CHAPTER 45
Brynn
Geneva, Switzerland
Day Twenty-Nine Off Grid
I sat cross-legged on the bed with my laptop open, hair still damp from a shower, while Jameson worked at the tiny hotel bureau that could barely be called a desk.
I was transcribing my notes.
We had been at it for hours, minus one break for breakfast from a place around the corner that sold pastries so good I briefly considered proposing to the woman behind the counter.
I wanted seventeen of them.
I restrained myself to two because I was an adult.
Barely.
How I’d never discovered them when I lived here, I had no idea.
I watched the back of his neck, the tension in his shoulders, the careful precision of his hands as he worked. “Tell me you have something.”
He didn’t look up. “Something, yes.”
“Useful?”
“Possibly,” he said.
Then his attention dropped back to the camera.
I got up and crossed the room, stepping around my boots, his jacket, and the bag with the guns I was trying very hard not to keep looking at.
I leaned against the edge of the bureau and looked at his screen. “This is all from the camera?”
It was mostly nonsense.
Not even useful nonsense. To me, it just looked like broken blocks of letters and numbers.
“Yes,” he said.
He dragged another file open.
A black window appeared, then stuttered into a frozen frame of nothing.
Gray static, a smear of wall, and a timestamp missing half its numbers.
Then it collapsed.
I stared at the screen. “Was that video?”
“It looks like it might have been once upon a time,” he said. “Distorted now.”
I straightened.
He ran another extraction.
The screen flashed again.
Another strip of corrupted video opened, jittered, then froze on what might have been the edge of a doorway. The image was washed out and broken into blocks, but there was shape there. Movement. The suggestion of a person passing through the frame.
Then the file skipped and died.
I looked at him. “Can you clean that up?”
“Some of it,” he said. “But not enough.”
His fingers moved.
The next file opened to static.
The one after that, black.
Then one stabilized for half a second longer than the others.
Not cleanly.
Not enough to call it footage.
But enough to show a figure half-broken by static, torn apart by digital noise and missing frames. The face was mostly gone, the body more suggestion than proof.
But it was something.
I pointed to the screen. “Can you export that?”
“I can pull the frames,” he said.
“Then pull them.”
He glanced back at me.
I frowned. “What?”
He looked back at the screen. “They’re damaged.”
“I can see that.”
“Brynn, it may be a waste of time. They’re garbage,” he said.
“Jameson, I’ve saved wedding photos shot in candlelight, rain, and panic. I once pulled a bride’s face out of a reception hall that had exactly two working bulbs and a fog machine. Put the cursed little video scraps on a thumb drive.”
For once, he looked almost impressed.
Not openly.
God forbid.
But the way he zeroed in on me made my stomach do something stupid.
“Well,” he said, “it certainly can’t hurt.”
“Careful. That almost sounded like faith in me.”
“It was more like statistical openness,” he said.
He exported the corrupted frames, copied them onto a thumb drive, and held it out.
I took it from him.
The metal was warm from his hand.
I plugged it into my laptop and opened the folder.
Static.
The second file was worse.
The third looked like someone had filmed a ghost through dirty ice.
But I’d worked with worse.
Photography taught you to look for what survived.
Edges. Shadows. Repeated shapes. The small betrayals of light.
I adjusted contrast. Lifted shadows. Pulled noise back where I could. Compared frames against the damaged ones before and after. Stacked what matched. Deleted what didn’t.
Not magic.
Just stubbornness.
Across from me, Jameson kept working through the camera cache, trying to pull anything else before it degraded.
I focused on the images.
One after another.
Blurred people. Mostly empty hallway. Broken frames. Static chewing through shapes before they could become anything useful.
Then one image caught.
Not cleanly, and not all at once.
It surfaced in pieces.
A cheekbone.
The hard line of a mouth.
Dark hair pulled back too tightly.
I sharpened the frame, then pulled back before the image broke worse. The face remained damaged, half-eaten by artifacting, but enough of the structure held.
