CHAPTER 6
Brynn
Geneva, Switzerland
One Year Ago
I dressed in the dark while he slept.
The room was cool against my skin, the sheets still warm behind me.
For one dangerous second, I considered waking him.
Not to explain.
Just to ask his name.
My hand hovered near his shoulder, close enough to feel the heat of him, then fell.
This might have been the strongest pull I’d ever felt toward anyone.
That was exactly the problem.
My life didn’t have room for something that could make leaving feel like a loss.
I took my shoes in one hand and opened the door without letting the latch click.
Then I stepped into the cold hallway before I did something reckless.
Like asking him to stop me.
***
I went to the gala for one name.
I left without it.
That should’ve been the end of it.
I called Matt twice before noon.
The first call went unanswered. The second rolled directly to voicemail.
I sent him a message instead.
No Mercer. Call me.
Matt disappeared for stretches when he was working, sometimes long enough that anyone else would have assumed he was dead in a ditch. I knew better than to panic after a few hours.
I also knew he had sent me into that room with more information than he had shared.
Go home, Hunt. Take the loss. Pretend you didn’t spend half the night in borrowed jewelry trying to bait a ghost into introducing himself.
Instead, I walked out with a list of things that didn’t make sense.
Not evidence. Evidence would’ve been nice. Evidence paid bills. Evidence got editors to answer emails before their second espresso.
What I had was a room full of powerful people who kept performing normal a little too hard.
People cut themselves off mid-sentence when certain topics came up. Not awkwardly. Not by accident. Cleanly, like they knew exactly where the edge was and stepped back before crossing it.
One man stopped talking when someone passed behind him, then picked the conversation back up like nothing had happened. Another corrected a date before anyone questioned him.
Everyone smiled through it.
That was what bothered me. No one looked scared or surprised. They all just adjusted, smoothed, pivoted, and kept drinking champagne like diplomacy wasn’t just theater with better tailoring.
It didn’t feel coordinated, but it wasn’t random either.
I couldn’t prove anything. That was the problem.
A feeling didn’t sell. A strange room didn’t sell. A man named Jameson Mercer, who may or may not have existed, definitely didn’t sell.
Editors wanted facts. Documents. Names. Something they could print without getting sued before lunch.
So I stayed.
A week, I told myself. Long enough to see if I’d caught something real or if one bad night in a room full of powerful people had gotten under my skin.
Long enough to figure out whether Jameson Mercer was a man, a rumor, or some asshole’s idea of a breadcrumb.
Long enough to stop wondering whether I’d stayed because of the story or because leaving Geneva felt too much like leaving him.
That part was inconvenient.
I ignored it with the maturity and emotional stability I was famous for.
Within two days, I’d found a flat.
I signed on month to month. Cash. No questions. No paper trail worth following.
Then I bought better coffee, a second notebook, and enough groceries to make the place feel less temporary than I wanted it to.
Jameson Mercer stayed in the file.
But he couldn’t be the only thing I chased.
Rent still existed. So did food. So did the brutal little reality that I couldn’t live on instinct and paranoia, no matter how good both of mine usually were.
Rude, honestly.
So I wrote the stories I could prove. Sanctions. Private security money. Shell companies with expensive lawyers and very boring public faces. Anything clean enough to sell while the Mercer file sat open in the background, waiting for one thread to pull loose.
And between those stories, I kept finding the same impossible neatness.
Different names.
Different places.
Same empty space where a person used to be.
I didn’t know what it was yet.
But it was real.
I looked down at the Mercer file. “I’m not done with you.”