CHAPTER 32

The entire hacking process took fifteen minutes. Aiden hooked his fancy looking laptop straight into one of the big hard drive towers and was murmuring nonsense back and forth with Caroline, who now had full access to the servers from where she waited in the van.

Darius walked around for a bit and then came and sat next to where I'd landed against the door.

The guards had done a sweep of the basement which was laid out like a large square with a hallway that came back upon itself. Found nothing apparently amiss and gone back up the stairs. The first floor was being swept systematically. We'd come across two labs when we'd been traversing that floor, and the guards were focusing on those, leaving me to wonder what exactly they contained that made them worry so much.

In all things had gone much smoother than I had been expecting.

"So," Darius leaned against the door, mimicking my position, "you come here often?"

I huffed and gave him a side look.

"Sorry, that one's corny," he apologized. "How about 'what's a girl like you doing in a place like this'?"

"I think the quote is supposed to be 'what's a *nice* girl like you doing in a place like this'," I told him.

"Ah...but you aren't a nice girl, are you?" He gaze held me and it felt like he was trying to crawl into my mind, discover all my secrets. It was a little hard to breathe.

"Not really," I shrugged and went back to watching Aiden tap on his laptop. Yet, despite trying to appear as though I was engrossed in the hacking, I was still entirely aware of Darius' presence, his distance from me, they way he was staring at me, as if trying to figure me out.

"Your wolf," he asked at last. "Was she always..."

"Different?" I interrupted, "yeah."

"I was going to say capable of hiding herself and detecting people from impossible ranges, but I suppose that adds up to the same thing. Two years, you never said anything about it," he pointed out.

I looked at him again.

"Is it something you would have shared, if it were you?"

"Maybe, to those I trusted. To you..." he met my eyes, "in a heartbeat."

I pinched my lips together and looked away. He didn't understand. He didn't know what it was like to always watch your back, even with your own pack.

On the surface, after my parents had begged for admission to the pack we'd been accepted. But the truth of it was that even though we arrived before I had formed memories, we were still outsiders. And everyone knew it. I was ostracized enough because I had no pack relatives or close family friends to call on. Everyone in the Cedar Pack knew who they were and how they fit into the pack's future. I was on the outside of every friend group I'd tried to ingrain myself with. Any excuse they had, anything that set me apart, and I was suddenly left out of invitations, ignored, or, for the worst of them, bullied. By the time I was in my mid teens I'd given up trying. It was lonely, but I had my wolf, and she was already becoming something more at the time. I've often wondered if being so isolated wasn't why she'd become her own consciousness.

"You were being groomed for alpha, your entire pack adored you. You can't judge my decisions based on your experiences."

He frowned at me.

"What about *our* experiences? I thought we'd grown close enough for some honesty."

I couldn't stop the dry chuckle that escaped. The nerve of this man. He still thought he was in the right, because he thought I was too dull to have figured out what he was up to all those years ago.

His frown deepened.

"Got it." Across the room, next to one of the server towers, Aiden snapped the laptop closed and tucked it back into the satchel that he was carrying. "We've programmed the servers to have a systematic malfunction in ten minutes, it will look as though there was a critical flaw in some of the recently installed software and will explain all the anomalies from tonight, hopefully leaving no trace of our presence. But we need to be out of here before that happens, because when the server fails security will go into automatic lock down. No one will get in or out until the problem is resolved."

I stood up and tilted my head, sensing out our guards.

"We'll have to move quickly, the lead security team is back in the office, but the others are doing sweeps and they aren't being lazy about it." I thought of something. "I know they can't see us, but won't they be able to see this door open and close on the camera footage?" In fact we'd opened a few doors.

"They could have, if they hadn't been distracted by a street fight outside the building as we were snooping. Now they won't because we've erased that footage and Caroline has the cameras failing randomly through the building now. Starting with this hallway right about now, following our exit route, and ending with the exterior door we entered in in..." he looked at his watch, "...eight minutes thirty-seven seconds. The sensors will follow the same pattern, so no need to stop every twenty feet to use the disrupter."

I wasn't so good at calculating distance, but even I could tell we needed to move quickly if we were to meet that goal.

Pulling the door open had my heart in my throat again, waiting for an alarm to sound, but, of course, none did. I led the way up the stairs, pausing only momentarily to check the guard's positioning. I looked down at the manual alarm switch on the floor and cursed. Someone had reset it, of course.

It was a switch, sort of like a light switch that slid, you could feel the resistance of it growing as it was pushed, but it had to reach a certain point before it snapped to open and triggered the alarm.

I played with the tension without allowing it to go past that point and found we could get the door open just enough for a body to slip through, so long as someone was holding the switch to keep it from flipping.

The trouble was, the way it was positioned, the last person through had no way of holding it and getting through the door at the same time.
It took a good portion of our time to find a workable solution that would leave no trace. A sturdy string tied around the switch and held from a certain angle by Darius who'd already passed through, allowed me to squeak out. We pulled the switch shut and cut the string so that we could gather it from beneath the door tucking it back in Aiden's bag of tricks.

The time we spent figuring that out, made us late for the next parts of our route and we wound up running, as quickly and quietly as we could, toward freedom. My senses on the guards I wound up calling out small changes of direction twice so that we would not be discovered. At that point I wasn't sure if all the sensors or detectors were out of line or not, we just needed out as quickly as possible.

I didn't breathe a sigh of relief until we tumbled out into the night air, keeping our pace until we were down the street and into the parkade.

We'd done it.

I couldn't believe it.

I mean, I'd hoped...and the plan had seemed reasonably plausible, but I was kind of expecting...a shit show.

I was still a little stupefied when we reached the tech van and Caroline opened the back doors, inviting us into a space that looked a little like a NASA terminal.

Aiden dropped into one of the swivel chairs that sat along a bank of very fancy computer surfaces and looked at me, an exhilarated smile on his face.

"How would you like a job?"