Page 18 of A Wise Prince

“Do it,” she commands, giving me a look that would make lesser men shrink back in fear. I sigh before complying.

She taps the umbrella on one of my shoulders and then the other. “I hereby declare under the authority of hundreds of years of women in the House of Alexander of the Kingdom of Norddale that you, Prince August of the House of Alexander, are a woman for the purposes upon which it is required for admittance and henceforth bestowed with the honors of being such in this family. If you shall ever reveal the secrets revealed to you tonight, you will be hung by your royal jewels in the dungeons. Please rise, Ms. Augusta, and follow me.” She twirls the umbrella and walks toward my closet and I stare after her in disbelief. What. The. Fuck. And my royal jewels? Seriously?

“Fuckknob, you coming?” she calls out from my closet.

I groan and head toward her.

“What’s with all the theatrics?” I ask as I follow her. I note she’s heading toward the family library in the tower.

“Sorry, I needed a clean conscience to show you this. It’s all I could think of…well, so last minute, anyhow,” she says as she leads us to the door that opens into the library.

Once inside, I look around. Then, I look back at Anna.

“You ready to have your mind blown?”

I point to my chest. “You are going to blow my mind?”

She grins. “Why yes, I am.” She heads up to the second story and I follow her along the narrow balcony until we reach the dead end. I cock my head to one side as she winks at me and pulls down a book, only the book doesn’t come off the shelf and a moment later the end of the bookcase swings open, revealing a hidden staircase. I’d like to pride myself that I don’t shock easily, call it years of practice or not giving a fuck, or somewhere in between, but right now, you would need a backhoe to pick my jaw up off the ground.

“What the…” I trail off as she crooks her finger at me.

“This way, Augusta,” she says with a smirk. I roll my eyes and follow her up a very narrow staircase. We pop out into a small circular room that’s essentially hidden in the woodwork of the beams of the roof. The room is…well…very Anna. There are computers and monitors everywhere. She’s somehow wired in electricity. And in one corner is a shelf and a chair. The light other than the single bulb overhead and the desk lamp comes from a slit in the wall where it looks like a stone has been removed to allow in natural light. It’s so narrow though, that from the outside, it would just look like a gap in the mortar of the stonework, hardly noticeable on a castle that’s been standing for centuries.

“What is this?” I ask her.

“Sit down.” She motions to the chair by the shelf. She sits in the small modern black chair at one of the desks.

“This,” she starts, motioning around us, “is the secret room of the women of the House of Alexander. It’s been passed down through generations. Mom had just shown it to me a few weeks before her death. And until right now, I kept it a secret at her request.”

“Holy. Shit,” I manage.

“I was hoping for more of a ‘wow, this is cool’ or ‘hey, glad I’m a girl now,’” she says.

“So, this is where you sneak off to,” I muse. For years, Anna would sneak off, and we wouldn’t be able to find her.

She nods. “Come here, let’s see what the dark web has for us tonight.” I scoot the chair over to her desk and watch as she expertly works through mazes of the web that I don’t understand. It’s all numbers and codes and a completely foreign language to me.

Not long ago, my sister revealed that she was a world-renowned hacker. She also happened to find out about a plot to kill a prince, who didn’t know he was a prince. She saved him and us and happened to uncover that our uncle was behind the murder plot and also had the prince’s mother and our mother killed in an attempt to bring down Montelandia’s monarchy and ours. As it happens, the prince is now Anna’s husband, Logan. Logan’s father happens to be the king of Montelandia, our neighbor principality. The whole thing ended in the death of my uncle after he nearly killed my aunt in an explosion he arranged at the Summer Palace, which was just reconstructed. Never a dull moment in the royal life.

I sit patiently, laughing when Anna keeps typing with one hand and opens a small fridge door with the other, handing me a bottle of water.

“Thanks. Quite the setup you have here. Is this a perk of being involved in the world of espionage?” I ask. Currently, Anna assists with intelligence work for our country. It’s an odd job for a princess, but it’s a perfect job for Anna.

“One could say that,” she answers. She sets a bucket of cheese puffs on the table and pushes it toward me, while she grabs a handful of Oreos from a container next to the desk.

“Fuck the cheese puffs, I want Oreos too,” I whine.

She laughs and throws one at me. I catch it and continue my watching.

She sighs after about ten minutes of clicking keys. “Nothing to note. Last nugget I had was an underground auction in Barcelona.”

“A what?”

She rubs her head. “There’s this ring of illegal artifact sellers that hold a roaming underground auction. It moves but is always held on the fifth of the month in a different city. It’s invite-only and has some of the most famous stolen works of art and historical artifacts in the world. Occasionally, they sell other things like ivory or whatnot, but mostly it’s the art. I had heard rumblings about a crown at one of them, but it turned out to be stolen from a gallery in Rome.”

“Wow,” I interject because leave it to my sister to have found this and infiltrated it.

She shrugs.

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