Tempt Me (2 page)

“Overworked. Exhausted. Bailey, you know the signs of burnout as well as I do.”

“I’m okay.”
I have to be. There’s too much at stake.
She tapped his shin with her round-toed shoe. “Put me down.” After he complied, she walked to the security door, slapping her hand against the biometric pad mounted at its side. After a short wait, her handprint was scanned, the status indicator switched from red to green, and there was a barely-audible click as the lock disengaged. She yanked the heavy door open, throwing her full body weight behind it. Jack followed closely behind.

After the funereal silence of the lobby, the sounds of Sebastiani Security’s busy first shift hit her like a blast furnace. Dozens of workers either sat or milled about, chatting with clients and each other, accompanied by the clatter of keyboards. She could hear trash talk from the Nerf basketball game underway in the back. Someone had recently made microwave popcorn. The luscious aroma made her stomach sting. 

Lukas caught up with them, nodding hello to the vamp who’d just walked out of the break room with a bag of blood clapped to his teeth. “Jack, can I have a minute?”

Jack hesitated.

“Go.” Bailey waved a hand toward Lukas’s office just down the hall. “I’m fine.”

Lukas shot her a look. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

She sighed. It was useless to try to hide her emotions from an incubus, especially one of Lukas’s skill. And he was right. She had to think things through, assess the real risks, in a calm and rational manner. “I’m just going to grab a drink, then go back to The Bunker.”

“Good. Who knows what kind of shenanigans Antonia’s gotten into while you’ve been gone?”

“What do you think she’s going to do, start a game of Global Thermonuclear War?”

Lukas’s bloody eyebrow jerked.

“Joke,” she quickly assured him. “Just a joke. Haven’t you ever seen
War Games
?”

“No.”

“Gap in your cultural education. Great movie.” She shooed them with her hands. “Go. Meet. I’ll see what she’s working on.”

Lukas rested his big hands on her shoulders, leaned down, and kissed both of her cheeks. “What would we do without you?”

Ooh, dirty pool
. “Go,” she whispered around the lump in her throat. As soon as he and Jack disappeared into Lukas’s office, she whirled.

Antonia really could have gotten into anything.

Weaving her way through the maze of cubicle walls, she approached The Bunker, her unquestioned domain, slapping her hand on yet another security pad. The Bunker was a warm, windowless room, with monitors crawling up the walls, and CPUs jostling for space on every flat surface. Racks of switches and routers, the backbone of Sebastiani Security’s and Council_Net’s computer network, blinked and grooved behind another set of secure doors across the room. And there, sprawled on the futon where Bailey slept most nights, was Lukas’s seventeen year old sister, Antonia—bare-footed, devouring a bag of popcorn, and flipping the pages of the big honkin’ binder overflowing her lap.

Bailey glanced at the bookshelf mounted over the computer she typically used when working on The Shredder, the encrypter/shredder/jammer that kept her—their—work on the down-low. There was a gap where the hardcopy backup of her code and script usually stood, but at least Antonia wasn’t at a keyboard. By the look of the bright tabs jutting from the thick stack of accordion-pleated paper lying on the floor next to her ratty flip-flops, Antonia had already finished the assignment Bailey had given her before leaving to meet with Banner.

In some ways, Antonia reminded her of herself at the same age—towering intellect, boy crazy, her judgment and control still very much works in progress—but in other ways, the young succubus had already outpaced her own dubious achievements. Antonia was the youngest member of the Underworld Council, the ruling body secretly governing the planet’s non-human species. Antonia had recently assumed a seat representing the incubi and succubi alongside her father, Elliott, freeing Lukas to focus on security and technology risks with Jack as his Second. In the short year she’d worked at Sebastiani Security, Bailey had been drawn into their covert world to such a degree, and had attended so many Council meetings as a technology resource, that Valkyrie Second Lorin Schlessinger had recently joked they should stop looking for candidates for the Humanity seat and have Bailey fill it instead.

The very idea made her shudder. She and Jack might be the only two humans alive with confirmed knowledge that “first contact” had occurred eons ago, but she wasn’t about to become any more enmeshed in the Council’s activities than she already was.

“Hey there,” Antonia called out.

“Hey.” As Bailey approached the futon, she fought an urge to snatch the binder from Antonia’s hands. “Whatcha doing?”

