Chapter 21: Alexis

Chapter 21: Alexis

Blair was like an obstinate blot on the otherwise squeaky-clean windscreen of my life. The more I tried to scrape him off my mind, the more messily he stuck there. I was not one to stay rattled after a confrontation. I was someone who devised an action plan and acted upon it.

My life was finally at a place where all the calamity and negativity had broken even, and now, I was starting to get some profitable returns in the form of emotional stability, peace, and love. Most of it was thanks to Will, who had just a few days ago professed his love for me and asked me to be his mate.

But Blair stuck around like some stubborn overhead cost that refused to go away.

Ever since he had come across me that day, I could not get the thought of him harming Will out of my mind. Men like Blair operated on a sociopathic level, a level where the law did not exist, and everything was theirs to do as they wished. To them, people were like playthings.

However, what Blair did not know was that two could play this game of shadows. He had underestimated me twice now. Once when he so brazenly kidnapped me in the middle of the day and once when he decided to taunt me in that crowded Starbucks.

One of the perks of picking my own hours at my new job was that I could allot myself a twelve-hour shift on Mondays and Tuesdays and get the entire day of Wednesday off. The minimum hours per week requirement for the job was forty. The way I saw it, I was putting in twelve hours on Mondays and Tuesdays, no hours on Wednesdays, and then eight hours each on Thursday and Friday, amounting to a total of forty. I had even made up my mind to put in some overtime over the weekends. It was like my dad used to say whenever we drove by the beach. “The ocean doesn’t take a day off.”

This was my first Wednesday off, and I was having a great time walking around the commune while most everyone was at work. The kids were at school, and the soccer moms with their minivans and PTA meet-and-greets were busy planning something down at the school. The men were at the docks, in the city, and wherever it was that they worked. I was surprised to recently learn that some of the men had restarted the lumber trade ever since the forest had become safer now that there weren’t as many vampires roaming about.

I roamed about the Grimm Abode, a cup of coffee in hand, worries on my mind, and a nervous spring in my step as a result of both. Will was nowhere to be found. This was good news. When Will was not around the commune, he was down at the docks, surrounded by members of his pack who could keep an eye on him as he worked on the Grimm Reaper. No one would be foolish enough to come near him while he was working in the daylight with his pack members close by. Not even Blair.

I took my nearly-finished cup of coffee and headed over to my truck. After a while, the aloofness of the empty commune became monotonous. There was a reason I chose this Wednesday as my off day. I put the cup on my truck’s roof and fished my phone out of my jacket. I dialed Maliha’s number.

“Is it done?” I asked.

“It’s done. I’ve set up a remote access point. Since it’s more than just a phone or a laptop that you’re surveilling, the remote access point is relatively bigger. You’re gonna wanna come by the apartment,” Maliha said.

“It’s not something remote? Like what we did with Maurice?” I asked. This was troubling. As of yet, I didn’t know the extent of Maliha’s hack. How deep had she penetrated Blair’s network?

“It’s not remotely anywhere near as remote as what we did with Maurice, girl,” Maliha said. Her voice gave away no expression. Usually, whenever she was this stoic, it meant only one thing: She had done something serious and was possibly scared. And when she was scared, God help the rest of us.

“What are you not telling me?” I asked, making no attempt to hide the fear in my tone.

“I think it’s best if you just come here. I can’t say anything more over the phone,” Maliha said, then abruptly cut the call.

This was not a good sign. All of a sudden, the solitude of the commune shifted from being comely to downright haunting. The sun seemed to glare at me mockingly from its perch in the sky.

I hurriedly got in my truck and reversed it, forgetting that the cup of coffee was resting on the roof. The cup crashed on the pavement and broke into a dozen pieces, spilling black joe everywhere.

Damn. That was my favorite cup.

But I had bigger fish to fry than to worry about my Dora the Explorer cup. I had an impulse to alert Will and let him know about this new development, but given that he still hadn’t understood how to use a smartphone, it would be a futile attempt. Besides, there wasn’t exactly a concrete development as of yet. I’d tell him when I’d have something tangible to report.

***

I held my breath as I stood at the transom of Maliha’s apartment. Right now, this was a Schrödinger’s cat sort of situation. If I didn’t knock, nothing bad would happen. If I knocked, Maliha would alert me to something either terribly good or terribly bad.

Before I could rap my knuckles on her door, Maliha opened it herself. The girl had deep circles under her eyes. Her hair was all wild and unkempt. And she was grinning like a maniac.

“I went big, Lexi. Holy Mary, I went big,” she whispered. I had barely registered the glee in her tone before she grabbed me by the arms and pulled me into her room. I had lost count of how many times she had done that.

As many times as I had been here, I had never actually been inside her bedroom. Maliha had made it clear that her bedroom was her Fortress of Solitude. It had piqued my interest several different times to find out what exactly was in there. We made a guessing game where I had to guess what was in her bedroom, and she’d say warmer or colder based on my answers. I’d guessed if there was a BDSM dungeon in there or maybe a slaughter room. So far, I was as cold as one could be.

