Clara found Jonas where she had expected: in his tech room, haloed by screens. The air had its own weather in here, a soft electrical buzz and a faint tang of hot plastic. He had the posture of a man soldered to his chair. Blue light bled across his cheekbones. His hands moved on the keyboard with a speed that would have made anyone else look frantic; on him, it looked like thinking out loud.
She stood in the doorway and watched him for a moment. The set of his shoulders. The little crease between his brows. The way he looked from one feed to another without moving his head, as if his eyes belonged to a bird rather than a man.
He felt her and stilled, then swivelled his chair. The lines around his mouth softened. “Hi.”
“Hi,” she said, and crossed the room because she could, because last night had shifted something that no one else could see. Without thinking, she lowered her head for his kiss, as if it was the most natural thing in the world and it was. “Do I need shoe covers or a hazmat suit?”
“You can sit where you like,” he said, mouth tugging. He cleared an improbable space beside him and produced a packet of Hobnobs from thin air. “Bribery.”
She took one and bumped his shoulder with hers. “Thank you for putting a dog treat in my pocket.”
A flush rose along his throat. “Force of habit.”
She watched the feeds for a minute. The world from a hundred angles. The house where her parents slept. The road by Lena’s temporary safe flat with a delivery van parked just crooked enough to make Jonas twitch. Her own face reflected faintly in the dark glass.
“You’re carrying a lot,” she said quietly. “I can’t make it lighter but I can help hold it. If you let me.”
He made a small sound that might have been a laugh and might have been a breath turning into something else. “You’re already helping.”
She slid her hand over his forearm and felt the muscle jump. “Then let me say one more thing. You don’t have to tell everyone, but I think you should tell someone. Someone who loves you and can stand there with you when you look at it again.”
His eyes flicked away, then back. Wariness. Shame. The instinct to say no, to disappear into code where everything had rules. She could see him building the refusal, brick by brick.
“Val,” she said, before he could set the last brick down. “Start with Val. She already knows the sharp edges, and she won’t drop you if you bleed.”
He didn’t speak for a long time. The room ticked and hummed. One of the cameras glitched and resolved. Somewhere a door banged, and a laugh carried, the warm, ordinary sound of a family of misfits remembering they were alive.
Finally, he nodded once, a small, precise thing. “I’ll think about it.”
Clara exhaled slowly, only then realising she’d been holding her breath. “That is all I’m asking.”
He looked at her as if she were a variable that kept returning unexpected values. Wonder and worry and something tender she didn’t trust herself to name. He reached for her hand, laced their fingers, then seemed surprised he’d done it.
“What did Lena say this morning?” he asked, almost casual, as if he needed a topic that wasn’t the tenderness in his face.
“She said you loom.”
A soft huff of amusement escaped him. “Accurate.”
“She also said if you hurt me, she’ll steal all your passwords.”
His mouth curved. “She can try.”
Clara rested her head briefly on his shoulder and watched London flicker past on a dozen screens. “We’re going to findthem,” she said, and she meant Oliver and the man in the car and every shadow that had ever dared lay a hand on the man beside her. “We’re going to finish this.”
“We are,” he said, and the plural settled deep into the room like a promise.
They sat like that for a while, shoulder to shoulder, sharing biscuits and tea that had gone lukewarm without either of them noticing. On the screens, the city kept moving. On the other side of the door, the team did too. Inside the circle of light, Clara felt the weight that had been crushing her ease to something she could breathe under.
She wasn’t a guest. She wasn’t a pawn. She wasn’t a woman waiting to be rescued or punished for stepping out of line. She was in it. With him. With all of them. And whatever came next, she wouldn’t let Jonas carry it alone.
Chapter 32
The compound wasquiet at this hour. Too quiet, almost, though Jonas had always told himself he liked it that way. The corridors were dark save for the low hum of emergency strips glowing along the walls, the faint smell of oil and damp stone lingering in the air.
But here, in his space, there was always light. The tech room pulsed with colour. Monitors casting shifting blues and greens across his skin, server fans whispering in constant chorus. Coffee gone cold sat beside him, untouched since he’d poured it hours ago. His fingers ghosted over the keyboard, chasing trails no one else could see.
Oliver’s face stared back at him from a dozen feeds. CCTV stills, travel records, a banking alert that shouldn’t exist but did. And alongside them, other names appearing like fungus on damp earth. New associates, one in Prague, another with a shell company in Geneva that, when prodded, traced back alarmingly close to Clara’s father’s business interests. Every thread he tugged seemed to unspool into another shadow, another knot.
