CHAPTER 49
Jameson
Tallinn, Estonia
Day Thirty-Five Off Grid
Kadriorg Art Museum looked exactly like what it was supposed to be.
Beautiful. Public. Legitimate.
The palace rose pale and symmetrical against the winter dark, all clean lines, old wealth, and careful restoration.
Floodlights warmed the fa?ade until the place looked almost delicate, the kind of building people photographed because it was pretty, not because they expected anything dangerous behind the doors.
And maybe there wasn’t.
I had my suspicions.
Maybe the museum was only a museum. And tonight it doubled as a rented venue with polished floors, priceless art, and staff who had no idea the skeletons in their honoree’s closet.
That was why we were here.
Not because the building was hiding something.
Because someone else might be using it to.
The public entrance remained open for another hour, tourists drifting through the front rooms with guide maps and coats buttoned high against the cold.
But the east wing had been closed off behind velvet ropes, discreet signage, and two men in suits who had been trained to look like event staff instead of security.
They weren’t good enough.
I clocked the first one before we reached the steps.
Right hand dominant. Weight slightly forward. Not carrying visibly, but the cut of his jacket sat wrong against his ribs.
The second stood beside the ticket scanner with a pleasant expression and eyes that had already measured every person entering the wing.
“Smile,” Brynn murmured beside me.
“I am.”
“No, you’re doing the thing where you look like you’re calculating how many bones someone needs to keep standing,” she said.
“Well, the math depends entirely on the person.”
She gave me a sideways look. “Jameson.”
I adjusted my expression.
Her mouth twitched. “Better.”
When our turn came, she walked up to the event desk like she had every right to be there, clutch in one hand, smile already in place. “Hi,” she said, warm and effortless. “We were hoping to join the dinner this evening.”
The woman behind the desk looked up from her tablet. “Do you have a reservation?”
“Unfortunately, no. We only just heard about it this afternoon.” Brynn gave a small, apologetic laugh and glanced toward me like I was the reason we were late. “My husband is impossible to plan around.”
The woman’s gaze moved between us, assessing the dress, the suit, the money we looked like we belonged to. “The dinner is ticketed.”
“Of course,” Brynn said. “If there’s any availability, we’re happy to pay at the door. And we’d be glad to make a sizeable donation this evening.”
She said it like price was not the part of the conversation that mattered.
That helped.
Money made certain doors less locked.
And tonight we looked like we had just that.
I had dressed for money without color.
Black suit. Black shirt. Black tie. Waistcoat fitted close beneath the jacket, the lines clean enough to pass for taste instead of preparation.
My watch did the rest.
People rarely questioned a man in a good suit and an expensive watch. They assumed access, or arrogance, or both. Either worked.
Brynn, unfortunately, had done something far more effective.
I kept having to stop myself from doing a double take every time I looked at her.
Not because of the dress, although that was a problem on its own.
It moved around her like shadow caught in fabric, dark lace and scattered beading glinting faintly every time she shifted beneath the museum lights.
The neckline sat low enough to draw attention without begging for it, and the most dangerous part of all, the skirt fell in layers until she walked and the slit opened high along one leg.
But it was her face that kept disrupting the pattern.
A few hours ago, we had realized the obvious too late.
Tomar had seen Brynn before.
Not Brynn exactly. Not like this. At Darrow, she had been wearing a blonde wig. But Tomar had still been close enough to look at her. Close enough that counting on darkness, pressure, and a changed dress would have been careless.
Brynn’s solution had involved twenty-two minutes in front of a mirror, several brushes, and something she called contouring.
I still didn’t understand the mechanics.
But I understood the result.
For the last month, I had mostly known her without any of this.
Bare face. Tired eyes. Sharp mouth. Hair twisted up without ceremony or falling loose because we had bigger problems than vanity.
I had never needed makeup to find her beautiful.
If anything, the lack of it made her harder to look away from, because there was nothing between her and what she was feeling.
Geneva had been different, but not unfamiliar.
I remembered that version of her too clearly.
Red dress. Red lips. Dark lashes. Makeup meant to enhance what was already there, to make her look polished enough to pass through a room full of money and lies without anyone questioning whether she belonged.
This was not that.
