Page 125 of Promised to the Alpha Prince

“You could protect me,” she said, lifting her chin, looking me over in an assessing way that made pride and eagerness rise in me. It wasn’t a question. She trusted my capabilities completely. She saw me for what I was, and she wasn’t frightened of it. She simply accepted it. I wasn’t a victim to her. I was useful. “I might like that, actually, Nikolai. A little adventure, you and me, to rescue my childhood sweetheart.”

I grinned. If I floated an idea like this to either Dmitri or Johannes, they’d stop me. To them, I was damaged and brittle. To her, I was, well, her alpha. “This wasn’t exactly what I meant when I said you should come away with me, you know.”

“But you’ll let me come along. And you’ll fix it,” she said. “You said you’d fix it, and you will.” She stepped closer, putting both of her hands on my chest. “I can help.”

She was not going to help. She was going to get in the way and make everything about seventy percent more difficult. But I might like the challenge. I might like to show off in front of her.

I kissed her hard. “I’ll fix it,” I whispered against her lips.

corentin

I WAS FRUSTRATED.

I was stuck at the airport.

My plan had been to go to a meeting with the Bannino family, because they’d been quite displeased to discover that we’d managed to wrangle a controlling stake in the company away from them. It had been a near thing, but I’d gotten it all done, buying stocks here and there at extraordinary prices—hurting the company, really, because I was driving the price of the stocks up in ways that made them unattractive.

But it had all been worth it.

It was done.

If I could have done it sooner, I could have been to Aurelie sooner, but I had only just managed it.

And then I got the call that the Banninos were demanding a meeting with me and that they wouldn’t be put off, that they were threatening me with exposure. They had dirt on me, after all. I didn’t have clean hands, and they could get me arrested and put away for a number of various crimes.

But that cut both ways.

I had dirt on them, too.

So, I acquiesced to the meeting. I’d go to them and tell them that if I went down, we all went down. They would see reason, and everything would work out.

Except I had not been able to make it to the meeting at all.

All I wanted was to be back with Aurelie right now.

And, uh, to Dmitri, truth be told.

I’d been thinking about him a lot.

Thinking about the sound of his deep voice, thinking about the way he’d told me to say that I was his, thinking about calling him “alpha.” Getting annoying knots at the most inopportune times when thoughts of him crossed my mind.

However, when I got to the airport to board the private plane I’d chartered to get me to the meeting in Arenze, my pilot was MIA. I spent the better part of an hour trying to get in touch with him, and then given up on that and tried to charter another plane with another pilot, or even that I would just fly commercial, but that had been fraught with issues too.

My phone suddenly stopped working entirely.

I must have somehow downloaded a virus accidentally or something. I wasn’t sure, but every time I tried to open any app, I was inundated with ads for watches and sports gear that would pop up, taking up the entire screen. I couldn’t call. I couldn’t open the internet. I couldn’t do a damned thing.

I managed to find a pay phone in the airport and to call the office.

They told me that every computer system on our end was infected with some kind of similar virus.

A hack. The Banninos had infiltrated our system and installed some awful spyware or something. Our IT guys were on it. They could clean it, they said. They’d already found the point of entry and closed the back door—apparently, the Banninos had gotten into our network and created some dummy administrator account that could fuck everything up. Our guys had locked them out of the system and closed off all their access.

Now, they just had to clean the hack, they said, which was time intensive. The programs installed would perpetrate themselves, installing new programs every time one of them was deleted. They would need to reinstall everything from a backup before the hack had occurred. This would probably take four or five hours, they said.

They could fix my phone, too, if I could get it to them.

I didn’t understand this.

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