CHAPTER 30
Brynn
Swiss Alps, Switzerland
Day Three Off Grid
By morning, the softness from the night before hadn’t disappeared exactly.
It had just been folded carefully away beneath coffee, locked shutters, and Jameson’s quiet insistence that I learn how to handle the firearm he’d left in my nightstand.
Which was how I ended up standing at the kitchen island, staring down at it like it had personally offended me.
The SIG looked smaller there than it had when I tossed it into my duffel.
Which was rude.
It wasn’t like I’d never seen one up close. Beckett had made sure of that years ago, with his usual cheerful approach to worst-case scenarios. But it had been a long time since I’d needed to think of one as anything other than something locked away in someone else’s emergency plan.
Anything capable of ruining my entire life should’ve had the decency to look more dramatic. Bigger, maybe. Meaner. Something with shadows around it and a soundtrack.
Instead, it sat there on the wood like an ugly little paperweight with a box of ammo next to it.
Jameson stood on the opposite side of the island with both hands resting near it, not touching it yet.
I stared at the SIG and tried very hard not to think about where he’d first stashed it.
“You’re making a face,” he said.
“I’m having a very private moment.”
His gaze flicked from me to the gun and back to me. “With the SIG?”
“With the memory of where you stored it.”
His expression didn’t change.
Not even a twitch.
“You needed it within reach,” he said.
“I needed it not to be spooning my vibrator.”
“They weren’t touching,” he said.
I closed my eyes. “That’s not the defense you think it is.”
“It was placed at the back of the drawer,” he said.
“Jameson.”
His index finger tapped once beside it. “Yes?”
“Stop helping.”
He looked down again, and the smallest shift moved through his mouth. Not quite a smile. I’d noticed his smiles were rare, endangered things that had to be spotted from a safe distance.
Annoyingly, I was developing a real interest in endangered species. I only wished he’d let me see the full thing once in a while.
Then my gaze dropped back to the gun.
Funny or not, someone had already fired into my apartment once.
Apparently, this ugly little paperweight was how I made sure they didn’t get another chance.
“Are we starting or not?” I asked.
“We’re starting,” he said.
“Great.” I pushed off the counter and reached for it.
I kept my finger straight along the frame and pointed the muzzle down and away. Then I pressed the magazine release, and the magazine dropped into my palm. I set it beside the SIG, pulled the slide back, and checked the chamber.
Empty.
I looked again for good measure.
Still empty.
I looked to the box of ammo and lifted my brow. “You want to do target practice with defense rounds?”
His eyes held mine. “This house wasn’t stocked for recreational shooting.”
“Fair enough.”
This place wasn’t a vacation cabin. It wasn’t a retreat. It wasn’t a secret romantic bunker with cleaning ladies and a very intense security system.
It was a place built around the assumption that one day someone, or in our case, multiple someones, might have to survive inside it.
My hand hovered over the box for half a second before I opened it.
The rounds sat in neat rows inside the box.
I picked one up and pressed it into the magazine.
The motion was slower than it used to be, but not unfamiliar. Beckett had drilled this into me years ago, probably somewhere between teaching me how to get out of a zip tie and how to identify a man lying badly.
Push down. Slide back. Seat it clean.
The first round clicked into place.
Then the next.
By the fourth, my thumb had found the rhythm again.
Jameson watched from the other side of the island, quiet enough that the silence started to feel like part of the test.
I finished loading the magazine and picked up the SIG again.
Magazine in until it clicked.
Finger straight along the frame.
Muzzle down and away.
I pulled the slide back and released it.
The sound cut through the kitchen.
That was when my stomach tightened.
Not because I didn’t know what I was doing.
Because now it was loaded.
I kept my finger off the trigger, angled it safely toward the floor, and looked up at him.
“What’s next, Professor?”
Something shifted in his face.
Not amusement exactly.
Recognition.
“That depends,” he said.
“On?”
“Whether you’re asking because you think it’s funny,” he said, “or because you know.”
I blinked. “Know what?”
“That I am one,” he said.
My brows lifted. “Hold on. You’re an actual professor?”
“Yes,” he said.
“As in students call you Professor Mercer?”
“Some do,” he said.
A laugh slipped out before I could stop it, soft and disbelieving. “That’s hot.”
