I nodded, the weight of Parker’s secrets and my own damn weakness digging deeper. My wolf whined, torn between her betrayal and the need to keep her safe.
Chapter 5
Parker
Iawoke to the now familiar feel of fur and doggie kisses. “I got you, buddy. Just gimme a sec.” I could not get my eyes open. I felt like I was coming up through black water. There was an ache deep in my hips, blooming down both thighs, hot and sweet and humiliating. A weight was suddenly dropped on my chest. “What the hell?” I caught the smell first. My eyes were trying to focus on the remnant in my hand. “A bone?” The reason for the ache in my hips came back in a rush.A nice juicy bone.I sat straight up and threw the bone across the room. “Shit, shit, shit!” Twenty seconds Rocket dropped the bone back in my lap, standing up against the side of my bed.
I peeked through my hands, which now held my face. His silly ear stuck straight up as he waited with anticipation for me to throw the bone again. “Did the big bad man give you this bone last night, buddy?” The tilt of his head was so precious it was almost enough to make me not want to die from the memory of the stranger’s hand striking my ass over and over. I flopped back down onto my pillow. “Ugh! What did Ido, Rocket?” My arms and shoulders were sore, as if I’d spent all night wrestling with a demon. And maybe I had.
I forced myself upright again. A cold, neutral light filtered in, falling over the chaos of the bed. My comforter was half-off; one corner of the fitted sheet jerked loose. I was naked, whichwasn’t unusual, but the state of the room made it different. I took inventory: no blood, no bruises worth the name, but there were finger imprints along my right side where someone had gripped me tight enough to leave a map.
The man in the mask—the one I’d seen at the window, then imagined stalking my sleep—had crossed the final boundary. Had touched me, held me, left me shaken but not broken. I looked down at my little pup, who was probably wondering why I wasn’t getting dressed to get his breakfast. “Why am I not more freaked out, Rocket?” I dragged myself out of bed and started to get dressed. I should have been terrified. Instead, I found myself humming with a new and terrible electricity. My wolf was almost purring. What was that about?
He had made me come, not with the slow tenderness of a lover, but with the deliberate efficiency of a musician tuning a guitar. It had worked. Even now, the ghost of his leather-covered hands hovered over my skin, turning every inch of me into an antenna. I traced my ribs with one hand and shivered, remembering the pressure of his grip.
My ass was tender. He’d fucking wailed on it. Punishment. For what? He said I was smart enough to figure it out. No sign of him now, except for that damn bone. That and the glass of water he’d pressed to my lips after. Even the water tasted different, as if the glass remembered him better than I did.
I should have called someone. I should have been angry, or afraid, or at the very least ashamed. But I wasn’t. What I felt was closer to relief, a slow uncoiling of something that had been knotted inside me for years.
I padded to the bathroom and flicked on the light. My reflection looked back, not as a victim, but as someone who had gotten exactly what she asked for. My face was flushed, the marks on my neck already fading to yellow. I smiled, then grimaced, then smiled again. It was all very confusing.
I threw on a pair of joggers, a sports bra and sweatshirt. My socked feet skidded along the hardwood as I made my way to the kitchen. Rocket waited patiently by his bowl. Such a good boy. “Who’s a good boy? You are? Yes, you are. Such a good, good, boy.” I showered him with praise as I filled his food bowl. My hands shook as I made coffee, but not from fear. From anticipation, maybe. Or just the thrill of knowing there was someone out there who wanted me badly enough to take what he wanted. And to give me what I needed.
While the coffee brewed, I powered up my laptop. I had to see if I could fix this mess. The screen flickered, then spat out a series of system alerts I hadn’t seen before. For a second, I thought the hack had gone nuclear, but it was just an update request from the network diagnostic tool I’d left running overnight.
I powered my phone back on. So many missed calls. I was the walking dead. It immediately rang. Fuck. Axel.
“Hello, brother dear.”
“WHAT THE FUCK, PARKER?”
I had to hold the phone away from my ear. He was shouting so loudly.
“Axel, calm down. What’s up?”
“Silas Drake is gonna kill you.”
That got my attention, because Silas Drake could very well do that. My life was shit anyway. I looked down at Rocket. My heart hurt. I really didn’t want to leave my new little dog. But I might not have a choice.
“Axel, I’m working on the code right now. This isn’t as easy as making a pivot table in Excel you know.”
“No, Parker, I don’t know. All I know is you ignored five calls from Silas yesterday. You’re lucky he didn’t just send someone to your house yesterday to end you.”
“Well, if he’d ended me yesterday, he’d never get Iron Valor money, cuz I’m the only person who can do it, if it can even be done.”
“Well, guess what, sis? You’ve got a meeting with Silas in two hours. You have to come to him.”
“Fuck Axel. I don’t want to come to Greenbriar pack territory.”
“Well, then you should have answered your fucking phone yesterday. You’d better have answers for Silas when you come.”
“Fine. I’ll be there.”
I hung up the phone and logged in, checked the dummy account I’d created to siphon funds from Iron Valor’s mainline. Shit! Last night’s transfer had gone through! No sign of interruption, no alerts from the receiving shell. I allowed myself a slow exhale, then checked the backup script. Everything looked tight.
But then I looked closer. There was a discrepancy in the timestamp—a ten-minute gap that shouldn’t have been possible. I checked the raw logs. In that window, the server should have pushed a confirmation ping, but the packet never appeared. Instead, there was a double-entry—a packet that arrived from my end, then bounced back as if the server was faking its own output.
I ran it again, this time with a different credential. The anomaly was still there. Not a bug, not a hardware fault. A counter-hack.
