But he doesn't.
I look up. His eyes are fixed on my face. His irises are dark, almost swallowed by the blown-out black of his pupils. His chest rises and falls in a slow, controlled rhythm. He looks at me the way a starving man looks at a thing he has decided is already his.
"Personal space," I say, my voice cracking. "Look it up."
He doesn't move. "You smell like amber."
The observation is so blunt, so completely disconnected from our current life-or-death situation, that my brain short-circuits. "What?"
"Amber," he repeats, his voice dropping an octave. "And musk. It is loud."
"Loud." I blink at him. "My perfume is loud."
"Yes."
I stare at him. The man is genuinely terrifying, lethal, and serious. He isn't making a joke. He is stating a physical fact that his brain just processed. I shake my head, breaking the eye contact before the intensity of his stare burns a hole through my skull.
"Right. Well. Apologies for the sensory overload," I mutter, turning my attention back to the junction box. I fold out the wire strippers on my multi-tool and expertly strip the casing off a blue data cable. "I'll try to smell quieter while I save our lives."
I bridge the blue data line into the service shunt and clip my jumper lead to the battery array. For one awful second, nothing happens. Then a low mechanical whine fills the corner of the room as the emergency system recognizes the bypass. The power reroutes.
Three feet away, a small wall-mounted screen flickers to life.
It is an old-school diagnostic terminal. No bigger than a tablet, sealed in a reinforced steel housing, designed for manual system overrides when the primary network fails.
I scramble up from the floor and step to the terminal. My fingers fly across the physical keyboard bolted beneath the screen. A command prompt blinks in the darkness.
He steps up directly behind me. The solid wall of his chest hovers inches from my back. The heat of his body bleeds through the heavy fabric wrapped around me. He leans in over my shoulder and the gold chain swings forward, the cross pendanttapping cool against my shoulder blade. I refuse to let my hands shake. I type a standard bypass sequence. The terminal rejects it.
"Locked," I mutter. "Local encryption. Standard alphanumeric passcode hashed at the prompt. I can brute the hash, but it'll take a minute."
"Why."
"Because I need to access the environmental controls. If I can reroute the battery power to the primary hydraulic pump, I can manually unseal the door."
"No."
I drop my hands from the keyboard and spin around. I am instantly trapped between the wall and his chest. I throw my head back to meet his eyes. "Excuse me?"
"You are not opening the door," he says. His face is a mask of absolute authority.
"We cannot stay in here."
"We will stay exactly here."
"Are you insane?" I push a hand against his chest. It is like pushing against a steel girder. He doesn't even sway. "There is no food. No water. Limited oxygen. No cell signal. We are in a sensory deprivation tank masquerading as a bank vault. I am not dying down here because you have some weird mafia death wish."
"You are not leaving," he states softly. The softness makes it worse. It is the tone of unbreakable certainty. "You touched the servers. You saw the architecture. You know the location."
"I don't care about your data! I don't care about the Bellantis or their ghost money or whatever criminal empire you belong to. I am a tech contractor. I just wanted my paycheck."
"The risk is too high."
"I am not a variable! I am a person. My name is Imani."
He goes still at the sound of my name. The muscle in his jaw flexes. He looks at my mouth, then up to my eyes.
"Imani," he repeats. He says the word like he is testing it on his tongue. Like it is the first real word he has spoken in years.
