I think about the conflict in his eyes when I asked him what he was going to do with me.
He doesn't know.
That's interesting.
That's something I can work with.
The Silent designed him to be a weapon. Cold, precise, without weakness. But weapons don't bring assets home off the record. Weapons don't make coffee at 3 AM and have kitchen conversations with their prisoners. Weapons don't look at broken journalists with something that almost looks like guilt.
Jagger Harrison isn't as inhuman as he wants to be.
And that makes him vulnerable.
A cross between a grimace and a smirk crosses my face.
Tomorrow, the memory testing starts. Tomorrow, I start remembering all the terrible things they did to me, all the secrets they tried to bury.
But tonight, I've learned something valuable.
My captor has cracks.
And I've always been good at finding ways in.
Chapter Three: Jagger
Ispentfromfoura.m. to five a.m. reviewing Moore's archive, cross-referencing financial trails, building connection maps between shell companies and offshore accounts. Productive work. Necessary work. The kind of work that should have consumed my full attention.
Instead, I kept pulling up the security feed from the guest bedroom.
Jonah sleeps like someone who's forgotten how. He tosses, kicks at the sheets, curls into himself like he's trying to disappear. Twice he sat bolt upright, gasping, before collapsing back against the pillows. Each time, I found myself leaning toward the monitor, watching the details of his distress with an attention I couldn't justify.
By five thirty, I gave up pretending to work and went to the kitchen.
Now I'm standing at the counter with a cup of coffee I don't remember making, watching the sun crawl over the city skyline, and trying to remember the last time another person's presence disrupted my routines this thoroughly.
I can't.
The Foundry trained isolation into us. We work alone, sleep alone, exist alone. Attachment is weakness. Connection is vulnerability. The only relationships we maintain are strategic, calculated, temporary.
The only exception is my brothers. We will always have each others backs, even when one brother acts like an idiot and almost reigns hell on all our heads. But each of us functions inside the triad differently.
Jinx has his chaos. Jace has his silence. I have my systems, my protocols, my carefully ordered existence.
And now there's a man sleeping in my guest bedroom who talks too much, deflects with humor, and looks at me like he’s trying to write some journalistic piece on how to make a statue smile.
It's unsettling.
The guest bedroom door opens at 7:12. I hear the soft slap of bare feet on hardwood, the hesitation at the hallway's edge, the almost imperceptible intake of breath when he spots me.
"You're up early," Jonah says. "Or did you just never go to bed? I'm betting on option two, based on the whole 'soulless automaton' vibe you've got going."
I don't turn around. "There's coffee."
"Wow. A complete sentence and an offer of caffeine. Much improved from a few hours ago. We're really making progress here." He moves into the kitchen, and I watch his reflection in the window glass. He's wearing the clothes I provided, a simple gray t-shirt and black pants, both slightly too large for his frame.His hair is a disaster, sticking up in multiple directions like he lost a fight with his pillow.
He pours himself coffee, adds an obscene amount of sugar from the canister on the counter, and leans against the refrigerator to drink it.
"That's disgusting," I say, watching him dump in a fourth spoonful.
