"Your heart is beating very fast," Thraka observes. His eyes haven't left mine, and I realize with dawning horror that he can probably see my pulse hammering as visual evidence of exactly how not-calm I am right now.
My breath catches. "That's because this closet has terrible ventilation and you take up all the oxygen."
He leans closer, bracing one hand on the door beside my head, and now he's caging me in, deliberate and controlled and completely overwhelming.
"You stopped me," he says quietly. "You put yourself between me and Chad. You were not afraid."
"I'm your supervisor. It's literally my job to manage personnel conflicts."
"No." His eyes search mine. "You were protecting me. From myself. From consequences. You care."
"I don't."
"Liar."
"Thraka."
"You smell different when you lie," he says, and my entire nervous system short-circuits. "Sharper. Like burnt coffee and panic. But right now, you smell like... want."
Oh God.
Oh no.
This is catastrophically, monumentally bad.
This is an HR nightmare wrapped in a lawsuit waiting to happen, tied up with a bow made of policy violations and terrible decision-making.
This is the kind of situation that ends with mandatory sensitivity training and me updating my LinkedIn profile at three in the morning while stress-eating an entire sleeve of Oreos.
This is me, backed against a supply closet door, staring up at an orc who looks at me like I'm the most fascinating puzzle he's ever encountered, and my brain is screaming INAPPROPRIATE while my body is whispering what if.
"I don't want anything," I manage, but my voice sounds breathless and unconvincing even to my own ears.
"Another lie." He tilts his head, studying me. "Then how do I punish him?"
"You don't. You let it go. You move on. You focus on doing excellent work that makes his commentary irrelevant."
"That is boring," he says, and I can hear the genuine disappointment in his voice, like I've just told him there are no more battles to fight, no more glory to be won.
"That's adulting," I reply, trying to inject some levity into this increasingly dangerous conversation, this closet that keeps getting smaller and warmer with every passing second.
"I do not like adulting." He says it with such profound conviction, such sincere distaste, that despite everything, despite the policy violations and the complete abandonment of professional boundaries and the fact that my career is probably circling the drain, I almost laugh.
"Join the club," I whisper, less Ice Queen and more actual human being. "We meet never because we're all too busy responding to emails and pretending we have our lives together."
His smile widens.
Stop being charmed by the orc who ate Steve's sandwich and tried to duel the IT department.
Stop noticing the way his eyes crinkle at the corners when he's amused.
Stop thinking about what it would feel like if he closed that last six inches of distance between us.
"Or," Thraka says, his voice dropping into that low register that seems to vibrate straight through me. "How do I reward you for stopping me?"
The air in the closet goes completely, utterly still, as if the universe itself has paused to watch what happens next, holding its breath in anticipation.
My pulse pounds as a frantic rhythm that I'm absolutely certain he can hear, because we're so close now that I can count every fleck of amber in his dark eyes, can feel the heat radiating off him like a furnace, can smell something distinctlyhim, earthy and warm and entirely too appealing for someone who violated three separate HR policies before lunch today.
