"Alpha." One of our pack warriors came in. "We have another problem." She said, walking to Jasper's desk. I sat back down and waited. "At the same time that we were chasing the prisoner, there was an anomaly in our security system for all our computer files."
"Jason." Troy looked at my brother.
"On it." He said, then he shot out of the office to get his laptop from his office. In seconds, he was back and setting up shop, going through our files to find what had been copied or taken. "Oh hell." He muttered.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Okay." He paused, picking his next words. "Our system is one of the most protected out there but somebody found a gap. With that gap they went into our personnel files and our member files." He answered.
"And whose files did they copy?" I asked as a follow-up.
Jason looked up at me. "Our family's."
"By 'our family's' do you mean me, you, and Jake?" I inquired.
"I mean us and our parents..., and your children." He said and my breath stuck in my throat. "Thankfully, the babies information is minimal at best. Our system snapped shot in seconds. The most they would have been able to access is the superficial details."
"That's enough for a lot to happen." I replied, my voice shaking. "I killed people on less than superficial information." I looked at Jasper.
"We need to find out who that woman is and who she was working with. We need to find out what we're up against." Jasper said, looking into my eyes.
*************************************
After checking on the babies, who were still sleeping peacefully, I urged Jasper to come with me down to the dungeon. He trailed silently behind me as we went down, less reluctant than earlier with the threat escalating. Although he had grumbled, he told all the pack guards to prepare for us to go down and vacate the area. The head pack doctor had been put on hold for if our little guest decided to be difficult.
It was obvious that Jasper was riled by going down to the dungeon but he trusted me enough and wanted to be with me enough that he ignored his unease and followed me. As we approached the woman's cell, he took a deep breath. I glanced back at him and his face turned blank. Something in his eyes did something to my insides. Stopping a few cells down, I turned to him.
"Okay," I mindlinked him. "I'm going to be a little more honest with you before we walk in there and hope it makes you less apprehensive about this. Back in my Blood Drip days, when I was asked to kill..., you, I might have had a little something more than respect for you back then. Even though I didn't know it was you at the time."
"Oh really?" He raised a brow at me. "Is that the Blood Drip wolf or Lena feeling that way?"
I stepped closer to him and draped my arms over his shoulders. He looked down at me, the darkness still on the surface but his natural humor lighting his eyes. "They're the same person, Jas. Just the same way that that old Alpha and you are the same. We're gonna go in there and get her to talk and find out who's after us. After that, we'll go upstairs and see our children and be with our family and pack. Then tonight, you and I will air out everything and we'll be ready for whoever is coming for us." I told him then leaned up to kiss him but he pulled back.
"As much as I want to feel your lips on me right now, she'll hear." He nodded to the cell. "First rule of an effective interrogation, don't give them anything to prey on. She already knows you're my mate, she'll press harder the more ammo we give her. I'm very strict about my interrogations." He explained and I grinned at him.
"Well then, Mr. Alpha, by all means, lead the way." I dropped my arms and gestured for him to go ahead. He broke a smile at me and moved ahead to the cell.
Inside the cell, our little friend had been placed in the center of the room, bolted to her chair. It was the usual way we kept prisoners when we were about to question them. It's easier then letting them be just sitting around then having to drag them to a chair and handle business. A lot less work was needed if they were already there. It makes a prisoner more..., defensive but it's effective.
"Hello there." I said when I walked in, taking a chair from beside the door and sitting in front of her. I crossed my legs and set my folded hands on my knee. "So, how about you start by telling us your name." I suggested. "We'll find out what it is eventually. Lets just cutout the extra work, shall we?"
"Go to hell." She sneered.
"Hey!" Jasper's voice snap through the room so rough it was like a punch in the gut and I wasn't even the one it was directed at. "You do not come on my land and show that kind of disrespect. Fix your tone or I'll fix it for you." The Alpha in him showed and it weighed on the room.
"I'd listen to him if I were you. He's a bit on edge." I told her. "Now, let's get back to that name you were just about to tell us."
"I'd rather die than tell you anything." She spat and my patience ran a bit thin.
"Ugh, she's irking me." Nina grumbled in my head. Me too, I answered.
When the woman stayed silent, I sighed. "Okay. You won't give me a name. Let's try something different then. Why were you looking for me and my family?" Silence. "Who sent you?" Silence. "You know, you're really starting to irk me."
"Lena," Jasper said my name softly. He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, staring at our prisoner. "why don't you go upstairs and grab the pack doctor? If she's not talking by the time you get back, I'll leave you with her for a while." I looked at him and he nodded, silently giving me a push to leave.
