Chapter 16
VANGUARD
The fire is a beast, a residential building in the Bronx, twelve stories high.
The blaze started on the sixth floor and ripped upward through ancient ventilation shafts that should have been replaced decades ago.
By the time I arrive, the top four floors are fully engulfed, and people are hanging out of windows, crying for help.
I pull a family of four from the eleventh floor—mother, father, two kids under ten, and a golden retriever who licks my face the whole way down.
The father keeps thanking me, over and over, tears cutting tracks through the soot on his face, and the little girl clutches my arm like I’m the only solid thing in a world that’s turned to smoke and ash.
“It’s okay,” I tell her as I set them down on the street, far from the flames. “You’re safe now. You’re all safe.”
The dog licks my face again.
I did my job.
The whole time, my mind is somewhere else. On a rooftop. On a woman in a red dress. On the taste of her still lingering on my tongue, the sounds she made when she came apart under my mouth, the way she looked at me when she admitted she’d never—
Focus.
I land back on 30 Rock with my heart hammering and my cock already stirring again at the memory of her. The rooftop is empty. Mia—and my jacket—are gone.
I ring up Danny from my watch.
Danny’s voice crackles. “Boss? You good?”
“Where is she?”
“Who?”
“Mia.” I scan the rooftop like she might be hiding behind an air conditioning unit. “I told her to stay here. I also told you to get her.”
“I brought the car like you asked, but she wasn’t there when I arrived. Must’ve found her own way down.” A pause. “Everything okay?”
No. Nothing is okay. I left her here—left her wet and wanting and wrapped in my jacket—and she just left. Without a word. Without waiting.
The rational part of my brain knows she probably got cold, got tired of waiting and left through the door. The irrational part—the dark part that’s been clawing at the edges of my consciousness all evening—wants to tear the city apart until I find her.
“I’m going to check her hotel,” I tell Danny. “Go home. I’ll be fine.”
“You sure? It’s late—”
I cut the comm link and launch myself into the sky.
The flight to Midtown takes less than a minute.
I know which hotel she’s staying at and I know which floor, because I may have asked Danny to do some digging after our first interview.
At the time, I told myself it was security protocol.
Due diligence. The kind of thing any reasonable person would do when a foreign journalist starts asking questions about their employer.
I was lying to myself even then.
You’re a stalker in the making, I chide myself.
I go invisible as I approach the building, which is for the best, since my tuxedo shirt burned off somewhere around the eighth floor and showing up shirtless outside a woman’s hotel window is a look even I can’t pull off.
The invisibility is one of my stranger abilities, and one of my favorites.
It’s not true invisibility, not like in the comics.
It’s active camouflage, a manipulation of the electromagnetic spectrum that bends light waves around my body instead of letting them bounce off.
I activate it the same way I activate flight: by thinking about it hard, until something clicks in my brain like a switch being flipped.
Julia once explained that they wired the control directly into my motor cortex during one of the procedures—the same part of the brain that handles voluntary movement.
So, going invisible is as natural as raising my arm or taking a step. I just decide to disappear, and I do.
The sensation is hard to describe. It starts with a tingling across my skin, like static electricity, as the field activates and expands outward about an inch from my body—just far enough to usually encompass whatever I’m wearing.
It’s not my skin doing the work, but something deeper, some kind of localized spacetime distortion that redirects photons around me like water flowing around a stone.
For about two hours—give or take, depending on what else I’m doing—I’m a ghost. Cameras can’t see me.
Only heat sensors can. I leave no shadow, cast no reflection.
The only sign I exist is a faint shimmer in the air if someone knows exactly where to look, a slight distortion, like heat rising off summer pavement.
And of course, if someone threw a bag of flour on me or something.
It’s a useful trick, and it lets me do things that would otherwise cause international incidents—like hovering outside hotel windows at midnight, looking for a woman I can’t stop thinking about.
Creepy, the rational part of my brain observes. This is creepy behavior.
I don’t care. I think I’ve earned my right to be a creep.
I circle her floor slowly, peering through each window in turn.
Most of them have their curtains closed; most people are asleep, but there are some outliers.
A businessman watching TV. An elderly couple reading in bed.
A family with two kids sprawled across a pullout couch.
Room after room after room, and none of them contain Mia.
She’s probably asleep, curtains closed, end of story.
But what if she’s not? If she’s not here, and she’s not at 30 Rock, then she’s somewhere in this city of eight million people, and I have no idea where.
The darkness pulses at the edges of my vision.
Find her. Take her. Keep her.
I shake my head, trying to clear it.
I force myself to turn away from her empty window and fly home.
The penthouse is dark when I land on the balcony, which is how I left it. What I didn’t leave is the woman sitting in my living room, silhouetted against the city lights like she belongs there.
Julia.
“You’re late,” she says without turning around.
Rage spikes through me, hot and immediate. “How did you get in here?”
“I have access to all Global Dynamix properties.” She swivels the chair to face me, her pale eyes catching the ambient light from outside. She’s still in the pastel-colored suit from the gala, her silver-blonde hair immaculate, her expression unreadable. “Including yours.”
“This is my home,” I say, my teeth grinding. “Not a Global Dynamix property. I own it.”
“Is there a difference?”
The question grates me. Because no, there isn’t. Not really. I couldn’t have this without them. I bought out the deed, but they still own the security systems, the surveillance, the infrastructure. They still own me, no matter how many papers I sign or how much money I throw at lawyers.
“You need to leave,” I say flatly.
“I need to talk to you.” She doesn’t move. “About the journalist.”
My jaw tightens. “What about her?”