His gaze dropped to the gun, then back to me. “Outside.”
Of course.
Because apparently breakfast was over, and Professor Mercer’s survival curriculum had office hours.
I followed him toward the back door with the SIG angled safely down and away.
Outside, the cold caught under my sweater immediately. The clearing looked different with a loaded gun in my hand. Yesterday it had been trees, frost, and Jameson correcting my stance while pretending not to stare at my mouth.
Today, every open line looked like distance. Every tree looked like cover. Every slope looked like a place someone could appear before I knew what to do with my hands.
A paper target had been fixed near the far side of the clearing, clean and square against a backing, with a dirt rise behind it.
“You set this up before I woke up?” I asked.
“After perimeter,” he said.
“Naturally.”
He stopped beside me, attention on my hands first, then my face. “Show me what you know.”
That landed differently than a correction.
I looked at him. “You’re not going to rearrange me like furniture?”
“Not unless I need to,” he said. “If I change everything at once, your body won’t know what to reach for when you’re scared.”
My grip tightened slightly around the SIG.
“This isn’t about making you shoot like me,” he said. “It’s about finding out what still works when you don’t have time to think.”
“Makes sense.” I nodded and looked back at the target.
I took my stance the way I was taught.
Feet set. Knees soft. Weight forward, but not exaggerated.
Both hands firm around the grip.
Finger straight until I was ready.
For half a second, I could almost hear my brother’s voice in my head.
Don’t fight the gun. Manage it.
Jameson stayed quiet.
“Well?” I asked.
He lifted one hand toward the target. “Whenever you’re ready.”
***
By the time we came back outside after lunch, my hands smelled like gun oil, smoke, and bologna, no matter how many times I’d washed them.
The target stood at the far side with a messy cluster of holes through the paper, evidence that I was not entirely hopeless.
Jameson replaced the target while I stood near the stump, checking the SIG.
He walked back across the clearing, coat unzipped, sleeves pushed up despite the cold. “Show me.”
I held up the firearm.
His gaze lingered for a moment before he looked toward the target. “Five rounds. Slow. Don’t chase the center. Repeat the process.”
I lifted the gun.
The first shot cracked across the clearing.
My body didn’t jump the way it had that morning.
Second shot.
Breathe.
Third.
The rhythm started to make sense. Not comfort. Never that. But sequence. A small set of decisions I could control inside a situation built from everything I could not.
Fourth shot.
My grip shifted slightly.
I felt it happen, but too late.
The fifth shot kicked harder than expected, and a hot sting sliced across the web of skin between my thumb and finger.
“Shit.” I lowered it immediately, finger straight, muzzle downrange.
He was already moving. “Set it down.”
“I’m fine.”
There was no panic in his voice. “Set it down, Brynn.”
I placed it carefully on the nearby stump.
A thin line of blood had opened near the base of my thumb.
“Oh,” I said. “That’s annoying.”
He took my wrist, then immediately loosened his grip as if he had remembered himself mid-contact. “Let me see.”
“It’s tiny.”
His eyes didn’t leave my hand. “Even so. Let me see.”
I gave him my hand fully.
He turned it over. “Slide bite,” he said. “Usually small. Always a bitch.”
I looked up at him. “It’s so much fun when you curse.”
His brow lifted.
“You know, because you’re always so collected and controlled. It feels almost rebellious.”
“You say that like it’s a flaw.”
His attention dropped back to my hand.
“You adjusted your grip after the fourth shot,” he said. “Your dominant hand rode too high.”
“I noticed, but too late.”
He pulled a small first aid kit from his jacket pocket and opened it across his palm.
I stared at it. “Do you just shed medical supplies?”
“Only during office hours,” he said, sorting through gauze packets and antiseptic wipes.
My eyes snapped up.
His hand moved to rip open the antiseptic packet.
I stared at him. “Was that a joke?”
His face did something fascinating. Color touched the tops of his cheekbones, faint and fast, like his body had betrayed him before he could file the reaction away.
“Oh my God.” I leaned closer. “It was.”
I flexed my fingers carefully. “Does my heroic battlefield injury mean I get a question?”
He looked at me then. “No.”
“Heartless.”
“You already had one,” he said.
“But I bled.”
“You were nicked,” he said.
“By a weapon.”
