Read Online His to Protect by Alice Cain - Free Book Online Page A

annoying. Perversely he wanted to go
and do exactly what Anaedra had accused him of.
    Enjoying Tyler all night long seemed like a
very good way to start.
    He was almost to the point of blowing off
his responsibilities when reality intruded and his cell phone rang.
     

Chapter Seven
     
    "Her donor found her before she woke
and he managed to prevent the worst of the bleeding."
    "Lucky lady," Adrian said as he
nodded a greeting to the man current cuddling a very tightly bandaged vampire.
She fed tiredly from his throat as he rocked them both slightly back and forth.
The poor thing looked like an Egyptian mummy, but at least she was still alive.
"Do we have any leads?"
    Brody nodded and tilted his head for Adrian
to follow. He scented the air, at least trying to determine if this had been
done by the same perpetrator who'd attacked William and Logan less than five
days ago. He growled in frustration when he caught the scent of yet another
human—five identical attacks on vampires made by five different attackers in
less than three weeks. The only thing he knew for certain was that the people
who'd committed these heinous acts were human.
    Adrian followed his youngest brother to the
internal door that hid the safe-like room that all vampires in this area
installed. It was a recommendation of Alateeka Security. A damn good one,
Adrian believed, but it also had a downside. Vampires tried only to deal with
other paranormals and a handful of trusted humans, but sometimes it simply wasn't
possible. Sometimes a human stumbled across their secret.
    "The killer knew the code," Brody
said leaning down to point to something that Adrian had no hope of seeing. As a
werewolf his eyesight wasn't that much better than a human's, perhaps worse in
some conditions, but his brother's animal gave him eyesight that seemed almost
beyond Adrian's comprehension.
    He turned to Brody, raised an eyebrow, and
waited for him to explain.
    "There are two sets of finger
prints—the vampire's and the donor's—and a set of smudges, probably from latex
gloves, in between. But they all only touched the correct buttons. The killer
only touched them once indicating that he or she not only knew the numbers but
the sequence as well."
    Adrian glanced around the small area. This
door and the panel that activated it were completely protected from prying
eyes. Either the killer had somehow learned the number or they'd watched
someone punch it in.
    "Did you do a sweep for electronic
surveillance?"
    Brody gave him an irritated look. "Yes,
I checked for bugs and cameras. I've been doing this as long as you have."
    "Sorry," Adrian mumbled as he
stepped into the unlocked safe-room. Brody was good at his job. He'd grasped technology
a lot faster than the rest of them, so he was quite entitled to his annoyance.
Hell, if Adrian wasn't currently half thinking with his dick—he could still
smell Tyler's sweet arousal in his mind—he wouldn't have even asked such a
stupid question.
    "I called our resident computer genius
hoping he could explain how someone might have gotten the codes," Tyler
said. "Brian admitted that there may have been a hacker in our computer
systems."
    "Fuck,"
Adrian grumbled. They were a security firm for heaven's sake. Keeping hackers
out of their computer systems was supposed to be something they were experts
at. "Why didn't he say anything?"
    "It was
a global issue, and we weren't the only ones affected. Some of the world's
biggest companies faced the same problem…something about a single line of code
creating a vulnerability in a common piece of
freeware." Maybe Adrian was too old to truly embrace technology, because
he was sure that very little of that explanation made sense to him. "Brian
said he couldn't find any evidence of information having been stolen, so he
updated everything, closed the vulnerability, and went on with business."
Brody shrugged and grimaced. "We don't even know for sure if that was how
the codes were stolen."
    Adrian
rubbed a