The call came on a Thursday, two days after the revelation about Marcus Holt. Anton's voice, clipped and precise, carrying the particular urgency of a man who never used more words than necessary and sometimes got it wrong.
"Holt has been located. He's in London. If we move tonight, we can close this."
Dimitri said very little on the call. He came to find Jane afterward, which was, she had begun to notice, becoming a pattern — not a conscious one, perhaps, but a consistent one. He reported things to her. He thought out loud in her direction. He had, she suspected, been doing the thinking-alone thing for fifteen years and was discovering, with some bewilderment, that it worked differently when done with another person.
"You're going to London," she said. Not a question.
"Tonight. And you're coming with me."
She blinked. "Why?"
"Because the safest place for you is next to me," he said. "And because—" He stopped. Started again. "Because I don't want you to be here alone while I'm dealing with this."
Jane looked at him. "You don't want me to be alone," she said slowly. "Or you don't want to be the one who left me."
The expression on his face was answer enough.
"Pack a bag," he said. "We leave in three hours."
Jane packed a bag. It felt strange — strange to be returning to the world she'd been taken from, strange to be doing it alongside the man who had taken her, stranger still to find that the return felt complicated in ways she was not ready to examine in the three hours available to her.
She was going home. She should feel straightforwardly glad about that.
She felt about seventeen other things instead.