CHAPTER 47
Brynn
A Few Hours Outside Tallinn, Estonia
Day Thirty-Three Off Grid
The vehicle behind us edged closer.
Too close.
Jameson’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror again, and this time his jaw tightened.
“Don’t turn around,” he said.
Which, obviously, made my entire spine try to twist backward like a feral cat.
I had to force myself to stare straight ahead.
The vehicle accelerated, pulled even with us, and matched our speed.
Only then did I get a clear enough look at it to realize it was a black SUV, dark-windowed and riding too close to be passing.
One of the windows rolled down.
“Jameson…” I said, but my voice caught on his name.
“Down,” he said, and shoved my head toward my knees just as he hit the gas and a shot cracked through the night.
The sound was too loud inside the car, a brutal snap that stole the air from my lungs. Glass exploded behind me, and cold rushed in with a spray of glittering fragments.
The car lurched sideways.
Jameson swore under his breath, the quiet, surgical kind of swearing that meant he was calculating angles, not panicking.
Another shot. Metal screamed. The steering wheel jerked in his hands.
“Hold on,” he said.
I didn’t simply hold on. I clung to the seat like a terrified barnacle.
He swerved hard, trying to break the other man’s line of sight. The SUV drifted, corrected, then drifted again. Snow kicked up in white sheets around us.
Another shot cracked through the night. A beat later, something slammed underneath us with a sickening thunk that traveled up through the floorboards.
More shots sounded, but we were in a fishtail.
A sound came out of me that might have been his name, or might have just been panic with a mouth.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I didn’t want to die on a frozen road in the middle of a country whose language I couldn’t even read.
I tried to breathe. In through my nose, out through my mouth, like that was a reasonable thing to ask of lungs currently trying to leave my body.
Then I turned my head just enough to look at him.
Headlights flashed across his face.
And Jameson was calm.
Not blank. Not relaxed. Calm in a way that made something inside me go colder than the water waiting below us.
His hand came up with the gun, steady despite the ice and the screaming tires, and he fired once through the broken window.
Then the world spun. Trees blurred. The guardrail vanished, and when I lifted my head a bit, all I saw was a half-frozen lake like a black mouth.
And that dark, icy water was getting closer. We were sliding into it. Immediately, every survival video I’d ever watched came roaring to the front of my brain, and I’d be damned if we were getting stuck in this lake.
I released my seat belt and his too.
I had my hand on the button for my window when the front end dropped hard, then stopped with a violent jolt that snapped both of us forward. Something under the car screamed against stone.
There was nothing to catch me now.
My shoulder hit first, then my forehead clipped the dash hard enough to send a quick burst of white across my vision.
Oh fuck.
I hadn’t anticipated resistance.
I turned my head, blinking, and watched as Jameson’s left wrist slammed into the windshield.
For the briefest moment, his face displayed pain.
He didn’t make a sound.
Water was coming in at the corner of my door.
“Out,” Jameson snapped.
I grabbed my bag from the footwell and threw the strap over my head.
The water wasn’t deep, thank God, but it was enough to soak us to the thighs as we opened the doors and scrambled out. My teeth were already chattering.
The back window had been shot out, leaving nothing but jagged little teeth of glass around the frame.
I reached through carefully, hissing when one edge caught my sleeve, and grabbed the backpack Jameson had shoved behind the seat. His laptop. His drives. Whatever else he’d decided mattered enough to keep close.
I dragged it out and hooked it onto my back.
Then I went for the duffel with our clothes.
The car shifted.
Water surged higher inside, black and fast, swallowing the bag by inches.
God damn it.
I stretched farther, fingers brushing wet canvas, but Jameson’s arm caught my waist and hauled me back before I could lose my balance.
“Leave it,” he said.
We slogged up the bank, slipping on mud and ice.
I turned back just in time to see the attacking SUV drifting crookedly toward the same drop, like it was going to follow us into the water.
It clipped the broken guardrail, spun sideways, and came to a stop against the snowy bank.
Jameson’s hand closed around my arm.
“Stay here,” he said.
He moved toward the SUV with the same calm he probably used to teach tax treaties. A moment later, he opened the driver’s door, leaned in, and then straightened.
He didn’t say anything.
