CHAPTER 23
Brynn
Geneva Outskirts, Switzerland
Day One Off Grid
You were closer than anyone had been in years.
For one stupid, reckless second, the words felt like validation.
I hated that.
I hated that some part of me still wanted to grab them with both hands and hold them up to every editor, every source, every smug, careful man who had ever looked at my notes and decided I’d mistaken obsession for evidence.
I had been right.
The pattern was real.
The missing records. The people whose lives stopped matching the paper trail.
All of it.
Real.
And then the rest of what he’d said caught up.
Closer than anyone had been in years.
Not close enough to publish.
Not close enough to expose anything.
But close enough to make someone put a rifle on me.
My coffee had gone cold.
I sipped from it anyway.
Jameson didn’t look at me. His attention stayed on the screen, on whatever ugly little web I had apparently crawled into without knowing what lived at the center.
“Closer to what?” I asked.
His jaw shifted.
One small movement. One crack in all that control.
“Mirrorstream,” he said.
The mug slipped in my hand. I caught it before it fell, but the ceramic still hit the counter with a clang.
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
Jameson’s fingers paused over the keyboard.
That was it. The only reaction. A fractional stillness, like even his body understood speaking the name had changed the room.
I set the mug down before I could drop it for real this time. “So Mirrorstream is real.”
“Yes,” he said.
I stared at him. “That’s it? Just yes?”
His eyes stayed on the screen. “You posed a direct question, so I gave a direct answer.”
“I asked what I was close to,” I said. “You said Mirrorstream like that explained why Matt is dead and someone shot through my apartment.”
“You asked what you were close to,” he said. “The answer is Mirrorstream.”
My laughter was a choked, awkward sound. “Right,” I said. “Sorry. I’ll phrase my existential horror more specifically next time.”
He finally looked at me.
The fire popped behind us, and for one second, the sound made my shoulders jump.
“What is it?” I asked.
Jameson looked back at the laptop. “It was a system.”
“Was?”
His mouth tightened. “Is, if someone brought it back to life.”
“What kind of system?” I asked, then shook my head before he could answer. “No. Wait. I know what it does. Or part of it.”
My eyes dropped to the laptop, to the files I’d spent months building from scraps and dead ends.
“It doesn’t make people disappear like a magic trick. It makes the world agree they were never standing there in the first place.”
Which was somehow worse. At least a magic trick admitted there was a trick.
I looked back at him. “That’s Mirrorstream, isn’t it? That’s what it does.”
He didn’t answer right away. The scan moved across my screen in slow increments, pulling apart the contents of my life while he decided how much truth I deserved.
“Jameson.”
He took his glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose, the first openly human gesture I’d seen from him since we’d reunited. “It was designed to identify people who were hiding inside systems,” he said.
My hand found the edge of the island as if I needed the stability. “But that’s not where it stopped, is it?”
“No,” he said quietly. “At first, it was threat detection. Hidden identities. Covert networks. People operating under names that weren’t theirs.”
“At first,” I repeated.
His eyes stayed on the floor for half a second too long. “Then people started using it for the opposite reason.”
My stomach tightened. “Not to save people.”
His gaze lifted to mine. “To remove people who became inconvenient.”
“My God,” I breathed.
I looked down at my laptop, at the files, at every name I had chased across borders and broken archives and dead links.
“That’s what I was seeing,” I said. “That’s why everything kept slipping through my fingers.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Files weren’t just disappearing. They were being replaced.”
His silence answered before he finally did. “Because they were being overwritten.”
My throat closed around the word.
Overwritten.
Like people were drafts. Like a life could be replaced if the original became inconvenient enough.
“Someone was playing God,” I said.
His fingers stilled over the keys.
“There were no witnesses left to contradict it,” he said quietly.
I pushed away from the island and paced three steps before turning back. There wasn’t enough room in the cabin for this conversation.
The air moved in and out of my lungs, but none of it seemed to help.
I sat down because my knees had stopped being useful.
The chair scraped too loudly against the floor.
Jameson’s eyes followed the movement, but he didn’t come closer.
I dropped my head into my hands. “Shit. This is so much worse than I could have imagined.”
He said nothing.
“I was really hoping the shots were from the man following me from the club.”
The room went still.
Slowly, I lifted my head.
Jameson was staring at me. “Excuse me?”
I blinked. “What?”
“There was a man following you from the club,” he said, each word too careful. “You decided to mention that now?”
“In my defense, there’s been a lot happening.”
His expression didn’t move.
“Okay, bad defense,” I muttered.
“Brynn,” he said.
“What?”
His voice went very quiet. “Tell me what happened.”