* Jana *
The car hummed softly beneath us, glass and steel cutting the city into fragments outside. I didn't look at him, not directly. If I did, the façade I'd built would fracture, and Lawrence Dankworth was the one man who could see straight through the cracks.
I'd walked into that brunch knowing exactly what I was doing. I'd dressed for war, rehearsed the cadence of my voice, chosen my words like daggers. Every move had been deliberate, every glance calculated. And it worked. I'd rattled Nano Tech. I'd forced their eyes to split between him and me. I'd reminded the great Lawrence Dankworth that he wasn't the only one who knew how to set a room on fire.
But the truth?
The truth was sitting right beside me, drinking his silence like it was another weapon in his arsenal.
I had never
