Night's Honor (7 page)

Folding her lips tight, she forced herself to breathe evenly until her unruly temper had subsided enough for her to answer. “Your job, your rules. Got it.”

“Good. Now there is one more thing you will do for me before we're done for the night. Come with me.” He rose to his feet.

Curious, she stood to follow him, but he only led her to the large desk across the room.

Standing to one side, he gestured to the chair. “Please sit.”

Complying, she glanced at the large dark screen of the desktop in front of her. It was easily a ten thousand dollar machine. A discreet, thoroughly modern keyboard tray had been added to the antique desk. “What now?”

“Now you will prove to me that you can really do what you claim you can do.” While he talked, he pulled an iPhone out of his pocket and moved his thumb rapidly over the screen. “The Nightkind demesne website is Evenfall dot gov. You said you can break through a firewall, so go break through it.”

She had lost count of how many times her adrenaline had surged over the last twenty-four hours. Gripping the edge of the desk, she said, “No, wait. I didn't say that.”

“I asked if you could break through a firewall.” His hard gaze bored into her. “You said you were good at it.”

She shook her head. “That was your choice of words, not mine! I just agreed because at the time I didn't want to get into a big discussion about it.”

He cocked his head, and his expression carried a cool challenge. “Are you saying that you lied in the interview?”

“No!” Frustration made her voice go shrill. “Look, you have to understand what you're asking and what can actually be done. There's no such thing as breaking through a firewall, because there is no wall.”

“Explain.” He crossed his arms.

Running her hands through her hair, she tried to come up with the right words to adequately describe a complicated technical concept quickly. “You don't break through a firewall like you would smash a window to get inside a house. A firewall is a complicated list of configured rules that either lets things pass through or blocks them. One way you can breach a system is if you discover something has been misconfigured. Do you understand?”

“I understand perfectly. You've got ten minutes.” He held the phone up to his ear. “She's starting now.”

Son of a bitch. He meant it.

Son of a bitch.

Galvanized into action, she yanked out the keyboard tray and toggled the screen on, as she muttered under her breath, “Ten minutes? Excuse me, but you're fucking nuts. It takes time to look for this kind of thing.”

“Nine minutes now.” He didn't sound in the least perturbed by her agitation or her swearing.

Her mind raced through various possibilities. She had one potential rabbit in her hat that she might be able to use on such ridiculously short notice—she would bet everything in her inaccessible bank accounts that he was on the inside of the Evenfall security network. That would mean the network firewall would be configured to recognize his IP address and his email program.

Maybe she could get lucky. The quickest way to bypass firewall security was from the inside, through a client-side attack. If she could hack his email, she could send a rough, simple malware program to exploit the breach. He said he wanted her to “break through” the firewall. He didn't say how, or what she should do when she did, or that it had to be an elegant job.

“Six minutes.”

“Shut up,” she hissed. Her fingers flew across the keyboard.

She hadn't hacked in a while. It felt good, running hot against the clock. It felt crazy, and she wanted to laugh like a lunatic, except she had already sworn at one of the scariest men she had ever met, and she thought she should keep her mouth shut for a few minutes.

He said, “Time.”

She sat back. “You've got mail.”

Sleek as a panther, he moved up behind her. She was intensely aware of his closeness as he leaned over to look at the screen. As he did so, the cell phone he held in one hand buzzed. He thumbed it on. “Yes, Gavin?”

On the other end, she could clearly hear a strange male voice demanding, “Did you leave your email program running while you set her to hack into the network?”

“Of course I didn't,” said Xavier. “I locked it down.”

“Well, I want to fucking know how she fucking sent a blast email to fucking everybody from your email address.”

She pulled back so Xavier could take control of the desktop, open his email account and click on his new mail.

In big red letters, the body of the email said:

YOU SUCK.

“This went out to everybody,” Xavier said.

“Fucking yes. All six hundred and thirty fucking people in the fucking network.”

