Page 71 of A Valiant Prince

She shakes her head.

“Damn it, I don’t understand,” she mutters. I place my hands on her arms and pull them back, forcing her to stop typing and to look up at me.

“Tell me what is going on,” I demand calmly.

“Remember that I traced the M email to Sebastian?” she says.

“Yes,” I answer.

“Well, I ran this search. Sebastian had another email account set up on his assistant’s computer. But the IP address associated with the account he was emailing, comes up in three places. It’s an IPv6 address, so it’s a little different than what many people use, but it’s the locations that are bugging me. It’s not the fact that it’s more than one in this case,” she explains.

“OK, that’s like the link to the internet ID number thing, right?” I ask.

“Sort of, yeah,” she mutters, staring back at the screen.

“So, where are those locations?” I ask her.

“The summer palace, a café downtown, and…here,” she says, her voice fading on the last word.

“I don’t understand. You mean Norddale here?” I ask, confused.

She shakes her head. “The palace,” she says.

My body tenses under those two words.

“Jesus Christ!” I say loudly.

“Logan, remember when we contemplated whether this was an inside job?” she says to me.

I nod. “It’s an inside job for sure. Sebastian was a pawn. M was a pawn. Sten is a pawn. I can’t believe I was so blind,” she says.

“What do you mean?” I ask, confused once again.

“The emails…I went through them, ran encryption. They aren’t the ones behind this. Someone hacked Sebastian’s email. Someone re-routed IP addresses to Sten and Uncle Eddie’s house, and M…well, according to those emails, M was ‘taken care of.’ So, that leaves our security, staff, and the rest of us,” she says, looking up at me.

“OK, so we’ve decided who it can’t be, who can it be?” I ask her frowning.

She pulls her arms back to the computer and hits a few keys, her fingers trembling as she does so. I place a hand on her shoulder, trying to reassure her. Emails start popping up, and I read them.

She points to one in particular. “It’s not just one person. It’s four people. And I know who they are,” she says as she pulls up four separate emails.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Ilook at the emails from over her shoulder. They are all talking about details that no one would know except our families and inner circle of staff and security. So, that narrows it down, but I’m missing something because although I can tell these emails are to three separate people, no three people pop out at me.

“What am I missing?” I ask.

She points to the first one. “Who knows all the whereabouts of my father and your father?” she asks.

I frown again. “Well, I guess their security and secretaries,” I muse.

“Marcus, Victor, Fredrik, and Gregor,” she says. “Your father recently switched security detail. He does this on a regular basis. You’ll learn. It’s a thing in your country, rotating the guard. Anyhow, if you wanted to always know the whereabouts over time, you’d have to be with the king all the time. Fredrik has only been privy to that information for a short time.”

“Gregor,” I say dryly.

“Yes. But for us, there are two possibilities. Because of my mother’s death, my father kept Victor in place. Therefore, Marcus and Victor worked in conjunction with each other,” she says.

“But then, who’s the fourth person?” I ask.

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