Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Harper didn’t sleep.
She spent the night pacing her room, her body thrumming with an energy that had nothing to do with caffeine. Every nerve ending felt alive, sensitized to the memory of Adrian’s hands on her waist, his mouth claiming hers, the possessive growl that vibrated through her entire being.
She’d meant what she said. She wasn’t good at people, at connections, at relationships.
Her life was a series of carefully constructed walls designed to keep everyone at a safe distance.
But Adrian had somehow slipped past those defenses, had found the vulnerable woman hiding behind sarcastic remarks and technological fortresses.
And she wanted him. Wanted him with an intensity that scared her, that made her question everything she thought she knew about herself.
At dawn, she gave up on rest, changed into jeans and a comfortable sweater, and made her way down to the office.
The main lodge was quiet, the pack members still sleeping off the night’s activities.
She let herself into the office, pausing as the scent of him, still lingering from the night before, washed over her.
Her nipples immediately tightened into two hard little peaks and she fought back the urge to turn around and flee back to the safety of her room.
She couldn’t keep reacting like this. She had work to do.
She was deep in the middle of a particularly stubborn piece of code, trying to create a custom encryption algorithm that would work seamlessly with the pack’s primitive communication systems, when Irene found her.
“I thought I might find you here.” The older woman set a plate of eggs and toast on the corner of her desk, along with a steaming mug of coffee. “You missed breakfast. Eat.”
“I didn’t miss breakfast. I skipped it.” She didn’t look up from her screen, but she could feel Irene’s knowing gaze on her.
“It wasn’t a suggestion,” Irene said firmly. “Eat something before you collapse. Adrian’s been in a mood all morning, and I don’t need you adding to the chaos.”
Adrian’s been in a mood.
She took a piece of toast because arguing with Irene seemed unwise, and ate it while her mind spun through possibilities. What kind of mood? Good? Bad? Regretful?
Stop, she ordered herself. You need to focus on work.
She finished her toast, downed half the coffee in one go—blessedly the good stuff—and turned back to her computer, pulling up the security protocols she’d been working on the night before. Irene shook her head but didn’t argue, quietly exiting the room.
Okay. The vulnerability in the new financial records system. That’s the priority.
Derek had sent over the initial framework for the pack’s new financial infrastructure—a system designed to integrate their traditional cash-heavy economy with modern digital banking. Her job was to make sure that integration didn’t create exploitable weaknesses.
Last night, before Adrian had interrupted her, she’d identified several suspicious probing attempts against the pack’s existing network. Someone was testing their defenses, looking for entry points. The attacks were sophisticated enough to suggest professional involvement, which was concerning.
But that wasn’t what made her blood run cold this morning.
As she dug deeper into the pack’s existing protocols—the ones that predated her involvement, the ones that had been in place for years under traditional pack management—she found something far worse than she’d expected.
“Oh no.” The words escaped before she could stop them. “No, no, no.”
She pulled up screen after screen, her fingers flying across the keyboard as the full scope of the problem revealed itself. The pack’s financial records weren’t just vulnerable to external attack. They were already compromised.
Not in an obvious way. Nothing had been stolen—at least, nothing that showed up in the immediate accounts.
But someone had inserted a backdoor into the system months ago, maybe longer.
A quiet little piece of code that sat dormant, waiting, occasionally phoning home with information about the pack’s financial movements.
She traced the insertion point back through layers of obfuscation, reverse engineering the process.
The backdoor had been planted using credentials that belonged to…
no one. A ghost account that shouldn’t exist, created with administrator privileges that should have been impossible to obtain without pack authority.
Traditional protocols, she thought grimly. All that talk about wolf dominance and pack security, and someone waltzed right through their defenses because they trusted the wrong systems.
The irony wasn’t lost on her. Every skeptical comment about her modern methods, every dismissive reference to her lack of wolf, every implication that she couldn’t understand pack security because she was human and female and an outsider—and meanwhile, their precious traditional protocols had been bleeding information for months.
I need to tell Adrian.
She grabbed her laptop and went to find him.
The training yard behind the pack house was exactly what she would have expected—a large cleared space surrounded by trees, equipped with various obstacles and sparring areas that showed heavy use.
What she hadn’t expected was to find half the pack assembled there, watching two wolves circle each other in what was clearly a practice fight.
One of them was Adrian.
She stopped at the edge of the yard, her breath catching.
She’d seen him in his human form often enough over the past week—commanding, imposing, frustratingly attractive. But she’d never seen him like this—stripped to the waist, his powerful body glistening with sweat, moving with that predatory grace that marked him as something more than human.
His opponent was a younger wolf—tall, lean, clearly skilled—but Adrian moved with breathtakingly controlled power. He executed every strike and block with an efficiency that made the younger wolf’s athleticism look like wasted motion.
Then his eyes caught hers across the yard.
His attention flickered for just a second, but it was enough. The younger wolf saw the opening and lunged—
—and found himself flat on his back with Adrian’s forearm across his throat.
