Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Harper sagged against the cool metal of the elevator doors, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.
She closed her eyes, replaying the encounter in her mind.
The feel of those strong, warm hands on her arms. The sheer, overwhelming size of him.
The predatory focus in his gaze that had made her feel simultaneously like prey and…
something else. Something she couldn’t name but which resonated deep in her bones.
And the way he’d said her name. Not just a word, but a command. A claim.
She squeezed her thighs together, a sudden, unexpected heat pooling between them.
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 tool for transporting her brain from place to place.
Now it was staging a full-scale rebellion over a thirty-second hallway encounter.
He smelled good. Her brain, ever the pragmatist, tried to file that under “irrelevant data,” but her body refused to comply. She wanted to find out what that scent was. She wanted to press her face against his chest and just breathe. She wanted to…
The elevator dinged and the doors slid open, jolting her back to reality. She headed back to her office, determined to lose herself in code, but for once she couldn’t get her brain to obey, it kept circling back to that hallway and the feel of that hard chest beneath her hands…
“Harper?”
She jumped and looked up to find Elise hovering outside her door. The pretty young girl was one of the interns from the Moonstone pack, and she was showing considerable promise.
“Elise. Hi.”
“I was just coming to show you the anomaly I found in the server logs—” The girl came to an abrupt halt, her nostrils flaring. “Has the Alpha been here?”
Her pulse started to race.
“Alpha?” she asked, playing for time as she tried to come up with an explanation.
“Yes, Adrian. The Alpha of the Moonstone Pack. Derek’s brother?”
“Oh, him.” She tried for an airy wave of her hand, but it felt more like a twitch. “We crossed paths in the hallway, I think.”
Elise just looked at her, her expression unreadable. After a beat she nodded slowly.
“He has a very strong presence,” was all she said, before turning her attention to the tablet in her hands. “About the server logs.”
Harper dragged her brain back from the hallway and focused on the screen. The anomaly was subtle, but it was there. A ghost in the machine, a flicker of data where there should be none.
“That’s interesting,” she murmured, her fingers automatically flying to her keyboard.
She pulled up the main security dashboard, running a series of diagnostic tests.
The green lights were still steady, her system humming along without a single alert.
But Elise was right—there was something.
Something that her system, her brilliant, beautiful, perfect system, had missed.
“I ran a trace,” Elise said, her face bright with excitement. “It’s bouncing through so many proxies it’s impossible to pinpoint the source, but it’s definitely trying to access the secure server that holds the financial records for the Moonstone pack’s investment.”
Her blood ran cold. That server was the digital equivalent of Fort Knox.
“I’ll look into it,” she promised, forgetting all about her intention of resting for a few hours. “Excellent work, Elise.”
“I’m glad it was helpful.” The girl started to leave, then hesitated. “Would… would you like to have lunch sometime? Or coffee? If you have time, I mean.”
The offer was so unexpected, so normal, that for a moment Harper just stared at her. A wave of heat washed over her cheeks.
“That… that would be nice,” she finally 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.
Harper stared after her for a moment, an unexpected warmth in her chest, then turned back to her screen, the ghost in the machine demanding her full attention.
She spent the next three hours buried in the code, her world shrinking to the glowing green lines on her monitor.
She barely registered the arrival of the day shift, the gradual increase in noise and activity as the office came to life.
Someone left a bagel and a cup of coffee on her desk—probably Elise, she thought distantly—but she didn’t look up.
She eliminated the anomaly, which hadn’t succeeded in penetrating her security, and increased the monitoring to look for similar attempts, but was unsuccessful in tracing the strange data packet back to its source.
She was frowning at her screen when a message popped up on her screen.
ASSIGNMENT: MOONSTONE PACK INFRASTRUCTURE BUILDOUT.
She clicked on it exactly once, read the first paragraph, and then promptly closed it and spent the next six hours reconfiguring the company’s firewall protocols. Which definitely needed to be done. Eventually. Probably.
Darkness had fallen by the time Derek appeared in her doorway.
“Is there a reason you haven’t responded to my email?”
She spun in her chair so fast she nearly gave herself whiplash. Her boss leaned against the doorframe of her office looking like he’d just stepped off the cover of Werewolf CEO Monthly.
“I’m not avoiding anything. 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 windows displayed various threat analyses, all of which she’d already completed yesterday but left open for exactly this kind of situation.
“The Moonstone assignment—” Derek started.
“Is clearly better suited for someone with field experience. I’m a programmer. I program. In chairs. With a roof over my head.”
“You’re the only person I trust to set up their network properly.”
“Glen could do it. Glen has camping skills.” At least she thought she’d heard him mention something about mountains once.
“It’s not exactly the wilderness,” he said dryly. “And Glen crashed the beta server last week because he forgot to initialize a variable.”
Her eye twitched. That had been a painful day for everyone. “Fine. What about Priya?”
“Priya’s on maternity leave.”
“Jordan?”
“Jordan left on Friday to become a goat farmer. You signed his farewell card.”
Had she? She vaguely remembered scrawling something about good luck with the goats on a piece of cardstock that someone had shoved under her nose. She’d been in the middle of tracking a potential breach at the time.
“The point is,” Derek continued, pushing off from 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. ”
“Werewolf teenagers hack?”
“Werewolf teenagers do everything human teenagers do, just with more property damage.” Derek took a step closer and she automatically slid her chair back.
He came to a halt. “Two months, Harper. Fresh mountain air. Pine trees. Maybe even some socialization with beings who don’t communicate entirely in code. ”
“I like code. Code makes sense. Code doesn’t have emotions or hidden agendas or…” She trailed off, thinking about intense golden-brown eyes and a chest that had felt like warm granite under her palms. “…complications.”
Derek’s expression shifted into something far too knowing. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with meeting Adrian, would it?”
“Who?”
“My brother. The Alpha. The one you literally ran into in the hallway this morning.”
Her face flamed. She could feel it happening, the blood rushing to her cheeks like a traitor fleeing a sinking ship. “I don’t remember that.”
Derek was quiet for a long moment. When she risked a glance at him, his expression was thoughtful rather than annoyed.
“The mountains might be good for you,” he said finally. “You’ve been living in this office since you arrived, Harper. 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, then realized she couldn’t actually remember. There’d been the breach attempt two weeks ago, which had required three consecutive all-nighters. And then the system upgrades. And before that…
“That isn’t why you took this job, is it?” he added.
The words landed somewhere soft and bruised in her chest. He was right. She had thought it was her chance to be different, to be better, to be someone who went outside and made friends and didn’t spend every waking moment hiding from the world behind a screen.
That had lasted approximately one day before she’d discovered TalkToMe’s legacy security systems and fallen into the comfortable rabbit hole of her own expertise.
“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.” Derek smiled. “Though I suspect you might find more there than you expect.”
She doubted that very much. She’d find trees, probably. Dirt. Maybe some hostile werewolves who resented the intrusion of a human into their territory.
But she’d also find distance. Distance from her office, from her desk, from the comfortable patterns that were as much of a trap as a home.
“Fine,” she heard herself say. “I’ll do it.”