Free Alpha's Captive 04 - Haven by V. M. Black

Chapter One
     
    “W hat do we do now?”
    Levi could hear the strain in Harper’s voice, her words precise and a little too high.
    “We follow my backup plan,” he said firmly, sealing the SD card inside its tiny plastic bag and putting it back into the coin purse. “We go to Beane’s lair.”
    “Who is this Beane, anyway, and why does he have a lair?” she asked. “And where the hell is it?”
    “West Virginia,” he said, answering her questions backward. “So turn around as soon as you get a chance. And Beane is…” Levi tried to find a phrase that could describe everything that Beane was. “My tech guy,” he finished lamely.
    “Your tech guy,” she repeated, the words sharp. “I don’t even know what that means. Why do you have a tech guy, and what kind of tech does he do? Fixes your computers?”
    “ Think more like Q from James Bond and less like Geek Squad,” Levi said calmly, even though a part of him wanted to drive his fist through the stupid cloth roof of the stupid Mini Cooper they’d just stolen.
    It was supposed to be over. Done. They’d gotten the reader, they’d gotten a tablet. And it was all for nothing, because the damned thing couldn’t read the data on the SD card.
    “Okay,” she said after a deep breath. “So who is he, then? Is he a shifter, too?”
    “Yeah,” Levi said. “He came about it in a roundabout kind of way, though.”
    Her hands tightened briefly on the steering wheel. “Look, our best chance just went up in smoke, and you’re talking in riddles. Just tell me what the hell is going on in plain English right now, before I throw you out of the car.”
    Levi grabbed his underwear. Beane had a long and complicated life story, almost none of which had anything to do with their current circumstances. He decided on the thirty-second summary. “Chay Beane’s a shifter with a spook shop out in West Virginia. He’s a freelancer now with a small team, mostly remote, and I contract with him whenever I need to trace stuff electronically or break into somebody’s network or tap someone’s communications. If anyone can get the files off the card, he can.”
    “You told me you were into art,” Harper said. “Not hacking.”
    There was a gravel turnaround ahead across the divided median meant for emergency services. Harper slowed to take it, ignoring the sign that warned of no turns.
    “I trace the exchange of rare objects for large amounts of money,” Levi said , tugging his pants on over his hips. “These days, the proof is often electronic.”
    “Okay, fine. So you have a hacker friend. Who’s a werewolf,” she said as the Mini Cooper’s wheels churned through the gravel. She swung the car around, back the other way.
    “A shifter,” he corrected as he fastened his pants. “Panther, actually.”
    “ Right. And he can fix this somehow. Get the files off the SD card. How do you even know they’re there? Maybe you stole a decoy. Maybe it’s broken. Maybe—”
    “It’s there.” Levi cut through her increasingly shrill speculation as he grabbed his shirt. “I promise you, Harper, it’s there. I can see it on the tablet. The SD card is practically full. But the data’s got some kind of lock on it to tell regular readers to ignore it. Beane warned me this could happen.”
    She snorted. “Great planning, there.”
    “I’m sorry.” Levi paused with his foot half-way into his stolen loafer. “Look, I thought I’d only be putting myself in danger.”
    “And what if you had?” she demanded. “There’s a very good chance that you’d be dead!”
    Levi shoved his foot the rest of the way in. The note in her voice caused a pain in his chest that he didn’t care to examine. It mattered to her that he might be dead, even though in the scenario she presented they never would have met.
    And it mattered to him that it mattered to her even though it shouldn’t.
    “Yeah,” he admitted for the first time. “You’re probably right. But I had to do