"Sure. I like that idea." I grinned evilly at the woman. For a split second, I saw fear in her eyes. That split second was all I needed. She was going to break, whether it be for me or Jasper. The only question was when it would happen.
Standing, I closed Jasper in with the woman and walked slowly upstairs. Me getting the pack doctor was nothing but a strategy. Either of us could have called the doctor through the mindlink. Giving him time, I took my time upstairs and made the doctor slow down on our way down.
Back inside the cell, Jasper was leaning against the way still but the woman wasn't as cool as before. She was shaking so hard that I thought she would shake out of the chair. Her cheeks were covered in her tears. There was no blood, no physical signs of trauma, but anybody could tell she had experienced some sort of torment.
"Her name is Angela." Jasper said when I looked back up at him. "Angela Wallace." He looked at her and it was like she could feel it. She cowered. "Tell the Luna whatever she wants to know." He pushed off the wall and walked out. I told the doctor to stay and followed him.
"What happened?" I asked him in our link, touching his arm to stop him from walking all the way to the stairs. "How'd you get her to talk?"
"The power of observation and using the right words. I can tell certain things about people when I'm in this state." He answered. "She's a wounded little girl under all that aggression. I forced her to see herself and she didn't like it. When a person lies to themselves so much, it's worse than a physical pain to make them see who they really are.
"She's pretty sore right now, her emotions are raw. She's looking for something to latch on to. She should answer any question and do anything to get away from herself again." He paused. "Now, go find out all she knows and come find me in my office. We'll debrief and go up to the babies." He turned and walked away and I found myself grinning at his back. I shook my head before turning and walking back inside.
"Well, Angela, let's talk." I grinned at her, taking a seat in front of her and pulling out my phone to record everything.
Jasper was partially right. As soon as I told her to go ahead, she told me some of what I wanted to know. It's amazing what you can get out of people if you play with their head a little. By the time she was done, she told me who her partner was and where the meet up point was supposed to be. However, she stopped at who sent her and why. Her loyalty to that person was unyielding. I had to spend an extra hour down in the cell, "convincing" her to give more information but no matter how bad the pain was she wouldn't say the person's name. That alone convinced me of who they might be to her.
"Hey, Jake!" I called toward his office as I passed. "Mind transcribing for me?" I threw my phone to him at his desk.
Immediately, he got to work. I knew he would have a print out of my session downstairs within the hour. He wasn't on Jason's level when it came to computers but he was still good enough to do an impressive job. Walking into Jasper's office, I found him sitting at his desk, looking at his computer screen with a deep frown on his face.
"What's wrong?" I asked, taking a seat in front of his desk.
"Nothing." He answered. "There's just been reports of some royal guards in the area."
Just like any other society, werewolves had a form of government dating back to our roots. It was always a monarchy, ran by the Alpha King and his Luna. In the past, it was a noble office but the most recent king was almost always neglecting his job. Many had spectated, in the years of his reign, that he was never meant to be king but his father had been and he'd taken the office when his father had been killed in a war. The King was said to be a nice enough guy but he was almost useless for his people.
Unless it was something that benefitted him, he was of no use. It almost did no good for him to be nice and cool with his subjects. Also, there was always something so off about him and the stories surrounding the palace. People knew that many wolves didn't go there because few ever came out. The palace was even purposely closed off from the public to make it harder to know what was going on. Yep, our king was something strange and none of us knew how dangerous that was.
"Why would the royal guards be in the area?" I asked, my brows pulling together.
"I have no idea but something isn't right here." He muttered, still looking at his computer. He finally looked up at me after a pause, "Get anything good out of her?"
"Yes and no. She wouldn't tell me why she was sent or who sent her. She protected whoever sent her unyieldingly. And the only thing she kept saying when I asked why she was here was, 'TWC LXXV,' over and over again. Once Jake gets done transcribing it, I'm going to sit down and go through it slowly. I'll analyze everything that was said and figure out if there's anything I might have missed while talking to her." I paused. "I think I have a profile on the person who sent her, though. At least, I think I have an idea of who they might be to her."
"Shoot." He leaned back in his chair, giving me the floor.
"Shouldn't we wait for the others?" I asked.
Jason would have more intel on how we were hacked and the exact amount of information that was taken. Jake was getting my transcriptions done as well and I needed time with them once he was done. Harper and Cory had been communicating with their packs, moving them in tighter for extra protection for all of us. Neither of them liked that I was the seemingly obvious target, despite my whole family's file being accessed. Despite me being married and a mom, each still had a lot of love for me and they weren't shy about it. This wasn't their fight but they were just as invested as us.
"Would you like to wait for them?" He asked in return.
