Chapter 18 The Vanishing Access Card #2
But before he could stop her, Ava leaned toward the corridor wall and pressed her palm against a service panel. It was flush, corporate, disguised as a decorative strip.
The metal was warm under her hand.
Roman’s stomach dropped again. “You felt that.”
Ava didn’t pull away. “It’s not decorative. It’s a heat sink. There’s wiring behind it.”
Roman’s gaze flicked to the corner camera. “If you open it - ”
“I know,” she said, and the way she said it wasn’t reckless. It was measured. “If they’re watching, we give them something to misinterpret.”
The speaker crackled once more, louder now, as if the building had decided to escalate. “Verification begins immediately.”
Ava’s eyes lifted to Roman. “Roman, listen to me.”
That tone - attorney to client, partner to protector - made him still. He hated how much he wanted to obey it.
“I’m not letting you carry this alone,” she said. “If they’re framing you, I’ll see it in the evidence they’re forcing into our path.”
Roman’s mouth went dry. The fear under his discipline wasn’t only for his life. It was for hers - because Ava’s stubborn courage was the kind of light that got people hunted.
He stepped closer, close enough that Ava could smell gun oil on him, close enough that the world narrowed to her face. “You don’t even know what they’re doing.”
“I do,” Ava said quietly. “They’re making sure I panic. They’re making sure I move without thinking.”
Roman’s eyes held hers. “And are you?”
Ava’s answer was immediate, but not in the way he expected. She reached up and touched his cheek with two fingers, thumb brushing the edge of his jaw as if she could wipe the tension off his skin. “No.”
The gesture should’ve softened him. It should’ve turned this into a moment they could survive with tenderness.
Instead, it made his betrayal fear worse, because Ava’s touch was too real for a trap this elaborate.
Ava withdrew her hand. “Open your access. Now.”
Roman’s brows pulled together. “What?”
Ava’s gaze flicked to the keypad beside the closed door. “Your card isn’t working because they’re overriding your credentials. But the system still recognizes you. That means there’s another path - one not tied to your clearance.”
Roman stared at the access panel again. His mind moved fast, hunting for a backdoor in corporate logic. He understood how internal sabotage worked. He’d survived enough fake approvals to know how someone could make the machine lie.
He pulled the gun closer to his body - not aiming, just holding it ready - and slid his fingers along the edge of the keypad housing. There was a seam, thin as a lie.
Ava crouched beside him, her hair brushing his knuckles. “If you jam the reader, they’ll reroute power to purge staging.”
“So we jam it fast.”
He found the seam, twisted, and felt a click. The panel popped just enough for a cable bundle to show - a ribbon of dark lines, the kind of data backbone used to keep corporate annexes from needing human attention.
Warm air breathed out from inside. Heat. Ozone. The same smell as the access threshold.
Ava leaned in. “There.”
Roman’s hands moved with clean efficiency. He didn’t yank. He didn’t tear. He pinched the cable connector free and shoved it into a port beside the biometric housing - an emergency bypass that would only work if the building still believed he was part of the system.
The lights flickered.
The speaker cut off.
For half a second, it felt like control might return. Roman’s chest loosened - just barely - before the building corrected itself.
A red alert flashed across the panel, bright and humiliating.
ROMAN COLLINS - VERIFICATION FAILED.
Ava straightened so sharply her coat brushed Roman’s gun hand. “Roman… it says Collins.”
Roman froze. His brain rejected the text, because the system had no right to use Ava’s name like a weapon against him.
He slammed his palm against the panel to pull up logs, but the screen shifted again, displaying a new line.
EVIDENCE LINKED TO SUBJECT: ROMAN.
And beneath it, a file label - partial, but readable enough to poison the air.
ROMAN - PERSONAL.
Ava’s face drained of color, not because she didn’t understand what it meant, but because she did. She looked at Roman like she was seeing the trap snap shut with his name inside it.
“Someone is framing you,” she whispered.
Roman’s pulse hammered against his ribs. “I know.”
“No,” Ava said, voice breaking around the edges she usually kept sealed. “No, you don’t. This isn’t just sabotage. This is - this is personal. They’re telling the purge team you’re the one who moved the ledger. They’re telling them I’m the accomplice.”
Roman’s throat tightened hard enough to hurt. He wanted to argue. He wanted to say it was a glitch, a mislabel, a corrupted interface.
But the way the building went quiet right when the bypass succeeded told him it wasn’t a glitch.
It was a message sent through the system.
The purge siren started then - low at first, vibrating through the walls like an engine revving behind concrete.
The corridor lights shifted to a harsher spectrum, turning everything sickly.
Roman heard the lock mechanism behind the sealed door recalibrate, and he knew with cold certainty that the building wasn’t just locking them out.
It was moving them into execution mode.