Page 23 of Jesse
My phone buzzed with a message from Preston.
Preston: “Want me to come in tomorrow?”
I typed back quickly.
Me: “No need. Rest up.”
I slipped my phone away and glanced at Jesse shutting down the truck for the night. Somehow, it felt like we might just pull this off.
Chapter 6
Jesse
I was alreadyten minutes late and feeling every second of it like a ticking bomb in my chest.
I was supposed to meet Beck at the local supermarket to grab the ingredients we needed for tomorrow’s menu.
Something spicy and Southern, if I remembered right.
We’d argued about cornbread versus hushpuppies for a solid fifteen minutes last night, and I was pretty sure we’d circled back to chili cheese sliders by the end of it.
Typical Beck. He was stubborn, sharp-tongued, and ridiculously good in the kitchen. And also the reason my thoughts wouldn’t stay still.
I gripped the steering wheel tighter as I turned down the back road toward the pack compound.
The pine trees lining the gravel path blurred past, but my mind wasn’t on the road. It was on Beck. He was nothing like anyone I’d worked with before.
Where I went instinct-first, he was precise. Measured.
Where I threw things together by feel, he weighed every gram, every second, like a scientist conducting a delicate experiment. And somehow, that didn’t annoy me.
It intrigued me. No. Beck intrigued me.
I’d never done serious relationships. Never wanted to. Hookups, fun, no strings. That had always worked fine for me. But with Beck… it didn’t feel like that.
It felt like I wanted to know what made him tick. It felt like my wolf had already made up his mind, and I was the last one catching up.
I cursed under my breath and pulled into the compound’s lot, parking in my usual spot. Duty first. Festival later.
Heading into the main house, I made a beeline for the basement level, where Anthony had basically built himself a digital lair.
I pushed open the heavy reinforced door and stepped into a room that looked like something out of a hacker action flick.
Walls covered in monitors, cables hanging from the ceiling like vines, the soft clack of mechanical keys tapping rhythmically.
“Morning, Tony,” I called, ducking under a bundle of wires strung from one side of the room to the other like a jungle trap.
Anthony didn’t look up. “Jesse. You’re late.”
“Story of my life,” I muttered, coming around to his desk.
Screens glowed with looping code, static frames from ruined footage, and one corner had the festival map open and marked up.
The space smelled faintly of coffee, energy drinks, and burnt solder. A fan whirred in the corner, trying and failing to cool the cluster of overheating servers.
Anthony finally turned in his chair, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
“I went over the footage again. Whoever fried the feed was thorough. Signal distortion, corrupted time stamps, metadata wiped,” he said, although I hadn’t the foggiest idea of what he just told me.
