Filed To Story: Destined Bond with My Forbidden Alpha Novel (Alpha Alexander & Selene)
“What are you talking about?”
“You never asked me how I and my wolves ended up there the night of the fae attack,” he said. “I got a warning, a message saying that there was going to be an attack on Winter. It didn’t say when, only that it was soon. So, I sent scouts to monitor for two days and that was when I got a report back saying there was an aggressive force moving on Winter.”
“You’re saying that it was Alice who warned you?” Selene asked.
“Yes.”
“Is that supposed to change my opinion?” Selene asked.
“It just seems worth considering. Of course, she’s mischievous, and I wouldn’t entirely trust her, but I don’t think she is necessarily a bad person, Selene.”
“Alexander,” she sighed. “Even if she did warn you, why didn’t she tell you that it was fae? We lost a lot of people that night because we didn’t know how to fight them.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe she didn’t know.”
“But she did know there was an attack coming. How? Did you ever think, maybe, it was because she was helping the ones responsible?”
“Then why tell me at all?”
“Well, my guess, is that she told you because she knew you would come to try to protect me. She expected you to die in that fight.”
“You don’t know that.” Alexander sighed.
“Neither do you,” she said. “But I do know that if she hadn’t been in Summer that day, I wouldn’t have been captured by Jackson.”
“Sorry to interrupt…” Nessa said awkwardly. “But um… you should know that Clara’s right and this chick’s code is freakin’ gorgeous.”
“Nessa, I’m not sure it’s the right time to be appreciating someone’s code…” Galen sighed.
“It is, because the reason I know she has gorgeous code, is because it’s still here.”
“What?” Galen and Alexander both asked.
“Yea… the bugs you cleared out before were just decoys. She layered a bunch of your systems with hall monitors and drones that collect and send data back to the receiver of her choosing. Which, by the way, I have tracked to seven different bouncing locations already? She’s good.”
“I told you…” Clara murmured.
“So, Alice has had access to our systems for months?” Galen asked.
“Yep… and I say that from what I’m seeing… the worm was hers too. So, maybe one of these little hall monitors found traces of the files she was looking for and then let her know. So, she came in person to drop off our little friend from the science building.”
Selene looked at Alexander and shook her head.
“Still think she’s helping you of the goodness of her heart?”
Alexander took a deep breath and turned back to Nessa.
“What do we need to do to make sure she is out of our systems for good?” he asked.
“Ctrl, alt, delete?” She suggested.
When both Galen and Alexander gave her irritated looks, she sighed.
“Complete system restore from before her initial hack.”
“What?!” Galen shouted. “We would lose months of research and work!”
“I know,” she said. “But as it is right now, these things are everywhere… like crawling through every part of your system. Trying to remove each one would take… I don’t even think its possible honestly. If we find and remove a group, a new group will spawn somewhere else.”
“I’m too tired for this,” Alexander sighed.
“Me too,” Selene said.
“You guys should just go get some rest, there is nothing you can do here anyway,” Galen suggested.
“What about the rest of the pack? You said systems were down, lights were out, people were trapped, there’s a lot that needs to be done,” Alexander insisted.
“Fiona is already handling a lot of those things. What she doesn’t have time for, I will take care of,” Galen said.
“Alright,” Alexander said. “I want a full briefing in the morning… of everything that has been going on the past two weeks.”
“Of course.”
Alexander was surprised by the knock at his door the following day. Selene had met Fiona at the training grounds an hour before, and he wasn’t scheduled to meet with Galen for at least another hour.
“Come in,” he said.
The door opened, and he was even more surprised by the person that entered.
“Nessa?”
“Hey, Alpha Alexander,” she smiled awkwardly, holding her laptop in her arms.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“So… I got the distinct impression that your Luna is not a fan of this Alice person,” she began. “And when Liara doesn’t like something, my dad tends to avoid it at all costs to keep her happy.”
“Alright…” Alexander said.
“So… as you know… the computer system is a bit jacked up right now.”
“Yes, you made that pretty clear last night.”
“Yea.. well… apparently, there is an option that will unjack the system,” Nessa smiled awkwardly.
“Why does it sound like this isn’t a good thing?” Alexander asked.
“Uhm… I kept working on the bugs last night. Chasing the little suckers down and destroying them. Finally, I got a little bored, and instead of killing them off right away, I dissected their code. Long story short, I found something….”
“What?”
“A kill switch,” she replied.
“That’s a good thing, Nessa… if you found a kill switch you can remove all of them at once without destroying our systems.”
“Right, that’s true, and I was totally like ‘yay, I’m the best’ when I found it…” she said. “Until I realized I didn’t find it… it was given to me.”
“How?”
“The Big Brother worms, the ones that killed the lights and the doors. They had a background timer. Twenty-four hours. Once that time was up, it sent me, the only admin on at the time, the kill switch. With instructions and a system restore to moments before the first worm went boom.”
Nessa turned her computer so Alexander could see the screen. He sighed when he saw the signature.
“It was from Alice,” Nessa said.
“So, she bugs the system for months, almost destroys it, and then conveniently she has the only way to fix it? Did I get that all right?” Selene asked not, bothering to hold back her irritation.
“I mean it’s a little more nuanced than all that,” Nessa said, “but yea, basically.”
Selene looked back and forth between Alexander, Galen, Fiona, and Nessa.
“Am I seriously the only one that sees a problem in this?” she asked.
“I understand where you are coming from, and I don’t like it either,” Fiona replied.
“Thank you,” Selene sighed.
“But,” Fiona sighed, “it does seem like our only option.”
“The amount of work we would lose… it’s not insignificant,” Galen said. “Just in the research we’ve gathered about the strange rogue attacks and the Fae in Winter… if we can save it, we need to.”
Selene shook her head.
“Galen, you of all people I expected to agree with me. You didn’t trust her before you even knew what she had done.”
New Book: Veiled Desires of the Alpha King Novel
Dayson was the alpha of the largest pack in North America. Powerful figures from other packs sought to offer gorgeous girls as potential mates for Dayson. He steadfastly rejected these advances, he was not a pawn to be manipulated. But eventually there came a mysterious girl he could hardly say No. Who was she?