Page 188 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

Behind her, a storage room door opens and Fabian backs out holding a hard drive, muttering something about file sizes. He turns around and sees me through the glass and freezes.

My eyes zero in on the hard drive in his hand. The research files.

They’re not just destroying the samples. They’re wiping everything.

“She’s here already?” he says to Lucy.

“Yeah, she was fast,” Lucy says.

The ground shifts under me. “You too?”

Fabian works in IT. Of course. He built the access system—he must’ve found a way to clone the keycard. He’s the reason Lucy got down here, and probably the reason the intruder got into Synthera in the first place.

Fabian sets the hard drive down and stands beside Lucy.

“But—” I stare at them through the glass. “The closet. You and him, I thought⁠—”

“I know what you thought.” Lucy’s thin smile widens. “That was the point.”

They weren’t making out in that closet. They were conspiring. And Lucy knew exactly how to make me look the other way.

“The intruder—” I say, before they can leave. “Who was it?”

Lucy’s eyes widen for just a second. “How do you know about that?”

“I—I heard the bosses talking about it.”

She studies me for a moment, then shrugs. “A friend of ours. Marcel. He’s fully recovered now, no thanks to Pack Cavill’s security team.”

Marcel. So Lucy thinks Pack Cavill’s security team caught him—that must’ve been what he told her. And he was too embarrassed to tell his own people he’d been almost taken down by someone half his size.

I want to keep her talking, but she switches off the speaker.

The silence is total. The room is insulated and completely sealed—I can’t hear anything from outside except my own breathing.

Then Lucy reaches under her jacket and pulls out a gun.

She points it at me through the glass and switches the speaker back on.

“Pack Cavill is coming,” she says, her voice flat. “I can hear them in the corridor. When they get here, you don’t say a word.” She tilts the gun slightly. “Or I shoot them the moment they walk through that door. Do you understand?”

My blood goes cold.

“Do you understand, Sophie?”

“Yes,” I whisper.

Fabian grabs the hard drive and slips back into the storage room, pulling the door almost shut behind him.

Lucy switches the speaker off, unlocks the glass door, and ducks behind the column, the gun held low against her thigh.

Max comes first, moving fast, his face tight with worry. Ethan is right behind him, his phone in his hand like he’s been calling someone. Finn brings up the rear, scanning the corridor with hard eyes.

Max’s eyes find mine through the glass and his face floods with relief. He pulls the door open and rushes in.

“Sophie.” His hands are on my shoulders almost immediately. “What happened? Are you hurt?”

Finn is right behind him, crossing the room to me. “Sweetheart, are you okay?”