Protective

Detective P

Lana

Once the weekend rolled around, I stayed in bed for hours. I needed to sleep. I needed to regroup.

The thing that went down between Yeremy and I was weird at first, but we quickly fell into the role of bodyguard and body.

It wasn't so hard. It was just painstakingly silent. Outside of a hello or a good morning we never talked to each other.

I even had skipped breakfast a few times and he didn't even hand me a piece of gum to alleviate my hunger.

I would be lying if I said that I didn't want to know why. I was dying to know why. Yeremy was an entire mystery to me and I was sure that either my father or my brother had details about him somewhere in this house.

All I had to do was find it.

I dragged myself out of bed and into my bathroom to get ready. I showered, brushed my teeth, combed my hair, and then got dressed.

I knew that aside from a few servants I was home alone today.

Today, Yeremy was doing something with Dmitri and I was ordered not to leave the house under any circumstances by both of them.

I assumed they were going to continue interrogating the  man that tried to steal my bracelet. Apparently they had gotten nothing out of him and my father hadn't made much progress in the motherland either.

I contemplated which office I was going to snoop around in first as I walked toward the East Wing of the house.

My brother would have absolutely taken precautions when hiding any information he had on anyone and my father had secrets with secrets.

I would have better luck finding whatever Dmitri had then scouring the dozens of rooms my father had hidden in the passageways of this house. But even I had to admit that anything Dmitri had, my father would have tenfold.

I opened up my father's office and chose to ignore the family portrait that I usually liked to admire whenever I entered. There were tons of portraits of us over the years but this one had always been my favorite because it was the last one with my mother in it.

My father's office was as organized and pristine as he was. But even I knew that there was nothing that I was going to find in here.

First I scoured the bookshelves pulling on all of the books to see if any would trigger a mechanism to a hidden wall. I had a feeling it was too cliche and it was. There was nothing there.

I even knocked on the wood at the back of the shelf to see if I could hear something hollow but there was nothing.

I then moved onto the fireplace where our family portrait hung above.

This was the only other place it could be, unless my father had put something in the floor. I reached into the pit before pulling my hand back. My fathers clothes were never dirty, but if I stepped into the ash and soot my clothes and hands would be black.

I looked around the craftsmanship of the marble running my fingers across the stone. This was handcrafted.

I continued to run my finger across it until I felt some initials. D.K.N.P.

DKNP?

It took me a minute to understand but it was only a minute. Those were my mothers initials. Her full name was Diana Khristina Novikov Petrov. She joined her last name to my father's.

I pushed down on the letters and waited a few seconds before hearing a latch click.

The entire fireplace shuffled to the right revealing a gaping hole in the middle of the wall.

I smiled to myself recognizing not only my genius but my father's insanity to build a home with secret room and tunnels and hide it with the name of the woman he loved.

I climbed into the hole grabbing my phone to use as a flashlight and waited for the fireplace to move back into place.

Once it was shut, I walked all the way down a dimly lit tunnel until reaching a door all the way at the end.

This must be it.

I opened the door and found dozens of rows of shelved containing boxes that I knew was filled with classified information that he had acquired over the years.

There was no doubt in my mind that this room was beyond just an invasion of privacy.

If my father found out I knew about this he'd lock me away in a tower until the day I died.

I pushed the thought out of my mind and dove into the first box I saw.

I quickly realized that the system was organized alphabetically and ran around the room until I found M.

Yeremy's last name was Maximoff, but I didn't find a file on him. I found and entire box filled with information, voice logs, documents, forgeries, and pictures.

It would take me at least two hours to shuffle through all of this information and the possibility of getting caught still loomed over my head.

Sure, the servants were the only ones home and they rarely bothered me, but what if my father came home early? What if my brother called looking for me?

He would never find me here but he wouldn't find me in my room either. The only solution was to take the entire box with me.

I looked around the room, sure there was another way to get out than the way I came.

I ran my hand along the wall pushing every brick until one of them opened up.

I had spent most of my life exploring these tunnels. I knew them like that back of my hand which meant once I turned the corner and saw the statue of a knight, I knew how to get back to my room.

It struck me as odd that I never came across that room before. I thought that I had discovered all of the rooms in this house and I somehow missed one?

Was there anything else I missed?

I thought about my fathers wing of the house. Dmitri and I were always allowed to enter it. After all, my father had the best library.

But I never actually explored it as much as I could have. Most of the secret rooms in my fathers wing of the house were empty.

Once I got back to my room, I locked the bedroom door and took the box in the closet before locking the closet door too.

I smiled at my box and my success before opening it.

Everything I needed to know was in there, but what if there was something I wasn't supposed to know.

Was this too crazy?

Yeremy was a stranger. He was just my bodyguard.

But Yeremy was leaving anyway. Why did it matter if I knew things about him if he was just going to leave in a few months anyway?

It wasn't like snooping on a friend. No. I was just giving my bodyguard a background check.

It wasn't as if he didn't know all of my dirty laundry.

This—

This made us even.

- - End of Chapter - -