When The Devil Stays

Chapter One: The Wrong Flight

Anna Jones was not the kind of woman who fell apart in public.

She had decided this years ago — standing at sixteen in a hospital corridor that smelled of bleach and bad news, watching her mother's hands shake against a plastic cup of cold tea — and she had kept the decision every day since. Through her father leaving. Through university on a shoestring budget. Through every boardroom full of men who'd looked at her and seen someone temporary. She had learned to keep her face very still and her spine very straight and let nothing show.

She was keeping that decision now, in the departure hall of Heathrow Terminal 5, with a boarding pass clutched in one hand and a lie pressed tight between her teeth.

The lie was: I am fine.

The truth was considerably worse.

Forty-eight hours ago, Anna had been an engaged woman with a good job, a flat in Kensington she couldn't quite afford, and a future that looked — from the outside, at least — like the kind of thing you'd worked hard enough to deserve. Then she'd found the number. One figure buried in a column of thousands, in a ledger she'd been hired to audit as a formality. The Hale Group didn't expect anyone to actually look. They'd hired her firm because Marcus had recommended her. Because she was supposed to be safe.

She had not been safe. She had looked.

And then Marcus had come to her office at seven-thirty in the evening when everyone else had gone home, and he'd sat across her desk — calm, careful, the way she'd once loved — and he'd told her, very quietly, that she had a choice to make. She could hand back the files, sign an NDA, take a very generous sum of money, and go somewhere quiet. Or she could find out what happened to the last person who'd tried to take the Hale Group to the Financial Conduct Authority.

He hadn't needed to say what had happened to that person.

The way he'd looked at her had said it clearly enough.

So now Anna had a ticket to Edinburgh — her sister's sofa, one week to think, the evidence backed up on an encrypted drive in her coat pocket — and a very bad feeling that she hadn't moved fast enough.

She spotted the man in the grey suit almost immediately.

He was standing near WHSmith, pretending to look at magazines. He was not looking at magazines. His eyes moved across the departures hall in the slow, methodical sweep of someone scanning for a face — not casually, not the way bored travellers watched the boards, but deliberately, the way someone did when they'd been given a photograph and told to find a match.

Anna's stomach dropped.

She didn't run. Running was the worst thing you could do when someone was looking for you — it was movement, it was noise, it was exactly what drew the eye. Instead she turned smoothly, as though she'd just remembered something, and walked at a measured pace toward the nearest cluster of people, which happened to be the queue spilling out of a coffee shop near Gate 9.

She stepped inside. Scanned the room in half a second. One empty seat — a corner table, partially obscured by a pillar, occupied on the other three sides by a businessman buried in his laptop, a mother feeding a toddler, and a man in a dark jacket who was looking at his phone and paying attention to no one.

She sat down across from the man in the dark jacket, picked up the menu, and held it in front of her face.

Her hands were not shaking. She was proud of that.

"You're being followed."

Anna went very still.

The voice came from directly across the table. It was low, unhurried, and completely certain — the kind of voice that didn't ask questions because it already had the answers. She lowered the menu one careful inch.

The man was not looking at her. He was looking at his phone, a cup of black coffee beside his right hand, one ankle crossed over his knee. He looked entirely relaxed. He also looked — and this was the thing she clocked in the first two seconds — like relaxed was something he'd practised. Like stillness was a choice he made, not a default. There was a quality of controlled attention about him that had nothing to do with looking at a phone screen.

He was, she registered despite herself, extremely handsome. Strong jaw, dark eyes, the kind of bone structure that would have been unfair on anyone but seemed to suit him in a way that felt almost deliberately inconvenient.

She filed that away and ignored it.

"I know," she said.

"Grey suit, near WHSmith," he said. "He's moving this way. You have about four minutes before he does a second sweep of this section."

"How do you know which section he's sweeping?" she asked, keeping her voice low and even.

"Because I've been watching him since you walked in," the man said simply.

Anna looked at him properly for the first time. He still wasn't looking at her. There was something almost deliberate about that too, she thought — like he was giving her the privacy of being assessed without being watched.

"My name is Jojo," he said. "And before you ask — no, I'm not with them."

"People who aren't with someone don't usually have to say so," Anna replied.

Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile. The beginning of one that had thought better of it.

"Fair point," he said. "Your gate is Gate 14. Edinburgh. The problem is they'll be watching it — he'll radio ahead the moment he spots you. You won't make it through the second security corridor."

The blood left Anna's face. She kept her expression neutral through pure stubbornness.

"How," she said carefully, "do you know my gate?"

Now he looked up. His eyes were dark brown, deep-set, and gave absolutely nothing away — and yet there was something in them that wasn't cold. Something that watched her with what she could only describe as careful attention.

"Because I've been looking for you," he said. "Not the way he has." A slight tilt of his head toward the hall. "Differently."

Every sensible instinct Anna possessed told her to get up and walk away. She had just escaped one man who'd had too much information about her life. She did not need another one. She did not need this.

She stayed seated.

"You have thirty seconds to tell me something that makes that sentence less alarming," she said.

"I know what you found in the Hale ledgers," he said. "I know what the number means. And I know you're the third auditor who's found it — the other two signed the NDA and took the money." He paused. "You didn't."

The air in Anna's chest went somewhere else entirely.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"Someone who needs what's on that drive in your pocket," he said. "And someone who can get you out of this terminal without that man in the grey suit ever seeing your face."

He reached into his jacket and placed a laminated staff lanyard on the table between them. Platinum lounge access. Staff corridor clearance. A photo ID that was not his own face.

"There's a service exit through the lounge," he said. "It bypasses the main gates entirely. You'd be airside in six minutes, on a different flight in forty."

"A different flight to where?"

"Somewhere they're not waiting for you."

She stared at the lanyard. She stared at him. Outside the coffee shop, she caught the grey suit drifting past the entrance — close, too close — and she made the calculation in the space of a single breath: the known danger versus the unknown one.

She picked up the lanyard.

"If you're lying to me," she said quietly, "I will find a way to make that a problem for you."

Jojo Smith looked at her for a moment. And this time, the thing in his expression wasn't almost a smile. It was one — small, contained, and somehow entirely genuine.

"I don't doubt it," he said.

He stood. She followed. They walked out of the coffee shop side by side, close enough to look like they were together, far enough apart that they weren't touching. She didn't look toward WHSmith. She kept her eyes forward and her shoulders level and her breathing slow.

The grey suit didn't turn around.

They made it to the lounge corridor. The door closed behind them. Anna exhaled — just once, just quietly — and told herself that the hard part was over.

She didn't know yet that the hard part hadn't started.

She didn't know that Jojo Smith had not arrived at Heathrow that morning to catch a flight.

She didn't know that the encrypted drive in her pocket was exactly what three separate organisations were currently willing to do very serious things to obtain.

And she didn't know — couldn't know, not yet — that the man walking beside her had been sent by one of them.

The question that would keep her awake for weeks to come was not whether he'd been sent.

It was whether, by the end of it, that would still matter.

He had been sent to find her.She wouldn't learn that until it was far too late to pretendshe didn't already want him to stay.

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