Cracked Kingdom (The Royals #5)(64)

He sets the pink screwdriver on the ground, abandoning his mini construction project. “What happened?”

“I confronted my mom and she said that I broke my wrist at school and that the school tried to place the blame on my family to get out of a lawsuit.”

“That’s bullshit,” he swears. “Why would you lie about this shit to me? I practically forced you to admit what happened. You didn’t want to tell me, so it wasn’t for attention or sympathy. It was the truth.”

“Okay, but how do I prove that? It’s been three years. I’ve been thinking all day about how to get Dylan away from my dad, but that’s the only thing I can come up with.”

He scratches his head. “All right. We find out where your old school is located. We search the hospitals that were around there and we get your medical records.”

“What about the fact that I’m a minor?”

Easton taps his fingers on the ground. “I have an idea. Get your jacket. We’re going to see someone.”





Chapter 26





Easton





Someone is Lawrence—“Call me Larry”—Watson, a behemoth of a guy who somehow, for all his size, doesn’t look like he has an ounce of fat on him.

“Larry plays on the O-line,” I explain to Hartley, but her face registers no understanding. I forgot that football isn’t her thing.

Despite Larry’s skill on the field, football isn’t his thing either. Computers are, though. When he was fifteen, he moved into the apartment above his family’s second garage, saying that he needed more space. Never mind that his house is bigger than a couple gymnasiums. His parents let him because they figured it would foster his huge brain.

"This looks like a branch of NASA," Hartley comments as she takes in the five computer screens in the dimly lit room Larry calls an office.

"NASA wishes its set up was as sweet as mine," he brags. "This baby has twenty-four cores of computing power on a dual 3.0 gigahertz Intel Xeon E5-2687W v4 topped off with thirty megs of Smart Cache per processor.”

Hartley's eyes glaze over. She's a musician, not a coder. I step in before we lose her. "Here's the deal, Larry. Hartley's lost her memory."

"Oh, that's for real?"

I scowl. "Yeah, of course it is."

He shrugs and swivels around to face his desk. "I was just asking. No need to bite my head off."

"It's fine," Hart assures me, placing her hand on my shoulder.

I take a deep breath and squeeze her fingers. If she's okay with it, I need to be okay with it, too.

“What do you want me to find?”

“Hartley’s boarding school. It’s in New York and it should have the word North and Academy in it.”

“That’s it? You guys should have been able to do this?” He types a few things and a screen loads that says Astor Park Prep at the top.

I grit my teeth in frustration. Did Larry not hear me? “We don’t need her Astor Park records—”

“Look,” Hartley interrupts, pointing to the screen.

Larry’s not looking at Hart’s transcript, but her entire student file. He flips through the digital pages, stopping on the ones that have Northwood Academy for Girls at the top. “All-girls’ school, huh?” He wiggles his eyebrows. “Kinky. Any hot girls there?’

“I assume they were all gorgeous,” Hartley says. “We had lesbian orgies every weekend. We rubbed lotion on each other, had tickle contests, and every night ended with a silk pajama pillow party.”

Larry’s jaw grows slack.

“She’s kidding,” I insert.

“Man, who cares if she’s kidding?” He winds his hand in a circle. “Keep going. I don’t care if you’re making up these stories or that shit actually happened, just keep going.”

“That’s it, sorry. Other than the orgies we held every third Sunday as part of our worship to Nyx, the goddess of night. It was quite the ritual. We’d select one freshman from the neighboring boys’ school, strip him and then castrate him before feeding his balls to our cats.”

Larry sighs. “You just had to ruin it, didn’t you?” He turns to his screen again. “I don’t see anything interesting here. Good grades. No extracurricular activities. A note that says you don’t enjoy participating in group shit. That’s it?”

He sounds disappointed.

“No, actually, we’re trying to find her hospital records but didn’t know where the school was located. Can you figure that out?”

His eyes brighten. “Hospital records? That’s a lot more fun. Let’s see.” He types in the address and retrieves the website of the only hospital in the area. “It’ll depend on how much they digitize, but most hospitals scan all their records because they have to send them around. Oh, look, a patient portal,” he chortles. “This isn’t even going to require hacking.”

And it doesn’t. Larry is able to enter Hartley’s social, date of birth, and mother’s maiden name—information he’d gotten from her Astor records—to gain access to her patient portal, which has lab results, x-ray readings, and doctors’ notes. It’s laughably easy. The world’s a scary place, I think.