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, hispowerful 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.
