by Lila Dubois
He had Alena pinned to the wall. Her hands were on his wrist, trying to weaken his hold on her neck. There were tear tracks on her cheeks. He’d squeezed too hard, almost choked her.
A vile dark part of him wanted to squeeze harder. He loosened the pressure, the sane part of him horrified at what he’d just done.
Alena’s nails dug into his wrist and hand. “Let go.” Her voice was thin and reedy.
“Let go?” Alexander balled the hand not around her throat into a fist. “No. I think— I’m going to, to—” His teeth clicked as he clenched his jaw.
“Alexander, I’m so sorry,” Alena wheezed. “Let go and I’ll explain the parts I can.”
His anger was still burning inside, but instead of heat now his anger was frigid. Piercing cold, like Dante’s hell.
“You will explain everything.” Alexander released her neck only long enough to grab her shoulders and flip her around, facing the wall. He grabbed her wrists, forcing them together behind her back. The pashmina was still around his neck. It was too thick and bulky to make a good restraint, but he looped it around her wrists, tied a knot, then grabbed the knot, twisting it as if it were a tourniquet. She sucked in air between her teeth.
I’m hurting her. I need to loosen it.
Alexander closed his eyes and took a deep breath, locking away his emotions. Except for the anger. That he held on to.
With his free hand, he grasped her shoulder, jerking her away from the wall and turning her towards the stairs.
He nudged her to walk, keeping the tension on the scarf around her wrists, even lifting a little to add pressure to her shoulders. Alexander realized that he’d turned her towards the stairs up. He’d started to take her back to his apartment.
He still wasn’t thinking clearly.
Alexander changed course, angling her towards the down staircase. As they passed the scattered pieces that had once been the box she was holding, Alena dodged to the side, briefly breaking his hold and kicked the largest remnant. It hit the wall and split into three pieces. Alexander lunged, grabbing her even as she kicked out, but not in time to prevent her from destroying it further. When he yanked her back, her center of gravity was off and she fell against him.
He wanted to wrap his arms around her. Hold her. Take comfort in her touch and smell, even though she was the reason he needed comfort.
Instead he grabbed the red pashmina and yanked it up. Her elbows locked and she was forced to bend forward to take the pressure off her shoulders.
When they stepped out onto the first floor, a red light in the corner started to blink. A motion-activated camera. His security company had wanted one covering every room, hall, and stairwell, but he valued his privacy, and had said no to the cameras. Except on the ground floor—for the safety of the tenant businesses—and on the first floor, where the onsite Wagner Global offices, as well as his household staff’s offices, were. These motion-activated camera were monitored by RTW Security. He paid for live monitoring, not just recording.
There had never been a break-in before, so tonight would be a good test to see if the obscene amount he was paying for security was worth it.
Alexander lowered her wrists and slid his hand from her shoulder up into her hair.
“Smile.” He yanked on her hair, jerking her head up.
“I assume you want me to see that blinking light?” Her voice had lost the soft, almost sorrowful note. Now it was cool and seemingly unconcerned.
He wanted to do something to her, hurt her, until she sounded as damaged as he felt.
“No.” Thankfully his voice didn’t shake—with either pain or rage. “It’s so the security team can start running facial recognition.”
“Ah. I assume the authorities be joining us soon?”
“Hoping an audience will save you?” He forced her over to the glass door with the Wagner Global logo on it. “No, the authorities won’t be joining us.”
He yanked her wrists up, forcing her to again bend at the waist. She tossed her head, getting her hair out of the way, and watched as he keyed in the code on the pad by the door.
“You know I could have done that for you,” Alena said. “The Fibonacci sequence, right?”
Alexander jerked the door open so hard he was briefly worried he’d break it. Holding it with one foot, he hooked a hand under her arm and hauled her into the suite.
Lights clicked on when they entered, and another red indicator started blinking.
Once they were in, he realized he should have taken her to the other suite. She’d been doing something to the server farm, and now he was walking her into the very place she’d been trying to access.
He forced her wrists up until her body was bent at a ninety-degree angle, then nudged her forward.
“I can’t walk like this.”
“Yes, you can.”
Alexander steered her to the conference room. Elegant but not ornate the way the floors above were, the room had the requisite conference table, elegant high-backed chairs, and a lovely view of the park across the street.
There was a bank of electronics, as well as a small wet bar, hidden behind the paneling on the short wall.
Alexander pressed, and a panel popped open, revealing the electronics within. He reached in and grabbed a spare cord. He had no idea what it was for, and he didn’t care. He needed a way to restrain her, and electronic cables had been the first thing that came to mind.
Alexander guided her to his spot at the head of the table, a plush leather rolling chair with wooden arms. “Sit.”
Alena straightened when he released her wrists, and her gaze was pinched.
“Sit,” he said again, holding up the coil of black cable.
She stared at his hand, and for a moment he thought she might try to run. Fight.
