CHAPTER 39
Brynn
Swiss Alps, Switzerland
Day Twenty-Four Off Grid
Jameson’s hand closed around mine the second I stepped out of the bedroom with my bag. The kind of grip that said move without raising his voice.
He guided me into the kitchen and nodded at the table. “Set everything down.”
I did. My fingers felt clumsy, like they didn’t belong to me. He set his own gear beside mine, unzipped the hard case, and pulled out two firearms.
He handed me mine first.
The weight steadied me more than my breathing did.
I checked the chamber the way he’d drilled into me over the last two weeks. Loaded. Ready.
My pulse jumped anyway.
Across from me, he checked his own firearm with one quiet, practiced motion. No hesitation. No wasted movement.
Then he crossed to the security panel beside the pantry.
Four camera feeds filled the screen.
Front porch. Drive. Rear clearing. East tree line.
Every one of them showed an empty property.
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
Jameson didn’t.
His fingers moved across the controls, cycling through the feeds once, then again.
“What is it?”
He enlarged the front camera.
Snow shifted along the porch railing. A bare branch moved at the edge of the frame. The wind lifted a curl of powder from the top step.
Then it happened again.
The same branch.
The same powder.
The same movement down to the second.
Oh my God.
Jameson went completely still.
He dragged the feed backward, watched several seconds, then let it play.
The branch moved.
The snow lifted.
Exactly the same.
His fingers moved faster over the panel. “This feed is looped.”
My grip tightened around the gun. “How? You said the cameras were closed circuit.”
His attention stayed on the camera feed. “They are.”
“Then how did someone get into them?”
He opened the cabinet beneath the panel and traced the front-camera line with two fingers. “They didn’t get into the system remotely. They inserted something into the physical connection.”
“Where?”
“The exterior junction is probably beneath the porch.” He opened a diagnostic screen. “Someone could access it without entering the house.”
Lines of data appeared beside the feed.
The image remained calm and empty, but the connection log showed a brief interruption followed by a restart.
FRONT CAMERA
SIGNAL LOSS
11:41:52
FRONT CAMERA
SIGNAL RESTORED
11:42:16
Jameson pulled his laptop from the hard case and set it beside the panel. He disconnected the front-camera line.
The porch feed went black.
“What are you doing?”
His hands moved through the cables until he separated two nearly identical connections. “Bypassing what they inserted.”
He connected the camera-side line directly to a diagnostic bridge, then attached the bridge to his laptop.
“You can get the real feed back?”
He kept his hands perfectly still on the diagnostic bridge. “The recorder was receiving the loop. The camera may still have written the original footage to its local storage.”
The laptop screen flickered.
Static broke across it, followed by a frozen image of the porch.
He entered a command.
The image moved.
A figure dressed entirely in black entered from the left edge of the frame.
I gasped.
The person stayed low as they crossed the porch. No hesitation. No wasted movement. They crouched beside the lower corner of the front door, blocking the camera’s view of their hands with their body.
Seconds later, the figure rose and moved quickly down the steps.
They disappeared into the trees east of the property.
Away from the drive.
Away from the SUV.
The recording ended.
Jameson replayed it once, stopping when the figure crouched at the door.
I stared at the trees where the person had disappeared. “What if there are more?”
“This type of contract is usually handled by one operator.” Jameson paused the recording on the figure crouched beside the door. “Like your brother.”
I turned toward him so fast the gun shifted in my grip. “What did you just say?”
His hands stopped over the keyboard.
For one second, neither of us moved.
Then he closed his eyes. “Fuck.”
“We will absolutely be revisiting that.”
He disconnected the diagnostic bridge and began packing it without looking at me. “I assumed we would.”
“Jameson.”
He pointed to the frozen image. The intruder’s shoulder blocked most of the view, but one gloved hand disappeared beneath the porch trim. “They spent eleven seconds at the door.”
The argument died in my throat.
“They did something.”
He locked the laptop into the hard case and opened the narrow compartment beneath the foam insert. From it, he removed a black handheld device with a short antenna and a small display.
“What the hell is that?”
He powered it on. “A nonlinear junction detector.”
I stared at him. “Right. Sure. Of course.”
“It locates concealed electronics.” He lifted his firearm and approached the front door. “Stay behind the wall.”
I moved out of the direct line of the entrance.
He swept the detector slowly along the inside wall, then down the frame. The device emitted a low electronic tone.
At the bottom corner of the door, the tone changed.
He moved the detector away, then brought it back across the same section.
The alert sounded again.
Stronger.
Jameson lowered his head and took one slow breath.
When he looked up, whatever frustration had crossed his face was gone.
“Trigger at the threshold.” He shut off the detector and secured it beside the hard case. “Backup exit. Bedroom window. Go.”
I went.
I shoved my bag through first, then swung my leg over the sill. Cold air hit my face like a slap. I dropped into the snow, knees bending hard, my breath puffing out in a white cloud.
Jameson pushed the hard case through, followed by the rest of the bags.
