Chapter 5 Dead Man's Switch.

POV: Zara Wells

Priya left because she had to.

She grabbed her bag. She didn't say goodbye, just squeezed my hand once on the way past and then she was gone and the door that couldn't close anymore was just an open frame with cold air coming through it and three men with him.

He had moved to my window. Standing there with his back half-turned like the room bored him. One of the other men had pulled out a laptop. Not mine. His own.

"Sit," he said. Still facing the window.

"It's my apartment."

He turned then.

So I sat. Not because he told me to. Because my legs had been shaking for the last ten minutes and I was done pretending they weren't.

He came away from the window and took the chair across from me, the wooden one I used for throwing clothes on, and he sat in it like it was a throne and waited.

Fine. Okay. He wanted to talk.

"The dead man's switch," I said. "That's what you're here about."

Something shifted in the room. The man with the laptop looked up. The one by the door straightened. Even the third one, who had been completely still since Priya left, moved his weight from one foot to the other.

But him? He just looked at me.

"You want to know if it's real," I said. "So I'll tell you how it works."

His jaw moved once. That was all.

I pulled out my phone. Opened the app. Turned it so he could see the interface, but not close enough that he could touch it. Five server nodes, each one lit green. A countdown timer sitting at eleven hours and forty-three minutes.

"Every twelve hours I check in," I said. "A code. If I miss it, the system reads that as a trigger. Everything goes. The video, the metadata, the original file with location data still attached. It goes to six news outlets and the FBI field office in lower Manhattan simultaneously."

He was looking at the screen.

"I set it up last year," I said. "After a brand deal went sideways and a lawyer threatened me. I had a tech guy build it." I put the phone face-down on my knee. "Twelve hours is not a lot of time."

The man with the laptop said something low in that same language from before. He cut him off with two words, flat and quiet, without looking away from me.

Then he said, "Who built it."

"Why."

"Because I want to know if it works the way you think it does."

"It does."

"You're certain."

"I watched him test it on a dummy account. Three minutes from trigger to delivery." I kept my voice level. "So yes."

He stood up.

Walked to the window again. Stood there with his hands in his pockets looking at nothing, or maybe looking at everything, I couldn't tell with him, and the three men in my apartment were completely silent.

"You built leverage," he said, still facing the window.

"I protected myself."

"Same thing." He turned. "And the people who have access to the servers."

"Only me."

"Your friend."

"No."

"Your tech person."

"He doesn't have the trigger key. He built the system. He can't fire it."

He crossed the room. Not toward me, just moving, the way something big moves when it's thinking, and he stopped at the edge of the coffee table and looked down at my phone and then up at me.

"You're not a journalist," he said. "You're not a cop. You made a video about cold coffee."

"And now I have a dead man's switch. Funny how that works."

Wrong thing to say. Not because he reacted badly. Because he almost smiled. Just the corner of his mouth, barely, like he caught himself doing it.

The man with the laptop closed it. The one by the door checked his watch.

He reached into his jacket. Pulled out a phone. Not his personal one, a different one, and he typed something short and fast and then put it back without showing me the screen.

Then he looked at me with that face, that flat nothing face that had been giving me nothing since he walked in, and said three words.

"Pack your bag."

The cold air coming through the broken door hit the back of my neck.

Not you're coming with us. Not we need to move you. Not anything that sounded like protection or procedure or anything I could frame as being on my side of this.

Pack your bag.

Like where I was going, I wouldn't be coming back from. Like this whole conversation, the servers, the switch, the leverage I thought I had built, had just become the reason he couldn't leave me here.