Chapter Two
Pierre leaned against their apartment door and closed his eyes, the enticing scent of their target hacker clinging to his nostrils.
A deep rumble threatened in his chest and his cock pressed against the zipper of his jeans.
She was a tiny little thing, barely reaching his shoulder, but there was a fierceness about her, a boldness in her gaze, and a stubborn tilt to her chin that had nearly had him pushing her up against the wall and fucking her in the damn elevator.
Putain. That was more Louis’ style than his. He shook his head, tamped down on his wayward dick and strode down the hall to where Louis was munching away on his latest foray into British gateaux.
Louis licked his lips and held out the sticky confection. “Chelsea bun. Want some?”
He screwed up his nose. His brother was determined to work his way through every unique variation of what passed for pastry here in London. It was lucky he was a shifter or his penchant for all things food, especially of the sweet variety, would see him wider than the Place de la Concorde.
His twin shrugged. “D’accord. More for me. Your café is on the table.”
Louis flopped on the hideous floral couch.
Convincing the previous tenant to sell up, furniture and all, had been a boon—as long as they were willing to put up with nineteen-forties old-lady décor.
Pierre needed a decent café to face it each morning.
Thankfully, the patisserie down the street catered to both his and Louis’ needs.
Pierre sucked down a fortifying gulp of caffeine and joined his brother on the couch. “You ran into her in the patisserie?”
“Oui, and while I’d love to say she was admiring my ass while I was making my selection, I’m more confident she was sizing me up as a threat.”
Pierre had had the same thought in the elevator. Although, there had been some interest. His cock perked up. “She’s a hacker. She’s bound to be wary. And she did detect our malware.”
Louis smirked. “Not quick enough. Not before we got what we needed.”
“What else do we know about our little Black Hat, Melinda Cheng?”
“Mm, not so much a Black Hat as a White Hat. Maybe. I did a little research on that building you said she went into.” Louis flipped open his laptop and pulled up an image of the nondescript block of apartments she’d visited this morning.
“Turns out it’s a women’s refuge. Not as well hidden as they would like to believe. It’s government funded.”
“What’s she doing at a women’s refuge?”
“I did some digging while I was waiting for the Tube. I couldn’t find anything current on our cipher except a name, and I was lucky to get that.
No surprises there. But I did find these.
” He clicked on a tab and brought up a list of recordings.
“Historical emergency calls.” He clicked on one, and the calm voice of the operator and a trembling voice of a child echoed through the speakers.
“Nine-nine-nine, what’s your emergency?”
“Please come quick. He’s hurting her again.”
“Who, sweetie? Tell me what’s happening.”
“It’s Daddy. He’s hurting Mommy again. Dinner was too cold and it made him angry.”
“I’m sending someone straight away, sweetheart. You stay on the line with me. Are you safe?”
“I’m hiding in the cupboard. He never finds me here.”
There were distant sounds of yelling, a crash, a woman’s scream and the line went dead.
“There are more. A lot more. All similar. There are records in the UK police database of officers attending the home of a Jiehong and Huiyeng Lee, multiple times. They offered to press charges, but each time Huiyeng claimed she’d”—Louis tapped the keyboard and brought up one statement after another—“fallen down the stairs, tripped and hit a door, wasn’t watching where she was going.
The list goes on. On record is their daughter, Mei Lin, as a regular nine-nine-nine caller. ”
“Mei Lin Lee.”
“She goes by Melinda Cheng now.” Louis clicked on another tab, revealing a black-and-white photo of a woman in her forties. She wasn’t smiling, and her face had the resigned look of someone who’d accepted her fate.
“Is that from an obituary?”
“Oui. This is Huiyeng Lee. She died of a stroke at forty-three. Constant beatings from her husband probably helped that along.”
Pierre studied the photo. “Melinda has her eyes, and her chin.” He took a sip of his café and stared at the sad eyes of Melinda’s mother.
“So, she couldn’t help her mother, no matter how many times she called the police, so now she makes it her mission in life to create fake identities for other battered women?
Giving them a chance to escape the life her mother never managed to free herself from?
