I’ll have to get to my father’s office.
“Oh, don’t worry. I’ll make sure I’m here when the reporters are ready for me.”
I stomp up the stairs, feeling not a little like the petulant teen raised under this roof. I can imagine the look on Constantine’s face at my behavior, his arms crossed over his chest. That implacable look he gives when he goes all alpha caveman on me.
I miss it.
I have to stop thinking about him.
I walk into the guest room and shut the door hard. I listen. No footsteps.
Good. I’m alone for now. The guest room’s adjacent to a shared bathroom with a second guest room my father’s used as his office for years. My mother never comes to this floor, and I’ll have at least a few minutes of quiet while the two of them argue.
I turn on a bedside alarm clock to a low-key jazz station someone traumatized might listen to, then roll my eyes at my intentional dramatics. I step into the bathroom and turn the shower on. The steaming hot water hits the wall and sides of the tub, billows of steam clouding my vision. I close my eyes when I’m assaulted with another memory of Constantine’s large body dwarfing mine while I’m bent over the tub…
Stay. Focused.
My hand shakes on the knob of the door to my father’s office. I take a deep breath, and open it.
The shades are drawn, casting the room in total darkness. I blink, trying to adjust my eyes to the dim lighting and quickly put the flashlight on my phone to bright. I swing the light around the room until I see it—his desk, cluttered and messy, the one “fuck you” to my mother’s compulsive dedication to neatness, the one space she doesn’t touch.
Crumpled papers and notebooks lie on the desk. But there’s no laptop in sight.
“Shit,” I mutter to myself, scanning everything and anything I can to find what I need. The shower runs in the background, and the music plays on.
He only takes his laptop out of the office when he’s in court. He’s home now, so it’s here somewhere. I race to the desk and try the drawers. They’re all open except for the bottom one, strangely locked with a padlock. I don’t remember him ever having a locked drawer before. Odd.
The laptop’s nowhere to be found.
I push myself to my feet, partly to get a better look around the office, partly because my nerves are on fire. Every second that ticks by feels loaded, weighted, as if they have a greater significance somehow. I need to find answers, and I need to find them now.
I glance at the locked drawer and wonder… is that where it is? Where’s the key?
When I was little, my parents had a secret stash of cookies and chocolate. My mother didn’t like me having sugar and would restrict junk food, but I found their stash, “hidden” in plain sight—right in my dad’s office closet.
In other words, my father isn’t terribly clever or conniving. I lift the padlock, frowning, and spin the dial to my dad’s birthday.
Nothing.
I try my parents’ anniversary. Again, nothing.
On a whim, I spin the dial to my own birthday. When the lock opens with a soft click, a lump knots my throat. With trembling hands, I open the drawer, knowing what I’ll find inside.
I expect the laptop. Slim, silver, it sits atop a small stack of papers with little else. Quaking, I remove it, open it, and quickly fire it up.
The laptop password is also my birthday, not surprisingly. The screen comes to life, and I quickly scroll.
His history’s filled with nothing but news articles, including a few recent searches involving Constantine. A cold trickle of fear and apprehension trace down my back when I narrow the search to dates and find Constantine’s name listed long before he was ever imprisoned.
Bratva heir
I close my eyes against the heady rush of emotion at seeing those words. It doesn’t take much to imagine Constantine sitting on a throne.
I haven’t really processed what any of that means yet. I swallow, hands trembling as a few more search histories come up that give me pause.
Alliance with Irish and Bratva.
Illicit drugs.
Nothing too incriminating for a DA, I tell myself. Until I come to his email.
The standard folders are filled with so much minutia, I don’t see it at first, but when I do, reality dawns on me so hard I can’t breathe. There’s an encrypted folder on his desktop with a little lock beside it.
For anyone else, that wouldn’t seem out of the ordinary. For my father who considers his birthday a secure password and still carries a flip phone… it’s a red flag.
I click the file. Encrypted flashes in yellow. I’ve been here before, though. I know how to do this. Quickly, I right-click the file and bring up the menu selection until I see “properties.” I navigate to “advanced,” then scroll again until the details pop up. Shaking, I remove the encryption. I breathe heavily when the file pops open.