Page 115 of Merciless Sinner

I'm hesitant and still not ready. The hurt is still raw. But I realize, it's not going to go away overnight.

This is not the kind of thing that you just forget. It's going to take time, just like with everything else.

Eden makes me a quick snack, and I take out a photo album Seamus brought around a few weeks ago.

I looked through it then, but I go to the sunroom to look through it again.

It contains pictures of Amelia and I.

I open it, and it starts with us as babies. Literal babies. Who are Nine months old. She has a pink bonnet, and I have a yellow one. I flick through to more pictures of us as children, then as teenagers, and then adults. We were all so close, us together, and our parents.

The feud ripped us all apart. She asked me for a chance. How can I not give her one?

We share such a rich history together. Deciding to push my feelings aside, I gear myself up to go and give her the chance she asked for.

The look on her face when she sees me walking across the road toward the museum is a sort a person would want to frame.

I smile back at her, hoping we can move past this.

But something inside me tells me, I can't.

ChapterThirty

Virgo

We found the recording unit in my father's office.

It's a small victory, but now we have to open it.

It was carefully hidden in the case with his Bible, of all the books, and I had to search through over two thousand books, documents, and various other things to find it.

The entire office is practically decimated and looks like a bomb dropped in the middle of it.

It seemed like the only course of action after he was shot was to look for the recording unit in here.

The plan was to hack into it and see if we could get the recording from the day he was shot.

I found it about an hour ago. Now I'm joined by Dante and Cillian, who've been trying to help me gain access to the device.

The unit is one of those tricky ones, with a self-destruct mechanism, so you get ten times to try and put the password in, and if it doesn't work, the unit will destroy itself.

Only my father would think of such a thing. Yes, it's a good idea, but not for times like these.

The worst thing is, I've already input the password wrong five times.

“Maybe we should take a break,” Dante suggests.

“That might be a good idea,” Cillian agrees. “We can regroup and come back later. We don't want to waste the next lot of tries.”

“No, I say looking over the unit. I have to keep trying. If this last attempt doesn't gain access, then we'll take a break.”

I've modified a hacking device I often use to access encrypted files on computers. I’m hoping my modifications will make it work here.

I've gone off the basis of trying to see if I can access the previous occasions when the password was used.

If this thing belonged to anybody but my father, I know I would have definitely been in by now. But it's clear from the fact that Ican'tget in, that he was trying to keep his affairs hidden from someone like me.

Or maybe it was actually me.

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