I stand in the doorway and watch him breathe. In sleep, his face loses that sharp, defensive edge. He looks younger. The bruise on his neck has darkened to purple, visible above his collar. There's another mark on his collarbone, barely visible where his shirt has shifted. My marks.
My claim.
I should wake him. Send him to his bed. Maintain the boundaries that keep getting thinner every day.
Instead, I cross to the closet and pull out a blanket. It's soft, expensive, the kind of thing I bought because it felt better tohave quality bedding, not because I ever expected to use it on someone else.
I drape it over him carefully, tucking the edges around his shoulders. He stirs, mumbles something that sounds like my name, and burrows deeper into the couch. His hand finds the edge of the blanket and pulls it closer.
I should leave. Go to bed. Get the four hours of sleep my body requires to function.
Instead, I sit in the chair across from him and pull up the files on my tablet. The Kreiss timeline. The date discrepancies Jonah found. The web of shell companies that connects Geneva to facilities I haven't identified yet.
But I keep looking up. Keep watching him sleep.
Aurelio Bonaccorso asked if he should be flattered that they sent a conversation instead of a bullet.
My mind drifts to Jonah in that detention center. The file that crossed my desk three years ago, flagging him for permanent erasure. The cold calculation I made when I decided to break him instead of kill him, because broken assets can still be useful and corpses are just waste.
I wonder what he would say if he knew how close he came to the same choice. How close he still is, every day, to disappearing into the same shit hole that's swallowed so many others. One wrong move. One suspicious Custodian. One slip in my careful performance, and he becomes another body in the foundation.
I wonder what it says about me that I can't let that happen.
The Foundry trained me to see people as assets. Resources. Tools to be used and discarded when their utility ends. For thirty years, that's exactly what I did. I never questioned it, never hesitated. Never lost a moment of sleep over the faces that blurred together into a single mass of processed humanity.
Now there's a man sleeping on my couch who calls me an asshole and makes me laugh and wants to be near me. A man I destroyed and somehow couldn't destroy completely. A man who should hate me, who has every right to hate me, and instead climbs into my bed and wants me to take control of his body, mind and soul.
The tablet dims from inactivity. I don't bother to wake it.
I just sit in the dark, watching over something I'm not supposed to want, and try to figure out what the hell I'm becoming.
Whatever it is, there's no going back.
I'm not sure I want to.
Chapter Eight: Jonah
Iwakeupwitha crick in my neck and Jagger watching me from across the room.
He's sitting in the armchair, tablet in his lap, coffee on the side table. The bright morning light cuts across his face, highlighting the sharp angles, the dark circles under his eyes. He looks like he hasn't slept. Again.
"Creepy," I say, voice rough from sleep. "Very creepy. Do you often watch people while they're unconscious?"
"You were drooling on my couch."
"That's not a no." I push myself upright, wincing at the stiffness in my spine. The blanket slides off my shoulders, and I notice it for the first time. Soft. Expensive. Definitely not something I put on myself. "Did you tuck me in?"
He doesn't answer. Just looks at his tablet like it contains the secrets of the universe.
"You did." I can't keep the grin off my face. "Jagger Harrison, cold-blooded assassin, tucked me in like a toddler. This is going in my memoir."
"You're not writing a memoir."
"Not yet. Give me time." I stretch, hearing my joints pop in protest. The documents I fell asleep on are scattered across the floor, sticky notes everywhere. "How long was I out?"
"Six hours."
"And you just sat there? Watching?"
