Chapter 1
The drone’s camera feed was crisp enough to pick out the steam curling from Oliver Grant’s cappuccino three rooftops away. A faint hum vibrated in Jonas Mason’s left ear from the earpiece, more felt than heard over the winter wind cutting across the slate tiles beneath him.
The roof was slick with frost, grit crunching faintly under the tread of his boots as he shifted into a lower crouch.
He adjusted the joystick, letting the quadcopter dip toward the café awning.
The sodium streetlamps painted the street in amber, but the drone’s software filtered it into cool, clean light.
On the feed, Oliver sat exactly where Jonas had predicted, corner table, back to the wall, angled so he had a clean view of the front entrance and the side street beyond. Phone on the table. Left hand wrapped around the coffee cup, right arm loose but ready.
Jonas’s mouth ticked at the corner. Textbook situational awareness.
“Where are you?” Lotus’s voice crackled over the comm, warm and nosy. “You’re not in the ops room.”
Jonas kept his gaze on the feed. “Visiting my mum.”
There was a pause. “And visiting your mum involves… a drone?”
“Long story.”
“Uh-huh. You’re doing the Watchdog thing, aren’t you?”
He gave a low sound that wasn’t quite agreement. “Enjoy your day off, Lotus.”
“Not until you tell me what you’re doing.”
He cut the channel, the corner of his mouth twitching against a smile.
Then the café door opened, and she walked in.
Dark wool coat. Long hair pulled back in a loose twist that said she cared enough to look polished but didn’t waste effort on perfection. The walk was deliberate, measured. The kind that didn’t invite interruption. Clara Sutton.
Her file had said museum archivist. Twenty-five. Engaged to Oliver Grant. Clean record. On paper, ordinary.
In reality, she was a problem.
Because the second Jonas saw her in real life, something inside him shifted. Sharp, immediate, and entirely unwelcome. The sensation slid under his skin, quickening his pulse without permission.
Attraction wasn’t foreign to him. He’d noticed women before. But this… this was different. It wasn’t logical, wasn’t convenient, and it didn’t fit anywhere in the ordered grid of his mind.
He didn’t like variables he couldn’t predict. And Clara Sutton looked like she might upend every calculation he’d made.
Through the camera’s zoom, her eyes swept the café once before landing on Oliver. Not long enough to seem suspicious. Just enough for Jonas to note the detail and file it away.
Oliver laughed at something she said. The sound didn’t reach Jonas through the feed, but Oliver’s eyes gave him away as he scanned the street, rooftops, and angles Jonas had used on other nights.
That was new.
Jonas’s thumbs moved over the controls, sending the drone up another twenty feet. He switched to thermal.
Two heat signatures bloomed in the image. A black van, parked one block down. No one was moving. But they weren’t watching Oliver.
They were watching Clara.
A thread of cold slid down Jonas’s spine. He tapped commands into the drone’s interface, pulling the camera tight on the van’s windshield.
Then the GPS scrambled.
Not a glitch. Deliberate.
He flicked into manual override, bringing the drone into a tight arc over the van, snapping stills in rapid succession. His system began running them through facial recognition before the feed cleared.
The matches came back faster than he liked. Too fast.
One of the faces had been in South Africa.
At that place.
His main tormentor, the man who’d ruined him. The man he thought was dead.
The image hit like a gut punch. The oppressive heat, the red dust clinging to sweat, the burn of the midday sun over corrugated metal walls.
The smell of diesel and the iron tang from his own blood.
The sound of boots on cracked earth, slow and deliberate, just before they’d tried to break him in ways that left no visible marks.
His jaw tightened, muscles working against the memory.
If he called Bás, the man would mobilise the whole team to help him. That was what they did for each other. Always.
But if it went sideways, if anyone caught a bullet meant for Jonas again, he’d never come back from it. He may not have been there when Rykov died, but his weakness had put his team in that position and ultimately cost his teammate his life. No, this was his mission. He couldn’t risk it.
Not after last time.
He pocketed the controller, flattening his palm over the cool metal casing for a moment before letting it go. The wind had found its way under his shirt now, slicing cold into the heat gathered along his back.
From the street below came the faint hiss of bus brakes, the distant thud of a bass from a passing car. Life went on down there.
Up here, Jonas made a choice.
Tonight wasn’t a team op.
Tonight was his.
He descended the fire escape, the metal slick under his boots. Street noise swelled around him, the snap of a newspaper page, a car horn somewhere behind him, the faint hum of conversation leaking from the café.
From the corner, he had a clear view of Oliver and Clara through the plate-glass window.
Oliver gestured with his coffee cup; Clara tilted her head, listening.
Her expression was unreadable, the way someone’s face looked when they were thinking about something entirely different from what was being said.
Jonas crossed the street casually, blending into a group of pedestrians. He kept his hands in his jacket pockets; the drone controller pressed against his palm like a second heartbeat.
When they left the café twenty minutes later, he was already in position.