He raised a brow and opened his mouth as if to say something, but his attention shifted immediately.
Not to me.
Past me.
The transformation was swift and complete.
One second he was holding my hand. The next, he was listening with every part of his body.
I froze. “What?”
His hand lifted slightly.
I recognized the order immediately.
I needed to be quiet.
Even the clearing seemed to hold its breath with me.
At first, I heard nothing except wind moving through branches and the faint creak of the target paper where it tugged against its pins.
Then the sound threaded through, a low mechanical buzz that would’ve been easy to miss if I weren’t standing beside a man whose nervous system apparently had military-grade reception.
I looked toward the trees. “Is that a drone?”
Jameson released my hand and drew his gun.
My stomach dropped. “Jameson.”
“Behind me,” he said.
“It could be hikers or tourists. People use drones for mountain footage all the time.”
“Behind me, Brynn,” he said.
The buzz dipped lower.
Then I saw it.
Small and dark between the trees, moving too cleanly through the gaps beyond the clearing. It skimmed along the slope, banked hard, then circled near the property line.
What the hell is it doing?
Jameson aimed.
“Wait,” I said. “Are you seriously going to shoot it?”
I had barely gotten the question out before he fired. The shot cracked through the clearing, and I flinched hard.
The drone jerked sideways but kept moving, the buzz rising into a fast, angry whine.
He fired again.
Missed.
Or maybe the drone was just too small and fast to hit cleanly. It cut behind a cluster of branches, vanished for half a heartbeat, then appeared again, even lower now.
Jameson moved sideways, placing himself between me and its line of sight.
His third shot clipped it.
The sound changed first.
The clean buzz warped into a damaged whine. The drone tilted, scraped through the top of a pine, recovered for one ugly second, then dropped beyond the slope.
A few seconds later, something crashed through brush and hit the ground with a dull, distant crack.
“Jesus Christ,” I snapped. “Did you just shoot down a toy?”
“Toys don’t hold altitude in crosswind and circle a property line more than once,” he said.
Silence rushed back in.
He holstered his weapon, snatched the SIG from the stump, and caught my wrist, pulling me toward the cabin.
“Inside,” he said.
“But the drone.”
“Inside first,” he said.
“If that thing recorded anything, we need to get it.”
“We will,” he said.
“It could be damaged.”
“It’s already damaged,” he said.
The calm way he said it made me want to scream.
He got us to the back door, keyed us in, and pushed me through first. The lock turned behind him. Then another. Then the alarm panel chirped as he entered a code.
A low mechanical hum moved through the walls.
For one awful second, I thought another drone had found us.
Then the shutters slid down over the windows.
I stared at them. “Have those been automated the whole time?”
“Yes,” he said.
“You let me close them manually yesterday.”
“It gave you something to do,” he said.
I gaped at him.
He moved through the cabin in a fast, methodical sweep. Windows. Hallway. Secondary door. Every movement controlled enough to make the rest of the room feel frantic around him.
“Sit,” he said.
“No.”
His attention dropped to my hand. “I need to finish wrapping that properly before we move.”
That stopped me.
I sat at the kitchen chair. “Fine.”
He took the seat across from me and unwrapped the quick strip of gauze he’d pressed over it outside.
“It’s fine,” I said.
He cleaned the cut again, quick but careful. My fingers twitched once, and his grip adjusted immediately.
A bandage probably would’ve worked, but the cut sat where my hand kept flexing.
He secured the fresh gauze with neat, precise strips of tape.
“The flight path wasn’t random,” he said. “But that doesn’t tell us whether someone was watching live or whether it was running a programmed sweep.”
He sat back just enough to look at me fully. “It was looking for something.”
“Us?”
“Possibly,” he said.
He turned his head slightly toward the shuttered windows and listened.
I hated that the silence no longer felt safe.
The drone had changed everything in a matter of moments. Before, the safe house had been strange, but it had still felt separate from the world, locked away and hidden enough to become ours in a way I hadn’t admitted even to myself.
I looked down at my hand. The bandage was neat and almost gentle.
“The drone saw us, didn’t it?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said.
“How bad is maybe?”
His eyes held mine. “Bad enough that I need to recover it before someone else does. I need to know whether it captured anything, whether it transmitted anything, and whether there’s anything stored onboard.”