It didn’t take too long for him to find the video file on the tablet, and he didn’t bother questioning why Silver still had it and hadn’t deleted it yet, pressing play as soon as it’d loaded. He didn’t project it on the giant screen, keeping it on the tablet with the volume down so as not to alert any possible passing servants in the hall.
Now that he was personally familiar with the room at the club, certain aspects stood out to him more than they had the first time around, but there was nothing all that telling. Nothing that could help him decide whether or not his theory was accurate. With a sigh, he pressed forward, painfully aware of the way his dick had started to swell at the first sight of Silver naked.
He adjusted himself and got back to work, about to give up when he was coming to the very end of the file. It was at the part where Silver had stopped it when he’d shown it, but Nuri let it keep going and—
There.
With a frown, he rewound and then pressed play, waiting for a few seconds before hitting the pause button on a certain frame.
Silver was in the process of walking away from the bed and his eyes…
He was staring directly at the camera.
When Nuri hit play again, the Emperor was already glancing away. He’d only glanced at it for a split second but it’d been long enough. There was little doubt in Nuri’s mind that he’d seen and been aware of the camera there.
Silver had known he was being filmed.
Ackor Hue had not.
Nuri dropped down into the plush chair, numb.
But why?
His gaze traveled toward the main computer. He couldn’t…Nuri wasn’t even sure what it was he was after at this point, but he needed answers. This uncontrollable feeling of dread and franticness was overcoming him, and before he could tell himself not to, he’d hooked N.I.M. to Silver’s computer and turned it on.
Since he didn’t know what he was looking for, he set N.I.M.’s search engine to seek out anything that had been purposefully hidden, knowing that Silver liked to use that method on important documents pertaining to the company. Perhaps he also did so with other things as well.
After the longest ten minutes of Nuri’s existence, three files were pinged and appeared on the holographic screen that hovered over the corner of the desk. Using his finger, Nuriopened the first, letting out a breath he hadn’t been aware he’d been holding when the first line of the document had their competitor's name in it.
He closed it and moved on to the next, that feeling of dread only yawning into a cavernous void that threatened to swallow him up when he did.
The file was another video, this one of a hospital room. It took him a second, but Nuri recognized it as the room where Sij Rien had been kept during his last days. Both he and Silver were in the footage.
The video that had played during Silver’s crowning. The one that had exposed his father’s Swift image to the world—a serious taboo—and the one that Silver had immediately ordered Nuri to do damage control for.
How had he gotten this file and why was it on his computer? The hospital had claimed their systems had been wiped when Nuri and the team he’d sent to investigate had asked them about it. The only way Silver could have gotten a copy was if…He’d been in possession of it all along.
“This is insane.” It wasn’t adding up. Why would Silver do either of these things?
The only common denominator he could find was…himself.
Nuri fell back into the chair a second time. Silver had admitted to him that he’d known Nuri had planned on resigning after his crowning. At the risk of being arrogant, what if Silver had done this to force Nuri to stick around? It wasn’t too far out of the realm of possibility only because it’d worked, hadn’t it?
And the issue with Ackor Hue. It was kind of convenient that Silver was being blackmailed just as Nuri was meant to leave on holiday to visit his siblings. He’d had to push his departure date in order to deal with the problem even. When that hadn’t been enough to get him to abort the trip? That’swhen Silver had finally resorted to extremes, canceling his ticket and putting him on the No Fly list.
While those first two things were merely a theory, the last one was not. It was a known fact that Silver had done that to Nuri. That he’d done that to keep Nuri there. He was clearly willing to go to extremes to get what he wanted, and what he’d wanted was Nuri forced to remain his secretary forever. Even during his shitty sort of proposal, when he’d revealed he wanted Nuri as his Royal Consort, he’d stated clear as day nothing was going to change.
Silver was manipulative and controlling, and his lack of empathy made it so he never hesitated to play dirty—
The N.I.M.’s glassy surface reflected the overhead lights, and Nuri felt like he was going to be sick.
“No.” He shook his head at himself but reached for the orb anyway, lifting it into his palm. There was no way… “N.I.M,” he swallowed the bile threatening to rise up his throat, “roll the dice, please.”
A set of dice was cast across the surface of the desk, the numbers adding up to five. Low.
“N.I.M., roll the dice for the Emperor, please.”
Another toss. Two sixes.
