CHAPTER 36
Brynn
Swiss Alps, Switzerland
Day Ten Off Grid
A week passed after I told Jameson I wasn’t leaving.
The drone stayed with us. Pieces of it still cluttered the kitchen table, but its presence lingered in every locked shutter and every glance toward the tree line.
So no, it wasn’t peaceful. Peace was too generous a word for a place with automated shutters, three exit protocols, and a man who waited until I fell asleep to slip his arm from beneath me, check the perimeter, and come back to bed before doing it all over again before coffee.
But the week passed nonetheless.
One day was worse than the others.
Jameson barely spoke. He checked the locks until checking became something else, then disappeared outside with no explanation beyond perimeter.
I followed him.
He made it halfway up the mountain before finally telling me it was the anniversary of Harrison’s death.
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I stopped trying.
I walked beside him until the trees thinned and the ridge opened beneath us. Then I pulled the little instant camera from my coat and made him stand beneath a sunset he had no interest in seeing.
He objected to the camera.
He did not object when I took his hand.
We trained. We worked. We argued over what counted as full disclosure and whether “because I said so” qualified as an explanation. It didn’t. Jameson adapted with visible suffering.
At night, he came to bed only after checking the locks twice, and I let him because I’d stopped pretending the sound didn’t help me sleep too.
I still didn’t know what to do with the fact that he’d built Mirrorstream.
There wasn’t exactly a handbook for sleeping beside the man who helped design the machine whose bastard child and its operators were currently trying to erase me.
Trust me. I would’ve read it.
But he’d also broken the original. And he’d stopped making me pry every truth out of him with a crowbar and a threat. Most days, anyway.
And somewhere between the coffee, the bruises, the bread, and the way he started giving me the truth before I had to drag it out of him, staying began to feel less like surrender and more like a choice.
Which was probably why leaving the cabin for a simple supply run felt so dangerous.
By the morning of Day Ten, though, danger had competition.
Because survival had started to taste like bread.
Not metaphorically. Actual bread.
Jameson had brought enough of it into this house that I could feel myself becoming structurally dependent on carbohydrates.
I could respect the bread. I had respected the bread. I’d even enjoyed the bread… at first.
But there came a point in every woman’s life when she had to look the man protecting her from international erasure in the eye and say, with courage and conviction, “For the love of God, I need a vegetable.”
He looked up from the map spread across the table. “I’m going into the village,” he said. “You’re staying here.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“No,” he said.
“I need vegetables,” I said. “Fruit. Shampoo. Conditioner. Body wash that doesn’t smell like it was formulated for a man named Lars who chops wood shirtless in February. Prescriptions. Actual socks. Possibly dignity, if they sell it in travel sizes.”
His expression didn’t change. “No,” he repeated.
I smiled. “Careful. That sounded dangerously close to handling me.”
He stared at me for one long second. Then he exhaled, dragged his hand down his face, and looked briefly toward the ceiling as if asking a higher power for diplomatic support. “Are we going to be in the kind of relationship where you throw that word at me every time I make a security decision?”
“Of course not, darling.”
His eyes narrowed.
I smiled. “We’re going to be in the kind of relationship that doesn’t have sex.”
His eyes narrowed. “And now you’re going to hold your body over my head?”
I blinked. “Oh my God. You think I’m withholding sex because you said no.”
“I didn’t say that,” he said.
“You absolutely thought it.”
His eyes held mine. “You introduced celibacy thirty seconds after accusing me of handling you.”
“That is an ugly interpretation of a very elegant threat.”
“It was still a threat,” he said.
I came around the chair.
His eyes followed me, wary now, but not retreating. Before he could stand, I slid one knee over his thigh, then the other, and settled carefully into his lap.
His hands lifted, waiting.
I caught them and set them on my hips. “This isn’t a punishment.”
“Feels like one,” he muttered.
I leaned closer, brushing my mouth over his. Not enough to start anything. Enough to make his fingers flex. “I would prove it right now,” I whispered, “but we’re on a timetable.”
His eyes darkened, then narrowed. “Then why?”
“Because,” I said, drawing the word out carefully, “if I can’t go into town with you, I can’t get a refill on my pills.”
He blinked.
Then every soft, bruised thing in his expression disappeared beneath calculation.
“Your birth control,” he said.
“Look at you. Context clues.”
His jaw flexed once. His hands were still on my hips, careful but no longer quite as detached as he probably wanted them to be.
