Clause 12.4

I was paid to translate. Not to interpret. Not to judge.

Kira Khine arrives in Portugal with a passport missing an entry stamp, a revoked university admission, and €23,000 she refuses to touch. She didn't come for romance. She came to survive.

But survival gets complicated when her landlord turns out to be Rodrigo Costa-tech billionaire, single father, and the quietest, most unreadable face in northern Portugal. He offers her a deal: translate contracts in Burmese. In exchange, he'll teach her to hack.

She takes it.

Then she translates Clause 12.4.

IMEI numbers. Geolocation data. Unrestricted real-time access-disguised as "urban planning." The kind of data you use to hunt people. The kind of people who disappear in Myanmar every day.

Kira has a choice: look away and cash the cheque. Or learn everything Rodrigo can teach her-and use it to burn his empire to the ground.

He's falling for her. She's collecting evidence. And somewhere in the vineyard, a seven-year-old girl named Sofia is waiting for her friend Kiki to come to her birthday party.

I trust me.

She did. She does.

A slow-burn geopolitical thriller about translation and betrayal, Clause 12.4 asks: when the contract is written in your own language, how do you plead?