The posture held.
Stillness and precision survived.
My breath caught. “That’s her.”
Jameson turned. “Who?”
“The woman from the basement. The one who caught me.”
His chair shifted as he crossed the room.
I zoomed in, then immediately regretted it when the image began to break apart.
I pulled back. “That’s definitely her.”
He leaned closer to the screen and squinted, one hand braced on the edge of the bureau. His attention moved over the damaged face, then lower, studying the angle of her shoulders and the rigid line of her posture.
He leaned in farther. “Holy fuck.”
I snapped toward him.
He didn’t often say things like that.
Not unless something had broken clean through his control.
I watched him. “Do you know her?”
His jaw tightened. “The probability of that is extremely low.”
“Who is she?”
He stared at the screen for another second. “Tomar Rana.”
The name seemed to leave something behind in the room.
“She was Mirrorstream’s continuity lead,” he said. “She handled field execution and identity stabilization. The part that made a fabricated life hold up under pressure.”
“So she was on the taskforce, on your team?”
“She was,” he said.
His voice had gone too controlled.
I looked from him to the damaged image. “You’re sure it’s her?”
“Yes,” he said.
“You can barely see her face.”
“I don’t need to see all of it,” he said.
There was no hesitation in the answer.
He knew her well enough to be certain from almost nothing.
I studied him. “She was someone you trusted.”
“Yes,” he said.
He reached past me and copied the restored image onto the thumb drive, then returned to his computer. He opened one of the blank-looking windows he used when he didn’t want a search connected to us, uploaded the file, and started it running.
Then he sat back.
His attention stayed fixed on the image as if he were waiting for it to become someone else.
Not at the evidence around her.
At her.
I knew before I wanted to.
I kept my eyes on him. “She was more, wasn’t she?”
His jaw shifted once. He looked back at the screen. “That isn’t relevant.”
He was quiet for a beat. “We were involved.”
My stomach tightened.
Not jealousy.
Okay, not only jealousy.
I looked back at him. “How involved?”
“Enough,” he said.
That was not an answer, and we both knew it.
I looked back at the screen. “And you never thought she could be part of something like this.”
“No,” he said. “She understood what the system meant to me. She knew it was getting out of control. If she was part of this, then she had been lying to me long before the taskforce ended.”
I glanced at him. “Jameson, she was standing outside that basement.”
“I can see that.” The words were controlled. His face was not.
Something in him had gone rigid around the contradiction, like if he could hold still enough, the evidence might rearrange itself into something that made sense.
His gaze stayed on her image. “I believed her.”
I let the silence sit before I asked, “Did you love her?”
His head turned toward me. “I don’t know.”
The answer was immediate, but not defensive.
I held his gaze. “You don’t know?”
He blinked once, then looked back at the screen. “I don’t have a reference point for any of that.”
There it was.
Not an excuse.
Just his truth.
And right now, it was leaving him with no way to understand why this hurt.
I shifted closer, turning toward him fully.
His eyes flicked to mine, wary and unguarded in a way he probably didn’t realize.
I lifted my hand and touched his jaw. “Then let me tell you.”
He didn’t move.
I kept my hand against his face. “Love is when your body reacts before your brain catches up. When someone is in danger and every other priority stops mattering.”
His breathing changed.
My thumb rested against his skin. “It’s sitting outside their door all night because you think they might leave, but you need to know they’re safe if they stay.”
His eyes snapped to mine, and I smiled softly. “It’s changing routes, plans, and every rule you made for yourself because protecting them became the first condition.”
I brushed my thumb over the tight line of his jaw. “It’s knowing distance would be safer and choosing not to create it anyway.”
His stare held mine.
“And it’s being terrified by how much someone matters,” I said quietly, “but still letting them stay against your chest when you know you should move.”
His lips parted.
For a second, he only looked at me.
Then something in him settled.