“Come in,” Maliha said, beckoning me to that very same bedroom.

“You cannot be serious,” I said. “No one’s allowed in there.”

“Yeah. I was up all night about it. But given the scale of the thing, I gotta let you in. I mean, if you want to see what I’ve been up to. You see, baby girl, last night, I had an epiphany. Hacking Blair wasn’t hard, but the thing that you’ve got to understand with hacking is that you don’t exactly hack someone once, and you unlock everything about them. Blair’s a man who knows how important and secure his digital footprint has to be. He’s like a ninja, leaving no clues about his online activity. When I hacked into his phone, it didn’t offer me much insight. So, for the past twelve hours, I’ve been busy hacking into Beckett Pharma’s enterprise-level security. There’s no coming back from something as big as this. I’m officially a cybercriminal now. See for yourself.” Maliha then opened the door to her bedroom, allowing me to see inside for the first time in my life.

A loud gasp escaped me.

If her living room was any indication of the kind of tech freak she was, her bedroom was like the heaven those tech freaks went to after they died. It wasn’t even a bedroom. There was no bed, to begin with. All four of the walls were covered with sixty-five-inch LED TVs, all of them showing Linux interfaces with commands running in the terminal. All along the walls were shelves with PCs, keyboards, computer mice, and a ton of equipment that I didn’t even know the names of. Well, some of them I could understand as routers. But others were more complex, with antennas jutting out of whirring machinery.

“This is madness,” I whispered as I entered the room, surrounded by blinking lights, blaring screens, and RGB keyboards.

“You see, this is what the inside of my mind looks like. For me, this is the most sacred place on the planet. My sanctum sanctorum. I have done things from here that would be undetectable to the common mind,” Maliha said. As she walked through the room, armed raised grandiosely, I followed her meekly, not knowing what to expect.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Oh, let’s just say that I hacked through Beckett Pharma’s entire security. If they so much as a whisper in that building, I’ll know. But I think your aspirations are a bit higher than mere whispers in corridors. Tell me what you want,” she said.

“I want to know what Blair’s doing,” I said. “And I want to see what he’s been working on in the lab.”

“We can totally do that. I hope you cleared your schedule. Unlike what they show in the movies, hacking takes a lot of time. And spying on someone using your hacks and exploits takes an even longer time,” Maliha said.

“I’m yours for the entire day,” I said.

She wasn’t kidding about the process being time-consuming. When she meant everything, it was indeed everything. From simple clerical company records detailing the attendance of everyone entering and leaving the building to hours of audio and video logs that the pharmacists had made while experimenting with the drugs they were manufacturing, the extent of Maliha’s hacking was as thorough as it could get, begging the question: How do I get through this much data in a single day?

“I have a solution for that as soon as you tell me what you’re looking for,” Maliha said, smiling slyly at me. “Compression-based AI search-bots can scour through the entire data within hours and come up with key phrases, search terms, and anything related to the query that we input.”

“Like a search engine, basically,” I said, nodding slowly. All this time spent with Maliha, and now I was finally getting the hang of all her tech jargon.

“Exactly like a search engine,” Maliha said, clapping me on the shoulder. “So tell me what we should search for. Or, if you’d rather do it alone for the sake of privacy, I’m cool with that too. I’ll leave you to it.”

“Really? Isn’t this your Fortress of Solitude?” I asked. “You’d trust me to be alone in your bedroom with all this stuff?”

“This may be the Fortress of Solitude, but you’re my sister,” Maliha gleamed at me. “Now, do what you’ve got to do.” With that brief farewell, she left me to my own devices, sitting in front of one of the giant screens, looking at the search bar.

First, I typed in “Maurice.” Blair’s chat records, call history, and emails came up in a matter of minutes, allowing me to go through all the records one by one. It was mostly very banal stuff that they were talking about. Politics, the next election, Maurice accepted bribes for some illegal Beckett Pharma expansion within the city, and so on. But the one thing that stuck out was a fifteen-minute-long call session between Maurice and Blair.

I clicked on the call recording and played it. Halfway through the call, Maurice said something that caught my attention.

“As for our canine friend,” Maurice said.

“You’re my canine friend,” Blair said, then burst into his sociopathic laughter.

“I meant the other canine friend, the pain in my ass, the bane of your existence. Have I made myself clearer, or do you need me to elaborate further?”

“Don’t worry, don’t get your fur all tangled up in a knot,” Blair said. “I told you, my best scientists are on it as we speak. The minute Wolf’s Bane serum finalizes, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Any timeline for when that is going to be?”

“These things take time. You don’t want me to inject him with a prototype and later discover that we’ve just mildly sedated him. Patience, Mr. Mayor, patience.”

“Fine. A month?”

“A month seems too optimistic. Even two months sounds like a tall leap,” Blair said. “But I’ll keep you posted.”

