My attention narrows to the present. In my mind, I start mapping the estate grounds, guards, and cameras. “So, we go in?—”
“You can’t.” The words are flat. Final. “There’s no way in. It’s impossible.”
I raise an eyebrow in disbelief.
“My mother’s husband is a tech millionaire who has the house wired to the teeth. Motion sensors, cameras, armed security. Everything.” She huffs out a humorless laugh. “You can try to infiltrate, but you’ll fail. Spectacularly.”
Adrenaline surges through me. While she’s brilliant, she’s also infuriating. “So, you call your mom?—”
Jordan shakes her head, a flush of rage and pain twisting her mouth. “I haven’t spoken to her in nine years. Not since she tried to erase my dad from my life. I lived under a bridge rather than her house.”
The story from before comes back in sharper focus. Jordan at sixteen, homeless, starving, and trading safety for freedom.
“After my dad died, my mom stopped pretending. She remarried in less than a year. A rich tech guy obsessed with security. And suddenly, there were all these new rules.”
Money comes with rules. That makes sense.
Her hands grip the sheets. “Prep schools. Uniforms. Etiquette lessons. Private security. Everything fake and scrubbed clean. She threw my dad’s clothes away like he never mattered. Said it was for me. That I needed to move on. Become someone else.”
I can picture that. The daughter, her father’s shadow, suddenly alone in a museum of perfection, every trace of love boxed up and thrown away.
No wonder she bolted.
Jordan remains stiff and upright on the bed. “I ran away a lot. The first time I lasted three days. The second, five. Then two weeks. By the time I was sixteen, I knew the streets. Learned how to vanish. Where to find food and which shelters would look the other way. Then I found…the spiritual stuff. Auras. Energy. A way to assign logic to the world. To prove that everything made sense if you just believed hard enough.”
Dense, suffocating silence stretches between us.
I don’t know what to say.
When I lost my mother, Roman took me in and gave me a family. Even if I work alone more often than not, I’ve had somewhere to go and people at my back for most of my life.
What did Jordan have?
A dead father, a closed-off mother, and no one to depend on but herself.
My fingers twitch with a foreign sensation. I should reach for her. I should…comfort her.
She wraps her arms around her body and curls into herself. “That’s it. The whole truth. No leverage. No secret plan. Just a safe I don’t have access to, if it even still exists. I can’t help you. I guess, in the end, I wasn’t worth a whole lot.”
There’s no protocol for this. No manual for how to respond when your target burns herself down to the bone and shows you every crack, every scar.
I can’t fix what’s broken or give her back what she lost. I can’t erase her mother’s apathy or her father’s ghost.
But I can dosomething.
I lift myself up, grab my phone, and call Evgeni, the errand boy who handles my requests. “It’s me. I need a reservation at Lighthouse. Best table. Thirty minutes.” I bulldoze over the objections from the other end. “I don’t care. Tell them it’s forRoman Kozlov.” I cut off more pushback. “Buy the restaurant if you have to. Table. Now.”
I hang up before he can protest, certain he’ll come through.
Jordan stares at me, wariness and confusion battling in her eyes.
“Get dressed. We’re going to dinner.”
Chapter 24
Jordan
Lighthouse is a vault. No, more than that.
