When All is Null and Void

Chapter Forty-Two

Not even twenty-four hours passed before Alaric Ralston put out another, incredibly short article redacting what he'd said. He apologized formally in it, explaining he was in the wrong and should never have posted the article without receiving clearance. Righteous satisfaction covered Titus as he read the redaction, but then a notification popped up on his screen. I didn't write it to hurt you.

Titus had furiously begun to type a reply when he stopped. Why did it even matter anymore?

Titus took off his wrist Holo for the first time since he'd received it three years ago, and laid it on the bedside table. He was angry. Furious he had no ring, pissed off that his mom had taken it after she'd confided in him her thoughts on Danielle and Natalee. She'd given him hope and then dashed it against the rocks of motherly concern.

Now this article made everything worse.

Titus felt an ache in his gut. He rubbed his hands through his hair, trying to dispel the memory of Alaric's hands on his stomach. How sure he'd felt in the moment, when a coursing fire of desire had hit him telling him it was precisely what he had always wanted. Titus shook his hands vigorously as guilt crashed over him in droves. Just because it was what you wanted, didn't mean you needed to give in so easily. Right?

He walked out of his room, because if he looked at the mirror, he kept getting flashes of Alaric's speckled blue eyes and the way his lips had been so soft and—he shivered, chiding himself. Alaric had played him. Had used him. He'd probably been put up to it, promised some extra bout of money from his dad if he could figure out some dirt on Rhea James' son.

Idiot, Titus thought. He fled down the hall and to the library where he was supposed to be meeting Tobias for his tutoring in English. He hated working with Tobias because he was an extremely boring old man with a constant state of onion-flavored halitosis. His eyes were always watering, and he was always sniffling on about the classics and the importance of literature. Titus understood. English was important, but this guy was the sort of man who'd grown so deep in the subject he was practically a classic himself: full of boring inner monologues and exhausting exposition.

He sat through the lesson for an hour before cutting it short. He simply chose to walk out, which wasn't an appropriate response, but if he had to hear one more thing about the quality of Jane Austen's writing, he was going to throw the book straight at Tobias' balding head. And that would be a pretty dismal way to react, and would surely cause him a lot of grief with his mom. He'd have to sit through a lecture on the way you treated other human beings, and it would make him feel all the more guilty.

He knew his mom was at the Museum today—which rarely meant she was actually visiting their building in Manhattan. It usually meant she was going to deal with a Void leak, or she was checking in on the Voidsick. She wouldn't return for at least a few hours. Whenever she would Hop, she hated to return to the exact moment she'd left, because it confused her.

So whenever he found himself in her office, Titus didn't feel particularly stressed about her walking in on him snooping. Since she'd admitted to it having been her experimenting with the Void in the first place when this had all started, and Natalee was only perpetuating the issue, he'd grown curious.

The only issue was he didn't know where to start looking to find the footage from when they'd been experimenting. What they would even be called—if she even kept them stored in her data—he didn't know. Her desk wasn't connected to any external servers, so the data was kept hidden. He'd noticed whenever she wanted to pull up information from the internet, she would have to use her own wrist Holo.

It was possible she would have kept the data on here.

And the desk wasn't even locked. At any rate, Titus already knew the backdoor method of entering whenever he wanted to view more...unsavory content.