Chapter Five Jagger
I fucked up.
The thought loops through my skull while I stand under water hot enough to scald, scrubbing at my hands like I can wash off the memory of his skin. The cum cleaned off easily. The feeling of him shaking apart under my grip didn't.
My reflection in the fogged mirror looks like a stranger.
Dark hair plastered to my forehead, water dripping down a face I've never particularly liked.
Too sharp. Too angular. The kind of face that makes people nervous in elevators.
Gray eyes that Jace once described as "the color of impending doom" staring back at me with an expression that feels weird on my face.
I'm thirty-two years old. I've killed forty-seven people. I've broken more minds than I can count. I've done things that would make ordinary humans vomit, and I've done them without flinching.
But I've never lost control like that.
I turn off the water and stand in the steam, assessing the damage.
My lip is swollen where he bit me back. There are scratches on my chest from his nails, red lines that will fade by tomorrow.
My cock, traitorous bastard that it is, is already half-hard again just from thinking about the sounds he made.
Pathetic.
I dress in clean clothes. Black pants, black shirt, because simplicity is efficient and I don't have the bandwidth for choices right now.
My office is on the other side of the apartment, separated from the living spaces by a hallway and two locked doors.
I seal myself inside and pull up Moore's archive.
Work. Focus on work. That's what I do. That's all I know how to do.
The financial records blur together for the first hour. Shell companies layered on shell companies, money moving through accounts in Switzerland, Singapore, the Caymans. Whoever designed this system was good. Better than good. The kind of meticulous that speaks to decades of experience.
I cross-reference transaction dates with the Westpoint Academy operational timeline.
Most of the money flowed through during the Academy's peak years, twenty to fifteen years ago.
Equipment purchases. "Personnel expenses" that almost certainly meant handlers and medical staff.
Regular payments to a network of fertility clinics across three continents.
Then, five years ago, the pattern changes.
The accounts don't close. They just... redirect. The money starts flowing somewhere else. Same shell company structure, same careful layering, but different destinations. I trace one thread through seventeen intermediaries before it dead-ends in a numbered account in Geneva.
Geneva.
I make a note and keep digging.
Three hours in, I find a name.
It's buried in a footnote on a wire transfer from 2019, so small I almost miss it. A compliance signature, required by Swiss banking law. The kind of detail most people would overlook.
Werner Kreiss.
I've heard the name before. Years ago, in whispered conversations between Custodians who thought I wasn't listening. Kreiss handles money. Not just any money. The kind of money that makes nations nervous, that funds wars without leaving fingerprints, that builds empires in the shadows.
If he signed off on these transfers, he's connected to Project Omega.
I open a new search, pulling every file in Moore's archive that mentions his name. Seven documents appear. All heavily redacted. All referencing financial arrangements between "interested parties" and "operational facilities."
One document is different. A letter, dated four years ago, addressed to the Custodian Council. The subject line reads: "Proposed restructuring of Eastern Seaboard operations."
The letter is mostly blacked out, but one paragraph survived:
"Mr. Kreiss represents an organization with significant interest in our mutual objectives. His proposal to consolidate financing through Geneva-based intermediaries would provide enhanced security for Phase Two initiatives while maintaining plausible deniability for participating Houses."
Phase Two: Westpoint Replication Initiative
That's the new program. The one that rose from Westpoint's ashes in an accelerated fashion, but was always planned. The one manufacturing a new generation of weapons in facilities scattered across the globe.
And Kreiss is financing it. Or at the very least, taking money from the Custodians as a back burner project that they want to see come to fruition.
I lean back in my chair and stare at the ceiling. My body aches. My eyes burn. I've been in this office for six hours, and the only reason I know that is because my computer tells me it's past two p.m..
Which means I've been avoiding Jonah for almost eight hours.
I pull up the security feed before I can stop myself.
He's in the library again, curled into the armchair like a cat, one of my books open in his lap.
From this angle, I can see the sharp line of his jaw, the way his dark hair falls across his forehead, the furrow between his brows as he concentrates.