If she did, he’d fight back, pin her as he had before.
Unless she’s a professional corporate spy, then she might have some training.
He’d managed to pin her upstairs, but what if that had just been luck?
The silence stretched, and with each moment his muscles tensed, ready to spring on her if she attempted escape.
She looked disheveled—half her hair was in a bun that had slid down over one ear, the rest of it spilling around her shoulders in a messy tangle, thanks to his hands. She wore casual black leggings and a black long-sleeved top that hung down to her thighs.
Her gaze shifted from the door to him. She dropped her hands to her sides, the pashmina that she’d freed herself from falling to the floor.
Looking him in the eye, Alena sat in his chair, her hands resting lightly on the arms.
“Alexander, please let me explain.”
“No.”
“What happened between us as Dom and sub had nothing to do with what I was doing upstairs.”
Lying bitch. He ground his teeth. He needed to tie her to the chair, but he was afraid his hands would shake noticeably. He needed to calm down first. “What were you— What, exactly, were you doing?”
“I can’t tell you.”
Before he could reply—as he was still deciding whether to say “fuck you” or “of course you can’t”, he heard a door open. Synchronized footsteps thudded through the offices.
Alexander moved away from the door as two men—covered head to toe in black, including tactical helmets with face shields—holding taser guns swept into the room. They were quickly followed by four more men. The first two checked the whole room, then positioned themselves on either side of Alena’s chair.
Some stupid part of him wanted to tell them to step back, away from his…
His what? His girl? His sub?
It didn’t matter. He’d been played for a fool.
One of the last men to enter walked up to him, pushing his visor up.
“Mr. Wagner,” he said in crisp German. “I’m Commander Fischer with RTW. We saw the cameras activate. We have a team on the way to sweep the building, and will discover how she got in and—”
�
��I brought her in. As a guest.” Alexander made sure there was no embarrassment evident in his words or tone. He knew he was speaking more slowly than was normal, a side effect of thinking through each word before it left his mouth. “I woke up, went to check on her. She wasn’t in her room. I found her in the second-floor parlor. She’d made a hole in the floor, into the server room.”
Commander Fischer nodded. “Would you like me to contact Wagner Global’s information security team?”
“Yes. And bring in one of your people. I want outside perspective.”
The commander caught on fast. “You think there is an internal issue?”
Alexander looked at Alena. “I think she’s a spy. The question is, who is she spying for?”
He watched as two techs struggled to reassemble and then access Alena’s device.
The lead tech—a Wagner Global employee—sat back. The device was still in pieces but he’d laid them out in what Alexander assumed was a logical order. A cable plugged into the biggest chunk ran to a laptop the tech had brought with him. “It’s a hardware protocol analyzer.”
The RTW tech looked from the screen to Alexander and nodded, confirming what the first man had said.
The employee watched the exchange, and outrage pinched his features. He glanced at Alexander, mouth open as if he were about to protest.
Alexander raised one brow. The tech closed his mouth and turned back to the laptop.
“What is a hardware protocol analyzer?” Alexander asked quietly.
“It captures data traffic,” the RTW tech said.
“Explain. Further.” Alexander bit off each word.
“Normally these are use to filter and analyze traffic between networks and computers.”
“Normally.” Alexander was going to shake the information out of this man if he didn’t explain fully in the next thirty seconds.
He isn’t the one you want to shake information out of.
“From what I can tell, this was used, via wired connection, for packet sniffing. Packet analyzers that are used to sniff packets means deep data packet inspection took place.”
The Wagner Global employee looked at the security tech, who motioned for him to take over the explanation.
“This was plugged directly in to our cluster servers, and someone used it to intercept and log all the traffic. Data was captured—copied. All the data on there.”
“She copied everything on our server onto that?” Alexander still didn’t fully understand what the device was, but he didn’t need to. “Destroy it.”
Now the techs glanced at each other.
Alexander suppressed a snarl. “What?”
“We can, of course, destroy the mirrored information, but it looks like all the data captured was already transferred out.”
“How?” She’d been alone in the parlor upstairs for a matter of minutes.
“Wirelessly.” The employee tapped a small rectangle of plastic. “Via this transfer device, and using an encrypted satellite link.”
“Who was the data sent to?”
“We can’t trace that, not with what we have.”
“Find it.”
The RTW tech cleared his throat. “He’s correct, it’s not possible for us to—”
Alexander turned away, jaw clenched. He wanted to lash out at them, but if they both said it wasn’t possible, then that wouldn’t help.
If they couldn’t give him answers, Alena would.
Alexander strode out of the small office. Across the hall, the door of the temperature-controlled server room was open, and two other employees were carefully checking all the connections.
Alexander strode down the hall, back towards the conference room.
Commander Fischer had removed his helmet and tactical vest, which were sitting in one of the conference chairs. When Alexander walked in, he looked up from a small laptop open on the conference table.