Xavier told the man on the other end of the line, “I'll call you back in a few minutes.”

“You'd better.”

After that, silence filled the room. Angling her head away, Tess slowly slid the chair a few inches farther away from him. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his hand come toward her. He took hold of the back of the chair, and as he pulled her closer again, he swiveled her around to face him.

When she lifted her eyes to his face, they felt as heavy as a ton of bricks.

His gaze was rapier-sharp.

She felt one of her shoulders creep up toward her ear. In a quiet, shaky voice, she said, “You didn't give me any time to finesse.”

“No, I didn't, did I?” he said. “You just tied Evenfall's IT administrator into gibbering knots.”

His voice had turned gentle again. While she suspected that gentleness of his was not always a safe or good thing to hear, this time he didn't appear to be angry with her. Not quite angry. She didn't think.

When the silence became too prolonged, she said, “So . . . Did I pass your test? Am I still staying?”

“Oh, indeed you are,” he told her. Finally he looked away, and only then did she realize how intense his gaze had been, like a spotlight, and how much the pressure eased from her chest when she was released from it. “Tomorrow you can explain to Gavin just how you did what you did, but for now, I believe I've asked quite enough from you for one evening. That will be all for tonight. Raoul has seen to your needs?”

Relief tried to turn her legs to noodles. She swallowed and said, “I— Yes.”

“Then I'll say good night.”

As he stood back, she rose to her feet and almost turned to go, but then paused to look at him again. “Xavier?”

He looked at her, slim eyebrows raised, looking as surprised as she was that she chose to linger in his presence. “Yes?”

A Vampyre's gaze was supposed to be mesmerizing, but he hadn't used it to force her into doing anything. According to his promise, he never would. Until she had reason to do otherwise, she might as well take him at his word.

She met his gaze. “Thank you for this opportunity. I really mean it. I'll work hard and do everything you or Raoul ask of me.”

He smiled again, and it must have been her imagination that said there was something slightly wistful about it. “Very good, Tess.”

Awkwardly, she returned his nod, and she left the room with a huge sense of relief and an equal amount of disquiet.

Outside in the hall, Raoul waited. When she appeared, he escorted her to the attendants' house without saying a word. If he had heard anything of what had happened in the study, it didn't show in his bland expression.

The tension from the last fifteen minutes faded and exhaustion rolled over her, as inescapable as the tide. Light-headed and shaky, she could have sworn she could still feel where Xavier's lips had rested on the thin skin of her wrist.

If she hadn't been so afraid of him, so tensed for the bite, it might have been . . . pleasurable.

If he weren't a Vampyre intent on feeding from her, his actions could have been construed as . . . caring.

She rubbed the area with a scowl.

She was grateful he had refrained from taking blood, and she was still frightened of him, but mostly he just confused her. He prompted her to think of things she didn't want to consider. While she had caught glimpses of his sharp, powerful personality, overall, he had shown her a depth of courtesy, thoughtfulness and feeling that she simply had no idea what to do with, even when she had been challenging or downright rude.

No matter how much she wanted to, she couldn't put him in a simple conceptual box. He didn't fit. He was too big, too complicated. The very fact that she couldn't simply label him and be done with it made her uneasy. It hinted at an unknown future, one where she learned new things and made adaptations, and became a stranger to herself.

She shook off the uneasiness. She could handle learning and adapting, as long as it meant survival. For now, supper was waiting and she could take time to settle into her own room, and put all thoughts of Xavier del Torro out of her mind.

•   •   •

L
eft alone, Xavier paced the room in long, quick strides, while his mind raced. As he reached the sitting area, he glanced at the book he'd been reading, but a quiet contemplation of Descartes's intelligent, ordered philosophy wasn't in his foreseeable future.

To save wear and tear on the book's spine, he closed it without bothering to mark the page. He and Descartes's writings were old friends, and he would reread all the old passages soon enough.

