46. Sophie #2
“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?”
I can’t speak. Behind them, through the glass, I can see Lucy stepping out from behind the column, the gun trained on the doorway. Ethan is the last one through, and the moment he clears the threshold Lucy shoves the door shut and locks it.
I watch through the glass as Lucy straightens, slips the gun back under her jacket, and looks at me one last time. She switches the speaker on.
“Change of plans,” she says, her voice flat. “Guess you won’t be able to take the fall for it. But we can still destroy Equinox.”
She switches the speaker off. Fabian emerges from the storage room, and the two of them walk down the corridor together without looking back.
“Sophie?” Max says. “Talk to me. What’s happening?”
“Lucy,” I say, and my voice comes out strangled. “It’s Lucy. She’s the mole. And Fabian—he’s with her. They switched off the temperature controls.” I pause. “Fabian had a hard drive. I think he was wiping the Equinox research.”
Ethan goes still. “The archive.”
“What?”
His eyes snap toward the storage units. “If Fabian wipes the research, we can rebuild from the samples. If we lose the samples, we can rebuild from the research.” His jaw tightens. “If he takes both, there’s nothing left to rebuild from.”
As soon as they realize what’s happening, they don’t waste time. Max is at the door within seconds, his shoulder against it, and the door doesn’t move at all. Finn tries next, and then both of them together, and the glass doesn’t even shudder.
“Stop.” Ethan’s voice cuts through. “It’s reinforced.
The frame is carbon composite—you’ll dislocate your shoulder before that door moves.
” He’s already scanning the room—ventilation ducts, ceiling panels.
He stops and looks at his watch. “Given the thermal buffer we installed after the last incident, we have approximately two hours before the samples are compromised.”
Max turns from the door. His green eyes move to me. “Tell us everything.”
“Lucy texted me and said there was a fire in the labs.” I press my lips together.
“I came running. She led me down here, locked me in, and told me she’s going to destroy the Equinox samples.
Then Fabian came out of a storage room—they’ve been working together.
The closet thing, when we caught them, Max—they weren’t hooking up. They were planning this.”
Max closes his eyes for a second. “I should have known. Fabian built our security infrastructure.”
“What exactly is her problem with Synthera?” Finn says.
“It’s Equinox. She thinks you’re playing God,” I say.
“That erasing omega designation is an abomination. That nobody should have that kind of power over someone’s biology.
She’s spent her whole life wishing she were an omega, and she thinks Equinox gives omegas the chance to throw away something she would give anything to have.
” I pause. “She needed a scapegoat. The fire was fake—she made it up to get me down here alone. Lock me in with the samples, switch off the temperature controls, and when someone finally opens this door, it looks like I did it.”
“She knew you’d come running,” Ethan says, almost to himself. “She counted on it.”
The words sting more than they should. I’m supposed to be the operative. I’m supposed to be the one who reads people and spots a cover when I see one. And Lucy read me like a book. She knew exactly which string to pull, and I came running like a first-year recruit who’d never heard of a lure.
Ten years of training. Weeks of living this cover. And she figured me out before I figured her out.
“She did,” I say.
It’s all my fault.
Lucy was right there. Right in front of me, every single day—handing me coffees, gossiping about the alphas, texting me heart emojis—and I missed it.
“I should have caught her,” I say, and my voice comes out rough. “Months ago. I should have seen it.” I stop, swallowing hard. “If I’d been doing my job properly, none of this would be happening.”
“Sophie.” Max’s voice is steady. “It’s not your fault.”
“It is, Max. This is your company. Your life’s work. And it’s all in here, being destroyed as we speak, and there’s nothing we can do about it—” My voice breaks. “I should have been better.”
He crosses the distance and cups my face in both hands, tilting my head up to look at him.
“This is not on you. Do you hear me?” he says. “We are going to fix this. Together.”
I want to believe him. I really do.
He presses his lips to my forehead, then turns and goes back to the door, running his hands along the frame, looking for a weakness.
The room is getting warmer. I can feel it on my skin already, a thin sheen of sweat forming at the back of my neck.
I slide down the shelving unit until I’m sitting on the floor.