Her blood ran cold. Her mind, still hazy from passion, snapped into sharp focus. “How long?”
“Started about twenty minutes ago. Our team’s holding them off, but barely. I need you here. Now.”
She was already mentally cataloging the steps she’d need to take. Firewall reinforcement. Traffic analysis. Source identification. Her fingers itched for her keyboard.
“I’m on my way.”
“Harper—” Derek’s voice deepened. “This feels connected. The timing, the sophistication. I think whoever’s been probing the pack’s financial servers has escalated.”
Her stomach dropped. The backdoor vulnerability she’d discovered. If this was the same threat actor…
“I’m on my way.”
She ended the call and turned to face Adrian, whose golden eyes had shifted to molten amber in the darkness. The moonlight streaming through the balcony doors painted sharp shadows across his face, highlighting the hard set of his jaw.
“I have to go.”
“I heard.” His voice was a low rumble. “I’m taking you.”
“Adrian, you don’t have to?—”
“I. Am. Taking. You.” Each word carried the weight of absolute command. “My mate doesn’t drive alone in the middle of the night when there’s a threat.”
Mate.The word sent a shiver through her, even as her analytical mind was already spinning through attack vectors and defense protocols. She’d agreed to be his mate. The reality of that still hadn’t fully settled in her chest.
“You hate the city.”
“I hate a lot of things.” He was already moving. “Doesn’t mean I won’t face them.”
She scrambled to gather her clothes, her body protesting every movement. She ached in the most delicious ways, muscles she didn’t know she had making themselves known. But there was no time to savor the aftermath of what they’d shared.
Within ten minutes, they were in his truck, tearing down the mountain roads at speeds that would have terrified her if she’d been paying attention. But her mind was elsewhere, fingers flying across her phone’s screen as she pulled up remote diagnostics.
The attack was even worse than Derek had described.
Three separate vectors. Someone had done their homework. They were hitting the authentication servers, the database clusters, and the payment processing systems simultaneously. Classic divide-and-conquer strategy, forcing the security team to split their resources.
“Talk to me.”
She barely registered his voice. The code scrolling across her small screen demanded every ounce of her attention. There—a signature in the attack pattern. Something familiar.
“Harper.”
The packet structure. She’d seen it before. In the probe attempts on the pack’s financial systems. Same timing algorithms, same obfuscation techniques.
“Harper.”
This wasn’t a coincidence. Whoever was targeting TalkToMe was also targeting the Moonstone Pack. But why? What was the connection beyond Derek’s ownership?
The truck jerked to a violent stop.
Her phone went flying as her seatbelt locked, yanking her back against the seat. She gasped, disoriented, suddenly very aware that the vehicle had stopped on a dark stretch of mountain road, moonlight filtering through the trees.
“What the hell, Adrian?”
He turned to face her, and the barely leashed fury burning in his eyes made her breath catch. His fingers gripped the steering wheel so hard the leather creaked.
“I’ve been talking to you for the last fifteen minutes.”
