Chapter 15: The Hoarder

I sat up in the iron bed with the phone against my ear.

"Who could get into the servers?"

"You. Duncan. And her. She's a Luna, she's got all your passwords now."

"Not mine. I changed mine."

"Well, she found a way round."

I listened to him breathing.

Down on the quay a gull was screaming at a bin. Somebody's radio was playing in a kitchen.

And something came back to me. A bill I paid every month without thinking about it.

Forty-one pounds.

"Paul," I said. "Don't tell anybody I rang. Let her think it's gone."

"Mischa, it is gone."

"Is it?"

I pulled Jago's jumper on over my nightshirt and went down the stairs barefoot.

His office door was open. He was at the kettle.

"You look like you've been shot out of a cannon."

"Is your computer on?"

"It's never off. I'm scared it won't come back."

His computer was older than some of his cellar wolves. The screen took a full minute to wake up.

I typed an address from memory.

Jago brought me tea and leaned over my shoulder to watch.

"What's Lakeside Ledgers Limited?"

"Me."

"You've got a company?"

"Twenty years ago I set up the pack's archive as a firm in my own name. So no Alpha could ever sell it, or lose it, or wipe it."

"Was that in case of Duncan?"

"It was in case of Duncan's dad. He bought a speedboat."

The login screen came up. I put in my password.

Every night at two in the morning, the pack servers copied themselves to a data centre in Leeds. Every camera, every email, every file.

And my firm kept every night's copy. It never threw one away.

I'd been paying forty-one pounds a month for that since I was twenty-two.

The folders filled the screen, one for every night, back and back for years.

Jago put his tea down.

"You kept everything?"

"I kept everything."

"Every night? For twenty years?"

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Eclipsed Life of Luna Mischa from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.