“I finished the analysis you asked me to do, and then I...got bored.” Antonia burrowed into the bag of microwave popcorn with her tiny, black-nailed hand. “That probation dude looks like The Banker from Monopoly. And that suit? Way too expensive for a government employee to afford.”

“How...”

Antonia gestured to a nearby screen, displaying the now-empty conference room where she and Jack had met with Banner. “Anyway.” Antonia kicked into a seated position on the futon, picked up the pile of paper from the floor, and patted the seat at her side. “I think I found something. You know, this would have gone a lot faster if I’d been online—”

“You know the rules.” One of the conditions Bailey had put in place when Antonia asked to study with her was that some internet back alleys were off limits, and the hacker bulletin board Bailey had printed the message log from was one of the darkest and nastiest. Antonia’s technical skill was growing at an astronomical rate—she had a real gift for scripting languages—but Bailey saw no reason to tempt fate.

“Yeah, yeah. So, the incursion thingies that have been going on at SL all week?”

She nodded. There’d been a noticeable uptick in the number of malicious incursion attempts at Sebastiani Labs. Her countermeasures had held thus far.

Antonia picked up the pleated, tabbed paper. “I think someone on this board claimed responsibility.”

“What?” Publicly discussing hacks, especially failed hacks, was akin to sprinkling yourself with loser dust.

“And look at these handles. Puh-
leeze.
”

Bailey dropped onto the futon, leaned over, and read.
Bow_Down_Bitch. JaCKhaMMer. SnatchMaster3000.
She didn’t bother rolling her eyes. The casual misogyny had been fathoms worse when she’d been Antonia’s age.

“Like this guy’s ever
seen
a real snatch,” Antonia muttered as she flipped pages. “Anyway. Here’s this Coyote, and he mentions you. You’re The Queen Bee, right?”

Her stomach dropped like a free-falling elevator.

“He doesn’t seem to have the same sexual compensation issues these other guys do.”

“Nope.” Wyatt Cooper had always been supremely confident of his skills in the bedroom, with good reason.
Wyatt. Wylie. Wily. Wily Coyote. Coyote.
Damn him for using the nickname she’d given him as his goddamn handle.

Dreamy and wicked-smart Wyatt Cooper, with his Black Irish coloring, his sharp-featured face, his irresistible scent, and eyes as blue as the deepest loch, who’d asked her to be his lab partner “because she brought brains
and
looks to the party.” Bailey shook her head at her youthful naiveté. Years younger than her fellow grad students, socially stunted and starved for validation, she’d fallen into his lap like a ripe plum.

Look where it had gotten her.

She skimmed the messages further down on the page. “Ah, shit.” No wonder there’d been a noticeable uptick in malicious activity against Sebastiani Labs. Wyatt had outed her, and her place of employment, on one of the most notorious hacker bulletin boards in existence. She could only surmise that his own coding skills hadn’t improved over the years, else he wouldn’t have put out the call for help. “But...help with what?” she murmured. “What’s your game?”

The security door beeped. Lukas entered, followed by Jack. “Hi, guys,” Antonia called.

Both of them showing up in The Bunker at the same time, so soon after their private huddle? She wasn’t going to like this.

“Hey, Sprout.” Lukas came over to the futon and scrubbed his knuckles against his younger sister’s head. Antonia batted his hand away, kicking at his huge body with her tiny bare feet. Despite the horseplay, Bailey noticed that Lukas protected his gonads.

Did they have any idea how much she coveted their easy physical affection? Did they appreciate it?

“Aah!” Antonia shrieked, wiggling and kicking as Lukas tickled her. The binder she’d been looking at slid off the futon, falling to the floor with a thunk.

“Okay, enough.” Bailey elbowed in to the melee to rescue her precious code. “What do you guys want?”

“Personnel issue.” Lukas winced as Antonia’s sneaky heel tagged him in the kidney. “Can you give us a minute, Sprout?”

“Like there’s anything you can’t say in front of her.” Actually, Antonia staying might even the odds a bit. She had a feeling she was about to be tag-teamed.

Lukas simply waited, ignoring his sister’s wounded-doe gaze. Antonia finally sat up with a huff, gathered her belongings in very slow motion, and at long last stepped into her flip-flops. “I guess I can use the time to study,” she pouted, reaching for the binder.

Bailey held on tight. “The binder stays here.”

Antonia heaved a put-upon sigh. “How about the popcorn? Can I take the popcorn with me?”

