She wouldn’t let him, dammit. But until she could figure out how to convince him, she’d wait. So, for now, she focused on helping the king get better, helping the king bring his lost sheep back into the fold, and discussing next steps with the Blue and Gold Clans. Because Gorgon might be back, but the news he’d brought, about a successfully mated Pytheios, changed everything.
If the woman he’d taken as his mate was truly a phoenix, what the hell did that mean for all of them? What did it mean for this war? Legitimized High King or not, he’d proven himself a corrupt leader. No way could they follow him. He’d kill them all eventually anyway, even if they did pay public tribute.
“Meira?” Gorgon’s voice came not from the bedrooms down the hall, but off to her right.
Leaving her guards at the door, she followed the sound to find him in an office—all smoothly carved-out rock walls, built-in bookshelves she could lose herself in, mahogany wood furniture throughout, and one wall of state-of-the-art computing systems. An entire freaking wall.
She tried not to let her gaze linger or run over and touch. It had been too long since her fingers had caressed a keyboard or a touchscreen. Days.
Deliberately, she turned her back on temptation. The back wall, facing the atrium, was entirely made of glass, the window giving this room an almost normal feel. After five hundred years not living in caves and mountains, the change had been rough. For Angelika, too, she’d bet. Her sister had always preferred to be outdoors and in the sun.
Gorgon, sitting behind his desk, had remained quiet while she’d looked her fill, muted emotions coming from him, as usual, but nothing to cause alarm. She turned her gaze to him with a smile, and suddenly a pulse of elusive emotions ran over her skin. That had been happening with him since he’d returned. She still couldn’t put her finger on what, but he didn’t feel the same as before. Not suspicious or angry. No blame. But something…
She managed to hold her smile as it disappeared, whispered away. “I like this room. It might be my favorite place in Ararat.”
He returned the smile—without an accompanying grimace of pain for the first time since he’d returned.
Gorgon got to his feet, the tremors gripping his body the last few days finally gone. “I thought you might. You’re excellent with computers, I understand.”
Totally geeked out was more like it, though she doubted he’d understand the slang. However, they’d talked about this before the mating ceremony. He’d been courting her—or that’s how he’d put it, at least—and the old-fashioned notion had made her warm to him. That and many other things had made it easier to choose him as a mate.
But that was before Samael Veles had finally let her in…
“In fact,” Gorgon continued, “I ordered these before we made our vows, so they’d be waiting for you when we returned.”
Taking her hand, he led her to the wall of technology. This time she let her gaze devour each detail—a custom-built set of rack-mounted systems. She spotted three Supermicro 2U Barebones with AMD Rome 64 Cores with PNY Technologies Quadro RTX 8000-48 GB. GPUs as opposed to CPUs. They’d handle the cryptographic workload better. Meira hummed as she ran her fingers over the shiny new objects.
She turned back to the man at her side with a grin. “How did you know what to get? I’m pretty sure I didn’t tell you specifications.”
The king chuckled, obviously pleased with her reaction to his gift. “I may have asked your sisters for advice on a mating gift you would enjoy and talked to the computer system experts in all three clans as well as having my people here research human hackers. I wanted it to be a surprise.”
Mating gift.
Trying to keep her smile in place, Meira turned her face away, back to the console he’d built for her. “I can hardly wait to dig in.”
If I ever get to.
Gorgon picked up a tablet similar to the one she’d drowned—rice had not helped—and handed to her. “I rarely saw you without your tablet thing before,” he said.
She unfolded the device and passed her hand over the smooth glass surface, immediately feeling slightly more grounded than she had a second ago. It would be so easy to sit down at this console and lose herself in her quiet, dependable, predictable digital world again. But the part of her awakened since the ceremony couldn’t do that anymore. Couldn’t stick her head in the sand and hide.
“I already have a job for you to apply your skills to.”
That pulled her gaze back around.
“I received information while in Pytheios’s…care.” He sneered at the word. “Over the centuries, he’s taken a good deal of wealth from the other clans, not to mention other paranormal creatures. Rather than keep it in physical gold or jewels, staying apart from human systems of currency as shifters normally do, he has hidden much of it in human banks and investments.”
Meira stared at Gorgon for a second, hardly noticing the yellowing bruises on his face as her mind clicked over on what he’d told her. “We can trust this account?”
He grimaced. “I wasn’t sure at first, but the evidence provided to me was enough to make me think it’s worth checking into.”
She trailed a hand over the keys. “You want me to track the money?”
He cocked his head. “Hit him where it hurts. If what you’ve told us about the colonies and mates is true, I think cutting off his supplies in many forms would be a…”
“Worthy endeavor?” she supplied.
“Indeed.”
She stared at the blank monitors, fingers itching to get started, already bending her mind to where she would start. Getting into Pytheios’s network within Everest jumped out as the best bet, but then what?
“I plan to check the veracity of my source with your brother-in-law.”
She swung back to him. “Brand?” After all,
