I am not a stranger to the feeling that comes when time stops—I felt it when I was falling toward the ocean and ice, and I felt it in the moments following when Rian’s heart stopped beating. The moment slows down, going so slow around you that it makes your heart race and your skin go cold. I remembered the rush of resisting air as I fell and how hard it was to breathe when I looked down at what I had done. I had felt heavier than the world at that moment, and it felt like time would never start again, like I would be forever stuck in this mutated limbo for the rest of my days.
I had only just hours earlier been thinking about my sins and how I wouldn’t be mad if I suffered for them, and I should have known that nothing was more unforgiving than karma.
It was like seeing a ghost, but so much worse because I knew that Jonathon was flesh and bone and standing in front of me, and that I could see him but he could not see me through Nina Abraham, and it kind of reminded me that I gave up on him so many years ago to wander this path.
I once thought that letting him go would be the only solution. I thought that if I was put in a position where I couldn’t monitor him, where I didn’t know where in the world he could possibly be, that I might be able to forget him and what he had always meant to me, the innocent soul in the hands of the devious Devil’s advocate.
Now that I was looking at him and time had stopped and his hand was held out for me to shake and the thought of touching him nearly set me on fire, I realized that all I had been this whole time without him was alone. I hadn’t even had the illusion of his company to soothe me.
Seeing him was like a nightmare and a breath of fresh air, like that moment when you wake from a nightmare and breathe in a sharp breath and you are aware that you are awake but the terror hadn’t worn off yet, and you still feel trapped, like you will never be free.
And then time starts back up again, as if it had never stopped in the first place, and you’re left with the painful back-lash of the moments that no one else would know you lived.
I reacted to Jonathon more robotically than I did out of thought. I took his hand and I shook it, smiling politely, and said, “I have been meaning to speak to you. It’s a pleasure.”
He was still smiling at me. We were perfect strangers.
It surprised me just how much that hurt.
“We’ve been looking forward to having you around these parts.” He smirked. “It’s not every day we find out that a public figure used to spend her days murdering people because someone behind a desk told her to.”
My smile hardened, in both anger and surprise. This was not the Jonathon that I had always known. I didn’t know anything about this person.
From behind me, I heard Meade suck in a surprised breath, the reaction I would have had if I wasn’t too much of a piece of stone, my mask unbreakable. I felt the presence of Meade stepping one step closer to me, bringing him closer to Jonathon, and I was suddenly aware that I should probably be watching for flying fists.
Jonathon’s gaze slipped from mine to Meade as Meade told him, his voice like ice water, “It’s best to watch your tongue around Helford operatives, DuPont. Especially this one.”
“We already established what I think of the majority of your opinions, Meade.”
“I could shoot you,” Meade said dismissively, tilting his head in my direction, “but she could definitely shoot you faster.”
“It is best not to pick fights with trained assassins, Monsieur DuPont,” I cautioned him, much more hurt than I was offended, injured at the world I had forced him into that changed him so much. “I am not going to shoot you, but I will if you don’t pull the stick out of your ass.”
At this, Jonathon laughed. The laugh was the same, so familiar, that I actually felt a little nauseous. So much had changed about him, but of what stayed the same . . .
It was like being back in Paris again.
Unconsciously, my hand flexed, the one still coated in burns from the day I pulled Jonathon from the flames, and a strike of fear went through me that he might recognize them, might remember the day when he got upset because I wanted to hide those scars. It had been five years, though, and now the scars were faint and looked as though they could have been from anything, from a blade to an innocent fall.
A slice of curiosity went through me as I wondered if he would remember, if he would see scars on a woman’s hand and think about all the sacrifices I once made for him, and the ones he doesn’t know I am still making all again for him.
He didn’t notice the movement of my hand or the scars—he just noticed Nina Abraham, standing strongly in front of him with an unmovable persona, so different from the Caitie Alastair he loved.
Jonathon was still blissfully oblivious as he grinned at me, a spark in his eyes that I didn’t recognize. “I guess I should watch what I say then,” he replied. “I would hate to have Helford gunning for me once again.”
I just responded, “I am not Helford anymore.”
“And I am,” Meade told Jonathon flatly, smiling with acid.
The tension in the air was thick enough to be glass in between us. I looked between Meade, who was tense and annoyed, to Jonathon, who held himself like all that and a bag of chips.
“Meade,” I called, “maybe you could check in with my superior in London, if you wouldn’t mind. Tell them the entire situation that is happening here that you are aware of. Oh, and send him my love, will you?”