But I stood there stunned as he yanked the motionless driver out and let him fall hard onto the snowy ground. Blood pooled dark and fast from the bullet wound in his throat.
“Come on,” he called. “At least we have another car. It’s too cold for this.”
I followed him, shivering so hard my bones rattled. The inside of the SUV was still warm. Blessedly warm.
He opened the back hatch and started searching through the cargo space.
“What are you looking for?” I asked through chattering teeth.
“A blanket,” he said. “Anything dry.”
He shoved aside a plastic case, pulled out a black duffel, and unzipped it.
“At least this guy had his own travel bag,” he said.
I blinked at him.
“Here,” he said, tossing me a pair of sweatpants. “Get out of the wet ones before you freeze.”
He pulled on a pair of cargo pants from the same bag like this was the most normal Tuesday of his life.
I blinked again and then peeled off my soaked jeans and yanked the sweats on. They were too big, but warm. Warm was everything.
He slid into the driver’s seat. I climbed into the passenger side. The heater roared to life.
For a long moment, neither of us spoke.
My pulse was still in my throat. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. The world felt too vivid, too loud, too real.
Finally, I exhaled.
“This is because of the contracts, isn’t it?”
His eyes stayed on the mirrors as he maneuvered us back onto the road. His left hand rested low against his thigh, half-hidden between the wheel and the console.
“I can’t be sure,” he said.
“But?” I asked.
He flexed his fingers one at a time, like he was taking inventory. “But it’s likely.”
I looked at his hand. “You’re hurt.”
“It’s fine,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought I was preparing us to be immersed.”
He adjusted his grip on the wheel, his right hand taking control. “It’s okay. It’s not broken. You made the right call. You were preparing us to be submerged. The boulder was a statistical outlier.”
After that, we drove in silence for a while.
Or maybe it was minutes.
Maybe it was seconds.
My brain had stopped measuring time in anything except impact, cold, gunfire.
Eventually, the pieces of the night started arranging themselves into something close to thought.
“You’re…” My voice cracked. I tried again. “You’re too good at this.”
He didn’t look at me. “Too good at what?” he asked.
“That.” I gestured vaguely behind us where the… incident lay. “All of it. The driving. The shooting. The not panicking. The…” I swallowed. “The killing.”
I took a breath.
“Are you really a professor?”
He took a beat before answering. “Yes,” he said. “But…”
My stomach dropped.
A small exhale left him. “I also have another job.”
“Do I want to know?”
“I sincerely doubt it,” he said.
I folded forward, pressing my forehead toward my knees. “Ughhhh.”
A moment later, I felt his hand on my back. Hesitant. Careful. Like he wasn’t sure if comfort was allowed.
I froze for a moment, barely noticeable.
His hand vanished instantly.
The absence of it felt heartbreaking.
I felt the car slowing and looked back up at him. He was pulling off onto a narrow access road and putting the SUV in park.
He turned to me fully. “Brynn. I would never hurt you. I need you to know that. No…” His voice dropped. “I need you to trust that.”
I swallowed hard. “I do. I think. I just…” I shook my head. “It’s just lately, I keep learning people aren’t who they seem. My God, if you knew what I recently discovered about my sister-in-law…”
He smirked. Actually smirked. “Ah. Yes. She was a student of mine.”
I stared at him. “EXCUSE ME?”
“I’ve never claimed to be a good man,” he said quietly. “But I know what’s right. I don’t harm innocent people. It’s why I shut Mirrorstream down. It’s why I opened my consulting firm. People come to me when something is broken.” His gaze stayed on mine. “And I fix it.”
My pulse thudded in my ears. “Like what?”
“For example, if a contract for a repeat child predator who happens to be a sheikh crosses my desk…” His voice didn’t change. Not even a little. “I find a home for it.”
There was nothing I could say to that.
Because before this, I would have known exactly what to do with it.
I would have known where to put him. What word to use. What line he had crossed.
What article to write.
But then I’d met Isabel Castillo.
I’d seen the woman my brother loved, the power she held, the blood that seemed to follow her like a second shadow. And for the first time in my life, I’d started to wonder if Beckett had ever been as clean as I needed him to be.
Not good. He was good. I knew that in my bones.
But clean?
Married to a woman who wore cartel power like a crown?
Maybe none of us got to stay that way.
I turned back toward the window and let my head rest against the cold glass.