” He frowned. “If that’s the case, where does Cordelia King fit into this?
The only thing she’s running from is us. And she deserves to be running.”
“I don’t imagine women from a government-funded refuge would pay well.
We’ve been watching Melinda for three weeks, and there’s no evidence she does anything but hacking.
” Louis pointed to the women’s refuge on the screen.
“My guess? These are her passion projects. Something she does because she wants to. Because she’s called to do it.
Cordelia could be how Melinda makes her money. Taking on other clients.”
Pierre stared at the long list of calls to nine-nine-nine.
It was telling she’d chosen her mother’s maiden name.
She could have given herself any name and disappeared completely into the ether.
She could’ve hacked into the police data system, as Louis had—she was good enough to do it—and removed all the evidence of her childhood, but she hadn’t.
No. She’d deliberately chosen to leave it there.
Like an act of defiance against the man who’d tormented her mother. Melinda Cheng was a crusader.
Pierre rose and paced the floor, his hands fisted at his side, his claws threatening to punch through into his palms. That Cordelia would hire hackers to elude them wasn’t unexpected, but of all the ones she could have chosen, that she’d picked one with heart, a White Hat, to do her dirty work, made him want to rend and destroy.
“Pierre?”
“Mm?”
“You were growling.”
“I was?” He was? What has got into me today? He was on edge, his whole body prepped for a fight and his wolf hovering close to the surface. He scrubbed his chin. “This would be so much easier if our hacker were some pimply little male.”
Louis closed his laptop, and swiveled to face him. “How so?”
“We could break into his apartment, tie him to a chair and beat the answers out of him. Or, at the very least, keep him quiet while we crack the encryption on his tech.”
Louis eyed him. “I’m not sure why that isn’t still an option.”
Pierre rubbed at his chest. It was what they’d planned. Why did he suddenly feel so uncomfortable about it? Because she was a woman?
Louis shrugged. “Alor, we wait until she goes to the refuge again and break into her apartment while she’s gone.”
“Her security on her tech will be almost as good as ours. We’d need days.”
Louis shrugged. “Then we take her tech. We’d have all the time in the world then.”
“Think, Louis. We do that, she contacts Cordelia, and the witch cuts off all ties and disappears. Any information we glean will be useless. We’d be back at the beginning again, hunting down another of her hackers, at the ass-end of the world in Australia or Russia. I don’t speak Russian, do you?”
Louis unfurled himself from the sofa. “D’accord. Then we go on the charm offensive. Seduce her. Convince her to tell us all of her secrets.”
Putain. His cock liked that idea.
“We are new to the building. We do the neighborly thing and invite her over for drinks and apéritifs.”
“What makes you think she’d come, Louis? Everything we’ve learned about her over the last few days suggests she lives most of her life online.”
“Mm, but she’s suspicious of us, no? This would be her chance to scope us out. If we invite the other tenants on this floor, and a few from the one above and below, she’ll think it’s safe enough to step inside the lion’s den. Or”—he grinned, his canines peeking through—“the wolf’s den.”
Pierre stared at his brother. That might actually work. “We need to do this soon. We’ve wasted enough time trying to track Cordelia down.”
“I can pick up a few bottles of wine, beer, maybe some rum to make a few mojitos tomorrow. Let’s make it Saturday night. We don’t want to give her too much time to think about it.”
Pierre headed for the door. “I’ll go invite our neighbors.”
Louis’ hand on his shoulder stopped him. “You invite the other neighbors. I’ll invite her. You had her all to yourself in the elevator. I barely got a good look at her in the patisserie.”
Pierre studied his twin. There was a determined set to Louis’ shoulders he rarely saw, and dark shadows flitted in his eyes, signaling his wolf was close to the surface. She was affecting him, too.
Could it be…? Could she be…? Fate had a funny way of interfering when it came to the mates of Langeais wolves. It’d happened in the past with their ancestors. They’d seen it with Laurent and Nathalie. And again with Gabriel when he’d been reunited with his mate Annabelle.
“Oui. You should go.”
If Louis reacted as strongly to her as he had… It wouldn’t be the first time in the history of the Langeais wolves twins had shared a mate.