“Yes, Adrian. The Alpha of the Moonstone Pack. Derek’s brother?”
“Oh, him.” She tried for an airy wave of her hand, but it felt more like a twitch. “We crossed paths in the hallway, I think.”
Elise just looked at her, her expression unreadable. After a beat she nodded slowly.
“He has a very strong presence,” was all she said, before turning her attention to the tablet in her hands. “About the server logs.”
Harper dragged her brain back from the hallway and focused on the screen. The anomaly was subtle, but it was there. A ghost in the machine, a flicker of data where there should be none.
“That’s interesting,” she murmured, her fingers automatically flying to her keyboard. She pulled up the main security dashboard, running a series of diagnostic tests. The green lights were still steady, her system humming along without a single alert. But Elise was right—there was something. Something that her system, her brilliant, beautiful, perfect system, had missed.
“I ran a trace,” Elise said, her face bright with excitement. “It’s bouncing through so many proxies it’s impossible to pinpoint the source, but it’s definitely trying to access the secure server that holds the financial records for the Moonstone pack’s investment.”
Her blood ran cold. That server was the digital equivalent of Fort Knox.
“I’ll look into it,” she promised, forgetting all about her intention of resting for a few hours. “Excellent work, Elise.”
“I’m glad it was helpful.” The girl started to leave, then hesitated. “Would… would you like to have lunch sometime? Or coffee? If you have time, I mean.”
The offer was so unexpected, so normal, that for a moment Harper just stared at her. A wave of heat washed over her cheeks.
“That… that would be nice,” she finally managed. “I just have to dig into this first.”
“Okay. I’m usually in the breakroom around one.” Elise gave her a shy smile and disappeared.
Harper stared after her for a moment, an unexpected warmth in her chest, then turned back to her screen, the ghost in the machine demanding her full attention.
She spent the next three hours buried in the code, her world shrinking to the glowing green lines on her monitor. She barely registered the arrival of the day shift, the gradual increase in noise and activity as the office came to life. Someone left a bagel and a cup of coffee on her desk—probably Elise, she thought distantly—but she didn’t look up.
She eliminated the anomaly, which hadn’t succeeded in penetrating her security, and increased the monitoring to look for similar attempts, but was unsuccessful in tracing the strange data packet back to its source. She was frowning at her screen when a message popped up on her screen. ASSIGNMENT: MOONSTONE PACK INFRASTRUCTURE BUILDOUT.
She clicked on it exactly once, read the first paragraph, and then promptly closed it and spent the next six hours reconfiguring the company’s firewall protocols. Which definitely needed to be done. Eventually. Probably.
Darkness had fallen by the time Derek appeared in her doorway.
“Is there a reason you haven’t responded to my email?”
She spun in her chair so fast she nearly gave herself whiplash. Her boss leaned against the doorframe of her office looking like he’d just stepped off the cover of Werewolf CEO Monthly.
“I’m not avoiding anything. I’m working. This is what working looks like.”
“Responding to emails is also working.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Swiveled back to face her monitors, where seventeen different windows displayed various threat analyses, all of which she’d already completed yesterday but left open for exactly this kind of situation.
“The Moonstone assignment—” Derek started.
“Is clearly better suited for someone with field experience. I’m a programmer. I program. In chairs. With a roof over my head.”
“You’re the only person I trust to set up their network properly.”
“Glen could do it. Glen has camping skills.” At least she thought she’d heard him mention something about mountains once.
“It’s not exactly the wilderness,” he said dryly. “And Glen crashed the beta server last week because he forgot to initialize a variable.”
Her eye twitched. That had been a painful day for everyone. “Fine. What about Priya?”
“Priya’s on maternity leave.”
