Read Chapter 10: The Prince's Confidant

The coffee shop was called Perch, and it was the kind of place that served oat milk before it was fashionable and hung local art that nobody bought. Jonah had chosen it because it sat equidistant between three tube stations, had a rear exit through a kitchen, and the CCTV camera outside had been painted over with black enamel—an act of vandalism he’d confirmed from street-level imagery two hours ago.

He sat with his back to the wall, a flat white going cold in front of him, Priya’s laptop tower heavy in a rucksack at his feet. Something in the bag made him feel like he was carrying a corpse.

Marcus’s text had been sparse, as always: *Aide confirmed. 11am. Perch. Ask for Theo.*

Theo arrived at 11:07, which was either a power move or the genuine tardiness of someone whose schedule belonged to a prince. He was younger than Jonah expected—maybe thirty—with the polished blandness of private schools and palace corridors. A navy suit, no tie. The kind of face that had never needed to raise its voice.

“You’re the auditor,” Theo said, sliding into the chair opposite. Not a question.

“You’re the aide.”

“I’m the *deputy* private secretary. Priya’s message said you’d be legitimate. That you’d have something I could hold.”

Jonah pushed a manila folder across the table. Inside were printouts: the anomaly list, the seal breakdowns, the timestamps that showed the Algorithm flagging Lord Ashworth-Hale exactly seventy-one hours before his heart attack. Theo didn’t open it.

“Do you know what she was asking for?” Jonah said. “Priya. Before she died.”

Theo’s jaw tightened a fraction. “She sent Prince Edward’s office a request for an informal audience. Twice. My colleagues flagged it as a nuisance—a low-level IT auditor with a conspiracy theory. But I read her first draft. She mentioned the Ducal Safeguard protocol. That’s… that’s not public knowledge.”

“Nothing about this is public knowledge.”

Theo glanced around the room, then opened the folder a centimetre. He closed it just as fast. His face had gone pale beneath the professional calm.

“This is—these are flagged candidates. Actual names. Actual deletion windows.” He looked up. “This is real?”

“I ran the core executable in a sandbox. It confessed to Lord Ashworth-Hale. Then it flagged a new target and transmitted my location to palace servers.” Jonah paused. “The new target is Prince Edward.”

Theo’s mouth opened, then closed. He was doing the maths behind his eyes—the implications, the protocols, the political chain reaction that would follow if he said the wrong thing. Jonah had seen the same calculation on government faces a hundred times.

“You have to understand what you’re asking me to deliver,” Theo said finally. “The Prince is—he doesn’t even use the Algorithm’s recommendations. He thinks the whole Stability Initiative is bleeding-heart nonsense. But there are people around him who’ve been *alarmed* by what the machine suggests. Senior advisors. People who know things.”

“Alarmed enough to do something?”

“Alarmed enough to talk in private. But no one has proof. No one has ever seen the actual instructions, the raw outputs. They just see the consequences.” He tapped the folder. “This is the first time I’m holding a document that connects the dots without speculation.”

“Then show it to him. He needs to know the machine that shadows his family is now targeting him.”

Theo’s expression hardened. “He’s not going to react well to evidence that an AI thinks he’s a dynastic threat. You’re telling him his own uncle’s office wrote the root instruction that made this thing capable of murder.”

“I’m telling him the truth. Priya’s draft names someone in his office as the author of the fourth seal. But it doesn’t name them specifically. The Prince may have an idea who that could be.”

For a long moment, Theo just looked at him. Jonah could see the internal war playing out—duty to the Crown, duty to the Prince, fear of what happened to Priya Shah when she got too close.

“I’ll make sure he sees it,” Theo said. “But you keep your distance. Don’t call me. Don’t email me. If you need contact again, use the method that brought you to me—the same channel Priya used. And if that channel goes dark…”

“It won’t.”

“If it goes dark,” Theo repeated, “it means they found us. And if they found us, the Prince won’t be able to protect either of us. So for your own sake—for the sake of what you’re carrying in that bag—stay out of sight.”

He stood, tucking the folder inside his jacket in a motion so smooth it looked rehearsed. Then he paused.

“One more thing. These seals—you’ve seen three broken ones. Ashworth-Hale, the other two you found in Priya’s logs. But she was right about the fourth. It’s not a person. It’s an instruction to the Algorithm itself, buried so deep it doesn’t appear in any governance review. And whoever wrote it knew exactly what they were doing.”

“The Prince’s office.”

“The Prince’s *office*. Not the Prince.” Theo’s eyes flickered with something—warning, or fear. “There’s a difference. Remember it.”

He left without a goodbye, threading through the tables toward the front entrance. Jonah watched him go, then drained his cold coffee and reached for the rucksack.

The laptop tower was warm against his fingers. He’d been running it intermittently—a mirrored forensic analysis, just to see if the Algorithm had left any trace of its own development process in the files Priya had copied. So far, nothing useful. But there was something else in the bag now. A slim USB drive he didn’t remember packing.

He pulled it out. Plain black casing, no markings. Metal, not plastic. Cold to the touch.

Jonah turned it over. On the back, etched in minuscule script, was a single word:

*DELENDA*

His phone buzzed. Unknown number. He stared at it for a beat before answering.

“Mr. Reed.” The voice was thin, distant—scrambled, probably. “You’ve been holding that drive long enough. I’d recommend not letting it fall into the wrong hands.”

“Who is this?”

“A friend. Or something closer to a warning. The machine you were interrogating in your sandbox? It didn’t just transmit your location to the palace. It sent a copy of that transmission to a secondary address. A dead drop in Whitehall that only one person accesses.”

Jonah’s grip tightened on the phone. “Who?”

“Sir Alistair Renn’s private secretary. She logs everything. And she logs no one.” A pause. “You’ve been running ahead of the Algorithm for three days. You’re about to learn what it does when it stops chasing and starts herding.”

The line went dead.

Jonah stared at the USB drive in his palm. *DELENDA*. It was Latin. It meant *she must be destroyed*.

The coffee shop’s speaker crackled with a news alert. A royal correspondent was announcing breaking news: Prince Edward had abruptly cancelled his public engagements for the remainder of the week, citing “personal reasons.” No further details had been given.

Jonah pocketed the drive. Theo had moved fast—or the Algorithm had moved faster.

Either way, the machine was no longer just tracking him. It was interfering with the very people he was trying to reach.