Then he stopped.
“Hold on,” he said.
Before I could ask what he was doing, he disappeared from view.
He returned seconds later and shoved something through the window toward me.
A cast-iron pan.
I caught it awkwardly against my chest and stared at him. “What in the fuck, Jameson?”
He climbed through and landed beside me, quiet despite the gear strapped across his body. “I need the weight and the handle.”
Apparently, that was all the explanation I was getting.
He pointed toward the trees. “Move. Low. Like we practiced.”
We crossed the rear of the cabin at an angle, staying close to the tree line. Snow crunched beneath our boots despite every effort to move quietly. My lungs burned. My legs shook. My heart hammered so loudly I was sure someone could hear it.
Halfway into the cover of the woods, my boot caught on something buried beneath the snow.
A root. A rock. A piece of the mountain deciding now was the perfect time to personally fuck me over.
My ankle rolled.
Pain shot up my leg, enough to steal the air from my lungs. I hit one knee hard, snow soaking through my jeans, one hand slamming into the ground to keep myself from going all the way down.
Jameson turned instantly. “Brynn.”
“I’m fine,” I bit out, already pushing myself up.
His gaze dropped to my ankle. “You’re not.”
“I said I’m fine.”
My ankle screamed the second I put weight on it.
There was no room for pain right now. Pain was for later. Pain was for somewhere with walls that were not wired to explode and people who were not trying to collect on a contract.
His jaw locked when he saw the limp. “Lean on me.”
“I can walk.”
He took one of the bags from my shoulder. “That wasn’t the question.”
I hated that I didn’t have time to fight him.
I grabbed his arm, put just enough weight on him to keep moving, and forced my feet forward.
We followed the trees around the side of the property until the SUV came into view where we had parked it below the cabin.
He stopped before we reached it.
“Stay here.” He held out the cast-iron pan.
I caught his sleeve. “Jameson.”
“Brynn.” The look he gave me ended the argument.
I took the pan.
He moved toward the SUV alone.
He approached from the rear, scanning the ground first. The snow around the tires looked undisturbed, but he did not trust that any more than I did.
He crouched beside the back wheel and studied the tread, the wheel well, and the underside of the bumper. Then he moved around the vehicle, checking the door seams, hood, fuel door, and the places beneath the chassis he could see without crawling underneath it.
Only then did he power the detector back on.
He didn’t sweep the entire SUV. He focused on the wheel wells, the bumpers, and the lower edges of the doors, moving the detector slowly over places where something could have been hidden.
I watched the display from where I stood, barely breathing.
The detector gave no warning.
He shut it off and opened the passenger door without letting it swing wide. “Come on.”
I limped toward him.
He took the pan and my bag before helping me into the seat. Then he loaded the hard case and the rest of our gear into the back, fast and careful at the same time.
Nothing tossed. Nothing loose.
Even now, he was making order out of panic.
“Head down,” he said.
“Jameson.”
“Down,” he repeated.
I ducked, but only enough to put the dashboard between me and the cabin. Enough to obey. Not enough to stop seeing.
His eyes cut to mine like he knew. “Brynn.”
“I’m down.”
He glanced at the narrow strip of me still visible above the dashboard. “You’re half down.”
“I’m down enough.”
His jaw tightened. “No, you’re not.” But he didn’t have time to fight me. He looked back toward the cabin, then handed me the gun. “Leave the door open until something louder covers it.”
My pulse tripped. “Like what?”
He looked at the cabin. “You’ll know.”
Then he was gone.
He moved low through the trees, staying beneath the line of sight from the front windows. The cast-iron pan hung from one hand. With the other, he pulled a length of cord from his bag.
My brain stalled on the absurdity of it.
He tied the cord around the handle, fast and efficient, like he had already built the plan three steps ago and his hands were only catching up.
Then he stopped behind the cover of a thick pine and fed out the line.
A second passed.
Two.
He threw.
The pan arced toward the porch, struck the railing, and dropped hard across the threshold.
I had one moment to understand what he was doing before the world went white.
A blast ripped through the cabin.
Heat slammed into the SUV hard enough to rock it on its tires. The sound struck a beat later, a deep, violent roar that swallowed everything.
I screamed, but the explosion swallowed it.
The cabin didn’t just explode.
It erupted.
Flames punched through the roof. The porch disintegrated. Wood splintered and flew. Smoke billowed into the sky in a thick black column.
I grabbed the open door with one hand and the gun with the other, staring through the gap I wasn’t supposed to be using.
Jameson was already running back.
“Shut it!” he shouted.
I slammed the door.
The sound disappeared beneath the last roll of the explosion.
He hit the driver’s side a second later, threw himself inside, and started the engine before his door was fully closed.
The SUV lurched backward.
I twisted toward the cabin, my breath coming too fast.
The safe house was gone.
Our mugs. My sweater. The maps. The porch. The walls that had held us for fourteen days.
Gone.
Like it had never existed.
My mouth opened, but nothing came out at first.