loaded with at least a hundred different items, ranging from documents to video files, the dates going back months to years. Samil became the prime minister roughly a year after Nora died.
At the time, his grief was consuming, and I remember asking him why he was running at all, plastering on a fake smile for the cameras and gladhanding contributors.
“One word,”he said.“Revenge.”
That was it, but I understood.
After he won the election, he didn’t come home often, needing to stay in the capital for business, but we texted frequently, and on random nights, he’d call and talk for hours. Endless rants about King Sebastian. About how crooked he was. How he wished the curse would come and take him already. How bad he was for the kingdom. How untouchable he was in this palace, locked away with the children.
Endless tirades that fed an already poisoned well inside me.
I start with the documents, scrolling through the list of Samil’s financial statements. All of these were obtained after his death, likely as part of an investigation. One particular document catches my eye, and I click on it, my brow furrowing as I scroll through line by line. It’s a list of names, and next to them are monetary amounts and bank account numbers. Each of the sums is different, but not small by any measure.
After that is a notation of a correspondence date.
I take a picture with my phone and go back to the documents to search.
One by one, I find the people linked to each dollar amount. And what I discover chills me to my bones and has me staring at the screen, reading and rereading to make sure I have it right.
Each is a text message conversation logged from Samil’s cell phone or emails he sent, all from the same IP address that’s pinpointed on here as Samil’s residence.
But that’s not what’s rattling me. They’re bribes. Bribes offered to engage the king in shady business deals. Bribes to parliament members to vote against the king on laws and policies. Payments for attacking or kidnapping Bellamy and/or the children. Payments if they’re able to get to the king himself.
Some of them are proposals or inquiries. Some of them, especially the bribes, were transactions.
I don’t know how to make sense of this. Of the things he told me versus the things I’m seeing here. King Sebastian never made any of this public. And he could have. He could have said,“Not only did the prime minister try to kill my future queen and me but look at all the evil he was attempting to do.”
He didn’t.
And the only reason I can come up with is for the betterment of his country that was in deep turmoil after the assassination attempt and Samil’s death.
On the flip side, Samil told me time and time again that the king was crooked. That the king was a liar. That he took bribes. That he was bad for the kingdom. How it was his job as the prime minister to stop him. That the king went after Nora simply to hurt him because he was jealous and spiteful.
But if he were spiteful, wouldn’t he have posted all of Samil’s wrongdoing?
Did Samil realize that the king wasn’t any of those things, and in the absence of evil, did he work to construct it? Was all that orchestrated? His own attempt at a cover-up for his crimes or was it simply the madness and obsession of a broken man?
Looking at this, looking at these files, looking at some of those bank accounts and registries, it’s not the king who was working bribes. It’s not the king who was crooked.
It was the prime minister.
I don’t know how to make heads or tails of this. I don’t know how to compartmentalize or make sense of what I’m reading. Why would Samil lie to me? Why would he tell me all these things about the king if they weren’t true?
Floored, I lean back in the chair and rub a weary hand over my forehead and across my mouth. I feel as though I’ve been rubbed raw with sea salt and left in the blazing sun to bake. I know Samil hated him. I know how venomous he was. But nothing he told me about the king was real, even as Samil tried to make it so.
