Chapter 012 Zero Day
Quinn didn’t sleep.
She spent the night pacing the small confines of her guest room, her body thrumming with an energy that had absolutely nothing to do with the exorbitant amount of caffeine she’d consumed earlier. Every nerve ending felt stripped, sensitized to the memory of Julian’s hands on her waist. The weight of him. The possessive growl that had vibrated through her ribs and settled somewhere deep in her marrow.
She’d meant what she said. She wasn’t good at people. Connections were messy variables she usually debugged by deleting them entirely. Her life was a series of firewalls designed to keep the world at a safe, sterile distance. Foster homes, temp jobs, short contracts.
But Julian had slipped past the perimeter. He’d found the vulnerability in the source code—the lonely woman hiding behind sarcasm and encryption keys.
And she wanted him.
She wanted him with a terrifying, illogical intensity that made her question every survival instinct she’d honed over twenty-six years.
By dawn, the walls of the room felt like they were closing in. She gave up on the concept of rest, pulled on jeans and a thick sweater, and escaped to the office. The main lodge was silent, heavy with the stillness of predators sleeping off the night. She let herself into the workspace, pausing as the scent of him hit her.
Rain. Pine. Something sharp and uniquely male.
It lingered from the night before, faint but undeniable. Her body betrayed her instantly—a flush of heat, a tightening in her chest, nipples hardening against the fabric of her bra.
Get it together, Bailey.
She sat down, woke her laptop, and buried herself in the only thing that made sense. Logic. Syntax. The clean, binary certainty of code.
She was deep in the weeds of a particularly stubborn encryption algorithm—trying to make it play nice with the pack’s Stone Age communication relays—when the door creaked.
Irene.
The older woman set a plate of eggs and toast on the corner of the desk, followed by a steaming mug of coffee. It smelled like heaven. Or at least, like high-quality caffeine, which was basically the same thing.
"I thought I might find you here." Irene’s voice was warm but brook-no-argument firm. "You missed breakfast. Eat."
"I didn’t miss it. I skipped it." Quinn didn’t look up from her screen, fingers flying across the keys. "Efficiency."
"It wasn’t a suggestion."
Quinn paused. She could feel Irene’s gaze boring into the side of her head. Maternal, but with teeth.
"Eat something before you collapse," Irene said. "Julian’s been in a mood all morning, and I don’t need you adding to the chaos."
Julian’s been in a mood.
Quinn took a piece of toast because arguing with the woman who ran the pack’s domestic logistics seemed like a tactical error. She chewed mechanically, mind spinning. What kind of mood? Good? Bad? Regretful? Was he pacing his office thinking what a mistake? Or was he thinking about how her legs had hooked around his waist?
Stop.
She washed the toast down with half the mug of coffee.
"Thanks, Irene."
The woman nodded, satisfied, and left her to the silence.
Okay. Focus.
The vulnerability assessment on the financial records. That was the priority. Silas had sent over the framework for the new infrastructure—a digital bridge to drag the pack’s cash-heavy economy into the twenty-first century. Her job was to ensure the integration didn’t create a blast radius for hackers.
Last night, before the... interruption... she’d flagged several suspicious pings against the network. Probes. Someone testing the fences, looking for a loose plank. Sophisticated stuff.
But that wasn’t what made her blood turn to ice an hour later.
She was digging into the legacy protocols—the digital equivalent of a rotting wooden door that the pack had been using for years under the elders’ supervision. She expected messiness. She expected outdated ciphers.
She didn’t expect this.
"Oh no." The words slipped out, quiet and horrified. "No, no, no."
She pulled up another terminal window, typing furiously. The code unspooled across the screen, confirming the nightmare.
The pack’s financial records weren’t just vulnerable. They were already owned.
It wasn’t a smash-and-grab. Nothing obvious had been drained from the operating accounts. This was subtler. A parasite. A backdoor inserted months ago, maybe longer, sitting dormant in the kernel. It woke up periodically, bundled up data on the pack’s movements and cash flows, phoned home, and went back to sleep.