If my condescending tone hadn’t been enough, then the last sentence had been. Meade shot a sharp look in the space between Jonathon and I like he wanted to make sure there was a reasonable distance between the two of us before he nodded to me in understanding and walked away to a safe corner in which he could contact Woodburn and share with him my obvious displeasure of the trap for me he had to have realized that he set. I watched Meade’s retreating back before I turned back to Jonathon, my eyebrow raised.
“You must be aware that you are poking a bear with testing him like that, are you not? Don’t you think that is too dangerous a game for you to be playing?”
Jonathon grinned at me like he was pleased. “Well, it got us alone, did it not?”
I knew Jonathon, but I did not know this Jonathon. I knew that Jonathon used to tease people I order to get a feel for their personality, that he acted much more tamer when he was alone with that person and had something to be serious about. Jonathon was too used to never allowing himself to become too dependent on people he knew would leave—I couldn’t be sure if this part of his personality stayed the same, but it was worth what hope I had left in him. I was looking at him now and he was a stranger in Jonathon’s body, his mind.
It had been three years since I had last seen or heard even the slightest mention of Jonathon DuPont, and it had been at Avenger’s with a paper crane. I hadn’t spoken to him; I had only seen him from afar. Technically, it had been five years, and I understood how people really changed over the course of five years.
Jonathon certainly had.
He looked different. Jonathon’s dark blond hair had gotten darker to the point that it was almost entirely brown now, and he had it cut shorter to his head than what I remembered. He had an unexplained scar on his hairline, and his eyes were weighed down with so many things he never should have had to see. His face was more defined, chiseled, a different kind of attractive than how he had been when he was still in school in France. He was still attractive in the way that Jonathon will always be gorgeous to me, no matter what. He was taller and broader, and it was stunningly obvious how much he had grown up—I had to keep reminding myself that he was a year older than me, that it wasn’t just Jonathon doing all of this growing up.
He seemed different even in his behavior. I remember how they used to call him Johnny France in Brooklyn, but I didn’t see much of who they saw in him when I was looking at him. Now, he seemed to have a bit of an ego—a persona. Jonathon was putting on a whole new face in this job for the Underground as if he felt as though there was something he had to prove. He acted much more selfishly and confidently and I couldn’t help but to question the validity of it, sympathizing the way that all people think when they are in a position of authority. He held himself different, like he was afraid of being torn down.
Jonathon was hanging on by a thread, and my aching heart would keep him clinging to what he had left to the best of my feeble ability for as long as it took.
I shook my head at Jonathon like his antics were unbelievable, but I remember him using a similar kind of charm to win my affections, so I didn’t try to scold him like an ex-girlfriend—I met his gaze evenly like a business contact. “Would you mind briefing me on the current information you have uncovered, as well as what your team is investigating into apparently behind closed doors?”
Jonathon had learned how to play this game; he smiled with all of the charm it nearly took to completely disarm me and bade me to follow him, and he began to lead me into the far back left corner.
I took a moment of peace to write up my hate list—Woodburn for knowing and sending me here anyway, Meade for failing to warn me even when he had multiple opportunities to do so, and Woodburn again for thinking it would be a good idea to recruit Jonathon DuPont to this cause in the first place. I would be having a talk with both of them the next time I saw them, that was for certain.
Jonathon stopped walking at a collection of monitors and a desk raised just a few inches off of the ground in order to give him a better vantage point toward the ways to exit or enter the building as well as over the worker bees at their desks, who were glancing furtively toward the two of us as we passed them by.
Jonathon gestured, offering me the desk chair, and I shook my head weakly in response. He paused before he sat down instead, rolling to a collection of monitors and two keyboards, typing so quickly I had to carefully watch his movement to pick it all up. Jonathon hit one button and all of the monitors changed to different pages—on the first was a picture of Krantz from the MI6 database that I had seen on several different occasions, the other was a list, and the last was a map of Europe.
The curiosity was eating at me. I had to ask, “How long have you been working in intelligence, Monsieur DuPont?”
“Three years almost exactly. I was approached by a friend of mine whom I trust very much and was offered a position. I’m apparently a natural with computers, but I think it was probably because I had already been working on tracking down proof against Helford before I was even recruited.” He twirled his desk chair around so he was facing me, his brown eyes searching for the truth in mine. “Now I get to ask you a question—why do you address me as Monsieur, specifically?
A slip. A very dangerous slip.
Jonathon’s English was almost completely free of a French accent, and the only blatantly obvious French thing about him was his last name, which could have just as easily been a French name laced with so much British or American or German or African that it was no longer nearly as French as the origin of it was. Although I hadn’t meant the slip, I answered him in seconds, without hesitation.
“You have a hint of a French accent under your English that makes it obvious that you had either spent a lot of time there—as there is no intelligence base in France beside a place with a slightly different dialect to your Parisian one—or it could be deduced that you originate from there, especially due to your last name.”
