Because victory didn’t erase the dead teammate they’d lost trying to get him out.
In the months since, he’d gone back over every file, every scrap of audio, every blurred photograph from South Africa, chasing the ghost of a single change he could have made to save them all. He’d never found it.
But Oliver’s name in the wrong place had stuck like a splinter under his skin.
Most people would call it a coincidence. Jonas didn’t believe in coincidence. Not with Hansen’s network, not with MI5, and not with the man walking three paces ahead of Clara Sutton.
They crossed a busier intersection, the headlights from a turning taxi flaring across Clara’s face. She blinked, tucking her chin down against the light. Her expression was neutral, pleasant even, but there was something in the way she carried herself, a subtle reserve that didn’t match the easy public narrative of a “storybook engagement.”
Jonas knew how to read tells. He’d made a career of noticing what people didn’t want noticed. Clara Sutton smiled with her mouth, but not her eyes. And right now, her gaze kept skipping to shop windows as though looking without really seeing.
Oliver, though… Oliver saw everything.
They moved past a florist closing for the night. The scent of crushed greenery followed them briefly before dissipating into the cold air. A man in a grey coat stepped out of a doorway ahead. Oliver’s right hand twitched toward his side before relaxing when the stranger veered away.
Jonas clocked it. A reflex like that wasn’t taught at museum galas.
They turned again, this time into a narrower street where the shopfronts were darker, the foot traffic lighter. Jonas let two other pedestrians slip between them and him, using their silhouettes as partial cover.
His mind replayed the van’s heat signatures, the scrambled GPS feed, the face that had been there in South Africa. If Oliver wasn’t connected, then he was the unluckiest man alive. And Jonas didn’t believe in luck any more than coincidence.
Clara laughed at something Oliver said, the sound carrying faintly back to Jonas. It was a genuine laugh, warmer than her earlier polite smile. Something about the sound tugged at him, unexpected and unwelcome. He shoved it aside, focusing instead on Oliver’s hand on the small of her back as they stepped around a puddle.
Protective. Possessive. Jonas couldn’t tell which.
They stopped outside a tall brick building, one of those pre-war flats with wrought-iron balconies and heavy double doors. Oliver keyed them in with a swipe card. Clara glanced up at the lit windows, her lips pressing together as if bracing herself.
Jonas stayed in the shadows until the door closed behind them. Then he crossed the street, pausing at the corner under the awning of a shuttered bakery. His eyes traced the layout. Fire escape on the left, narrow alley to the right, one streetlight flickering two doors down.
A moment later, a window on the third floor lit up. Clara moved into view, setting her bag down on a chair and glancing toward the street. Her gaze swept over him without pause. She couldn’t see him in the dark from that distance, but something in her stillness made the hairs on the back of his neck rise.
Then she closed the curtains.
Jonas stayed in the shadows a moment longer, the image of her looking down burned into his mind.
She hadn’t seen him. But she’d felt him.
And that unsettled him almost as much as the van.
Chapter 2
The bolthole wasone room over a shuttered tailor’s shop, the kind of space that collected other people’s air. Dust and machine oil. Old cigarettes in the yellowing curtains. A lone radiator rattled like it had a cough. It wasn’t pretty, but it had a lock he’d replaced himself and a sightline on the back alley that let him mark every passerby without being seen.
He had arranged it the way he arranged most things, function first, then quiet ritual. Laptop centred on a scarred table. Drone case to the left. A roll of tape, a spare SIM, a coiled charging cable aligned top to bottom, so the ends pointed the same direction. On the chair by the door, a change of clothes folded tight, edges squared. In the backpack, a slim leather wallet with a single photo tucked in the sleeve, his mother at twenty, smiling in a way she didn’t remember how to do anymore. He didn’t take the photo out. He just liked knowing it was there.
He set the drone’s drive into the port. The laptop woke without complaint, no splashy logos, just black to grey to the encrypted prompt only he could read. The fans spun up a soft, stable hum under his breath.
First, the café.
The video filled the screen in cool, corrected light, Oliver and Clara in a corner booth that created its own polite distance from the crowd. Oliver leaned forward as though it were intimate, but his eyes worked the street reflected in the glass behind her: doors, alley mouth, the shine of a bus mirror, the high line of the rooftops. Shoulders set, chin free to pivot. Jonas had seen that posture on three continents. Men who expected trouble wore their awareness like a second jacket.
Oliver Grant’s name appeared where it shouldn’t have, tucked into the metadata of a wire transfer that stank of Hansen’s money.
Clara.
He slowed the footage to half-speed. Her hands stayed close to her body, fingers folded around the coffee cup when she wasn’t speaking. She listened like an archivist, head angled, gaze steady, absorbing. Twice her eyes drifted; to the door once, to the window once, and both times she came back with a small smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. Not distraction. Detachment. As if a part of her stood back and made a note in the margin.
He scrubbed the audio with a narrow EQ, peeled the café’s clatter off the top. What remained wasn’t much: Clara’s low voice, Oliver’s answer, a shape of words without content.
