Chapter 004 The Assignment
Quinn sagged against the cool metal of the elevator doors, her heart hammering against her ribs.
Seventeen floors. It shouldn't have been enough time to unravel twenty-six years of carefully constructed repression, but apparently, her nervous system had decided to reboot in safe mode.
She closed her eyes. The afterimage was still there, burned into her retinas like a monitor ghost. The sheer, overwhelming size of him. The way he took up space, displacing the air until there was nothing left to breathe but him. And the eyes. Golden. Predatory. They hadn't looked at her like she was a consultant; they’d looked at her like she was... something else.
Something resonant.
And the way he’d said her name. It wasn't a greeting. It was a claim.
She squeezed her thighs together, a sudden, wet heat pooling between them.
Oh, come on.
This was not good. She didn’t react like this to men. She didn’t react like this to anyone. Her body was usually a neutral territory, a meat-sack transport vehicle for moving her brain from one server room to another. It wasn't supposed to stage a full-scale rebellion over a thirty-second hallway encounter.
He smelled like...
Her brain, ever the pragmatist, tried to file the data under Irrelevant/Corrupt Files, but her body refused to comply. It wanted to find out what that scent was. It wanted to press her face against the wall of his chest and inhale until the static in her head cleared.
Stop it.
The elevator dinged. The doors slid open.
Quinn pushed off the wall, smoothing her shirt with trembling hands. Reality. Code. Logic. She needed a terminal. She needed to bury herself in syntax until the world made sense again. She marched down the hallway, eyes fixed on the carpet, determined to purge the memory from her cache.
"Quinn?"
She jumped, nearly dropping her tablet.
Elise was hovering outside her office door. The intern was young, bright, and frighteningly observant. She was also Moonstone pack, which meant she probably had better hearing than a directional microphone.
"Elise. Hi." Quinn’s voice came out an octave too high. She cleared her throat. "Hey."
"I was just coming to show you the anomaly I found in the server logs—" The girl stopped dead. Her nose twitched. Then flared. "Has the Alpha been here?"
Quinn’s pulse spiked.
"Alpha?" she asked. The word felt heavy in her mouth. She tried for an airy, dismissive wave, but it looked more like a muscle spasm.
"Yes. Julian. The Alpha of the Moonstone Pack. Silas’s brother?" Elise took a step closer, inhaling deeply, her eyes widening.
"Oh. Him." Quinn unlocked her office door, desperate to put a physical barrier between herself and the conversation. "We crossed paths in the hallway, I think. Brief interaction. Very brief."
Elise just looked at her. Her expression was unreadable, weighing the scent clinging to Quinn against the frantic deflection. After a long, agonizing beat, she nodded slowly.
"He has a very strong presence," Elise said.
"Right. Sure." Quinn sat behind her desk, tapping the spacebar to wake her monitors. "You said something about server logs?"
Elise blinked, shaking off the wolfish distraction. She held out her tablet. "Right. The anomaly."
Quinn dragged her brain back from the hallway and focused on the screen. The data stream was clean, mostly. But there, buried in the handshake protocol of the external firewall... a blip.
"That’s interesting," she murmured. Her fingers found the keyboard, and the familiar plastic click-clack settled her nerves instantly. She pulled up the main security dashboard. Green lights across the board. System optimal.
But Elise was right. There was a ghost in the machine. A flicker of data where there should be none.
"I ran a trace," Elise said, her voice dropping into excitement. "It’s bouncing through so many proxies it’s impossible to pinpoint the source, but look at the target vector. It’s definitely trying to access the secure server that holds the financial records for the Moonstone pack’s investment."
Quinn’s blood ran cold. That server was the digital equivalent of Fort Knox. It was air-gapped from most of the network for a reason.
"I’ll look into it," she promised, the lingering heat in her body forgotten. "Excellent work, Elise. Seriously."
"I’m glad it was helpful." The girl lingered in the doorway. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "Would... would you like to have lunch sometime? Or coffee? If you have time, I mean."
The question hung in the air, alien and terrifying.
Quinn stared at her. An invitation. A normal, human interaction. A wave of heat washed over her cheeks, different from the earlier flush but just as disorienting.
"That... that would be nice," she managed. "I just have to dig into this first."
"Okay. I’m usually in the breakroom around one." Elise gave her a shy smile and disappeared down the hall.
Quinn stared at the empty doorway for a moment, a strange warmth blooming in her chest. Then she turned back to her screens. The ghost in the machine was waiting.
---
Three hours later, her eyes burned.
The world had shrunk to the glowing green lines on her monitor. She barely registered the arrival of the day shift, the hum of the HVAC, or the gradual increase in office noise. Someone—probably Elise—had left a bagel and a cup of lukewarm coffee on the corner of her desk. Quinn ate the bagel without looking away from the code.
She had isolated the anomaly. It hadn't penetrated the security—her architecture was too good for that—but it was persistent. A probe. Someone testing the fences. She increased the monitoring frequency and set up a honeypot trap, but the trace was a dead end. Whoever was on the other end knew what they were doing.
She was frowning at a line of hex code when a notification popped up in the center of her primary monitor.