The rest of the call recording was just them busting each other’s balls, talking about baseball, and wondering if the Red Sox will bring in the World Series trophy this season or not.

I had expected this to take the entire day, but my work was miraculously cut short. I continued searching up different terms, including “Wolf’s Bane” in the AI search engine, but most of what I needed to know, I had already learned through the call recording between Maurice and Blair. I even downloaded the lab reports detailing the recipe for Wolf’s Bane and transferred them to my phone. I may not be a Linux tech genius, but a simple data transfer was not above me.

The looming sense of dreadful anticipation that had vexed me since my last confrontation with Blair was finally put to rest.

***

“He’s grasping at straws,” Will said, staring longingly into the sea. He seemed to be half-present now, but he had listened intently to my findings. “The Beckett men seem to be attracted to futile endeavors. His father spent all his life trying to create something that would grant him immortality and power. He failed. And now, it seems that Blair is giving in to that same madness.”

“He wants you dead, Will. Are you not concerned just a little bit?” I asked. I couldn’t help but follow his line of sight, given how intently he was staring into the distance. He seemed to be looking at a couple of yachts on the horizon. The sun was idyllically setting behind them, creating a picturesque scene.

“Why would I worry? I have you now. I was the loneliest soul for the longest time. It feels good for a change to have a mate. All my troubles are sawn in half. All my worries are now resting upon four shoulders instead of two. Your presence in my life has made me realize that an alpha is stronger with his mate. Never weaker. For as long as I have you, I’m never worried,” Will said. With that, he placed his hand under my chin and lifted my face. “I want to confess something.”

“Oh…” My heartbeat suddenly quickened its pace, and my mouth became dry all of a sudden. Words seemed to elude me as his face came closer to mine. I could see his irises. His eyes reflected the sun and the sea behind me, and I could smell his minty breath coolly wafting across my face.

“I have fallen in love with you,” Will said, now holding my cheeks in his hands. “You don’t even know how much I appreciate all that you’ve done for me. I feel sorry for the way that I treated you in the past. It has taken me this long to see you as the divine creature you are. I love you, Alexis.”

Butterflies in my stomach. A jackhammer for a heart. My legs turned to jelly. My mouth was utterly parched.

“Will” was all I managed to say, hoping that my utterance of his name would let him know everything I was feeling. The joy, the relief, the anticipation of every goodness coming our way, and desire. So much desire.

Will’s face was so close to mine now. I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I closed my eyes and let him kiss me. At once, the parchedness of my mouth disappeared in the wake of this moist and deep kiss. His lips on my lips, his tongue caressing the inside of my cheeks, and his hands exploring my body freely. I knew then that I was fated to this man. As his hands closed around me in a loving embrace, I realized that I loved this man just as much.

“I love you too, Will,” I said, finally, and then kissed him again. I did not want this pleasure to be over.

It was a good thing we were in the abandoned warehouse. I did not want prying eyes to witness this sweet moment of intimacy.

Will passionately took off my shirt and looked at me lovingly as he unhooked my bra. I slid his shirt off and then worked on unbuckling his pants. He was already hard down there when I put my hand in his boxers. I gently took his bulging dick out of his pants. The next thing I knew, I was on my knees, my mouth watering at the sight of the glistening, erect penis.

I opened my mouth and took his cock in, letting my spit slurp down his shaft, wetting his member. I sucked gently on his tip, reveling in the moaning sounds he made as I sucked deeply. I held on to his hips for support and then deepened the reach of his cock in my mouth, letting it slide into my throat. My lips wound around the base as I let him fill my mouth.

Before I could fully have my way, Will lifted me in his arms and lay me down on a stack of plywood. He promptly took off my jeans and then yanked my panties to the side. I closed my eyes as his face disappeared between my thighs. His warm lips cradled my clit as he sucked, licked, flicked, and fingered down there. I arched my back as waves of pleasure erupted from my vagina. Loud moans escaped from my mouth as Will licked my pussy and sucked on my clit. I was on the brink of orgasm when he stopped.

I opened my eyes to find him atop me. His face was next to my face, his throbbing cock rubbing against my thigh. I let him hold me by my waist as he eased himself upon me. We kissed each other, our naked bodies entwined in a sexual embrace. He thrust himself inside me, filling my vagina with his thick, long, hard cock.

I moaned, “Will!” as the orgasm that had been building up finally came, sending tremors of pleasure all over my body. Will thrust again, and immediately, I could feel yet another orgasm succeeding the last one. My body crested the wave of pure sensuality as Will came inside me, his cock gushing his manhood deep within me.

I wrapped my arms and legs around him as we lay panting, our bodies a miasma of sensations, sweat, and serenity.

“I love you,” Will uttered again, this time breathlessly.

“I love you, too,” I said once I had caught my breath.

Who knows for how long we lay there, arm in arm, our bodies wrapped around each other. I never wanted this moment to end.