Page 12 of Shattered Empire (Shattered World)

Except he wouldn’t.

He was dead.

Vas sighed. It was deep and sad. Leaning back in his chair, his ankle crossed over his opposite knee, he said, “I know what you mean. I’ve been going through the reports on his laptop and feel like I’m snooping.”

“What reports?” I asked curiously.

“We keep all of our dealings on an encrypted black box that is nestled just inside the laptop,” Vas explained. “Unless someone took the laptop apart piece by piece, no one would ever know it was there. Plus, it’s linked directly into a program. So as long as you insert the right username and passcode, it leads you to the box. Any other combination will take you through the dummy program. It allows the operation to keep everything off paper as well as make sure there isn’t any electronic trace either.”

That had me stunned. It was pretty advanced thinking for the mafia. Not even Hollywood movies had come up with that.

“When you say dealings,” I questioned, leaning forward in my seat. “Do you mean like theBratva’sblack book?” Vas nodded.

Snapping my fingers excitedly, I stood, the chair rolling out from beneath me and hitting the shelves at my back. “That’s it,” I exclaimed, rushing from the room.

“What’s it?” Vas trailed behind me, hot on my tail.

“Libby mentioned snagging a few of Elias’s black books from his office when you took her back for some of her things,” I told him, pushing the door to Libby’s old room open. “I went through her room, and I never found anything.”

“I can sense abutcoming.” Vas sighed.

“But—” I kept going, ignoring his snide remark. “If you all managed to think about having everything electronically, so would Libby. She was nothing like Mark, but Libby knew her way around a computer. What if she translated everything electronically and locked it up?”

The lightbulb went off in Vas’s brain. His shoulders straightened, and a feral smile crawled across his face. “Damn, she was smart.”

“No doubt.”

Opening her bedside drawer, I pulled out the sleek black laptop she was given when she first arrived so she could still complete her schoolwork while they hunted down Elias and Christian.

I flipped open the top, and the laptop whirred to life.

“She didn’t have it locked?” Surprise tinted his voice. “Who doesn’t lock their laptop?”

I shrugged. “Someone who has nothing to hide that isn’t already secure?”

It made sense. Libby would have only ever had her schoolwork on the computer, which she completed from the safety of the penthouse after Vas had her switched to online classes. She wouldn’t have needed to lock her laptop. But she would have protected the information she copied over from Elias’s black books.

The question was—where would she put imperative information on her laptop? A subdrive was possible, but I wasn’t seeing anything popping out at me other than her normal school documents. I thought back to what I read in her journal. The hastily scrawled numbers and name. I assumed Demeter was a username I would enter to access a specific file, but there wasn’t anything in her files that didn’t just open. No passwords were needed for any of them.

Where the fuck did she put it?

“What if it isn’t to a file?” Vas asked. “What if it’s to a site or even another account on the laptop?”

“Worth a try.” I logged out of the current account to get to the main screen. Nothing. There wasn’t even an option to log in to another one. “Wait.” The lightbulb clicked. The dawn was rising. It was all coming full circle. “What was Demeter’s daughter’s name in the Greek myth?”

“Um,” Vas thought for a moment before the lightbulb dinged. “Persephone.”

“Persephone’s Web.” We both said aloud. Persephone’s Web was an underground chat room and dark web encryption hosting platform. Unlike most of the dark web, Persephone’s Web was created to help people in need find and store vital information on taking down organizations like Elias’s. Libby and I had learned about it from Mark before I pulled a Houdini and disappeared in the dead of night under Elias’s nose.

Persephone was a legend. Having exposed more sex trafficking rings and shady government officials and deals than any law enforcement agency in the world. It was a safe space for victims or families of victims to find justice without all the expenses.

My fingers moved lightning fast, clicking back into Libby’s primary account. I had missed it. There had been a small black symbol that blended in with the swirling of her wallpaper in the top right corner of the screen. It was Demeter’s symbol in Greek mythology. Flush stalks of grain.

I double clicked.

And waited with bated breath as the rainbow icon of the mouse shifted and turned.

“Yes!” I grinned broadly when a subscreen popped up before my eyes, requesting a password. Entering the digits I saw in her journal, I pressed enter.

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