“You should’ve told me you were running low,” he said.
“I am telling you.”
His gaze dropped to my mouth.
Then lower.
Then he cleared his throat and looked very deliberately back at my face. “Those are important.”
“Very important.”
His eyes narrowed. “Do not make this harder.”
“I’m literally trying to make sure we can keep making this hard.”
For one dangerous second, he looked like he might forget the village entirely.
Then his fingers tightened on my hips. “Brynn.”
“Jameson.”
“You need a pharmacy,” he said, as if forcing the sentence out.
“I do.”
“You could’ve put it on the list,” he said.
“And sent you into a Swiss pharmacy to pantomime my prescription history with your charming bedside manner and a burner phone? Tempting, but no.”
“I can manage a pharmacy,” he said.
“I’m sure you can manage many things. My uterus isn’t one of them.”
His mouth opened, then closed.
Excellent. Growth.
Then his fingers tightened on my hips. “Fine. You can come with me. You follow my lead if something changes.”
“I listen in the moment,” I said. “I take it out on you later.”
His mouth curved faintly. “Acceptable.”
“Excellent.”
I slid off his lap slowly enough to make his hands tighten before he let me go.
Then I dropped to my knees between his boots.
His entire body went still. “Brynn.”
I looked up at him, fingers already working the buckle of his belt with deliberate, unhurried movements. The metal gave with a soft clink. “What? I’m showing appreciation for your personal growth.”
His eyes darkened to something molten. One hand came down to cup my cheek, thumb brushing my bottom lip.
I tugged the zipper down, the sound loud in the quiet cabin, and found nothing underneath.
I paused.
Then looked up.
He held my gaze. “We’re low on laundry detergent.”
For one second, I forgot every clever thing I had ever said in my life.
“Practical,” I murmured.
Then I wrapped my hand around him.
“Fuck,” he breathed, the word rough.
I leaned in, dragging my tongue up the full length of him, and whatever answer he might have given turned into a rough sound in the back of his throat.
His hips jerked once before he caught himself, his hand tightening in my hair without guiding me. Still careful. Still letting me decide. I did it again, slower this time, tasting him until I reached the head. Then I took him into my mouth.
The groan that tore out of him was low and wrecked.
I hollowed my cheeks and slid down, taking as much of him as I could. His breathing changed above me, turning uneven in a way that made my own pulse kick hard.
At some point, he must have taken off his glasses.
I didn’t see him do it. One second they were there, catching the pale morning light from the window, and the next there was nothing between me and his eyes. No lenses. No reflection to hide behind. No shield.
Just Jameson watching me like he was losing the argument and enjoying every second of defeat.
Satisfaction moved through me, warm and immediate. I moaned around him before I could stop myself.
His hand tightened.
“Brynn,” he breathed.
I pulled back until only the head remained between my lips, then sank down again, deeper this time. My hand worked the base in steady rhythm with my mouth.
He looked ruined. Controlled, still, but barely.
His jaw was clenched. His chest rose and fell too fast. His other hand gripped the edge of the chair like he was one bad decision away from breaking it.
“Brynn. Shit. That’s…” he said.
His words cut off when I swallowed around him.
His head fell back for a second, the tendons in his neck standing out, before he dragged his gaze back down to mine.
There it was. That look.
Not control.
Promise.
Like he was already calculating exactly how he was going to return the favor the second we got back to the cabin.
I was more than happy to let him plan.
***
By the time we reached the village, the taste of him was gone from my mouth, but not from my memory.
Which was inconvenient, because he had spent the entire drive turning a grocery run into a military operation.
No real names. No cards.
No phones powered on inside the village. As if he’d even given me mine back.
No standing in front of cameras.
No looking at the same reflective surface twice.
No unnecessary conversation, which I thought was rich coming from a man who considered move a complete sentence.
He parked behind a row of narrow stone buildings instead of pulling into the square. No explanation. No lecture. Just a clean turn into a space beside a delivery entrance and a slow sweep of his gaze across the street before he killed the engine.
He’d spent the drive explaining enough.
If I needed him, I was supposed to touch the strap of my tote twice.
If he needed me to move, he would touch my elbow once.
If everything went wrong, I was to follow the narrow street beside the bakery to the blue door with the chipped paint, turn left at the fountain, and keep walking until he caught up.
Which was, frankly, not my favorite plan.