Page 42 of The Beast's Baby
But she knew.
She knew that the two wolves attacking Brendan were her brothers.
She didn’t know their names or their age or exactly where they’d come from, but she could feel the connection through her wolf connecting with theirs. It was weird and amazing all at once.
“Come on,” Jay said, heading for the window and stepping through it, reaching out a hand to help her avoid the glass even though she didn’t need it. She still took his hand and let it steady her. It made him smile, but there was no time for that.
“Where are we going?” she asked, hoping he would say they were taking a different route to his car—since the one they had gone down the day prior was now occupied by combating wolves—and getting the hell out of there, but he had other plans.
“We need to go down to level five,” he said.
“What’s on level five?”
“The servers,” he replied. “I’m not leaving before I know they’re toast.”
She didn’t want to be impressed because there was a survivalist in her that simply wanted to tuck tail and run, but the bigger part of him was all in. The company had to be stopped and her brothers and Olive seemed to be poised to attempt some sort of coup. Who were they to sit out? Did she want to tell her child ten years from now how the world came to be dehumanized because she couldn’t stick around to see things through? No, she did not.
“How do we get to level five?” she asked, and he tugged her along as he started down the corridor, eyes on the snapping, snarling darkness behind them.
“Stairs,” he said.
Chapter 12 - Jay
He was really going to do it. He was going to blow up six years of his life. He had been working so hard for this company, for this project. He had believed in it with his entire heart and soul. So much that he’d barely had a life outside of it, and now he couldn’t wait to see the files begin to delete off those servers. It felt like the ultimate revenge—deleting the life’s work of those that had duped him with half-truths and glittering promises of a better tomorrow for everyone.
Isobel’s hand was hot in his. They’d taken the stairs at record speed, both of them terrified of getting caught by guards. Isobel kept sniffing the air and he found it adorable but didn’t think this was the right time to tell her. She should feel in control, like she was contributing, and as though he knew he could handle it if they ran into trouble, and she had to shift to protect them.
“Actually,” he said as they stopped on the landing in front of the door to level five. “Could you… fight someone if you had to?”
“I don’t know,” she said, out of breath. “I’ve never tried.”
“Ah,” he said. “Well, it’s too late to teach you now.”
“Could you?” she stopped him.
“A technician or another lab coat, sure. But a wolf?” He made a face to tell her not likely and she rolled her eyes but smiled.
“Are you sure you’re ready to do this?” she asked. “Yesterday you were pretty convinced this was the way to save the world.”
“Yeah, well, a lot has changed since yesterday,” he said. “And maybe I wasn’t all that convinced after all. In my heart of hearts, and all that.”
She kissed him then. Hard and brief. But it set his heart aflame and he stared at her, thinking he wouldn’t mind staring at her every day for the rest of—
“Go,” she encouraged, nodding to the door in a gesture that told him to take the lead.
Which made sense since he knew where they were going.
He opened the door slowly. The only lights anywhere were the exit signs, which meant whoever was attacking must have cut off the back-up power as well as the core power source. Impressive. The servers, however, always ran on a power source located behind locked doors within the large room where they were housed to protect them from such an occurrence. They had to get into the locked room—which would be very locked now that there was no power source—and manually begin to delete files. They could try to get into the container that housed the power and switch it off, but it would take hours. He explained all this to her in not so many words.
“Let’s just do it,” she interrupted him when he was halfway through. “I don’t care how.”
He smiled at her impatience, then kissed her. Hard and brief. Before he opened the door wide enough to slip through. She followed right behind him, both of them pausing as the noise of the door closing sent an echo through the abandoned level.
“Sorry,” she whispered.
Hopefully, no one was close enough to have heard it.
“This way,” he said, leading her into an office space desert of desks and chairs. Some of the desk lamps were shining their cold light over the desktops, bouncing off papers, making little pools of blinding reflections. Isobel lifted one hand to shield her eyes from the glare.