He seemed impressed.
I added reluctantly, “But yours is a story that many of us rebels know well, Monsieur DuPont.”
His face went dark and he turned back to the monitors, still injured over the mere mention of my mission to save him. I studied the stiffness to his shoulders, noticing the muscular tone that had not been so defined the last time I had seen him, biting my tongue.
“Don’t call me Monsieur, please,” he asked of me flatly, and I couldn’t help but to think back to when he had asked the same thing of Caitie, and the face he had made then. He didn’t look back at me when he added, “I hate when people call me that. It’s just Jonathon.”
I didn’t respond. I allowed him to type at something for a moment, hanging back and letting him finish what he was doing, giving him permission to begin as he may. It was the least I could do.
Jonathon stood to face me, his arms crossed over his chest as he stood at his computer. “First off is that I don’t have much for you at all at this time—the crew upstairs is running an encryption code that should be able to unlock some new information—but this is what little we know now. We know that he has six bank accounts all spread over Europe,” he pointed to various locations on the monitor with the map on it, and as he touched it red push-pins appeared in the locations, marking it, “and we believe there is one more, but he is doing a great job with keeping that one under the radar. Over the last six months, Krantz has been religiously drawing large sums of money from each of these banks monthly and more than likely depositing it all into the account that we couldn’t locate, but it is close enough that he would have been able to travel to it. The sum of money is approximately six million dollars, and it is gone with the wind.”
“What is the source of all of that money?” I demanded, surprised. “That’s a little bit above his pay-grade.”
Jonathon pulled up a bank number onto the monitor that I knew much too well. My skin crawled just looking at it, and I had to scream at myself in my head to keep my composure, or else I would have slipped.
He was watching me, waiting for any sign of a reaction. “Do you recognize this account?” he demanded. “It’s completely untraceable—I can’t even tell you what country it’s from, what company.”
“I’ve never seen that number before,” I lied without batting my eyes, acting completely unaffected. My stomach felt like it had dropped. Jonathon removed the number from the screen, looking dejected, but I wasn’t going to open my mouth when it came to something as big as this.
Something so obviously from war.
Jonathon shrugged like I had asked an unanswerable question, even though I hadn’t said anything at all. “I hate to say it, but that is the bulk of what we have been able to dig up, and even that took us a very long time. This Krantz guy is excellent at covering his tracks, truly above average, but we are running a lot of different software upstairs—facial recognition from planes, trains, and automobile locations all over the world, along with getting into his MI6 account, and I have one of my best intelligence hackers cracking down hard on his computers for anything behind a firewall or written into a hard drive, but so far we have no hits, and we really don’t expect anything until a later hour today. We’re really doing all that we can.”
They were, and they would never be able to delve deep enough. This was something they would never be able to uncover.
I was always running in circles.
I ran a hand through my hair. “I appreciate what you all have found so far—it’s not much, but it’s a start. Krantz is smart, and he is very important and he knows it, so he is not going to make it easy for us to find him.”
“As far as I am concerned, you and your hot-headed little friend over there will probably be waiting for a couple more days here before we find enough to actually give you something to go on.” Jonathon plucked a dark green jacket from under his desk and slid it on in the same motion. I watched him with amusement.
“I’m sorry, but do you have somewhere else more interesting to be, Mr. DuPont?”
He grimaced at my new title for him but chose not to immediately argue it, and replied instead, “Yes, I do—it was named one of my instructions to show you around and, now that we have a lull in activity, that means I get to show you around Barcelona. It’s late afternoon, before sundown, and we won’t hit anything in the databases until midnight if we are lucky. And you’re here under the guise of vacationing, so you might as well be able to prove it, should you not?”
He was reminding me too much of the old Jonathon right now, the one with the energized grin and the adventurous, curious glint in his eyes. It made it impossible for me to want to say no, and I soon found myself telling him, “You are supervising the floor, are you not?”
He rolled his eyes at my weak argument, his grin widening. “We have two supervisors on the floor at all times—I am just the primary. I could call over the second string at any time and she would do just as good of a job as I would.”
I pursed my lips, half wanting to stay and guard myself from the pain that would be inevitable when I had to leave Jonathon behind again with new memories of him to go along with it, half wanting to go anyway because my life expectancy wasn’t high enough for me to want to be cautious.
Jonathon could tell that I was having an internal debate because he gave me this small, unsure smile, almost nervous, and I managed to see it and think of the time he looked me in the eye and told me that I was the bravest person he had ever known and how ashamed of myself I had been when he had told me that.
I would never stop owing Jonathon DuPont.
So I said, “Okay.”