Chapter Twenty-Nine
Nate
I learned something about Jo over the next week.
If she was wound tight enough to snap, joking with her was the fastest way to keep her from detonating. So I teased her now and then. Did it usually make her look at me like she was calculating how many ways she could strangle me with household objects? Yes.
Did she actually strangle me? No.
And about three seconds after every glare, her shoulders would drop half an inch, she’d take a long breath, and whatever storm she was riding crested and rolled back.
I was learning her patterns.
And there wasn’t a single one of them that wasn’t addictive.
I loved the way she got up already in gear, eyes soft from sleep but brain three steps ahead of the day. I loved how every conversation about her father sharpened her focus until the whole world narrowed to one point: get him out, clear his name, bring down those who’d framed him.
I liked the way she treated my security team like background noise one minute and then, out of nowhere, turned and scared the hell out of them—or made them laugh.
Same effect.
These men had worked with heads of state, CEOs, celebrities who thought they were gods. In all that time, I’d never seen them look at anyone the way they looked at Jo.
Half amused.
Half wary.
Half hopelessly charmed.
Yes, that was three halves. It still felt accurate.
There was simply nothing about her that wasn’t likable.
And the most dangerous part? She wasn’t even trying.
One afternoon I walked into the guest house and found her at the kitchen table with Decker, one of my more serious guys. Their heads were bent over his sidearm, its parts laid neatly on a dish towel.
“What are we doing?” I asked, because I already knew I wouldn’t like the answer.
“Race,” Jo said without looking up. “Best time to field strip and reassemble wins.”
Decker shot me a quick, guilty glance.
“I’m consistently winning,” Jo added.
I watched her hands—quick, competent, sure. She wasn’t showing off; she knew exactly what she was doing.
I cleared my throat. “Decker.”
“Sir?”
“When we’re guarding someone and trying to keep them from running away,” I said evenly, “we generally don’t hand them our weapon.”
Decker winced. “Yes, sir.”
Jo smirked openly.
I eyed the half-assembled gun. Usually, I would assume Decker was letting a woman win to appease her, but his look of frustration told me otherwise. They both seemed impatient for me to leave so they continue their game.
I could have cracked down. Hard. But she wasn’t a prisoner, and I didn’t want to be her jailor. We were . . . I don’t know what we were.
When she wasn’t entertaining herself at the expense of the egos of my security, she headed to her lab in the garage and I went with her. It was a modest area tucked behind the garage, exactly where she said it was. From outside, it looked like storage. Inside, it was something else entirely.
A long workbench lined with tools and wired components. Shelves of labeled parts. Repurposed equipment. Monitors glowing in the dim light. A whiteboard covered in equations that made my head ache if I stared too long.
This was Jo’s natural habitat.
She spent half her time tinkering with what looked like part of a motorcycle: open panels, exposed wiring, a metal housing unlike any design I’d seen. The other half she sat in front of a laptop, eyes narrowed at columns of numbers.
Sometimes she was online in chat windows so outdated they looked like artifacts—no profile pictures, no names, just strings of characters and conversations refreshing in uneven bursts.
I sat at the other end of the bench with my laptop open, pretending my emails were riveting. They weren’t.
She was.
Jo in problem-solving mode was impressive. She muttered to herself, tapped out calculations, scribbled notes, erased half of them, then started again. Her hair kept slipping from the pencil she’d twisted it around, and she kept tucking strands back, leaving faint streaks of graphite on her wrist.
I watched her more than my screen. I tried to be subtle. Jury’s still out on whether I succeeded.
I was sitting there, one day, asking myself if I’d ever met a more interesting person when I decided to stop pretending I wasn’t fascinated by what she was doing. I closed my laptop, leaned back, and asked, “Any success over there?”
“Some,” she replied without glancing up. “Not as much as I’d like.”
“Who are you talking to?”
That froze her.
She slowly turned her head, then flicked her gaze toward the screen, then back at me. I could practically hear the thought: If I tell him, I’ll have to kill him.
I kept my expression neutral, elbows on my knees.
She swiveled her chair to face me fully, taking a breath. “Do you know what the dark web is?”
“Of course.”
I didn’t add the obvious: It’s full of criminals, hackers, and the kind of people who end up on watchlists. “What do you do there?” I asked.
She chewed the inside of her cheek. Debating honesty.
I didn’t push. I’d spent the last week proving I could wait her out.
“When I don’t know what to do next,” she said quietly, “I have a network of people I talk to.”
“On the dark web.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of people?”
“Scientists. Engineers. Professors. A couple of politicians. One person who claims they’re royalty, but I’m not convinced.” A faint twitch of her mouth. “Doesn’t matter who they are. It’s what we talk about.”
“And today?”
She sighed from someplace deep. “Today, like every other day, I’m trying to figure out why I can’t stabilize this battery.”
I glanced at the metal housing on the bench. “What kind of battery?”
“Power cell,” she corrected, turning the casing over in her hands. “I can’t get it to hold a consistent charge. Not the way my father imagined it would.”
That pulled me in. “So, this is what your father was working on?”
“Of course.” Her voice was threaded with affection and frustration.
She set the casing down and leaned back, staring at the ceiling, looking as if she were battling with herself.
Eventually, she said, “Raymean hired him to design a motorcycle for a military bid and that’s what they thought he was working on. ”
“But he wasn’t?”
“Oh, he was,” she said. “The motorcycle out there is his design. It’s virtually indestructible and can run on a wide variety of fuel sources. This power cell, though, would have brought it to a whole new level along with solving worldwide power issues.”
“How so?”
“He was working on a power cell that, once charged, could hold that charge for decades. Recharging itself. Paired with the engine from the bike it would have provided the kind of renewable power source currently we’re seeking from solar energy.”
I stared. “For the military?”
“For everyone,” she said, eyes brightening. “Portable power that doesn’t drain. Remote clinics that never lose electricity. Off-grid villages choosing heat and clean water. Emergency crews who never worry about a dead vehicle in a disaster zone.”
“And is this what he’s accused of stealing?”
“Yes, but you can’t steal something you haven’t yet invented. The bike might technically belong to them, but it’s part of a bigger design. They have the bike plans. What they don’t have is what I’m trying to figure out.”
“Holy shit. You’re serious.”
One of her shoulders lifted and fell. “Someone at Raymean knew he was close,” she said softly. “They must have found out what the battery could do. And they didn’t want the world to have that kind of freedom.”
“Because you can’t meter what you can’t control,” I said. “And you can’t bill a village for power they’re not buying.”
She looked at me, startled. “Exactly. That’s why my father would have shared his discovery online so no one could claim it.”
“How close was he?”
Her fingers tightened around the casing. “Close enough that they locked him up for it.”
Silence settled, humming with machines and fluorescent lights. “And how close are you?”
“I wish I knew,” she said, shutters slipping back over her expression. “If I solve this, it’ll be worth a lot of money to someone.”
“You’d sell it?”
She frowned. “To save my father? Yes.”
Holy shit, if she created a sustainable power source like that, it would skyrocket whoever bought it to an entirely new level of wealth–one beyond what was currently possible to achieve.
There was a time when I would have been tempted by that, but I didn’t like what side of history that would put me on.
And I could sit back and watch someone who had a dream of helping the world sell out because they were forced to. There had to be another way.
The lab hummed around us—the whir of machines, the faint buzz of overhead lights, the soft ping of an alert on her screen. Outside, my men patrolled the property. Inside, Jo turned her attention back to her computer.
I sat there trying not to think about how, in one week, a woman I thought was robbing my uncle had become someone I couldn’t imagine my life without.