“Be my guest.” Her stomach would rebel if she tried to eat any herself. She gestured to the report. “Good work on the analysis.”

With a final theatrical sigh, Antonia trudged from the room, each step snap-snap-snapping with accusation.

Lukas glanced at Jack, then back to her. “We really do have a personnel issue to discuss with you.”

She didn’t have personnel. She didn’t manage anyone. She worked by herself; that was the deal. Glancing at the new flat-screens she’d recently installed above her main work area, she bit her lip. “Am I spending too much money? I know I—”

“—need some downtime,” Jack interrupted. “You haven’t taken a full day off since you started working here.” He crooked a thumb at the futon. “You never go home.”

Bailey’s jaw dropped. “I can’t take time off now. Wyatt doxxed me.”

“Wyatt Cooper?”

She handed Jack the pile of paper. “He claimed responsibility for the failed hacks against Sebastiani Labs, put out a call for a virtual army, and also revealed where I work.”

Jack shook his head as he paged through the messages. “I see he hasn’t acquired any new brain cells since he let you take the fall,” he said with disgust.

She shrugged. It was an old argument between them. Jack, her defense attorney at the time, hadn’t understood her decision not to drag anyone else into the mess she’d made. He still didn’t. “The design and code was mine,” she replied.

“And he modified it, and tried to use it in a way you never intended. He manipulated you, Bailey. Played you like—”

“Enough,” she snapped.

Silence hummed. “I’m sorry.” Sighing, Jack jammed a hand through his short blond hair. “You didn’t respond?”

“Of course not.”

“He’s been obsessed with you for years. Take a couple of days off and let him stew a little while longer.”

“What would I do with a couple of days off?” See friends? Spend time with her loving family? Her friends and family were
here
—and Wyatt had just threatened everyone and everything she held dear.

“Just a long weekend,” Jack urged. “Get some rest, recharge your batteries. Then we can deal with Wyatt Cooper once and for all.”

Jack sounded like he wanted to squash Wyatt Cooper under the sole of his Hugo Boss shoe.
My hero
. “Now’s a really bad time, Jack. I need to run a diagnostic on—”

“Bailey.” Lukas’s voice snapped like a whip, and his nostrils were twitching up a storm. “You’re running on fumes. You live on pizza and Red Bull. I can taste your freaking stomach acid from here.”

She dropped the fist she’d unconsciously raised to her burning stomach. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, just take care of it. Take care of yourself.” Lukas reached into his back jeans pocket and pulled out a tube of antacids. “Here. I have more in my office.”

She knew he did. Though all incubi and succubi absorbed emotional energy for sustenance, due to a genetic glitch Lukas tasted emotions as he absorbed them. Some of them tasted pretty nasty.

“Bailey, you’re exhausted, and exhausted people make mistakes,” he said quietly. “Don’t make me yank your access.”

“What?”

“I’ll block your access to the building, and to the network. Don’t think I won’t.”

Cut off her access to Sebastiani Security? To Sebastiani Labs, to Council_Net, to The Bunker? Cutting off her fingers would be far less painful. Work was all she had left.

Damn it. Lukas’s threat was largely an empty one—she’d designed their network security architecture, and she certainly knew how to get around it—but...

“I mean it, Bailey. If you don’t take care of this, I will.”

Lukas didn’t play the boss card very often, and despite the degree of autonomy she had, he...
was
her boss. It was his illegible signature at the bottom of her outrageous paycheck. On little more than Jack’s recommendation, he’d thrown her a lifeline at a time when her lonely existence had threatened to swamp her, drag her under.

And Jack stood at Lukas’s side, not saying a word—which meant that Jack agreed with him, damn it. “Okay. Okay. Let me think.” She whirled away, her brain whirring. Cheyenne Winterbourne, Sebastiani Labs’ network architect, was fully capable of monitoring things, and would send up a flare if she needed help or noticed anything hinky. Bailey could ...supervise remotely.

Hmm. Maybe this break idea had some possibilities. Jack was always after her to delegate more. It was impossible to find time to take on new projects without offloading the old ones first. She could do a lot with two or three days’ focused attention, uninterrupted by the emergency
du jour.
She might have a reasonable shot at designing that SysAdmin overhaul, or she could brainstorm ways to access the utterly sophisticated device Lorin Schlessinger had found last summer, buried in an otherworldly box alongside three thousand year old wild rice and paper made of birch bark.