Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Harper’s laugh rang out across the rooftop restaurant, bright and uninhibited, and Adrian leaned back in his chair, watching her. The wave of possessive pride was so strong it almost left him breathless.
Mine.
He’d spent years convincing himself he’d never feel this way. That the capacity for this kind of happiness had been burned out of him, scorched away by betrayal and disappointment until only duty remained.
He’d been spectacularly wrong.
“—and then the entire server room flooded with foam because someone thought it would be funny to test the fire suppression system manually.”
Derek groaned, rubbing his temples. “In my defense, I was nineteen.”
“You were twenty-two,” Julie corrected sweetly. “I’ve seen the incident report.”
“You have an incident report?”
“I have all the incident reports.” Julie’s smile was pure mischief. The curvy brunette had Derek wrapped around her finger, and his brother seemed perfectly happy about it. “My husband’s youthful misadventures make excellent bedtime reading.”
Harper snorted into her wine glass. “Please tell me there are more stories.”
“So many stories.” Julie leaned forward conspiratorially. “Did you know he once tried to convince the IT department that he’d been hacked when he was really just locked out of his own email?”
“I was hacked. Technically. By myself.”
Harper rolled her eyes. “That’s not how hacking works and you know it.”
He couldn’t stop staring at her. The mating mark on her neck was clearly visible, showcased by the wider neckline she’d cut out of her black t-shirt. It was a constant reminder that she’d chosen him. That she’d looked at everything he was—dominant, possessive, traditional—and said yes.
The rooftop restaurant occupied the top floor of the corporate tower next to the TalkToMe headquarters, all glass walls and artful greenery designed to make wealthy executives feel like they were dining in a garden rather than ten stories above Behemoth City.
White tablecloths gleamed in the afternoon light and waitstaff in crisp uniforms moved silently between the tables.
It was exactly the kind of place he usually hated. Today, he couldn’t bring himself to care.
“You’re doing it again,” Derek said quietly, pitching his voice below the women’s conversation.
“Doing what?”
“Smiling. It’s unnerving.”
He schooled his features into something more neutral. Or at least he tried to. His mouth kept twitching upwards without permission. “Shut up.”
“I’ve known you for twenty-eight years. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen you smile like that.” Derek’s expression softened with something that might have been pride. “It suits you.”
“Don’t get sentimental.”
“Too late. Julie’s already planning the mating ceremony.”
His gaze cut to his brother’s mate, who was currently demonstrating something on her phone to Harper—probably more embarrassing photos, given Derek’s pained expression.
“The pack hasn’t accepted her yet.”
“They will.”
“The Elders—”
“Will come around or be overruled.” Derek sipped his whiskey with infuriating calm. “You’re the Alpha, Adrian. Your choice of mate isn’t up for committee approval.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It’s exactly that simple. You’ve spent so long trying to be the leader they expected that you forgot you get to decide what kind of leader you actually are.” Derek set down his glass. “Father let the Elders dictate his choices. Look where that got him.”
The mention of their father sent a familiar twist through his gut. Robert Moonstone had been a good man, a strong Alpha, until Vivienne had twisted him into something unrecognizable. Until the pack’s rigid traditional ways had given her the weapons she needed to nearly destroy them all.
“Harper isn’t Vivienne.”
“No,” Derek agreed. “She isn’t. So stop treating your situation like it’s the same.”
Before he could respond, Harper turned towards him, her grey eyes bright behind her glasses.
“Julie says you used to be afraid of heights.”
He shot his brother a betrayed look. “That was confidential.”
“Nothing’s confidential from mates,” Julie said cheerfully. “Pack law, I’m pretty sure.”
“It’s definitely not pack law.”
“It should be.” Harper reached across the table to squeeze his hand, and even that brief contact sent warmth flooding through him. “Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me. Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
“I might use it for leverage during future arguments.” Her grin was unrepentant. “A girl needs advantages.”
“You have plenty of advantages.” His voice deepened, rough with the memory of exactly how she’d used some of those advantages earlier that morning.
Her cheeks flushed pink. Adorable. The thought was followed by a surge of possessive satisfaction. This brilliant, stubborn, impossibly brave woman was his. His to protect. His to cherish. His to drive slowly insane with wanting until she gasped his name—
“Adrian.”