"Yeah, I think it'll be redundant to have to repeat stuff. We can take a break and go upstairs to the kids then when Jake's done, I'll come back down here to go over the transcription. When I'm done, we can all come together and get it done." I shrugged. "Also, send some guards to this location. She said it was the meeting place.
"Okay." He gave an answering shrug the cracked a small smile. "I'll do that then I just have to talk to a couple people before we go. I got in touch with Hilda and Hectors eldest and they've agreed to let the others know. I need to get the doctor up here to talk about preparing the bodies for whatever type of ceremony they want. Then I need to talk to my events planner to be sure to clear all events whenever they decide to put them to rest."
"I understand." I stood, going around to kiss his forehead. "I'll go on up and see if they're up and energized. Just come on up when you're done." I kissed him one more time then headed upstairs.
The babies were wide awake and full of life when I entered the nursery and let the nanny know she could go. I set up the floor, for them to play without getting hurt, then I took each of them from their cribs and let them crawl around. Sitting down on the floor with them, I watched their tiny bodies go from place to place and enjoyed their soft giggles. My children, I thought to myself.
"My pups." Nina said lovingly in my head. They were just as much her pups as they were my children. After all, Nina was a part of me. A part that could not and would not ever be separated from me.
While I played with the kids, I felt such a sense of peace with myself and the world. It took him almost an hour but Jasper finally came up and the children's excitement at their father's appearance was like a beam of light in the darkest of darkness. He grinned at them and swept them into his arms, settling himself on the floor beside me. It was all fun until Jake mindlinked me that my transcriptions were ready and I headed downstairs to go through them.
Since I had a key to Jasper's office, I locked myself inside with the transcription and got to work. By the time I was done going through my interview with Angela, the packet was marked up with notes and highlights on anything I saw as important. When Jason opened a link to let us know he was done with his computer search, Harper and Cory confirmed they were on their way and Jasper left the babies with another pack nanny.
I vacated his seat as he walked in, out of respect for him as the Alpha. Even though I was an alpha female, his position was higher than mine and I respected his right to be at the head of the meeting if he chose to. Jasper did, however, gesture to the chair that was still next to his, giving me a place of reverence and respect as his Luna. When everybody was in, he looked over at me.
"I guess he wants us to lead this meeting." Nina said. I guess so, was my only reply.
"Jason, what do ya got?" I started with him.
"I found that they didn't get anything on the babies other than their names. They spent most of their time on the other files. More specifically, your file." He handed me a folder with my information in it.
"What exactly about me did they want to know?" I looked through my file.
"If I was to guess? I would say everything. Yours is the only full file they touched. I also found out they went a step further from us and tried to do a search for Jasper's file."
"And?"
"Jasper's file is only in a hardcopy. We were just recently converting to a computer system and I hadn't began his yet." Jason answered. "Yours was incomplete as well but it was enough to cause a little worry."
"And why that?"
"It had an area with your 'dead' years in them. The area that would refer to your time away from the pack. There was no full report but there was a reference to an incident report from Jasper's kidnap. In it, your past was briefly mentioned but not in detail. I'm only worried about it in so far as they might go a step further and dig up some old enemies and dirt."
I shrugged. "Let them. It'll do them some good to know who to be afraid of." I paused, tossing the file back on the desk. "Did you find anything about where the breach came from?"
"The guards couldn't find anything at the location you sent them to. Once I traced the hack back to a location and I sent the guards to it. It was abandoned when they got there but they sent these photos." He pulled up some pictures of an old, broken down building on the big screen in the room so all of us could see. It was so bad I wondered who would chance going inside. The inside had cobwebs and dirt so thick it was noticeable where people had stepped.
"You tracked it wrong." I said calmly.
"Sis, I think I know how to track a hacker." Jason replied.
"Is Jasper's computer still linked to yours?" I asked and he gave a slow nod. "May I?" I gestured to the computer and Jasper got up, giving me his chair. I went through the code sequences. "See here?" I connected the screens so they could see and pointed to the screen. "The final sequence of this code is a dummy. It's there so a person doesn't look closer.
"If you keep going though, you'll find this." I typed in a series of codes I had picked up back in my assassin days. "That's where he hacked us from." I paused. "Hm, but that's not where he is now."
"How do you know?" Cory asked, sitting on the couch.
"Okay, um, do you see this spike right here?" I pointed with the mouse and everybody nodded. "That's where he hacked us. However, it ebbs when our walls came down but, right here, there's a shot of activity from the same person. This network isn't stationary, it has to be a wireless thing. The locations, based on satellite trajectories, are different. If I look at which satellite it's firing off of right now, I think I can find our guy. Get the warriors ready to move." My fingers moved.
"Careful." Jason warned me. "That's a hidden firewall that releases a killer virus upon disruption."
