“The script’s not done and we can’t leave or he’ll see us!”
“Liam, you need to—“
I looked at the terminal, at the progress bar crawling across the bottom of the command window with agonizing slowness.
Forty-two percent. If we left now, it wouldn’t finish. The file would still be there. The video would still exist. And whoever sent it would know we’d tried to delete it.
We’d lose our only shot at this.
The flashlight was getting closer, the beam brighter now, and I could hear footsteps—heavy boots on concrete, unhurried but inevitable.
Twenty seconds.
Alex left the window. Started moving around the room, checking the walls, his hands running along the surface like he was searching for something.
“What are you doing?” I hissed.
He didn’t answer. Just kept searching, methodical despite the panic I could see in the set of his shoulders. His hand ran along the back wall, fingers finding the gap between a server rack and the corner.
“Alex—”
His hand found something. A door handle. Small. Almost hidden in the shadow behind the equipment.
He pulled.
The door opened to reveal a closet—tiny, barely visible in the dark, just a storage space. Then, the door handle to the server room rattled.
Fuck.
He was coming in.
“Go,” I said.
We moved fast. Alex slipped into the closet first, his body disappearing into the darkness. I followed, pulling the door shut behind us just as the server room door opened with a soft click that sounded deafening in the silence.
The space was impossibly small.
Not even a closet, really. More like a storage nook someone had carved out of dead space. Shelves on one side. Cleaning supplies stacked haphazardly.
And Alex.
Right there. Right fucking there.
Our bodies pressed together in a way that made it impossible to think about anything else—his chest against mine, his breath on my neck, his shoulder digging into my collarbone, his thigh wedged between my legs.
I couldn’t move without touching him more.
Couldn’t breathe without breathing him in, without catching that expensive cologne mixed with sweat and adrenaline.
Heat rushed through me down to my dick. I was getting hard fast. It was all overwhelming and completely inappropriate for this moment when we were seconds away from getting caught and expelled and losing everything.
But it happened anyway.
Through the crack in the door, I could see the security guard’s flashlight beam sweeping across the server room in methodical arcs. Could hear his boots on the concrete floor—slow, careful, the sound of someone who had all the time in the world to check every corner.
He was checking everything.
“Noah,” I whispered, barely audible. “We’re hiding. Security’s in the room.”
