Coldsnap: The Billionaire Alpha's Fated Pregnant Princess (GL)
Chapter 53 - [C] An Insane Assistant, In All Kinds Of Ways

Chapter 53: Chapter 53 - [C] An Insane Assistant, In All Kinds Of Ways

A/N: She has a curse strewn mouth in private, I apologize~

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***[POV: Claire Thomsson]***

The notification pinged just as I was getting comfortable and about to watch a drama. An alert I set for unusual activity on our private server.

"You have got to be kidding me."

I muttered while reaching for my third energy drink of the night. The clock on my monitor read 10:18 PM.

That makes it officially three hours past when I’d promised Kyrie I’d go home and get some rest... after her driver brought her back here to order me to do so in person.

Such a sweet boss. Technically, I was home!

My private apartment in Lunarizon Tower wasn’t exactly what one would call... separation of work and personal life. Not like the company’s official HR guidelines recommended.

But when your boss is also the Alpha of a whole pack of fucking werewolves... well, some rules just don’t apply. I never liked rules anyway!

"Unless I’m bending them~"

Walking towards the six glowing monitors in my home office, wearing my favorite oversized t-shirt with a computer science joke that nobody in the office would ever get... I was the picture of off-duty relaxation if anyone actually came to check on me.

I even let myself wear glasses instead of contacts here. Something I don’t do anymore outside these walls. Not for three years.

The notification flashed again as I adjusted them on my nose.

[Backup initiated from device LH-7842-X. Large file queue detected.]

"Oh, hello there!"

I greet the data of our mystery ’client’. This was the entered tag for the phone I set up on our system.

Kyrie’s little project she handed off today. Wiping the data, masking the IMEI, and adding all the necessary security protocols for interaction with our servers.

Something which marked it immediately to me as:

"Not for a hunter, despite what this device was..."

I trail off when what I was saying is made even clearer. When I pulled up the backup queue and scrolled through the data packets I found a contact entry was made hours ago... almost right after I handed her the phone back?

[Your Waiting Mate]

"Seriously? Boss lady has it bad. Oh god, and I can’t tell anyone... what is this torture? Luca... no he likely doesn’t even know. But he’s smart so-"

I babble as I continue skimming. Over two hundred image files uploading to our secure server.

No calls made. No messages sent. Just photo after photo capped off by some videos and... some more photos.

I hummed a nervous tune while tapping my white-painted fingernails against my desk. This feels like the sort of thing that might get me punished...

So I reach over and slam down the last of an energy drink I opened this morning and forgot about.

"A-alright, let’s see what you’ve been up to, Mystery Mate."

I shouldn’t look. Really shouldn’t. Except what Kyrie didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

"Just a little peek. Professional reasons only. Just protecting my boss from a bad man..."

I clicked on the first file and saw a slightly blurry selfie shot of a dark-haired woman.

"Oh fuck, it’s a chick. I mean, of course it is. I just thought... I mean I know what she’s into but with how she is acting and using the term ’mate’?"

I just sort of assumed... well, no it was fucked up to assume that, Claire. She’s even told you she feared falling under the spell of a male.

"That was sort of why I wanted to see so bad, but this..."

The next few were similar. Test shots as ’miss someone’ figured out how to better use the camera. But then...

"Well, hello there. Not so stiff anymore?"

Striking gray eyes in the next photo paired the same woman with her tongue poking out. Then a series of increasingly silly faces, made all the more childish by the messy twin-tails behind her.

"Oh my god, does she think she’s an anime character in a photo booth? This is hilarious!"

As I bust my gut laughing, it clicks - this was her. The reason Kyrie had been acting so weird the last couple days.

Missing meetings, making spa appointments, going out into the forest while her card was still making purchases...

Footage at the spa I combed through was this person. This Duskpaw rogue?

The reason my boss had made me scramble to prepare forged documentation for someone who didn’t officially exist.

"So you’re the *mate*, miss Citra Lomdi..."

I whispered, leaning closer to study her features. On a secondary screen, I access the traffic camera footage I’d archived yesterday around when our CEO went MIA from the meetings.

There she was... Kyrie’s woman outside the pawnshop whose owner I had to send $5000 to for unexplained reasons. Like a half hour earlier.

I just figured it was paying someone off who saw something they shouldn’t have... no, I guess that’s right? Didn’t really notice it was her the first time I looked because-

"Thought she was just a vagrant bum."

Enthralled by this ’rags to riches’ more than any waiting net-drama, I watch the progression of photos that told a whole story. Of finding herself in photographic expression.

"Aspiring model werewolf? Or maybe just trying to take the perfect pic to send the boss."

Close together timestamps followed by short breaks prove she is checking them out on occasion, trying to get better at it. And she really is getting there!

I choke on the chips I opened to snack on when I move to picture 121.

"Urk... agh. O-oh, shit. If I wasn’t going to be killed for this before, I really am now."

Fucking woman just took off her clothes and snapped a glamour picture of herself in the mirror! I mean, I’ve done it too, but... yeah I have no ground to stand on.

I’m literally peeking in on private photos as we speak. My hand shakes in daredevil excitement, or perhaps just too much caffeine, as I tap the arrow key to see just how dead I really am... and sigh in relief.

"Good, so only one of those photos is going to give me nightmares of being mauled by my boss. I feel better now."

The rest of them are just her in a red shirt of a different style. Looks good on her.

When I get to the videos, I see she was using these to practice... putting up her hair.

Clearly, I don’t watch an hour of her recorded attempts. Not at 1x speed, anyway.

Except the end of the last one, which is followed by a bunch of images showing a stupidly genuine smile. The kind that makes it hard for me to even see her as a threat.

"No, hold on. It’s crazy to have spent this much time on something like that, right? Normal people don’t just do that... and werewolves aren’t usually the best at hyperfocusing on a single task this long."

I leaned back in my chair, considering this all deeper. With less of my usual irreverent self and more of what I’m actually paid to do.

The fact that this rogue maybe-mate was taking selfies like a teenager was amusing. I can even understand why someone from her former pack might find tech so intriguing to spend all night with it.

However, the boss had described the person she met to me when we watched the spa footage in two words. Proud and difficult.

In that careful way she had when she was understating something to me by about 1000%. Which honestly just sounded like Victoria 2.0.

...It’s very possible that she has never seen this side of the woman, isn’t it?

"Should I tell her?"

The professional thing would be to inform Kyrie that the backup system was working for the device and leave it at that. Maybe track what she does with that info.

Meanwhile, the ethical thing would be to disable the image backup feature entirely since twin-tails clearly has no idea it is on.

"Yeah, not gonna do either of those things!"

Fingers quickly flew across my keyboard, creating a separate secure directory on my private server. I copied all the current files there before wiping them.

Then diverted the future uploads from that device directly to the new location. No alerts to the company dashboard. Just a direct line to my own ’personal curiosity’ cabinet.

But I didn’t really want to see alerts all the time, so I set a new parameter on my image crawler. To notify me only if the device captured any images containing Kyrie.

"Hm..."

I also make another, for if both of them appear together in one. Because I need to know the very moment this all gets serious.

"Real life drama~ real life... oh these two are going to be so much trouble..."

Before my energy crashed again, I finally skimmed back and found what happened with the car. Followed back the city footage and saw the stand off at the bench and parts of the silent, tense walk together.

"Oh, this is so precious. Boss’s first girlfriend? Crap, what do I do, I can’t take it!"

I rush off and flopped onto my bed. My brain circles around what Luca would say if he knew what I’d just done.

Probably lecture then ask to see the pictures anyway. Men were so predictable that way.

"I wonder if I could lure him into my room again if I seem like I know something..."

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