"I know. I've used it before. Best way to get around it is to go a little ghost. You have to make yourself undetectable as something that would normally come in." I typed in sequences that I remembered from back when I had to protect my computers from hackers. I used computers to correspond sometimes and having good knowledge of how to hack and defend was extremely important. "I'm in." I announced to the others. "Is Dan with them?"
Dan Fisher was our..., chief, I guess you could call him. He was one of the leaders of our warriors in the absence of my brothers or Jasper and I.
"He's the only one I trust to be out there." Jacob replied. He had been the one to train Dan to be able to keep things together without us.
"Great. Sending location now." I hit send and sat back, my fingers aching a bit. "Sorry, it's been a while." I cracked my knuckles. I send a message down to the remaining warriors to have one of them prepare another cell.
"Nice job, sis." Jason said, looking a little defeated but happy I had found the mistake.
"It's nothing big. You do greater stuff all the time. I'm just pretty good at this stuff because I've done it before." I grinned. "One time, I turned a group of computers into a bomb and detonated it from across the country. It was a productive day." I shrugged and Jason just looked at me. "What?"
"Do I even want to know how you did that and why?" He asked.
"Probably not." I answered. "Now, let's move on." I moved back to my seat but Jasper just looked at me. "What?"
"You never cease to amaze me." He said.
"I'm not trying to amaze anybody. I just have a little bit of black girl magic on my side." I joked then turned serious. "I was close to our pack hacker growing up and he taught me well. I had to learn to do all these other things for my own safety while I did my job. You pick up some crazy stuff when you make money k-killing people." I replied, my voice dropping off at the end then I cleared my throat. "Anyway, um, Angela didn't reveal much in our little session but she did give me some clues."
"Such as?" Harper asked.
"I'm pretty sure whoever sent her is either a lover or a parent. Did we find any background on her?" I asked Jason.
"She's from Michigan. Her parents were killed when she was younger and she was raised by her uncle, Alpha Wallace." Jason said, taking the screen over again to pull up Angela's information.
"Wallace is one of my old friends." Cory said. "Jason called me when he found a connection and I got in touch. He's preparing a video call for five today."
"Great. Let's finish this before he calls in." I said.
"Other than the obvious stuff, her file is pretty bare and her uncle is the only one who can help us. I'm pretty sure he's the one to keep her file bare or, at least, he knows the one who did." Jason continued.
"Cool. Anything on this, 'TWC LXXV,' she kept saying?" I asked.
"I saw that while transcribing," Jacob said. "So I dug around a bit." He took the remote from Jason. "I figured it had to be some type of code or something. Then I remembered visiting the archives at the library before.., the secret archives." He pressed the button. "These letters mean, 'The Werewolf Chronicles volume seventy-five.'" He pulled up an old looking book.
"Do we..," I began and he stopped me.
"I've already sent for it. They're sending it to me by morning and I'll read through it." Jake assured me.
Where Jason was the computer buff, Jake had his own strengths. Usually it was in being a warrior but he had a thing for books and history. It was kind of strange, the mix between the warrior in him and the slightly geeky insides he had. Reading and studying history were his hidden attributes but he was pretty great at them.
"Okay. We'll meet tomorrow to go over whatever you find."
"Alpha! Luna! Betas! We have a problem." Dan's voice rang out.
"What is it, Fisher?" Jake snapped at him.
"We had him, sir. The guy was in our custody." He answered.
"Spit it out, Fisher." Jasper ordered.
"Some royal guards showed up and claimed he was their prisoner. They gave me an order issued by the King and told me he had escaped and was to be brought back to the palace. They took him and warned that they would kill us if we followed. I'm sorry, Alpha." He told us.
"It wasn't your fault, Dan. Come back to the packhouse and write your report to submit to Beta Jacob." I answered for a livid Jasper.
"Yes, Luna." He replied then cut the link.
I turned to Harper and Cory who were waiting. "The royal guards that were reported in the area took the hacker."
"Why the hell would they do that?" Cory demanded.
"They claim he's their prisoner and he had escaped. They've taken him and threatened to kill our warriors if they resist. Our warriors are on the way back right now." I sighed.
"What the hell is going on?" Jasper muttered angrily, slamming his hand down on his desk. Lucky for the desk, he wasn't putting too much power behind the slam so it didn't break anything. I laid my hand on top of his and rubbed my thumb over the back of his hand.
Silence came over all of us as we each stewed in our own annoyance at the situation. The silence was broken by the ringing of the big screen, signaling Alpha Wallace's call. Maybe he'll have some answers for us. We need to know why the royal guards are getting in the way.
"I don't like when people involve themselves where they don't belong." Nina grumbled. Me either, I replied.