Disgraced
Copyright© 2025 by Ogreface
Chapter 4: Guilty Until Proven Innocent
“We need to talk,” the duke said to Dane as the shuttle lifted off nearly soundlessly and flew away. “Come to my office.” With that the two noblemen turned and headed into the palace, with stern faces.
Something was wrong. His two brothers were not peeking through the doorway anymore either. He would have expected some kind of welcome back even if he was not a returning hero, but this cold-shoulder greeting was rather ominous.
Just inside the door Dane encountered the butler and a footman. Dane was carrying the uniform pieces and two bladed weapons. Taking those items into the duke’s office seemed weird so he handed the stuff to the butler, knowing that everything would be handed off to a footman to be dumped in his room. The butler was glaring at him but took the stuff Dane was handing him.
“I was about to cancel the rest of the festival,” the duke said to Dane after the office door was closed. “Luckily we discovered that most of the population were not visiting the data-net sites where you posted the images, so we managed to remove them before they became general knowledge.”
“What images, Your Grace?” Dane asked in confusion.
“Images of my daughters busy undressing,” the duke said in an icy tone. Dane’s dad was rather red in the face as he glared at Dane. “I decided not to cancel the rest of the festival, but my family will be out of the public eye for a while, all thanks to you.”
“I’m sorry, Your Grace, but I don’t understand,” Dane said. He was suddenly feeling a bit light-headed. He still had no idea what was going on but the conversation, and the tone of it, seemed unreal, as did his own body.
“You think you were clever in hiding your tracks,” the duke said. “You forgot a few key issues. The culprit had to be somebody with sufficient technical knowledge to rig a spy system using optical crystals and a recording device. Then the culprit also had to have access to the palace, and to the suites of my daughters. You have been a guest in my house for nearly a week. Even your brothers revealed how you showed them how to rig such a system. The information Lance and William provided was the key to finding the guilty party, meaning you.”
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