Coldsnap: The Billionaire Alpha's Fated Pregnant Princess (GL)
Chapter 90 - App Access Granted

Chapter 90: Chapter 90 - App Access Granted

The discovery of the storage ability - and nothing else - had left me too ’wired’ to sleep.

> Yes, that is the hill I am dying on. No, we are not talking about it further. It is better to remain unattached. For me and this child. Okay? <

As much as I shared the barest snippets of the results... windows into how I shamefully reacted into a withdrawn mess to both my brother and a few other key people, after they’d shown me that their love only extended to quite well defined breaking points?

My wolf feels none of that in the shapes and forms I try to express. I wish I did not either as I was born as a fox - but funnily enough, the opposition of the nature of shifters in both of these worlds carries over... even to that.

Beasts that develop a deeper sense of humanity and all the emotional complexity that brings in mine... compared to the werewolves here. Humans growing more bestial in their responses and instinctual reactions.

"It approaches the same idea but when it comes from two starting points, the journeys are still different..."

My mumbles about thoughts that will simply not escape me came as I sat cross-legged on the bed. The journal that had been the old hunter’s private record for decades sat open in one hand as I skimmed through it.

There is some practical information here. Locations of caches he buried, tactics for evading detection when in pack territory, and other general notes on werewolf behavior from a human’s perspective.

Near the back is the real prize I hoped to find tonight - a ’dog-eared’ page with a different kind of entry. The handwriting was far more agitated, the ink pressed clearly harder into the paper.

[Another password reset on the damn Network. Third time this year! As if anyone’s trying to hack into discussions about silver-tipped arrow performance.]

While there were rants like this scattered throughout by the man who others most surely have called... a pain to deal with? Old and cantankerous like no one’s business? His faults were my gain.

[Writing it down here because those computer people keep making me change it. Who’s going to steal my journal anyway? The werewolves? Ha! Over my dead body.]

Below this was a ’username’ - [GreyVictor] - and a series of scratched out sections. Leaving a single ’password’ that looked like random characters.

I glanced at the hunter’s phone I had been charging again on the nightstand. The crosshair icon app I’d noticed on it before had needed these credentials, and now I had them.

> This could be dangerous, but it could open so many more options. <

Vrika’s anxiety filtered through our connection, especially not liking the thrilled smirk I wore. Logging into a hunter’s account carried some pretty obvious risks that I definitely understood.

If they discovered someone using a dead man’s credentials, they might trace the activity to me. Worse, they’d probably assume I’d killed him - which was the biggest reason I was in a rush to collect all of his belongings.

Yet the potential information in such a social gathering place was too valuable to ignore. I picked up the phone and swiped to unlock the screen, entering the credentials with care and only having to hit ’backspace’ three times.

The center of the screen filled with an icon that spun for several seconds, then the screen changed to a new interface. Something I believe was meant to be styled like that of ’internet forums’.

Upper categories appeared in a neatly organized list, with little mentions of the most recent post that occurred within it. While Helene had never really used a site like this, she’d seen them on television...

[Council Alerts]

[Regional Warnings]

[Tracking Reports]

[Equipment Reviews]

[Exchange Network]

[Containment Documentation]

My options were thankfully limited, but I tapped on the first one instead of choosing with more purpose. The section opened to reveal dozens with titles like [Updated: Silver Handling] and [Updated: Non-Lethal Containment Standards].

One ’thread’ that caught my eye, as the main posts seemed to be called, was [Working with Pack Authority Structure]. I opened it to find a detailed guide for independent hunters operating in established werewolf territories.

[Remember that all operations must be cleared and sanctioned through Council liaisons except in Class-1 emergency scenarios. Direct communication with pack leadership should follow established channels.]

It already reads like bureaucracy. But I keep going until the end.

[#RimecoatAlpha has established weekly briefing protocols that have proven effective and are recommended as the standard for all extended regional operations].

I raised an eyebrow at seeing that... ’tag’. But even more because all of this really didn’t sound like instructions for werewolf killers, but rather for something closer to a specialized law enforcement working within a set of established boundaries.

Further reading through some other posts confirmed this impression. The hunters’ relationship with werewolves appeared complex - not absolutely friendly, certainly, but regulated by mutual agreement pacts and a sense of oversight between them.

"So what Helene knew wasn’t the whole story. Not that this necessarily is either..."

This network, at least, focused primarily on rogues who threatened human safety, working with packs and relying on their truthfulness in matters rather than aligning completely against them. Not total ’boogeymen’ any more than the average werewolf should be considered toward humans.

Before I knew what I was doing, exactly, I found the ’search’ and entered a term I’d seen. An older post, one of the earliest, was called [#RimecoatAlphaX’s Hardline Stance Ends].

I quickly realize that the ’X’ is added to denote deceased parties. It mentions the change of pack leadership from the prior Alpha to the new one - Kyrie Voss - and suggests her predecessor had been less accommodating to their operations than she intended to be.

And I’m only mildly disappointed that there seems to be no pictures of her anywhere.

> I just wanted to see if they had one in her hybrid form, since I only saw that partial hand shift. There is nothing wrong with being curious about that... which necessitates you trying to mimic my gekkering again! <

Vrika finally left me alone, curling up and closing its eyes as I stood fiercely in my mindscape. With an irritated blow of breath, I begin to ignore the spirit too.

I navigated to [Regional Warnings] to find it filled with reports of criminal rogue activity in territories. Seemingly provided directly by the council of Alphas itself... and the clinical, bureaucratic tone was sort of jarring.

Even in the responses underneath, from ’usernames’ which I can only guess are from more respected human members overseeing the hunters. These people tracked and sometimes killed my kind, yet they wrote about it like they were penning tax documents.

The [Containment Documentation] section made me... particularly uncomfortable. Detailed records of rogues who had been ’processed’ after threatening the well being of humans.

None of the entries here glorified any violence - instead, they methodically documented evidence, methods used, and Council verifications. Many even noted how they had performed non-lethal resolutions when possible.

"But it doesn’t say what happens to them in that situation, other than being handed to the council. Do the werewolves have some sort of prison system? Or do they give them another trial in their old pack and then maybe kill them directly..."

Too much fiction that a child should really not be reading gave Helene a bad impression of organizations that operated in the shadows. I tried not to think of the possibility of them being experimented upon.

> However, now I can almost picture a white lab coated werewolf doing mad scientist things. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have her dry memories at all. <