He went back to his desk and checked his email. Already there were fifty-six replies to the blast email. Like an apologetic cough, the program emitted a discreet ding and the number of unread replies updated to seventy-two.

Something shook through him, and he burst out laughing. He dialed Gavin's number again, and Gavin answered without a greeting. “Never mind, I figured out how she fucking did it. Your computer is compromised. Are you coming to Evenfall this evening?”

“Yes, I'll be leaving soon.”

“Bring it with you. I'll wipe the hard drive and reinstall everything while you're here.”

“Remember what I said,” Xavier told him. “I don't want you to say a word to anyone about how this happened.”

“Don't worry, I won't fucking say a fucking word. No matter how many fucking email complaints I get. Jesus Christ, I just got ten more— Come on, people. All the email said was YOU SUCK. It didn't contain a bomb threat.” Gavin sounded completely out of patience. “Look Xavier, I want to meet her when I've got time, but for now, just keep her away from my network, you hear?”

“Understood.” Disconnecting from the call, he powered down his computer, walked over to his leather armchair, sat and tried to haul his thoughts into some kind of order.

They refused to comply. Rubbing his face with one hand, he thought of the angry defiance in Tess's eyes as her fingers had raced over the keyboard, and how, despite being so afraid of him, she had spat out curses as she worked, and he laughed all over again.

Underneath it all, a persistent, more insidious thread ran through his thoughts. The memory of the silken, warm skin at Tess's wrist wouldn't leave him. He closed his eyes, reliving the moment in the dark privacy of his mind, until a discreet tap came at the door.

“Come in, Raoul.”

Raoul opened the door and walked in, carrying a tray with a bottle of bloodwine, an empty glass and a second glass filled with a normal Merlot. He set the bloodwine on the table near Xavier's hand. “Are you sure you don't want anything fresh to drink?”

“Not tonight, thanks. I need to leave soon. Julian, all twelve Nightkind council members and Melisande await.” He paused. “So she is settled for the night.”

“Yes.” Raoul took the Merlot and sat in the chair opposite him with a small smile. “I would ask how she did with your little test, except I got the email.”

Xavier snorted without replying. It would be a long time before he heard the end of the evening's adventure.

Raoul sipped his wine. He said, “Are you sure you don't want me to run a background check on her? She has an edge that I dislike. It's a little too desperate, for my taste.”

The last of his humor died as he rested his head against the back of his chair and considered the idea.

You're supposed to protect me
, she had said.

In that moment, she had been so upset he didn't think she realized what she had given away. Her dark eyes had gone wide, and her soft, sensitive-looking mouth had trembled.

There was a certain kind of nobility in her narrow bone structure, and that wonderful, aquiline nose, as if she was descended from unknown kings. Watching her gave him a subversive pleasure, and he had catalogued her every emotion to date.

Thus far she had evidenced an overabundance of fear, along with a spitting kind of defiance, as well as a rather naive outrage at the Vampyre's Ball, along with the wariness of a young, untamed animal.

Some of it had amused him, but that one moment of raw, uncensored distress of hers . . .

He didn't like it. It called all kinds of inappropriate responses out of him. He wanted to find out what had caused her such distress and to protect her from it. And none of that had to do with the reason why he had invited her here. Protectiveness was the very last thing he should be feeling toward her.

He frowned.

Raoul was right. Tess was desperate about something. A shadow of violence seemed to hover behind her words. Perhaps she'd had an abusive boyfriend or husband, or she had gotten involved in something illegal. He tried to imagine her involved in the drug trade but couldn't. That would harm innocents and go against her moral code.

One by one, he considered various possibilities and dismissed them. Whatever the reason behind her distress, the chances were very slim that a non-magical human would have been involved in something dangerous enough to concern him.

Which was, of course, why he was interested in her. Most creatures of the Elder Races would think the same thing. After one glance, they would dismiss her utterly. That dismissal could be very useful to him.