Page 100 of Vows of Silence

When two days passed and he still hadn’t returned home, my anxiety was through the roof.

He wasn’t dead. Of that, I was certain. Silas had a reputation, and if he was dead, it would be breaking news. I never turned the TV off, so I would have seen the announcement. But something was keeping him from me. Something was preventing him from returning home.

And rather than sit panicking over it a moment longer, I decided to do something about it.

Old Isabelle would have spiralled. She would have sunk into a depression and figured there was nothing she could do about it. But Silas had taught me that there was so much I could do, even if it wasn’t a physical search. So I walked straight over to Silas’s office and changed the roles.

I was now the watcher.

Okay.

I may have been a bit premature with my declaration.

I most certainly was not the watcher, because I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing!

Silas’s office wasnothinglike my father’s. His was all leather sofas and a single desk with one computer on top.

Silas’s, on the other hand?

This was fucking madness.

I looked around, my jaw slacking as an overwhelming feeling settled over me. He had one desk stretching the length of the entire wall. Above the desk were twelve monitors, and then along the desk were three computer screens.

Who the fuck needs fifteen different screens?!

I pressed a button on the remote, and the monitors on the wall turned on, showing me surveillance cameras. On the remote were presets, allowing me to choose the location. As I flicked through them, I saw the docks, various different casinos, a horrific-looking dungeon setup that I rapidly looked away from, cameras around Adrien’s property, as well as a whole bunch of others.

Of course, there were also presets relating to me. There was my bedroom back at my father’s, a preset for the entire house, as well as my bedroom here.

I took note of the cameras in my current bedroom, deciding once Silas returned home it would be fun to cover those cameras and hide from him without an unfair advantage for once. I grinned wickedly, thinking of the delicious punishment he would dole out once he caught me—because I had no doubt that he would. And then I sat down at the computer, deciding to turn off the other two monitors at the switch and focus just on the middle one.

If Silas were to walk through the door right now, I knew he wouldn’t be angry with me. In fact, he’d be curious as to what I was doing. He would encourage me in his own way to dig, toexplore the questions in my mind, to satisfy my curiosity on my own.

Silas and Luca were similar like that. They liked me to think for myself. Which made sense. Luca had once told me he knew Adrien’s guards. And I had no doubt that Luca was somehow responsible for the casino fire that had dragged Adrien and my father away from dinner. It made sense that Luca had picked up one or two habits from Silas. It would make sense for Silas to have similar men around him—especially if Luca was one of Silas’s men, which is what I was beginning to suspect.

Feeling pretty proud of myself and my own deductions, I impatiently waited for the computer to boot up. And when I did, I was surprisingly taken aback by how ordinary it seemed. Considering the sheer amount of surveillance equipment surrounding it, I had expected something straight out of a Bond film. Perhaps a giant red button labelledlaunch missiles, or at the very least a dramatic black screen filled with green code slowly scrolling down it.

Instead, it looked like every other computer I’d ever used.

The desktop was organised into folders, all carefully labelled and arranged in neat rows that told me everything I needed to know about Silas before I’d even opened a single one. He was organised to an almost frightening degree. There wasn’t a single file out of place. Everything had a purpose. Everything had a home.

I clicked on one of the folders.

Numbers.

Blah. Next.

More numbers.

Blah times two. Thank you, next.

Even more numbers.

“Right,” I muttered. “I’m starting to understand why you’re so quiet. This is ever so thrilling.”

Whatever Silas actually spent his days doing, it apparently involved spreadsheets. Lots and lots of spreadsheets.

I cringed as I closed the folder, glancing around the office as though someone might have witnessed me insulting what was probably a very important criminal empire. I was glad to see that the room remained empty.