Page 121 of Tall, Royal and Grumpy

Twenty minutes. That’s how long it had taken Rocco, Laal, and Earl to find the bug in my room.

It took five hours for Gary, Rocco, and I to watch through nearly all ten days of CCTV footage.

Five minutes to figure out who had been acting suspicious.

And one minute for any sympathy, kindness, and understanding to evaporate from my blood.

No one was being forgiven for hurting my Babble. No matter what their excuse was.

I picked up the glass of water on the silver tray and finished the last few sips in a long gulp. There came a heavy knock on the door directly opposite me. Like planned, without receiving my summon, it was opened.

Three sets of footsteps clicked against the solid wood floor before the door closed, and the sound of two sets of steps were softened by the thick red patterned rug spread over most of my office.

I didn’t look up from my laptop. I didn’t have to. I knew exactly who had entered and where they were standing. Gary by the door. Rocco just ahead, at the end of the rug. The culprit ahead of him.

“Good evening, Your Highness. You asked to see me…”

Slowly, I lifted my chin. “Good evening—Sylvie.”

Sylvie—the young, newly-hired member of general staff who I’d startled this morning in the utility room—stood with her hands clasped in front of her a few steps away from my desk. About the same height as Esmeralda, she kept her shoulders relaxed, but her brown eyes screamed with the guilt she couldn’t manage to hide.

She knew why she was there. She knew what she had done. What I wanted to know was why. Because there was one thing that didn’t make sense in all of this.

I opened the top drawer of three on my left and picked up the bug. A thin black rectangle a touch smaller than my pinkie, with two wires that had been attached to a small cube housing the battery before Rocco had taken it off to cut the feed. It had been on the wall behind the painting of Bucky hanging by my bedroom door that Fay had done for my twenty-seventh birthday. The camera almost blended into the black frame of the painting, hence why I hadn’t noticed it.

It rolled off my fingers onto the wooden surface with a little clack. Sylvie’s eyes dipped to it, her knuckles on one hand going white as she squeezed the other. Leaning into the high back of my chair, I gestured to the bug with a lazy turn of my hand. “Rocco found this in my bedroom.”

“Really?” The puzzled look on her face was so obviously forced. “What is it?”

“You don’t know?” I arched my brow. She shook her head. “Are you sure?” I gave her a moment to answer. She replied with nervous silence. “Because the CCTV footage from the corridor shows you on the morning of Memorial Day—at the same time we were on our way to the service—pulling something that looked just like this out of your uniform pocket as you entered my room.”

Sylvie blanched, her body tensing before she blinked rapidly. “I—I don’t know what you mean, Your Highness. I mean, I did enter you room, but I didn’t—I didn’t have anything with me other than a trolley of cleaning supplies. Mini asked me to clean the window, because—”

“Mini asked you to do no such thing.” The ice globe caging my anger started cracking. “So don’t waste your breath trying to lie to me.” She twitched all over with a panicky restlessness.

“Why did you do it?” Silence. “Why did you bug my room?” Nothing but a rapid flicker in her expression as she refused to look at me head-on.

I sighed and leaned forward, pressing the pads of my spread fingers together, and touched my joint index fingers to my chin. “Okay, fine. Then tell me why you sent us those emails? What did you intend to gain from doing that?”

The edginess died away from her hands instantly. “What—what emails?”

Ah. There it was. The puzzle piece that didn’t fit.

She hadn’t sent the emails.

That was her first moment of honesty. And it made sense. What was the point of sending riddles rather than a demand for what she wanted in return for the footage? Only someone who had an agenda other than a material gain would have played with our heads like that.

That wasn’t Sylvie. But I had a skulking feeling I knew who it was.

“Who was your accomplice?” I said, my voice darker than the deepest depths of the Pursian sea.

She quickly shook her head. “I didn’t—”

“I suggest you tell me who it was unless you want to find yourself incriminated before a court in Touma and Jahandar for infringing on the privacy of two royal households and threatening them with illegally recorded videos. And I swear on Esmeralda’s life, Sylvie…” I looked her dead in the eyes. “I will make sure you serve nothing less than a life sentence in jail, never to see the light of day again, let alone have any interaction with your brother.”

She jerked a desperate step forward and Rocco swiftly moved, his two-metre frame lingering right behind her. “No, no please. Please, don’t hurt Jack. He’s all I have. I’m all he has—I can’t—I can’t go to jail, we have no one else. Please, he’s only a child. I can’t leave him—”

“You should have thought about that before you did all this, shouldn’t have you?”

---