Alena wasn’t there. Fischer’s men had cleared out a small storage closet—boxes of office supplies were now lining the hall—and taken Alena in there. A makeshift cell.
“Mr. Wagner,” Commander Fischer said.
Alexander didn’t have the time or mental space for pleasantries. “All information on the servers was copied using the—” Damn it, he’d forgotten what they called it. “—that box.”
Commander Fischer nodded. “And based on what the information security specialists retrieved, it appears that data has already been passed on. She is most likely a professional.”
Professional what? Spy—that’s what he’d assumed, but Commander Fischer had gently noted that “spy” was a term primarily used in fiction.
She might be a professional hacker, or a private investigator. Most corporate espionage—unless there was a disgruntled employee in the mix—utilized outside people, or involved hiring high level personnel away from a competitor and asking them to bring proprietary information with them.
His company—his family legacy—controlled a huge percentage of the shipping and import/export in this part of Europe. They had waterway rights for the Danube that went back more than a century, knew national tariff and tax laws sometime better than the governments in question. They’d also rolled out state-of-the-art hardware RFID tracking and accompanying software with user-side interfaces not long ago. The list of things his company had or knew that competitors would want was long and varied.
No matter what kind of professional Fischer was talking about, there was no way around the fact that Alena had played him.
He should stop thinking about her and call in his VPs. Based on what they knew so far, it seemed unlikely she was working for someone inside his organization, though he’d considered that. Wagner Global had contingencies and protocols for everything from terrorist attacks to pirates—which were a legitimate concern in this business.
Was there a protocol for the CEO being a gullible asshole?
“Who does she work for?” Alexander asked.
“I don’t know, but we do know who she is.” Fischer picked up a blue passport book. “She had this hidden on her person. The information matches up with facial recognition.”
Alexander accepted the American passport. Hidden on her person. That meant Fischer, or one of his men, had searched her. Put their hands on her. Alexander’s jaw clenched.
He opened the book, turning it to read the inside front cover.
The picture was undeniably her, though the blank expression wasn’t one he’d seen on her face.
Magdalena Moreau. US citizen. According to her date of birth, she really was thirty-one, and had been born in the US state of Georgia.
She hadn’t lied about where she was from, and her legal name was close to the name she’d given—Magdalena to Alena, Moreau to Moore.
He closed the book and tossed it back to Fischer. “There was an article in Forbes about her. Her photo, but the name was Alena Moore.”
“I’ll have someone look into it.”
“What else?” Alexander asked.
“What else…do we know?” Fischer was only momentarily confused by his succinct question. “There’s very little available information. So little that I suspect someone scrubbed her digital footprint, though the tech team would need to confirm that.”
Alexander nodded for Fischer to continue when he paused.
“We’re reaching out to contacts who might be able to access U.S. records that we cannot, but for now we know that Magdalena Moreau is well travel based on the stamps in the passport. Her occupation, and this is self-reported on her only social media site, is as a consultant.”
“Consulting on what?”
“That we don’t know, sir.”
“Find out.”
“We will. As I said, we’re reaching out to colleagues who should be able to access her financial information, and based on that, we will know who paid her, and therefore extrapolate what she was paid to do. We also have a contact in SCIP, who can tell us if she’s a member.”
He’d heard of SCIP—S
trategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals. It was supposedly a world-wide organization—a non-profit of all ridiculous things—but primarily American.
“Find out if she works for the U.S. government.”
Fischer hesitated. “If she’s employed by the C.I.A., it will take more than trading favors with an American colleague to access that information.”
“Find. Out.”
Alexander turned away, aware that his terse statements, and probably unreasonable demands, weren’t helping. Nor was the fact that he was still in his pajamas.
Her red pashmina lay on the table.
The urge to go to her, to check on her, was nearly overwhelming. He squashed it, even as he grabbed the scarf.
He needed to be dressed. He needed his cellphone.
He needed to find that burning cold anger once more, let it take the reins before his stupid heart made him do something idiotic—like demand the security team focus on her comfort rather than keeping her securely in custody.
“I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
Fischer nodded, and Alexander stalked from the room. He took the stairs two at a time, and was breathing heavily by the time he reached his floor. He glanced back, wondering if he should run the stairs a few more times, let physical exertion work off some of the excess emotions.
No, that was a crutch. He would master his emotions, and deal with Alena—Magdalena—as if she were a stranger.
Not just a stranger. An adversary.
She was the enemy, and he would treat her appropriately.
Keep reading Vienna Bargain.
About the Author
Lila Dubois is a multi-published, bestselling author of erotic, paranormal and fantasy romance. Her books have been nominated for many awards including RT Book Reviews Erotic Novella for Undone Rebel and the Golden Flogger. Having spent extensive time in France, Egypt, Turkey, Ireland and England Lila speaks five languages, none of them (including English) fluently. Lila lives in California with her own Irish Farm Boy and loves receiving email from readers.