Oliver led, scanning the street again. Clara followed, her coat pulled tight, one hand wrapped around the strap of her bag. Jonas fell in two paces behind, then angled across to the opposite side of the road, keeping them in sight through the shifting crowd.
The van from earlier was gone.
That didn’t make him feel any better.
They turned down a narrower street lined with bookshops and antique stores. Clara paused at one window, her gaze lingering on a display of old maps before Oliver touched her arm, guiding her onward.
Jonas noted the pause. Museum archivist. She wasn’t just looking, she was cataloguing, committing details to memory.
A small smile ghosted across his face before he killed it. This wasn’t about her.
It couldn’t be.
Jonas kept his pace even, his gaze drifting just enough to look like another man walking home. But every step was calculated, every streetlamp and shadow accounted for.
Oliver’s stride was purposeful. Too purposeful. Men going to dinner with their fiancées didn’t keep that kind of posture, shoulders set, head turning in slow arcs like a scanner sweeping a room.
Jonas had seen it before. South Africa. Berlin. Caracas. A man expecting trouble.
Oliver Grant. Officially, a liaison for an international NGO that specialised in “conflict resolution initiatives.” Unofficially, MI5. Jonas had verified that in about thirty minutes, the first time Oliver’s name had surfaced in his system.
That had been months ago, buried in a stack of encrypted financial logs tied to the cell that had taken Jonas in South Africa. Ninety percent of the data was useless noise. The other ten percent… always just out of reach, scrubbed clean before he could pin it down.
The same cell run by Hansen.
Jonas’s stomach tightened at the name. Hansen had been the architect of every minute of his captivity, the voice that ordered the blows, the one who decided when water would replace food, the one who played cruelty like an art.
Hansen had also been tied to Bás years before, in a tangle of past operations that still didn’t make full sense to Jonas.
Bás had been the one to kill him in the end. Swift. Justice, maybe. But the victory had never settled in Jonas’s bones.
Because victory didn’t erase the dead teammate they’d lost trying to get him out.
In the months since, he’d gone back over every file, every scrap of audio, every blurred photograph from South Africa, chasing the ghost of a single change he could have made to save them all. He’d never found it.
But Oliver’s name in the wrong place had stuck like a splinter under his skin.
Most people would call it a coincidence. Jonas didn’t believe in coincidence. Not with Hansen’s network, not with MI5, and not with the man walking three paces ahead of Clara Sutton.
They crossed a busier intersection, the headlights from a turning taxi flaring across Clara’s face.
She blinked, tucking her chin down against the light.
Her expression was neutral, pleasant even, but there was something in the way she carried herself, a subtle reserve that didn’t match the easy public narrative of a “storybook engagement.”
Jonas knew how to read tells. He’d made a career of noticing what people didn’t want noticed. Clara Sutton smiled with her mouth, but not her eyes. And right now, her gaze kept skipping to shop windows as though looking without really seeing.
Oliver, though… Oliver saw everything.
They moved past a florist closing for the night. The scent of crushed greenery followed them briefly before dissipating into the cold air. A man in a grey coat stepped out of a doorway ahead. Oliver’s right hand twitched toward his side before relaxing when the stranger veered away.
Jonas clocked it. A reflex like that wasn’t taught at museum galas.
They turned again, this time into a narrower street where the shopfronts were darker, the foot traffic lighter. Jonas let two other pedestrians slip between them and him, using their silhouettes as partial cover.
His mind replayed the van’s heat signatures, the scrambled GPS feed, the face that had been there in South Africa. If Oliver wasn’t connected, then he was the unluckiest man alive. And Jonas didn’t believe in luck any more than coincidence.
Clara laughed at something Oliver said, the sound carrying faintly back to Jonas.
It was a genuine laugh, warmer than her earlier polite smile.
Something about the sound tugged at him, unexpected and unwelcome.
He shoved it aside, focusing instead on Oliver’s hand on the small of her back as they stepped around a puddle.
Protective. Possessive. Jonas couldn’t tell which.
They stopped outside a tall brick building, one of those pre-war flats with wrought-iron balconies and heavy double doors. Oliver keyed them in with a swipe card. Clara glanced up at the lit windows, her lips pressing together as if bracing herself.
Jonas stayed in the shadows until the door closed behind them. Then he crossed the street, pausing at the corner under the awning of a shuttered bakery. His eyes traced the layout. Fire escape on the left, narrow alley to the right, one streetlight flickering two doors down.
A moment later, a window on the third floor lit up.
Clara moved into view, setting her bag down on a chair and glancing toward the street.
Her gaze swept over him without pause. She couldn’t see him in the dark from that distance, but something in her stillness made the hairs on the back of his neck rise.
Then she closed the curtains.
Jonas stayed in the shadows a moment longer, the image of her looking down burned into his mind.
She hadn’t seen him. But she’d felt him.
And that unsettled him almost as much as the van.