Not disappeared. Settled. Like the fear had finally been assigned the correct name.
“Oh,” he said quietly.
I almost laughed, except my chest hurt too much. “Oh? That’s all you have to say?”
He looked at me like he was solving a proof he should have recognized sooner.
“Then that is what this has been,” he said.
I froze because he meant it literally.
He wasn’t trying to be romantic. He was telling me the truth as he understood it.
I barely got his name out. “Jameson.”
“I changed the parameters before I understood why.” His gaze stayed on mine. “Your safety became the first condition in every decision. Distance stopped correcting the problem. It made it worse.”
My breath went still.
“And the possibility of losing you makes everything else stop functioning the way it should,” he said.
The words hit harder than anything rehearsed could have.
I stared at him. “You make that sound deeply inconvenient.”
“It would be catastrophic,” he said.
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it, wet at the edges.
His thumb brushed beneath my eye.
“I don’t know when it began,” he said. “But I know what it is now.”
My throat tightened. “That might be the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“It was not intended to be romantic,” he said.
“I know. That’s the best part.”
I leaned in and kissed him.
A promise.
When I pulled back, my forehead rested against his.
His hand stayed at the back of my neck, gentle and grounding.
For a few seconds, neither of us moved.
Then I kissed him again, slower this time.
His arm came around my waist and held me against him, but he did not push for more. He only kept me there, his mouth softening against mine as if closeness itself was something he was still learning how to trust.
The computer chimed.
The sound cut through the room with brutal precision.
Jameson went still against me.
I sighed into the space between us. “I hate your computer.”
“It may have found something,” he said.
“Of course it did.”
He pressed one last kiss to my forehead before turning back toward the bureau.
I stayed close as he clicked through two blank-looking screens, entered something too fast for me to read, then opened a page that was public-facing and painfully clean. All white space, soft blue accents, and language polished until it no longer had fingerprints.
A woman appeared at the top.
Different hair. Heavier makeup. Different name.
But my body knew before my brain finished translating the page.
The face was cleaner here, posed for a professional photograph.
She looked downright altruistic.
And of course she was just as fucking beautiful as I remembered.
That was somehow the worst part.
Under the photograph was a name.
Ingrid Sarv.
Below that:
Chief Executive Officer, Serpens Geminus Foundation.
I nearly stopped breathing.
A notice beneath the biography announced a donor recognition dinner that weekend at Kadriorg Art Museum in Tallinn, honoring advancements in humanitarian identification systems, refugee tracing, and missing persons recovery.
I read it a third time because apparently I enjoyed being stabbed by vocabulary.
Humanitarian identification.
Missing persons recovery.
Identity restoration.
I stared at the language. “That is a disgusting amount of pretty language.”
“Yes,” he said.
I stared at the screen.
At the clean font.
The museum name.
The donors.
I pointed at the page. “Are you telling me she’s using this thing to help people in public and destroy them in private?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Which was an answer.
“This is pretty damning, Jameson.”
His eyes stayed on the page.
“All of it.” I pointed at the screen. “Refugees. Missing people. Identification systems. Those are people nobody can afford to doubt. People with broken paperwork and no safety net and no one powerful enough to say, actually, that record is wrong.”
I kept going. “And if she fixes them, she’s a saint. If she rewrites them, who’s going to know the difference?”
His jaw tightened. “No one.”
I paced a few steps away. “I honestly don’t even know what to do with this information. I have a thousand ways I could write the exposure piece on her alone.”
Jameson hadn’t moved.
I spun back toward him. “Will you say something?”
“I’m thinking,” he said.
“About?”
“If she’s spending this much money in Estonia, it may be the center of operations,” he said.
I looked back at the screen, then at him. “You think we need to go to Estonia?”
“More specifically,” he said, “I think we need to go to Tallinn and attend this dinner.”
A loud tone sounded from his computer. The search window flashed red, then disappeared.
“What the fuck was that?”
“The connection timed out,” he said.