THE COUNTDOWN

The door sealed behind Lang, and the silence that followed wasn’t stillness — it was pressure. Thick. Heavy. A weight settling in Elena’s lungs as reality rearranged itself around her. Twelve hours. By morning, she wouldn’t just be a name on a ticker.

She would be a public battleground.

Adrian moved first, crossing to the table in the center of the room. “Sit,” he said quietly.

Not an order.

Not command.

Preparation.

She joined him. He didn’t take the seat across from her — he sat beside her again. Deliberate.

“You need to know exactly what they’ll come at you with first,” he said.

She met his eyes. “Go on.”

“They’ll weaponize the power imbalance,” he said. “Before they even address the leak, they’ll paint you as compromised — emotionally, intellectually, ethically. A girl who didn’t know what she was doing.”

“I know what I’m doing,” she said.

“They don’t care,” he replied. “They care what they can make people believe. You can tell the truth, but if they define you before you speak, you lose before you start.”

She swallowed. “So I speak before they do.”

“Exactly.”

He leaned forward, forearms on the table. “Tomorrow, they will not ask you about corruption. They will ask: ‘When did you meet Adrian Wells emotionally, not professionally?’ — because that tells them whether this was exploitation or agency.”

Her heartbeat kicked.

“Then I answer,” she said.

“You must answer carefully,” he corrected. “Not defensively. Not apologetically. If you sound like you’re defending the connection, they’ll assume guilt. If you sound frightened, they’ll treat you like a victim. You must sound like it was a choice.”

“It was a choice.”

He held her gaze. “Then own it like one.”

She didn’t blink. “I will.”

He exhaled — not relief, not ease — alignment.

He reached for the holoscreen pad on the table and pulled up a muted live feed of three networks running coverage, all cycling her name under CHIRON headlines already.

They were guessing her major.

Guessing her age.

Guessing her background.

Debating her before she even existed to them.

A piece of discourse. Not a person.

“You’re watching them write the version of you they want,” Adrian said quietly. “Tomorrow is the only time you get to take ‘you’ back.”

She turned from the screen to him. “And what about you?”

He didn’t answer immediately.

He didn’t look away either.

“They’ll try to force me to distance myself from you publicly,” he said. “To frame you as uninvolved. To pretend that you were incidental.”

“Are you going to?”

“No.”

One word.

No hesitation.

Her breath caught.

“You’re choosing the harder road,” she whispered.

“I’m choosing the true one.” He paused. “And I’m choosing it with my eyes open — which means accepting every cost that comes with it.”

She didn’t speak — didn’t need to. The acknowledgment lived in the air between them.

His voice shifted — lower, steadier.

“This is the last moment before the world owns the story. After tonight, everything changes. So I need you to hear the rest — the part I should have told you before any of this.”

She stilled.

He leaned in, elbows braced on his knees, voice quiet but stripped of deflection.

“When I matched with you on the app, I didn’t know who you were. You were just… someone bright. Unfiltered. Human. I wasn’t looking for you. I didn’t plan you. And when I realized—” He stopped. A beat. “When I realized it was you, I should’ve pulled away. But I didn’t. Not because you were leverage. Not because you were a liability. Because I didn’t want to.”

Her pulse thrummed.

“You asked me in the safehouse why I came back for you.” His voice roughened. “The truth is, I wasn’t running into a rescue. I was running back to something I wasn’t willing to lose.”

The room seemed to tilt — not danger-tilt, not panic — something deeper. Ground being rearranged.

“And now that the world knows it too,” she said quietly, “you can’t undo it.”

“No,” he said. “I won’t.”

Silence settled — not the heavy oppressive kind, but the kind that shifts gravity.

Then—

The lights flickered.

Not red alert this time.

System interference.

Adrian stood in a single controlled motion. “Someone’s trying to breach internal feeds again.”

Elena rose too. “Here?”

He crossed to the wall panel, scanned diagnostics — security ciphers scrolling too quickly to be external.

“Not an attack,” he muttered. “A redirect. Someone is rerouting our telemetry.”

“Why reroute—” she began.

Then she understood.

“They’re trying to record us.”

His jaw clenched.

“Not just record,” he said. “Frame.”

The lights cut out completely — replaced by a dim auxiliary glow.

The worst confirmation possible.

Someone didn’t just want her named.

They wanted her caught on camera — emotional, flustered, unprepared — before she went public.

Then they could splice her however they needed.

“They want their version before yours,” she whispered.

“And they want my reactions on tape,” Adrian said darkly. “So they can prove emotional entanglement as misconduct.”

The room was suddenly too small for safety.

He stepped toward her, urgency threading his posture now. Not panic — strategy.

“We’re not staying in here,” he said. “If they weaponize this room, we lose.”

“Where do we go?”

“Somewhere they can’t frame, can’t edit, and can’t strip context from.” His eyes found hers. “Somewhere unmonitored.”

She nodded once — ready.

He moved toward the far panel and triggered a manual override. A secondary exit slid open — meant for fire code exemption, not transfer. A gap in the eyes of the building.

He turned back just once, and for a heartbeat his guard lowered — not professionally, not tactically, but personally.

“After tonight,” he said quietly, “they will come for us in daylight. If we walk into that, we walk into it together.”

She held his gaze.

“I already chose together.”

The faintest flicker crossed his expression — not shock, not softness —

Recognition.

This was no longer protection.

It was partnership.

He extended his hand.

Not to lead her.

Not to shield her.

To take her with him.

No more rescues.

No more hiding.

No more distance.

She placed her hand in his.

The door shut behind them.

And for the first time — truly — they stepped into the next phase not as fugitive and protector…

…but as two people who now had something far more dangerous in common:

The truth.