“You took her off-grid tonight, flew her somewhere outside our surveillance coverage.” Julia’s voice is calm, measured, but I can hear the edge underneath. The accusation. “Care to explain why?”
“You’re not my mother. I don’t answer to you.”
She waves her hand at that dismissively, not slighted in the least. “You answer to Global Dynamix, and as CTO, that means you answer to me.” She rises from the chair, smooth and controlled, and crosses toward me. “Did you see where she went? After your little…excursion?”
“No.” I hold my ground as she approaches, wondering what exactly she knows. They can track me through my watch; they measure my vitals that way too, no different than any other citizen with such a device. Audio surveillance without my knowledge, though, would be a new one.
“You took her away from our surveillance.” Her eyes flash. “A deliberate choice, I assume.”
I let out a humorless laugh. “I wanted privacy.”
“For what?”
The question hangs between us, loaded with implication.
I can smell her perfume, something expensive and cold, giving me a headache.
There was a time when Julia’s presence felt comforting.
Safe, even. She was the one who found me after Emma died.
The one who offered me a chance to become something more than a broken soldier drowning in grief.
A chance to make a difference in the world Emma believed in so much.
Now, she just feels like a zookeeper, and I’m the animal in the cage.
“That’s none of your business,” I tell her.
“Everything about you is my business.” She stops inches away, and I fight the urge to back up. “I made you, Nate. Every enhancement, every ability, every cell in your body exists because of my work. You don’t get to have secrets from me.”
“Why are you surveilling her?” I counter. “Mia’s just doing her job. You’re the one who thought this piece would be good for me and the company.”
“Mia’s job is to interview you. That’s it. No intimate slow dancing in front of the president, no whisking her off for alone time. She’s not on your side, and you can’t trust her.” She pauses, those cold eyes flicking over my face. “Do you trust her?”
“I—” I hesitate. Do I trust Mia? I barely know her, truthfully.
All I know is the way she looks at me, like she’s seeing something underneath the mask, and it make me want to rip the mask right off.
I know the way she tastes, the way she sounds when she comes, the way she felt in my arms like she belonged there.
Those things, I know.
“I think so,” I say finally.
“You shouldn’t.” Julia’s voice sharpens. “We’ve done our research on Miss Baxter. Everything about her is exactly what it should be, which means either she’s the most boring journalist on the planet, or she’s very good at hiding who she really is.”
A flash of her face runs through my head—the way she looked at me when I kissed her, that strange fear I wanted to unravel. “What do you mean?”
“I worry she’s not what she claims to be, and I think you’re too compromised to see it clearly.” She reaches up as if to touch my face, and I jerk back instinctively. Her hand drops. “Keep it professional, Nate. Whatever you think is happening between you—”
“Nothing is happening between us.”
“—end it. End it before it begins.”
“Or else what?” I say, my voice hard. I don’t take to threats kindly.
Julia’s expression doesn’t change, but something cold gleams behind her eyes.
“You know what happens when you lose control,” she says quietly. “You know how unpleasant the recalibrations can be, especially when we have to do a little extra digging.” She pauses, letting that sink in. “You know how you can get, Nate, how easily obsession forms. That darkness.”
I go still.
The darkness.
She knows about the darkness.
How? I’ve never told anyone about it—the black tide that rises in my blood when I’m angry, the violent urges that claw at the edges of my consciousness, the voice that occasionally speaks to me. I’ve buried it so deep, fought so hard to keep it contained, and she knows.
Which means she’s been watching more closely than I realized.
Or she put it there.
“What did you do to me?” The question comes out rough, bordering on panicked. “During the procedures. The enhancements. What did you do, Julia?”
She gives me a thin smile. “I made you better. Stronger. More capable than any soldier who’s ever lived.” She steps back, putting distance between us. “But every weapon needs a safety, a way to ensure it doesn’t turn on its wielders.”
“I’m not a weapon,” I grind out.
“You’re whatever I designed you to be.” She heads for the door, pausing with her hand on the frame. “Keep it professional with Ms. Baxter, Nate. I won’t ask again.”
She leaves.
The door clicks shut behind her, and I’m alone in my dark penthouse with rage burning through my veins and thoughts I shouldn’t be thinking.
I could kill her.
The idea surfaces, clear and cold and strangely appealing. Julia is human. Fragile. Breakable. One moment of lost control, one squeeze around her throat, and she’d be gone. No more surveillance. No more recalibrations. No more cage.
I could kill Marsh too, kill anyone who tries to control me. Burn Global Dynamix to the ground and walk away from the ashes. Total freedom.
The darkness pulses, hungry and seductive. It would be so easy, so satisfying, too, to stop pretending to be the golden boy, to stop performing, to let the monster out and watch everyone who’s ever leashed me burn.
I press my palms against the cold glass of the window and force myself to breathe.
This isn’t you. This is whatever she put in your head. Fight it.
But that’s the thing about the darkness: I’m not sure anymore where it ends and I begin. Did Julia create it, and for what purpose? Or did she amplify it? Was it always there, lurking beneath the surface since childhood, waiting for permission to emerge?
Does it even matter?
Either way, this dark, simmering destruction inside me wants Mia, wants her with an intensity that scares me, that keeps me awake at night, that makes me do things like fly to rooftops and taste her like she’s the last meal I’ll ever have.
Find her. Take her. Keep her.
Make her yours.
I slam my fist against the glass. It doesn’t break—it’s enforced beyond measure, and I didn’t hit it hard enough—but the impact reverberates through my arm, through my chest, shaking something loose.
Julia’s wrong about one thing. Whatever’s happening with Mia, it’s already too late to end it.
I’m in too deep.
And I’m not sure I want to find my way out.