His main tormentor, the man who’d ruined him. The man he thought was dead.
The image hit like a gut punch. The oppressive heat, the red dust clinging to sweat, the burn of the midday sun over corrugated metal walls. The smell of diesel and the iron tang from his own blood. The sound of boots on cracked earth, slow and deliberate, just before they’d tried to break him in ways that left no visible marks.
His jaw tightened, muscles working against the memory.
If he called Bás, the man would mobilise the whole team to help him. That was what they did for each other. Always.
But if it went sideways, if anyone caught a bullet meant for Jonas again, he’d never come back from it. He may not have been there when Rykov died, but his weakness had put his team in that position and ultimately cost his teammate his life. No, this was his mission. He couldn’t risk it.
Not after last time.
He pocketed the controller, flattening his palm over the cool metal casing for a moment before letting it go. The wind had found its way under his shirt now, slicing cold into the heat gathered along his back.
From the street below came the faint hiss of bus brakes, the distant thud of a bass from a passing car. Life went on down there.
Up here, Jonas made a choice.
Tonight wasn’t a team op.
Tonight was his.
He descended the fire escape,the metal slick under his boots. Street noise swelled around him, the snap of a newspaper page, a car horn somewhere behind him, the faint hum of conversation leaking from the café.
From the corner, he had a clear view of Oliver and Clara through the plate-glass window. Oliver gestured with his coffee cup; Clara tilted her head, listening. Her expression was unreadable, the way someone’s face looked when they were thinking about something entirely different from what was being said.
Jonas crossed the street casually, blending into a group of pedestrians. He kept his hands in his jacket pockets; the drone controller pressed against his palm like a second heartbeat.
When they left the café twenty minutes later, he was already in position.
Oliver led, scanning the street again. Clara followed, her coat pulled tight, one hand wrapped around the strap of her bag. Jonas fell in two paces behind, then angled across to the opposite side of the road, keeping them in sight through the shifting crowd.
The van from earlier was gone.
That didn’t make him feel any better.
They turned down a narrower street lined with bookshops and antique stores. Clara paused at one window, her gaze lingering on a display of old maps before Oliver touched her arm, guiding her onward.
Jonas noted the pause. Museum archivist. She wasn’t just looking, she was cataloguing, committing details to memory.
A small smile ghosted across his face before he killed it. This wasn’t about her.
It couldn’t be.
Jonas kept his pace even, his gaze drifting just enough to look like another man walking home. But every step was calculated, every streetlamp and shadow accounted for.
Oliver’s stride was purposeful. Too purposeful. Men going to dinner with their fiancées didn’t keep that kind of posture, shoulders set, head turning in slow arcs like a scanner sweeping a room.
Jonas had seen it before. South Africa. Berlin. Caracas. A man expecting trouble.
Oliver Grant. Officially, a liaison for an international NGO that specialised in “conflict resolution initiatives.” Unofficially, MI5. Jonas had verified that in about thirty minutes, the first time Oliver’s name had surfaced in his system.
That had been months ago, buried in a stack of encrypted financial logs tied to the cell that had taken Jonas in SouthAfrica. Ninety percent of the data was useless noise. The other ten percent… always just out of reach, scrubbed clean before he could pin it down.
The same cell run by Hansen.
Jonas’s stomach tightened at the name. Hansen had been the architect of every minute of his captivity, the voice that ordered the blows, the one who decided when water would replace food, the one who played cruelty like an art. Hansen had also been tied to Bás years before, in a tangle of past operations that still didn’t make full sense to Jonas.
Bás had been the one to kill him in the end. Swift. Justice, maybe. But the victory had never settled in Jonas’s bones.