This was jarring. Not ugly. Not even close.
But wrong in the specific way a familiar song sounded wrong when one note shifted half a step.
Her face didn’t stop being hers. That might have been easier.
Instead, the makeup interrupted the order my mind expected.
Shadow defined one angle and softened another.
Her cheekbones seemed higher. Her jaw looked slightly different.
Her eyes pulled focus before the rest of her features could resolve.
It forced a delay.
A fleeting moment where recognition reached for her and missed the first attempt.
Nevertheless, that was the point.
Her hair was no longer loose around her shoulders either. Every piece had been swept up and pinned away from her face, removing the one detail most people would reach for first.
I returned my attention to the transaction just in time to hear the woman at the desk wish us a good evening.
Brynn smiled. “Thank you.”
We headed toward the reserved wing.
The possessive instinct hit me so hard I almost missed the third camera.
It came from somewhere low and old in the body. Not thought. Not strategy. A violent, useless impulse to put myself between Brynn and every set of eyes that touched her like ownership could be established by proximity.
This was more primitive and less useful.
A man near the entry glanced at the open back of her dress, and my hand flexed where it rested at the base of her spine.
Without looking at me, she reached down and brushed her fingers against mine. A brief, grounding touch.
“Darling,” she said softly, somehow making the endearment sound like a warning.
I looked at her. “I haven’t done anything.”
“Your silence is committing crimes,” she whispered.
“That remains to be seen.”
She kept walking, mouth curved like she was enjoying herself. “We need information, not a body count.”
She laughed under her breath, and several people turned.
Every eye followed the sound.
She used it.
That was the thing I kept having to relearn about her. Brynn didn’t shrink from attention when it found her. She absorbed it, sorted it, turned it into cover, then walked straight through the opening people gave her because they were too busy underestimating the woman in front of them.
It made her dangerous.
It made me want to touch her.
It made me want to drag her out of the room, lock every door behind us, and let the entire operation burn while I kept her where no one else could reach.
But the time for backing out was long gone.
We were no longer merely looking into Mirrorstream’s rebirth.
Mirrorstream was looking into us.
The dining room had been staged in one of the formal halls, beneath painted ceilings and gilt molding that made the whole evening feel curated for donors who wanted history without blood on it.
Round tables filled the space between marble columns.
White linens. Low arrangements of dark greenery and winter flowers.
Candles in glass sleeves. Wine already poured.
At the far end, a podium stood before a projection screen carrying the Serpens Geminus crest.
Clean typography beneath.
Restoration Through Resolution.
I stared at the phrase.
Brynn grabbed my hand and immediately angled us toward the bar.
The bartender’s eyes flicked over her dress, then to me, then back to her. “Champagne?”
“Please,” she said.
I ordered a whiskey. Neat.
We stepped away with our drinks, weaving through the crowd until we reached an empty cocktail table near the wall. No chairs. No expectation to mingle. Just a place to stand and look like we belonged.
Brynn rested her elbow lightly on the table, gaze drifting across the room. “So,” she murmured, “first impressions?”
“It’s not housed here.”
She blinked. “You walked in thirty seconds ago. How could you possibly know that already?”
I took a slow sip of whiskey, letting the burn settle. “A full system needs cooling, isolation, and power you can’t hide in a museum, especially not one that was a palace.”
Brynn arched a brow. “Darrow was in a club basement.”
“I suspect Darrow was just an access point,” I said.
“A startup hub. It could run fragments, not the core. It didn’t need as much infrastructure.
But even still, The Rh?ne river was practically across the street if they needed to pull significant cooling.
This place does have the bay, but its architecture still isn’t right. ”
She tilted her head, studying me like she was trying to see the composition through my eyes. “So where did you hide the core?”
I reached out and brushed my thumb along the delicate skin beneath her ear, cover, camouflage, misdirection. Or simply because I just wanted to touch her.
To anyone watching, it looked intimate, and that’s what was important.
“On a freighter,” I said quietly. “In the middle of an ocean owned by no one. Oceans offer massive thermal capacity, stay cold year round at depth, allow closed loop heat exchangers without contamination, require no zoning or permits, and leave no visible infrastructure or suspicious power draw on land.”