CHAPTER 33
Brynn
Swiss Alps, Switzerland
Night Three Off Grid
I stared at the dismantled drone on the kitchen table. Tiny boards, a cracked chip, shattered casing.
Such a small thing to upend everything again.
The safe house felt tighter now, with the shutters sealed, the fire burning low, and the mountains outside swallowed by darkness.
Jameson’s workstation glowed in front of him, throwing pale light across his hands as he sorted through the wreckage. He moved with the same quiet competence he had before I knew what those hands had built.
“Brynn,” he said.
I blinked.
His gaze dropped to my hand. The pen had cracked between my fingers, one jagged edge pressing into my palm.
I released it.
The house didn’t feel as safe as it had that morning.
Neither did he.
And whatever had started growing between us no longer felt steady enough to trust.
I pushed back from the island and walked to the hearth. The fire’s heat brushed my shins but didn’t reach any deeper.
Every option that came to mind was worse than the one before it.
I could run. Grab my notes and laptop and disappear before proximity convinced me safety was the same as trust.
I could go to the police. Explain a buried identity system, a dead source, and the man hiding me who had helped create the nightmare.
I could send everything to an editor and hope the story reached daylight before someone erased it.
Or I could call Beckett.
The thought was a hit of oxygen.
My brother would come without hesitation. He would tear the continent apart if it meant getting me out. For one clean moment, it felt like the only sane choice.
“Maybe it’s time I called my brother to come get me.”
The chair scraped behind me.
I turned.
Jameson was standing, one hand gripping the back of the chair hard enough to whiten his knuckles.
“No,” he said.
My eyes narrowed. “No?”
His grip loosened. “You can’t call Beckett.”
A quick laugh burst out of me. “You don’t get to decide who I call.”
“I know,” he said.
“Do you? Because that sounded exactly like you deciding for me.”
“It was a reaction.” His jaw tightened. “To Beckett. And to you leaving.”
I looked away before my heart could involve itself.
“He’s my brother.”
“I know,” he said.
“He’s the person I call when everything falls apart.”
His fingers tightened around the chair again. The wood gave a faint creak. “I know.”
“He would come.”
“Yes,” he said.
I faced him fully. “Then what’s your objection?”
He exhaled through his nose. “Bringing him here puts him directly in the path of whoever found you.”
The fire cracked behind me.
“So what am I supposed to do?” I asked. “Stay here with the man who built the thing that found me? The thing I’m trying to expose? Or leave with no phone, no safe money, and no idea what Darrow already knows or what Mirrorstream has already connected?”
He said nothing.
“Do I call Beckett and drag him into this?”
Still nothing.
“Or maybe I go to the police and explain that my source was murdered over a system that erases people, and the man protecting me helped build it.”
His mouth tightened.
“Answer me.”
His gaze remained fixed on mine. “I’m trying to determine which part of that you want answered.”
“Oh my God.” I threw my hands up. “I’m not asking you to sort it into categories, Jameson.”
His control no longer looked calm. It looked held together through effort.
“I know,” he said.
“No, you don’t. You’re standing there deciding which part is tactical and which part is emotional, and I need you to be you.”
“This is me,” he whispered.
The quiet certainty of it stopped me.
“I don’t know how to have the conversation you want,” he said.
The words had none of his usual precision. He stood there with steady hands and a voice that had started to fracture, looking less defensive than lost.
If he had sounded cold, I could have stayed angry. If he had sounded cruel, I could have used it.
Instead, he looked like a man facing something he had never learned how to cross, and part of me still wanted to reach for him.
I rubbed both hands over my face.
The betrayal still burned. It had simply developed too many layers.
When this started, I thought we were running from the same thing. The people who shot through my apartment. The system that swallowed Matt and God knew how many others. The men beneath Darrow with their cameras and locked doors.
I thought Jameson and I were on the same side of the same problem.
Now I wasn’t sure what the problem was to him.
Maybe he was protecting me. Maybe he was protecting himself.
Maybe this house was safety, or maybe it was containment with better furniture.
No usable phone. No outside access through my laptop. No Beckett. No editor. No police. Every connection to the outside world depended on Jameson deciding it was safe.
I looked back at him.
He stood beside the chair, tense and pale, too careful with his hands.
Every reason not to trust him came wrapped around a reason he might still be right.
The room tightened around me.
My next breath stopped halfway down. I tried again, but my lungs seemed to reject it.
“I can’t do this in here.”
He took one step toward me. “Brynn.”
My chest pulled tighter.
I crossed the room and opened the door before I could look at his face again.
The frigid air struck my lungs hard enough to hurt.
Good.
I stepped onto the porch and gripped the railing.
My next breath made it halfway down. The one after that caught even higher.
The door opened behind me.
I stiffened.
Jameson stepped outside and stopped just beyond the threshold.
He didn’t speak. I heard him inhale, slow and measured, then release it. Another breath followed, then another.
My body tried to follow without permission.
The floorboards creaked beneath his weight as he moved closer, but he stopped before reaching me.