She traced the insertion point, reverse-engineering the breadcrumbs through layers of obfuscation.
The backdoor had been planted using administrator credentials.
Not hacked. Used.
A ghost account. It had full root access, created with privileges that should have been impossible to generate without explicit authorization from the pack leadership.
"Traditional protocols," she muttered, a bitter laugh escaping her throat.
All that posturing about wolf dominance. All the lectures from Elder Sterling about how humans were weak and technology was a crutch. They were so busy guarding the front gate with teeth and claws that they’d left the digital window wide open. They trusted the wrong things.
I need to tell Julian.
She grabbed her laptop, ignoring the sudden spike in her heart rate, and went hunting.
---
The training yard behind the pack house was a sprawling patch of cleared earth bordered by dense forest. It was equipped with wooden sparring dummies, climbing ropes, and heavy bags that looked like they’d been filled with concrete.
Quinn expected it to be empty this late in the morning. Instead, half the pack seemed to be assembled along the perimeter, silent and watchful.
In the center of the ring, two wolves circled each other.
One was young, lanky, eager.
The other was Julian.
Quinn stopped at the edge of the grass, her breath hitching in her throat.
She’d seen him in suits. She’d seen him in jeans. She’d seen him angry, tired, and dangerously aroused. But she’d never seen him like this.
He was stripped to the waist, his skin slick with sweat and dust. In the pale morning light, he looked less like a CEO and more like a myth made flesh. Muscles coiled and released under his skin with hydraulic power. He moved with a terrifying, predatory grace that made the human part of her brain scream danger while the rest of her just stared.
The younger wolf was fast. Skilled, even. He feinted left, dropped low, and tried to sweep Julian’s legs.
Julian didn’t just dodge; he flowed. Minimal effort. Maximum efficiency.
Then his eyes snapped to hers.
Across the yard, gold flared. His attention flickered for a microsecond.
The younger wolf saw the opening. He lunged, a blur of motion aimed at Julian’s exposed flank.
Wham.
Quinn blinked. One second the kid was attacking; the next, he was flat on his back, dust puffing up around him, with Julian’s forearm pressed casually against his throat.
"Lesson one," Julian said, his voice rough, carrying easily across the silence. "Never assume your opponent is distracted. They might be testing you."
He released the kid and stepped back, offering a hand to pull him up. He wasn’t even winded.
He turned, locking onto Quinn immediately. He didn’t smile. He just started walking toward her, eating up the distance with long, stalking strides.
Focus, Bailey.
You have a catastrophic security breach to report. Stop staring at his abs.
His very impressive, very defined abs. The way the sweat tracked down the center of his chest, over the ridges of muscle, disappearing into the waistband of jeans that hung dangerously low on his hips...
Jesus.
"Quinn."
He grabbed a black t-shirt from a nearby bench and pulled it on. The tragedy of covering up was mitigated by the way the fabric clung to damp skin.
"Is something wrong?" he asked.
She snapped her eyes up to his face. "We need to talk. I found something."
The Alpha mask slid into place instantly. The heat in his eyes cooled to alertness. "My office. Now."
He didn’t wait. He turned and headed for the house, moving at a pace that forced her into a near-jog. As they passed other pack members, people scattered. They didn’t just move; they deferred. Heads dipped, bodies turned away, space cleared. It was a physical manifestation of hierarchy that made her skin prickle.
This wasn’t the man who had almost kissed her on a desk. This was the Alpha.
They reached his office, and he shut the door with a definitive click. The silence of the room wrapped around them.
"Show me," he said.
She set her laptop on his desk, pushing aside a stack of files, and woke the screen.
"Someone compromised your existing financial systems," she said, her voice steadying into professional cadence. "Not the new infrastructure I’m building—that’s clean. I’m talking about the protocols that have been in place for years. The ones the elders swore were secure."
She pointed to the lines of code she’d highlighted in red. "There’s a backdoor. It’s been siphoning data on pack finances to an external server."
