Free Two Scents' Worth: A Wolf Rampant spinoff serial (Bloodling Serial Book 3) by Aimee Easterling Page B

a week?
    Victor: Fuck you, dude. It's work-from-home. And the 'rents are starting to whinge about employment AGAIN.
    Wolf: LOL. Well, then it's yours. You'll be the world's best anti-hacker.
    I didn't want to cede what looked like a lucrative gig. But I considered Victor my friend even though I wasn't so sure he would have said the same about me. At least he'd given me an idea for another direction where I could look for pack-friendly employment. Surely First Ohio wasn't the only bank out there in need of a security analyst to revamp their online safety net....
    I moved the mouse to click on a new browser tab. But before I could follow that thought trail, my gaze was drawn back to new words popping into existence on my terminal.
    Victor: Hey, I'm up for a challenge if you are. No one's going to pick baby hacker over me.
    I smiled. Seemed like human males responded to taunting just as predictably as shifter males. Next we'd embark on a dick-measuring contest.
    But, meanwhile, my friend had a valid point—I'd only learned how to turn on a computer twelve months ago. Could I really handle online security for even a small-town bank?
    Of course, unlike Victor, I hadn't wasted the last eight thousand hours playing video games. Instead, I'd fallen down the digital rabbit hole with a vengeance and was already proficient at multiple programming languages.
    And, in the end, I knew I worked best under pressure. So I had a feeling Victor would come to regret his chivalry.
    Wolf: You sure?
    Victor: You scared?
    It was decided. I would see Victor—and his bank manager—at MavCon.
     
     

Chapter 3
    "We can come into the hotel with you if you want."
    Chase—my milk brother, my best friend—sometimes felt annoyingly like a nanny. What was this, the first day of kindergarten?
    It was bad enough that my entire pack had banded together and refused to allow me behind the wheel of a car on the way to MavCon. But I quickly got over that frustration when I realized my trip doubled as a chance for Wade and Chase to shake off their usual responsibilities and spend the weekend in the big city. My companions had managed to line up a concert to attend while I was glad-handing bank managers, and I particularly enjoyed seeing a spark of joy come into the eyes of the young shifter who had been a half-starved, whipped puppy only a few months before.
    But the trip made much less sense if Chase was going to insist on walking me to my hotel room as if I were incompetent. Heck, I was supposed to be the pack leader around here. So why did I get the impression no one trusted me to keep fur and fangs in check in a hotel full of humans?
    Which wasn't to say my milk brother was wrong. Proving Chase's point, I found myself incapable of voicing my current combination of annoyance and appreciation in words. So I simply raised one eyebrow, knowing Chase could read every thought that ran through my mind with the ease of long practice.
    I'm going in alone , I thought, flaring my nostrils. Don't forget that I'm the alpha, not you.
    In response, Wade cringed back against his seat proving that he, at least, understood that I could rip the pair of them apart without skipping a beat. Unfortunately, my potential for mayhem was the precise image I was trying to work out of the kid's head after his traumatic experience at my brother's hands last winter. So I was much less heartened by his reaction than another pack leader might have been.
    Beside me, Chase's mouth quirked up into a smug smile. The bastard probably provoked my show of anger on purpose to remind me what was at stake if I screwed up.
    Fuck. That's so totally fighting unfair.
    Still, I couldn't leave Wade cowering in the backseat. So I made sure my voice was calm enough to soothe the young shifter at the same time as I whipped out my cell phone and laid my best friend's worries at rest.
    "You're on autodial." As if in reaction to my words, Chase's phone rang from his hip pocket, my finger having hit the proper