He's not classically handsome. His nose is slightly crooked, broken at some point and never set properly.
His eyebrows are too heavy, his mouth too wide.
But there's something about the way his face moves when he thinks.
The way his expressions cycle through amusement, frustration, curiosity, all in the space of a single page.
He's thinner than he should be. Three years of detention center nutrition left him as a sack of angles and edges, cheekbones too prominent, wrists too narrow.
The clothes I gave him hang off his frame, making him look younger than twenty-seven.
But there's a resilience in the way he holds himself.
A refusal to fold that I've only seen in people who've survived things that should have destroyed them.
His eyes are brown. Not the poetic kind of brown that romance novels describe as chocolate or honey. Just brown. Plain and dark and entirely too perceptive. When he looks at me, those brown eyes see things I've spent thirty years hiding from everyone else.
He survived me.
I designed his interrogation. Sat across from him for eighteen hours while he screamed and begged and broke. I was the one who decided which chemicals would erase his memories, which methods would strip him down to nothing. I did that. I unmade him.
And now he's sitting in my library, reading my books, filling my apartment with his sharp wit and sharper observations, and I can't stop wanting to touch him again.
The Foundry raised me to be a weapon. Weapons don't want things. Weapons don't feel guilt or desire or this sick churning in my gut that might be both.
But I touched him this morning, and he touched me back, and now I can't remember what it felt like to be the cold, controlled thing I was before.
My phone buzzes with that annoying pattern that signals it’s Jinx.
I consider ignoring it. Then I remember that ignoring Jinx usually results in him showing up uninvited, and the last thing I need right now is my brother in my apartment while I'm hiding from an asset I jerked off in my kitchen.
"What?"
"Rude." Jinx's voice is bright with manic energy, the kind that makes people cross streets to avoid him.
Of the three of us, Jinx is the one who looks like what we actually are; unhinged.
Wild dark hair he never bothers to style, tattoos crawling up his neck, eyes that can't decide if they're green or gray and seem to change depending on how much violence he's contemplating.
He's the youngest by eleven months, but he's always been the most feral.
"You sound constipated. You been sitting in that office all day? "
"I'm working."
"You're always working. It's boring." A pause, and his tone shifts. "Jace called. He's worried about you."
"Jace should focus on his own shit."
"Jace is doing great. Elliot's got him taking walks and cooking dinner and doing all kinds of disgustingly normal shit. It's revolting." Jinx laughs, but there's an edge to it. "Saw pictures. Our brother, wearing an apron and making pancakes. I almost threw my phone out the window."
I can picture it. Jace, who's killed more people than either of us combined, standing in his kitchen with flour on his hands. A year ago, the image would have been impossible. Now it's just unsettling in a different way.
"He says you haven't checked in for a week. That's not like you."
"I've been busy."
"With the archive? Or with the asset you transferred to your residence off the record?"
I go still. "How do you know about that?"
"Please. You think I don't have eyes in the Ministry? You think I don't notice when my brother does something extremely out of character?" Jinx's voice drops, losing its playful veneer. This is the real him, the one that most people don't see until it's too late. "Jagger. What are you doing?"
"It's for a reason."
"Bullshit. You don't do things off the record. You don't hide assets from oversight. You're the most by-the-book person I've ever met, which is saying something considering the book was written by sociopaths." He pauses. "Is this about Project Omega?"
I don't answer. That's answer enough.
"Fuck." Jinx breathes out hard. "What did you find?"
"I'm not sure yet. The informant's memories are resurfacing. He was investigating Westpoint when we took him. He got close to something."
"Close to what?"
The words stick in my throat. I should tell him. Jinx is my brother. The three of us are the only real family any of us have ever known. If anyone deserves to know what I've discovered, it's him.
But saying it out loud makes it real. Saying "we were manufactured, we were never orphans, everything we believed was a lie" makes it something I can't take back.
"I'll tell you when I know more," I say instead.
"Jagger."
"I have to go."
"Don't hang up on me, you dramatic assho—"
I hang up.