“On it.”
I’m barely halfway into the notebook. I’ll never take a picture of every page. Switching tactics, I begin filming instead and flip through the pages. Hopefully, we’ll be able to read the rest of it. There should be enough light.
It only takes about two minutes for Andrea to let out, “All good.”
“Me too. Let’s return everything to the safe and ditch this place.”
“With fucking pleasure.”
We walk up to the closet, and Andrea puts the laptop first, as it was placed, before I set the notebook on top of it.
“We’re good, I think?” she hesitantly says.
“I think so, yes. It was exactly like this when we opened.”
“Then I’ll close it.”
She sends her gloved hand into the niche and pushes the steel door closed. The locks snap into place, and the screen lights up to write “Locked.”
There. We did it. We not only have whatever is on that laptop, but we also got extra information from the notebook. This went even better than I imagined, though we aren’t out of the woods yet.
“I can’t believe we did it,” Andrea breathes out, sounding less overwhelmed than she did before.
“We’ll have done it once we’re out. Come on, let’s—”
My words die with the darkness that suddenly falls on us. The lights went out. We’re in perfect obscurity, completely blind in the last place in the world where we’d want to be. Fuck, this is Iris’s warning. Someone’s coming this way.
Andrea is faster than I am at reacting, turning on her phone’s light immediately. Shit, we forgot about that. I’m still trying to decide what to do when she launches herself at the desk to get the screwdriver she left there.
“Get the card out of the cloning station!” she orders before running to a corner of the room. There, she drops to her knees and begins unscrewing a brass floor vent.
Understanding what her clever brain just came up with, I gather everything we wouldn’t want to be found with and join her. As soon as she has the vent opened, I hand her everything, and she throws it down there. The camera, the cloning station, the adapter, the duplicate key… When it’s all down, she lowers her arm in there and pushes it all to the side, out of view.
She’s just done when the lights return. Fuck, the thirty seconds are gone.
“Your gloves,” she demands.
I snap them off, and she throws them in the vent before returning the cover to its place. She screws it back on and then lets the screwdriver fall through a gap in the design.
That’s when we hear voices. Coming closer. And fast.
“What do we do now?!” Andrea whispers, panicked.
The rush from earlier has returned in full force, and my brain calculates every option and outcome. There’s only one solution to this. Only one reason we could be in a room we shouldn’t be in, isolated from the rest of the guests.
I grab Andrea’s hand and tug her up. Then I rush her to the desk and sit her on it, hiking her dress up. She understands what I have in mind and looks down to help. The voices are right fucking there. Right behind the door. Someone slips a key in the lock, and my heart drops as my throat swells.
This isn’t how we end. This is how we get free.
The key tries to turn but can’t since it’s already open, and I look down at our joined hands, hoping with every last cell in my body that we’ll make it out of this. My eyes widen when I see the SD card right there, where I left it in my rush to give her everything to throw down the vent.
“This is odd,” Becker says. “I always lock this room.”
I grab the SD card and, without thinking, send my hand into the opening of Andrea’s dress as I crash my lips onto hers. I saw what she has underneath, and the garter at her thigh might be the most secure place to hide it.
This is how they find us when the door opens—Andrea clinging to me as we kiss, and my hand between her legs. The men at the door stop talking as we break our kiss to look at them. At least we don’t have to feign our flushness or bated breath. The rush we just went through took care of that.
“What are you doing here?” Becker asks coldly.
