Coalescence ➳ H.S.

Sixteen: Lover Boy

Bria's POV

"Bria, wait," Harry cut me off in my tracks just before my hand reached for the hidden key card reader behind the mirror in the foyer of his suite. I turned around to see him hesitating to advance past the edge of his bed. "The tracker. I'll get-"

"Electrocuted," I finished. "Fuck...okay. Okay here's what we're going to do: it's 11:45 at night right now; Xander has a meeting in Switzerland tomorrow, so he's probably asleep, and the evening guards switch out for the night guards, which takes about fifteen minutes. They won't check up on your suite for until the time you're scheduled to work tomorrow-"

"They don't check up on me?"

"Of course not."

"Seriously? What if I died in here? There aren't any fucking windows or anything-"

"Well...the last person that died in their room ended up ramming himself into a wall so many times that he internally bled to death. They found him about a day later. Anyway, that's besides the point. We'll go to the lab-"

"Lab? What for?"

"You want to get the tracker out of you, don't you? We have to inject-"

"No, no, no. Absolutely not. God, I fucking hate needles-you injecting me with that shit was already bad enough, let alone-"

"Do you want to die before you get back to America, lover boy? Because I don't care about the lab, it's not like I've been implanted with a tracker-"

"Fuck, fine, fine," he sighed, shuddering at the thought of the sharp end prodding into his skin.

"Right. So we'll head down to the lab and there we can get you a lab coat or something and we'll run."

"Are...are you sure this is a good idea, Bria?" he asked, looking a little worried.

"When did we ever decide to settle on if an idea was good or not?"

"I don't know, I just...you know Xander's a little...well-"

"Look, I did this because you're unhappy. I-don't look at me like that-I know you're unhappy. I watch you on the surveillance cameras. Let's not discuss this right now-when the hell did you start discussing things?"

I checked my phone and let us out, grabbing his wrist and tugging him along the hall as he tried to speak.

"I...well I respect your decisions and I guess-"

"It'd be less insulting if you just told me that cop got the better of you."

"It's not like I don't care about you-"

"Save it, Styles, before I change my mind and lock you up in that room again," I snapped. He needed to be okay, no matter how much I wanted him. It was difficult to sway myself to do the right thing when I could ensure both my safety and his loyalty by doing the wrong thing.

We sprinted down the corridors-long, dimly lit passages with side doors and pass codes-until we reached the Main Laboratory nearly five minutes later. It was one of the only rooms in the building with a biometric scanner-the ones that needed a palm print for entry-because that was where all of the experiments happened, such as the one that brought Harry to the lab in the first place.

I watched Harry's eyes widen at exactly how much we had going on behind closed doors; there were tubes filled with bubbling liquids, diagrams with molecular specifications, and, on the far wall, calculations of algorithms to bypass several governments' security measures that Harry had scribed for us several days ago. There was no time to pause and gawk; the serum was kept in a refrigerator in the back room and we needed to get out, otherwise both of us would get killed. I kept pulling on Harry's arm, and he reacted like a little boy in a toy store, dragging his feet and begging to look at what chemicals were on the tables and asking to fix the algorithms slightly. Fucking nerdy as always.