“Why would I try anything? If you don’t want my help, then fine. I’ll stay here and do nothing, and you can brace yourself for an attack you don’t know where it’ll happen.” He turned on his heel and started to walk away.

“Wait.” We needed this information, but first I had to make sure we really didn’t have the keywords to decode the message stored somewhere. Maybe someone had thought the papers with them were useless and had put them in a box somewhere, but we definitely hadn’t thrown anything away just yet.

James faced me again, giving me an expectant look.

“I thought you never saw the keywords yourself, but now you claim you know they are in a secret compartment.”

“I saw my father put those papers in there, and he never let me take a closer look. That’s all. I know you don’t trust me, but that compartment isn’t in my father’s office like the others. You have to know how to find it.”

“And you’d be willing to show me where it is?”

“Obviously.”

“Why?” I wanted to hear him say it.

“If you need more of your men here because you keep losing fights, you could call back some of those who are guarding my family, and I don’t want that to happen. If anything happens to you, there will be people who’ll go after them immediately. I know your protection would remain in place, but it wouldn’t withstand attacks for long.” His eyes seemed honest. “And you know what they’re saying about me out there.”

I blinked at him, because I wasn’t sure how he could possibly know any of that.

“Your second didn’t tell you.” He let out a small laugh. “I thought surely he would.”

“I suppose he didn’t deem it important.” I slipped my hand into my pocket and grabbed my phone. “Go back to Meg and see if you can figure out the keyword somehow, and I’ll check if anyone found anything that resembles keywords.” I started down the hallway, intent on going through some of the things that had been found at the Ezzatis’ place myself. If one of my own had actually stolen those papers, we’d all have a whole lot more trouble.

***

“ARE YOU SURE THERE isn’t anything else?” I wiped my sweaty forehead after I’d gone through the final boxes with papers that had been brought from the Ezzatis’.

“Yes, ma’am,” the man in charge of guarding the boxes said. “This was all that was brought.”

“And every corner was searched? Even the secret safes?” I got to my feet, dusting off my pants. This storage room didn’t look like it had been cleaned in the past few months.