Milluki said nothing.
The light from the screen shone on his face, and sweat dripped down his fat chin.
He understood that directory name that looked like a string of gibberish. The annotations in needle-shaped characters, the three nested layers of anti-tracking code, and the timestamp on the entry—it dated to shortly after an early model of the Hive had been stolen, according to the Zoldyck Family's internal records.
He entered the same verification command a second time. The result was identical.
Then he entered it a third time.
Bai Zhu leaned beside him, watching the same result pop up on the screen without a word.
In silence, Milluki reached over and picked up the empty chip bags on the table beside him, one by one. He smoothed them out, then carefully folded each in half and stacked them into a little square.
Once he finished, he suddenly slammed his fist into the casing of the server cabinet beside him.
"Fuck!"
He wasn't loud, but his whole body was shaking.
He finally understood.
The family had told him that the Hive project he'd led had been shelved because of a technical bottleneck. So it hadn't been shelved at all. His own eldest brother, Illumi, had turned around and sold the technology to outsiders, even leaving himself a backdoor that no one could discover.
And he, the Zoldyck Family's nominal head of technology, had known nothing about it.
It wasn't the money that angered him.
It was that they'd treated him like a complete idiot. Like an outsider.
Bai Zhu didn't try to comfort him. He simply looked at the familiar signature on the screen and calmly pointed out, "The door your brother left behind is yours to use now."
He paused, then finished his thought.
"When you're done, you can