When The Devil Stays

Chapter Eight

The flat in Eaux-Vives was on the third floor of a pale stone building two streets from the lake, and it was, as Claudine had promised, nothing dramatic - white walls, wooden floors, a kitchen the size of a generous thought, two bedrooms separated by a sitting room that contained a sofa, a lamp, and a bookshelf full of paperbacks in four languages. The windows looked out over a quiet courtyard where a cat was conducting what appeared to be a thorough audit of the flowerpots.

Anna stood in the middle of the sitting room and felt the silence settle around her.

It was the first real silence she had had since - she counted backwards - yesterday morning. Before Marcus's people had come. Before the airport. Before all of it. Forty-eight hours of moving and thinking and holding herself together and not looking too directly at anything that required feeling rather than managing, and now here was a room, and here was quiet, and here was the specific and dangerous luxury of having a moment to simply stand still.

She heard Jojo set bags down in the kitchen - Claudine had sent them with supplies, practical and unsentimental, food and basic necessities and a change of clothes for each of them sourced with the quiet efficiency of someone who had done this for people before - and she heard the tap run and the kettle fill and the particular domestic sounds of a person making themselves useful in a small kitchen, and she found, to her considerable surprise, that those sounds made the room feel less like a holding place and more like somewhere she could actually breathe.

She sat on the sofa. Put her face in her hands. Did not cry - she had decided this years ago and she kept it - but sat in the dark of her own palms for a long moment and let herself feel the full weight of everything that had changed in the last two days.

Her job. Gone.

Her flat - Marcus's flat, she corrected herself, it had always been Marcus's flat and she had been a fool not to see that sooner. Gone.

Her engagement, which she had been half-relieved to lose and half-devastated by and had not yet had time to feel either properly. Still pending.

Her city. Temporarily inaccessible.

Her plan. Entirely obsolete.

And in exchange for all of that: a white-walled flat in Geneva, a Swiss lawyer who was probably the most competent person she had ever met, an encrypted drive that was now in three places at once and therefore indestructible, and a man in her kitchen who had walked her through the dark and told her she was remarkable and asked her to dinner with the careful seriousness of someone who did not say things he did not mean.

She took her face out of her hands.

It was not the exchange she would have chosen. It was, she was slowly and reluctantly beginning to understand, not entirely the worst one she could imagine.

Jojo appeared in the doorway with two mugs. He looked at her - one quick, complete assessment, the kind that took in everything and filed it - and then crossed the room and sat beside her on the sofa and held out a mug without speaking.

She took it. Tea. Strong, no sugar - which was exactly right, and she hadn't told him that, and she didn't remark on it because she thought if she remarked on it something would shift in a direction she wasn't quite ready for yet.

They sat.

The cat was still auditing the flowerpots below. The city made its gentle afternoon sounds through the glass. The tea was hot and the sofa was soft and Jojo was close enough that she could feel the warmth of him without them touching, which was becoming something of a recurring theme and she was beginning to think it was deliberate - not manipulative, not calculated, but careful. He was careful with her. She noticed it every time.

"You can say it," he said quietly.

"Say what?"

"Whatever you've been sitting with since we got here. You went quiet in a different way." He looked at his mug. "Not the organising quiet. The other kind."

She looked at him sidelong. "You can tell the difference."

"I've been watching you for two days," he said. "I can tell several."

She turned that over. "That should bother me more than it does."

"Probably," he agreed.

She drank her tea. He waited, the way he waited - without pressure, without impatience, like someone who had learned that the best way to make space for a person was to simply hold it open and let them find it when they were ready.

"I'm angry," she said finally. "I keep not having time to be angry and then finding a corner of it where there is time and it's - it's a lot of anger. For a lot of things." She paused. "Marcus. Sutton. The entire apparatus of men who build systems to protect themselves and assume no one will look closely enough to find the seams."

"That's reasonable anger," Jojo said.

"And I'm angry at myself," she said. "For not seeing Marcus sooner. For trusting the flat. For-" She stopped.

"For what?"

"For being the kind of person who works very hard and does everything right and ends up sitting in a flat in Geneva at thirty-two with no job and no home and no-" She cut herself off again. Recalibrated. "It's self-pity. I know it's self-pity. I'm allowing myself approximately four more minutes of it and then I'm going to stop."

Jojo was quiet for a moment.

"It's not self-pity," he said. "It's grief. They look similar from the inside but they're different things. Self-pity is a loop. Grief is - grief is just the gap between what you had and what you have now. It closes. It just takes time and it's not comfortable while it's open." He looked at her. "Four minutes seems insufficient."

She looked back at him.

"How long do you suggest?"

"As long as it takes," he said simply. "I'm not going anywhere."

The room was very quiet.

Later, she would think about that sentence - I'm not going anywhere - and how it had landed, and what it had done to something in her chest that she had been keeping very carefully locked for a very long time. She would think about how she had looked at him in that moment and felt, clearly and without ambiguity, for perhaps the first time in two days, not frightened and not angry and not exhausted but - seen.

Right now, she just looked at him.

"Jojo," she said.

"Yes."

"I'm glad you're not going anywhere."

Something in his face - that quality of light through walls, the same one she'd seen on the street corner this morning - moved again. Stayed longer this time. He held her gaze, and the moment held both of them, and neither of them moved, and neither of them looked away, and the six inches between them on that sofa felt at once like an enormous distance and no distance at all.

His hand moved - just slightly, just enough - and rested on the cushion between them. Not reaching. Not quite. Just there. An offer made without pressure, the way he did everything.

She looked at it.

She set her mug down on the coffee table and settled back into the sofa and let her hand rest near his - not touching, almost - and they sat like that in the white-walled flat above the courtyard while the afternoon light shifted and the cat below finished its inspection and the city went on in its quiet Swiss way entirely indifferent to the fact that something was happening in that room, slowly and inevitably and without either of them having to say a single word about it.

Her phone buzzed on the cushion beside her.

She picked it up. A message from an unknown number - Claudine's, she recognised the format - and two words that rearranged everything.

She read it twice.

Then she turned to Jojo and held the phone out and watched his face go very still in a way she hadn't seen before - not the controlled stillness, not the careful calm, but the stillness of someone whose worst calculation has just been confirmed.

The message said: Sutton knows she's alive. He's coming himself.

Sutton knows she's alive.Not his lawyers. Not his watchers. Not the men in grey suits.Him. Personally. And a man like Sutton didn't come himself unless he intended to finish it.