Warmth moved through him in a way the radiator never managed. The team had a way of making that happen, domestic messages like lines tossed across a cold sea. He hovered over the keyboard and, before he could stop it, his mind supplied a picture he hadn’t invited: Clara at the café, the cut of her profile when she turned to the window, the way her hand flattened the napkin she didn’t need to flatten.
He shut it down hard, like slamming a drawer on a hand.
Jonas: I’ll try to make it.
A beat, then another bubble.
Bishop: You okay?
He could write yes, and the man would know it wasn’t true. He could ignore the question, and Bishop would show up at his door. He picked another angle entirely.
Jonas: Did you know people who eat together have a 33% increase in positive affective states? Consider me supportive of Charlie’s vowels.
He watched the dots blink, blink, stop.
Bishop: Nerd. Bring bread.
Jonas: Copy.
The warmth lingered, familiar and foreign at once. They didn’t exclude him. That isolation he carried wasn’t something they put on him; it was something he wore, like an old injury you learned to move around. They had found their people, couples, inside jokes that worked in pairs. He had them all, Bás’s steady regard, Lotus’s sharp humour, Damon’s bone-deep reliability, and still there were nights he stood just outside the circle of light, preferring the shadows because it was safer.
He set the phone face down, screen off. The feeling faded as it always did, replaced by the simplicity of logistics. He worked better inside systems. He pulled a city map onto the screen, sketched routes in his head while his hands stayed still. Clara’s building. Fire escape left, alley right, one streetlight flickeringtwo doors down. Entry points. Exit points. Timelines. Places in the city where a temporary absence wouldn’t raise a siren but would make a point to the right person at the right time.
The plan formed the way frost forms on glass, quiet, inevitable, a pattern pulling itself out of air. Get Clara Sutton away from Oliver Grant. Keep her safe. Use her proximity to pry open the lock Oliver kept on whatever he was using Venter and Drost for. Do it without giving the team a reason to follow, because they would, and he wouldn’t risk them. Not again.
He reopened the café footage for one last pass. Slow. Frame by frame. Oliver’s scanning eyes. Clara’s composed detachment. In one frame, she looked toward the window. It wasn’t quite at the camera, not at him, but the line of her gaze ran close enough that his skin prickled with the old sense he’d had on the street, that she felt him even when she couldn’t possibly see him. Some people did that. Some people were tuned to a frequency most missed. He had spent his life being the watcher. It unsettled him that she’d turned her head like that.
His chest rose with a breath he made himself take. He keyed commands to archive the files to a hardened drive, wiped the temporary memory, copied the thermal clips to a small, unmarked stick, and slid it into a pocket in his jacket. The motions were mechanical, clean. He liked that about them. Things that behaved exactly as built.
He stood, stretched the tension out of his shoulders until something shifted and heat eased where it had pooled along his spine. The radiator clunked and hiccupped. Outside, a bus sighed to a stop and the doors wheezed open, ordinary sounds that made the night feel harmless. He didn’t trust that feeling either.
He crossed to the window and opened it a fraction wider. City sound lifted, distant bass thud from a car, a single shout punctuated by laughter, the soft hush of tyres over damp road.Life went on down there. That used to make him feel separate. Tonight, it made him feel… not invited exactly. Just aware there were rooms where people weren’t counting exits while they drank their tea.
He let the window drop back into its slot, checked the lock, checked the door, checked the single screw he’d set at a weird angle on the hinge as a tell-tale marker, still cocked a quarter turn to the left, exactly as he’d left it. He laid out the things he would need tomorrow. Gloves. Zip ties. A strip of medical tape. He preferred never to use force if planning could replace it; still, he didn’t lie to himself about what he was about to do. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t gentle. It was necessary.
He sat again and looked at the last frame he’d left on the screen, Clara’s profile, the line of her mouth held in a way that told him she was bracing. The pull returned, dull and steady. It would be easy to make that the story. Personal interest. Some magnetic thing that would let him lie to himself about methods and ends.
He didn’t do easy. He did accurate.
He closed the laptop and let the room dim down around him.
Tomorrow, he’d make his move.
He would keep her safe.
And he would do it alone.
Chapter 3
The hushof the museum after hours was her favourite sound. Not silence exactly, silence was empty. This was softer, layered: the low whir of the climate control system, the faint tick of the security cameras, the creak of old pipes that had survived wars and winters and renovations. To Clara, it was as alive as the artefacts she catalogued.
She slid a cotton glove over her right hand and lifted the parchment fragment from its acid-free sleeve. Fourteenth century. Latin script, heavily abbreviated, the ink browned to near amber. Another piece of the collection saved from damp storage thanks to a grant her department had won. She leaned in, her nose almost touching the glass magnifier, and for a moment, the rest of the world fell away.
Her father’s voice intruded anyway.We can’t lose the house, Clara. It’s been in the family for five generations. Your grandfather would—
She pressed her lips together, forcing the thought aside as carefully as she handled the parchment. She couldn’t afford distraction, not here, not when a single slip could undo centuries.
Cataloguing, documenting, preserving. These things made sense. Unlike the mess of her personal life.