“Lesson one,” Adrian said, his voice carrying across the yard. “Never assume your opponent is distracted. They might be testing you.”
He released the younger wolf and stepped back, barely winded despite the exertion. His gaze immediately returned to her, and he stalked across the clearing towards her.
Focus, she reminded herself. You have important information. Stop staring at his chest.
His very impressive chest. All those muscles moving beneath sweat-slicked skin. The way his jeans sat low on his hips, revealing a trail of dark hair that disappeared beneath…
Stop. It.
“Harper.” He grabbed a shirt from a nearby bench and, regrettably, pulled it on as he joined her. “Is something wrong?”
“We need to talk.” She held up her laptop. “I found something.”
His expression shifted instantly from warm to alert. “My office. Now.”
He led her back through the pack house at a pace that forced her to nearly jog to keep up.
The wolves they passed scattered out of his way without being asked, their body language communicating a deference that she was beginning to understand on an instinctive level.
This was Adrian in Alpha mode—focused, commanding, no room for the vulnerability he’d shown last night.
His office door had barely closed behind them when he turned to face her. “Show me.”
She set her laptop on the desk and pulled up the relevant screens.
“Someone compromised your existing financial systems. Not the new infrastructure—that’s still clean—but the protocols that have been in place for years.
There’s a backdoor that’s been feeding information about pack finances to an external source. ”
He leaned over her shoulder to study the screen, and she tried very hard not to notice how close he was, how his scent wrapped around her, how the heat of his body radiated against her back.
Professional, she reminded herself desperately. This is a professional conversation about a serious security breach.
“How long?” His voice was low, controlled, but she could hear the anger underneath.
“Months. Maybe longer. The code is sophisticated—designed to stay hidden, only activate periodically, avoid detection by standard security sweeps.” She pulled up another screen.
“The insertion point used administrator credentials that shouldn’t exist. Someone created a ghost account with full access privileges. ”
“That’s impossible. Only the Alpha and the pack elders have authority to create administrator accounts.”
“According to traditional protocols, yes. But traditional protocols assume everyone with access is trustworthy.” She turned to face him, and immediately regretted it.
He was too close, his jaw tight with anger, his eyes flickering between brown and gold in a way that made her heart rate spike.
“The backdoor was planted by someone who either had those credentials or found a way to bypass the authentication entirely.”
“You’re saying someone in my pack—”
“I’m saying someone exploited weaknesses in your traditional systems. It might be internal.
It might be external. I can’t tell yet.” She held his gaze, forcing herself to stay focused despite his distracting proximity.
“What I can tell you is that your existing protocols weren’t protective enough.
All that trust in tradition, all that skepticism about modern methods, and meanwhile, someone was stealing information right under your nose. ”
His expression darkened, but not with the defensive anger she’d expected. Instead, he looked… thoughtful. Troubled.
“The elders won’t want to hear this.”
“The elders don’t get a vote on reality. The breach exists whether they acknowledge it or not.”
“You don’t understand pack politics—”
“I understand security.” She cut him off, her own frustration rising.
“I understand that someone is actively probing your network. I understand that the new systems I’m building could be compromised before they’re even operational if we don’t address the existing vulnerabilities.
And I understand that tradition alone isn’t going to protect your pack from enemies who don’t play by traditional rules. ”
They stared at each other, the tension between them shifting from professional to something more charged. She could see his wolf in his eyes—that golden flicker that meant his control was slipping—and she felt an answering heat building in her own chest.
Not now, she told herself. This is important.
“What do you need?” he asked finally, his voice rough.
“Access. Full access to all your systems, including the ones the elders have been protecting from outside review. I need to trace the breach back to its source, and I can’t do that if I’m working blind.”
“The elders will fight you on this.”
“Then fight them back,” she said sharply. “You’re the Alpha. Act like it.”
His eyes flared gold, his jaw tightening—and then, unexpectedly, his lips curved into something that might have been a smile.
“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. “Someone needs to. Your pack is in danger, Adrian. Real danger, not the hypothetical corruption the elders keep warning about. Modern problems require modern solutions, and tradition alone isn’t going to save you.”
The silence stretched between them, thick with unspoken things. Last night’s kiss hung in the air like a third presence, impossible to ignore but equally impossible to address when there were more pressing concerns.
Finally, he nodded.
“I’ll call a meeting with the elders this afternoon.
You’ll present your findings.” His hand came up, and for one heart-stopping moment she thought he was going to touch her face.
Instead, he gripped her shoulder—a firm, almost professional gesture that somehow felt more intimate than a caress. “Prepare your evidence. And kitten?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t hold back. They need to understand exactly how serious this is.”
He released her shoulder and stepped back, creating distance that felt both necessary and wrong. She watched him go, her laptop forgotten on the desk, her mind spinning with security protocols and pack politics and the lingering warmth where his hand had been.
One problem at a time, she told herself. Fix the security breach. Save the pack. And then figure out what the hell is happening between us.