Julian leaned over her shoulder.
Mistake.
He was too close. The heat radiating off him was a tangible force, and the scent of him—amped up by the exertion of the fight—flooded her senses. Musk, pine, and raw power.
Professional, she chanted internally. This is a disaster recovery meeting.
"How long?" His voice was a low rumble near her ear.
"Months. Maybe longer. The code is sophisticated. It’s designed to stay dormant during standard sweeps." She tapped a key, bringing up the user logs. "The insertion point used administrator credentials. A ghost account. It has full privileges."
Julian stiffened. "That’s impossible. Only the Alpha and the Council of Elders have the authority to create administrator accounts."
"According to your traditional protocols, sure. But traditional protocols assume everyone with a key is one of the good guys."
She turned to face him.
Bad idea. He was inches away. She could see the flecks of gold in his irises, the tension in his jaw.
"The backdoor was planted by someone who either had those credentials or found a way to bypass the authentication entirely," she said.
"You’re saying someone in my pack..." He trailed off, the implication hanging heavy in the air.
"I’m saying someone exploited the weaknesses in your 'trusted' systems. It might be internal. It might be external. I can't tell yet." She held his gaze, refusing to be intimidated by the storm brewing in his eyes. "What I can tell you is that your existing protocols were a joke. All that trust in tradition? All that skepticism about modern tech? While you guys were worrying about me, someone was robbing you blind right under your nose."
His expression darkened. She braced herself for the defensive anger, the denial she usually got from clients when she told them their baby was ugly.
But it didn't come.
He looked... thoughtful. Troubled.
"The elders won’t want to hear this," he said quietly.
"The elders don’t get a vote on reality. The breach exists whether they like it or not."
"You don’t understand pack politics, Quinn."
"I understand security." She cut him off, frustration spiking. "I understand that someone is actively probing your network right now. I understand that the new system I’m building is going to be compromised before I even finish typing the code if we don't plug the holes in the old one. Tradition isn't going to save you from an enemy who knows how to use a keyboard."
They stared at each other. The air in the room grew thick, charged with something that wasn't just about computer code.
His eyes flickered gold—the wolf pushing against the surface.
"What do you need?" he asked.
"Access. Full, unrestricted root access to everything. Including the legacy archives the elders have been protecting from 'outside eyes.' I need to trace the breach back to the source, and I can't do that if I’m working with one hand tied behind my back."
"The elders will fight you on this. They’ll see it as an invasion."
"Then fight them back," she said sharply. "You’re the Alpha. Act like it."
Silence.
His jaw tightened. Then, slowly, the corner of his mouth ticked up. A dark, dangerous amusement.
"You don’t back down, do you?"
"Not when I’m right."
"Even when you’re challenging an Alpha in his own territory?"
"Especially then." She lifted her chin, heart hammering against her ribs. "Someone needs to. Your pack is in danger, Julian. Real danger. Not the hypothetical moral corruption the elders preach about. You hired me to fix this. Let me fix it."
The memory of last night—the kiss, the heat, the almost—hung between them like smoke. It would be so easy to lean in. To let the professional crisis dissolve into the physical one.
Finally, he nodded.
"I’ll call a meeting with the elders this afternoon. You’ll present your findings."
He lifted a hand. For a heart-stopping second, she thought he was going to cup her cheek. Instead, he gripped her shoulder. His hand was heavy, warm, grounding. It felt less like a professional reassurance and more like a claim.
"Prepare your evidence," he said, his voice dropping an octave. "And kitten?"
A shiver raced down her spine at the nickname. "Yes?"
"Don’t hold back. They need to understand exactly how serious this is."
He released her and stepped back. The distance felt cold.
"I’ll be ready," she said.
She grabbed her laptop and headed for the door, her mind already racing through logs and IP addresses, trying to drown out the sensation of his hand on her shoulder.
One problem at a time. Fix the code. Save the pack.
Then, maybe, figure out what the hell to do about the wolf.