Page 165 of Primal

Payton sags against me—then straightens.

The screen’s filled with her. Altar feed. Every pixel screaming. Denim skirt rucked up, back arched, my hands gripping her thighs—

Motherfucker.

I smash CTRL+ALT+DELETE so hard the keys stick.

The screen flickers—

Deleting source files …

A blinking alert.

[UPLOAD INTERRUPTED – FAILSAFE SYSTEM PURGE INITIATED. DETONATION IN 09:57]

Of course—the bastard wouldn’t leave it to chance. If the upload fails, the laptop cannibalizes itself. If he couldn’t control the story, he’d torch the proof. Leak it—or lose it all.

“Fuck.”

Payton leans in. “What is it?”

I dive back into the command line, fingers trembling.

Her hand’s over mine. Correcting. Steadying.

ps aux | grep remote_trigger

There. A hidden script piggybacking on the purge process.

/etc/remote_access/dollface_trigger.sh

Figures.

kill -9 23098

My finger slips, hits 9 twice. She fixes it.

rm -rf /etc/remote_access/dollface_trigger.sh

One less leash for Derek to yank.

“He rigged a bomb.”

Her face goes slack. “What? Where?”

“My guess? The control room. Employee files, backup logs, payment records—all the shit that ties him here. If the footage leaked, the owners would get smoked first. Not him.”

“The laptop’s not enough?”

I glance down. Code floods the screen.

“It’s self-destructing. Auto-purge. He built this to go nuclear. Frame the owners, walk away clean.”

She swallows. “The bomb—it’s not in here too, right?”

“Hey, man. What’s the holdup?”

The timer ticks to 08:43. I shut the laptop.