Page 39 of Sweethearts and Savages
I glared daggers at him. “So sorry.”
He laughed, and then smothered the sound again. “Get up. I’m hungry.”
As I stood, his shirt falling down to my knees, I watched his eyes travel up my body, snagging on my surgery scars. I may as well have been wearing a circus tent, but I searched his face for anything lecherous. But he just turned away and walked toward the kitchen, dragging me along like a faithful puppy.
I was so screwed.
19
Stacey
Bohdie paced back and forth through the room, temporarily as a man and not as a lion. He’d lost control of his shifting after Enit had been taken, and he was just as likely to shift into a lion in the middle of the conference room as he was to stay human.
For the first time in nearly fifteen years, a bounty hunter had stolen a member of Eden. The fear in the room was a palpable force that kept stealing my breath. The room was filled with people, including some of Enit’s parents, plus her pseudo-grandfather and Convocation member Alexander, who was a goddamn dragon. He scared the shit out of me and I was worried that he was going to snap, and rip Bohdie in half.
Bohdie was on the phone too, and whoever was on the other end was trying to appease him but the Alpha lion was without his Omega and he was spiraling hard. I was spiraling hard.
“Get Talbot on it. Yeah, Reese is here too but Vance, I need this. I’ll owe you whatever you want. I’ll become a soldier or come home or fucking pledge my allegience to the Sleuth, but I need to find her. She’s my Omega, my mate. I need her,” he growled and I paused. So did everyone else in the room.
His mate. I didn’t think they’d actually made the leap yet to perform a mating ceremony, but it was good to know that he was thinking forever, because so was I.
If we ever got her back.
Whatever the guy at the other end of the line was saying calmed him a little, and I drew my gaze from him to the rest of the people in the room. Half the vampires were missing, searching the surrounding area and the cities further out. The Alpha of the Nîso Pack was also missing, along with Carmen’s mate Bobby, as they searched the woods for a scent trail.
Everyone was doing something, except me. I was lost. I didn’t know how to help. All the founding members of Eden were here, including all my parents but Layla, who was home with the kids. The humans who had funded Eden were all here: Lincoln, Reese, and Vincent with their mate Celeste, who was a snow leopard shifter. Lincoln was on the phone to some contacts in the States and Reese was on a computer, doing whatever the hell he did.
If there was a human who could keep up with me, it was Reese. He was a genius, especially when it came to technology. It wasn’t my area of interest, but I could appreciate the art of his creations.
As if he could feel my gaze, he looked up. “Stacey, come and look at these. Maybe your mind will pick up a pattern that mine is missing.”
I doubted it, but I was happy to have anything to do. I sat down beside him, looking at what I assumed was a log of security incursions.
“This shows everything that bounces off our secure firewalls. The numbers beside them are origin VPNs and their location. The better the hacker, the more difficult it is tracking their origin location.” There were hundreds, from random spam to more tactical attacks. But I couldn’t see any patterns as Reese scrolled through the logs. “I’m hoping I can find something to trace from here while Talbot puts a crawler through the dark web for any reference to Eden or shifters. It’ll take time to sift through all that metadata though.”
He may as well be talking in another language, but I could do patterns. I watched the numbers scroll down, as my brain did what it did best.
Finally, after what could have been minutes or hours, I shouted, “Stop.” Everyone turned but I ignored them. “These all say New York.”
Reese nodded. “Yeah, it’s a popular location to bounce through because there are literally hundreds of millions of VPNs just in that city. It would be hard to pinpoint any one person in that mess.”
I grabbed his mouse, and he gasped a little. Lincoln huffed a laugh under his breath.
“Here. These suburbs are all within a twenty-mile radius of each other, like he’s bouncing their first location somewhere close to home. Can we triangulate that?”
Someone muttered something about a nineties technothriller, but Reese was already on it. “I didn’t think about triangulating differing VPSs,” he grumbled to himself. He pulled the data from a bunch of logs and then pinpointed the locales on a map, narrowing it down more and more until he found an exact location.
Celeste shook her head. “The internet is a scary place…”
“The house belongs to a Cedric Frostmore,” Reese said, but Alexander was already on the phone.
“I need the occupant of this address brought to me. Now.” Alexander’s voice was an order, and even without being a shifter, I wanted to follow his command.
He looked around the rest of the room. “Now we wait.”
We all lookedat the photo of an average human on the screen. He had a black eye, and you could see a hand holding him by the scruff of his shirt. What you couldn’t see was Enit anywhere.
Alexander had given his contacts terse orders to get the guy on a jet and bring him to Eden immediately. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the Academy, but apparently there was a holding cell deep within the lower levels of the compound. Below the infirmary, which I’d thought had been the lowest level.