FROM: SILAS MOONSTONE
SUBJECT: ASSIGNMENT: MOONSTONE PACK INFRASTRUCTURE BUILDOUT
She clicked it open. Read the first paragraph.
...on-site implementation required... remote access insufficient due to topography... two-month duration...
She closed the window.
Absolutely not.
She spent the next six hours reconfiguring the company’s firewall protocols. It was busy work, mostly. Digital sweeping. But it kept her hands moving and her brain occupied.
Darkness fell outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. The office emptied out, leaving only the janitorial staff and the hum of the servers.
"Is there a reason you haven’t responded to my email?"
Quinn spun in her chair so fast she nearly gave herself whiplash.
Silas was leaning against the doorframe. He looked immaculate, as always. Tailored suit, relaxed posture, the kind of easy confidence that came from having too much money and being an apex predator. He looked like he’d just stepped off the cover of Werewolf CEO Monthly.
"I’m not avoiding anything," Quinn lied. "I’m working. This is what working looks like."
"Responding to emails is also working."
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Swiveled back to face her monitors, where seventeen different threat analysis windows were open. She’d finished them all yesterday.
"The Moonstone assignment—" Silas started.
"Is clearly better suited for someone with field experience," she interrupted, typing a command that listed the directory she was already looking at. "I’m a programmer, Silas. I program. In chairs. With a roof over my head. With high-speed internet and climate control."
"You’re the only person I trust to set up their network properly."
"Glen could do it. Glen has camping skills." She was pretty sure she’d heard Glen mention a tent once. Or maybe it was a yurt.
"It’s not exactly the wilderness," Silas said dryly. "And Glen crashed the beta server last week because he forgot to initialize a variable. I don't need my pack's security crashing because Glen got distracted by a squirrel."
Her eye twitched. That had been a painful day. "Fine. What about Priya?"
"Priya is on maternity leave."
"Jordan?"
"Jordan left on Friday to become a goat farmer. You signed his farewell card."
Quinn paused, fingers hovering over the keys. Had she? A vague memory surfaced—someone shoving a piece of cardstock under her nose while she was patching a kernel vulnerability. She had scrawled something generic. Good luck with the goats.
"The point is," Silas continued, pushing off the doorframe and stepping into her office, "you’re the best candidate. You know these systems inside and out, and the pack needs someone who can build them infrastructure that won’t collapse the moment a determined teenager tries to hack their way into the lodge’s Wi-Fi to stream anime."
"Werewolf teenagers hack?"
"Werewolf teenagers do everything human teenagers do, just with more property damage." Silas stopped in front of her desk. "Two months, Quinn. Fresh mountain air. Pine trees. Maybe even some socialization with beings who don’t communicate entirely in C++."
"I like code. Code makes sense." She stared at the cursor blinking on her screen. "Code doesn’t have emotions. It doesn't have hidden agendas. It doesn't have..." She trailed off.
Golden eyes. Scent of rain and musk. The feeling of being small and fragile and wanted.
"...complications," she finished quietly.
Silas’s expression shifted. The CEO mask slipped, revealing something sharper, more knowing. "This wouldn’t have anything to do with meeting Julian, would it?"
"Who?"
"My brother. The Alpha. The one you literally ran into in the hallway this morning."
Her face flamed. Instant, traitorous heat. "I don't remember that."
Silas watched her. He didn't say anything, which was worse than arguing. He just let the silence stretch until she started fidgeting with her mouse.
"The mountains might be good for you," he said finally, his voice softer. "You’ve been living in this office since you arrived, Quinn. The security team has a running bet on whether you actually have an apartment or if you’ve just been showering in the gym and sleeping under your desk."
"I have an apartment!"
"When’s the last time you spent the night there?"
She opened her mouth to answer.
Last night? No, she’d fallen asleep reviewing the encryption keys.
The night before? The breach attempt.
The weekend? System upgrades.
She closed her mouth. She couldn't actually remember.
"That isn’t why you took this job, is it?" Silas asked.
The words landed somewhere soft and bruised in her chest. He was right. She had taken the job at TalkToMe because she wanted to be different. She wanted to be the kind of person who went to happy hours and had friends and didn't treat social interaction like a bomb diffusal scenario.
That resolve had lasted approximately twenty-four hours. Then she’d found the legacy security systems, panicked at the idea of small talk, and dived headfirst into the comfortable, binary rabbit hole of her own expertise.
She looked around her office. The empty coffee cups. The sleeping bag rolled up behind the filing cabinet. The glow of the monitors that were her only real friends.
"Two months," she said slowly.
"Two months. You’ll have complete autonomy over the project. The pack will provide housing and meals. And if it’s truly unbearable, I’ll send someone to extract you." Silas smiled, a small quirk of his lips. "Though I suspect you might find more there than you expect."
She doubted that very much. She’d find trees. Dirt. Bugs. Probably some hostile werewolves who resented a human touching their precious dial-up connection.
But she’d also find distance.
Distance from this office. Distance from the rut she’d dug for herself. And maybe, just maybe, distance from the memory of golden eyes and the terrifying realization that for one second in that hallway, she hadn't wanted to run away.
"Fine," she heard herself say. "I’ll do it."