He blinked, dragging himself back to the present. Derek was watching him with poorly concealed amusement.
“You’re staring at your mate again.”
“I wasn’t staring.”
“You absolutely were,” Julie said. “It was sweet. Slightly terrifying, but sweet.”
Harper laughed again, and he felt his carefully maintained composure crack further. He signaled for the check, suddenly eager to have her alone again.
Later, he told himself. Business first.
The reminder sobered him. They still had to deal with the cyber threat. Had to figure out who had targeted the pack’s finances and why. Had to ensure his people were protected before he could fully settle into this new, unexpected happiness.
“I need to stop by my office,” Harper said, as if reading his thoughts. “Just for an hour. I want to run some additional traces on those attack vectors.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I want to.”
Derek and Julie exchanged a look that he chose to ignore.
Harper moved through the TalkToMe building like she owned it, nodding to security guards and swiping through access points, and the old worry gnawed at him.
She belongs here.
He did his best to push the thought aside. They’d had this conversation. She’d chosen him. She had given herself to him completely, body and heart and bond. But watching her navigate this world with such easy confidence, he couldn’t entirely silence the voice that whispered for how long?
Her office was smaller than he’d expected—a glass-walled space barely larger than a closet, crammed with monitors and cables and a coffee mug collection that bordered on concerning.
“Home sweet home,” she said, dropping into the same custom chair he’d bought for her with a sigh that was half-contentment, half-resignation. “Well. Former home.”
“You’ll miss it.”
“Parts of it.” She was already pulling up screens, her fingers flying across the keyboard. “The coffee machine in the break room. The twenty-four-hour dim sum place around the corner. The way everything just works when you have a tech budget bigger than most countries’ GDP.”
“We could improve the compound’s infrastructure.”
“That’s literally why I’m there.” She flashed him a grin over her shoulder. “But I appreciate the thought.”
He moved to stand behind her, watching data scroll across her screens in patterns he couldn’t begin to interpret. Code. Network diagrams. Things that might as well have been magic for all he understood them.
“What are you looking for?”
“The breadcrumbs.” Her voice had gone distant, her attention funneling into that laser focus he’d come to recognize. “Whoever attacked us was careful. Professional. But everyone leaves traces. You just have to know where to look.”
He watched her work in silence, content to simply be near her. She chewed on her lower lip when she was thinking hard—a habit he found unreasonably distracting.
Minutes stretched into half an hour.
His wolf grew restless, pacing beneath his skin, unhappy with the enclosed space, the artificial lights, and the thousand unfamiliar scents pressing in from all sides.
Everything in him wanted to grab her and carry her back to the mountains where the air was clean and the trees were tall and threats could be dealt with using teeth and claws.
He controlled the urge. Barely.
“That’s… interesting.”
Her voice had changed, the distant focus sharpening into something harder.
“What?”
“Give me a minute.” Her fingers moved faster, pulling up new windows, cross-referencing data. “I need to verify… okay. Okay, that’s definitely not a coincidence.”
“Harper.”
“The attack on our financial systems came from a spoofed IP address. I knew that already. But I’ve been tracing the routing patterns, looking for anything distinctive.
” She pointed at a cluster of numbers on her screen that meant nothing to him.
“See this? It’s a timing signature. Basically tells us when the attack packets were sent, down to the millisecond. ”
“And?”
“And they correspond exactly—exactly—with the Council meeting schedules.” She turned to face him, her eyes bright with discovery. “Someone was launching attacks specifically when they knew you’d be distracted. When they knew the whole pack leadership would be occupied.”
His wolf surged forward, lips peeling back from teeth that had gone suddenly sharp.
“Who?”
“That’s the interesting part.” She pulled up another screen, this one showing a map with colored lines connecting various points. “I traced the routing back through about seventeen proxy servers. Whoever did this really didn’t want to be found.”
“But you found them.”
“I found their provider.” Her smile held no warmth. “They were using a VPN service that’s popular with people who want to hide their tracks. Problem is, the service keeps metadata logs even when they claim they don’t. I may have… acquired some of those logs.”
“Legally?”
“Let’s say ‘creatively.’“ She waved off his concern. “The important thing is, I found a device registration that tracks back to a satellite internet account.”
“Satellite?”