“Brynn,” he said.
His voice was low. No command. No attempt to pull me back inside.
He waited.
Jameson Mercer, who moved through danger like hesitation was a flaw in the design, stood behind me and did nothing until I gave him something.
I dragged in a breath. It shuddered out wrong.
His hand lifted near my elbow, close enough that I felt his warmth through the cold.
“Can I?” he asked.
I should have said no. I wanted to say no.
Instead, I nodded.
His fingers settled lightly against my sleeve. When I didn’t pull away, he moved closer until his chest brushed my shoulder with every slow breath he took.
“In for four,” he said. “Out for six.”
A bitter laugh scraped my throat. “You’re counting my breathing.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Of course you are.”
“I can stop,” he said.
I closed my eyes.
“Don’t.”
He went still.
Then his hand moved from my elbow to my wrist, careful of the bandage, and turned my palm until it rested flat against his chest.
His heartbeat pressed against my hand.
Not calm. Steady.
There was a difference.
“Use mine,” he said.
I hated that it helped. I hated that my body trusted him before the rest of me had decided whether it should.
One breath, then another.
The railing remained hard beneath my other hand. The air burned in my lungs. Jameson stayed close without closing around me.
The world slowly stopped tilting.
“There,” he murmured. “You’re safe.”
A strangled sound tore out of me, half laugh and half disbelief.
He froze.
I didn’t pull my hand away, but I didn’t lean into him either.
“Am I?”
His breath faltered beneath my palm.
He didn’t retreat or deflect.
“I would never hurt you,” he said.
I couldn’t help but let out a laugh.
“Why?” I said, my voice cracking. “Because we’re fucking?”
He recoiled like I had struck him.
Not angry.
The reaction was too immediate to hide, and the hurt in it stopped me.
“That’s what you think this is?” he asked.
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
His gaze moved over my face as though he was trying to find the answer there before I gave it to him.
“I hadn’t categorized it,” he said finally. His voice had gone precise, controlled in the way it did when control was costing him. “But that is not what I thought.”
My hand was still against his chest.
I pulled it back, and he let me.
“And that isn’t why I would never hurt you,” he said.
There were several parts of what he had just admitted that I needed to address, but only one question came out.
“Then why?”
His eyes held mine.
“Because I know what it is to build something for one purpose and watch other people turn it into another,” he said.
I said nothing.
His voice lowered. “I have hurt people, Brynn. I’m not going to lie to you about that. But I have never hurt someone to keep them quiet. I have never buried a witness to protect myself. And I would never do that to you.”
The cold pressed harder against my skin.
“You’re not collateral to me,” he said.
The word should have reassured me.
It didn’t.
“Collateral?” I stepped toward him. “You created Mirrorstream. That made everyone collateral.”
He closed his eyes for a beat.
When he opened them again, the strain in his face had settled into something heavier.
“Yes,” he said.
I had been ready for an argument, not agreement.
He slid his hands into his pockets, like he needed somewhere to contain them.
“It wasn’t created for that,” he said.
I opened my mouth, but he continued.
“And you haven’t asked what I did when I learned what it had become.”
My anger faltered.
He had given me almost nothing, and I had filled the silence with the only version that made sense.
Now he was telling me there was more.
“What does that mean?”
He looked past me into the dark. “It means I didn’t look away.”
A shiver moved across my skin.
“You think I built a weapon and walked away,” he said. “That I let them use it on people like you. Like Matt. Like the ones who never made it out.”
“Didn’t you?”
“No,” he said.
The certainty in his voice made me hold still.
“I didn’t know everything the coalition agencies were doing with it,” he said. “Not at first. They built applications around the original architecture and restricted access until no single person could see the whole system.”
“And when you found out?”
“I broke it,” he said.
My pulse struck hard beneath my skin.
“What?”
“I broke Mirrorstream from the inside,” he said.
I stared at him.
“How?”
“I couldn’t shut it down outright,” he said. “A direct attack would have triggered the redundancies, backups, and countermeasures built into the architecture.”
“So you sabotaged it.”
“Yes,” he said.
The word held no pride.
“I introduced failures gradually,” he said. “Corrupted nodes. Delayed searches. Broken cross-references. Small enough that no one could identify a single point of attack.”
“And then?”
His jaw tightened. “Then I dismantled the last functioning architecture myself.”
The way he said it made the destruction sound like a wound rather than a victory.
“Why was that hard?”
His eyes lifted to mine, but he didn’t answer.
“Jameson.”
“I spent years building it,” he said.
“That isn’t an answer.”
“No.” His gaze returned to the darkness beyond the porch. “It isn’t.”
I waited.
He had done the same for me minutes earlier, standing behind me without forcing contact, breath, or words.
So I gave him the silence.
“My brother was killed eight years ago,” he said.
The anger inside me shifted but didn’t disappear.
“I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“Most people don’t,” he said.
“Was he older or younger?”
Jameson’s gaze stayed fixed on the darkness beyond the porch. “Two minutes and six seconds older.”