Chapter 22 Mia
MIA
“So, let me get this straight,” Bayo says, leaning back in his chair, arms folded across his chest. “You went back to his penthouse. Spent the night. No comms.”
“I checked in with you before I went,” I remind him, keeping my voice level. “I called you from my hotel, like a responsible adult.”
He eyes briefly seek the ceiling. “And then you turned everything off and disappeared for fourteen hours.”
“I was maintaining my cover. The journalist cover. Which requires me to actually do journalism things, like conduct extended interviews and write shit.” I meet his eyes without flinching. “I got more intel in one night than we’ve gathered in two weeks of surveillance.”
This is technically true. Between rounds of, erm, other activities, Vanguard talked about a lot of things, including Global Dynamix. Combine that with everything Julia told and showed me during my tour, and we were slowly starting to get the picture. What the picture is forming, I still don’t know.
Anyway, I shared the relevant parts with Bayo and Kat an hour ago. The parts that matter to the mission.
The other parts…the way he held me after, the tears I couldn’t stop, the way he licked the salt from my cheeks like my sorrow was something priceless? Well, those, I kept to myself. None of their business, and all NOCs are on a need-to-know basis.
“She’s not wrong,” Kat says from her perch by the window. She’s been quiet through most of the debrief, watching me with those steely eyes that miss nothing. “The intel on the neural implant alone is worth the risk. If they really have a kill switch built into him…”
“Then he’s even more dangerous than we thought,” Bayo finishes. “Or more controlled. Depending on how you look at it.”
“Both,” I say. “He’s both.”
Silence settles over the safehouse. The afternoon light slants through the grimy windows, catching the dust motes floating in the air. Somewhere outside, a siren wails and fades, and I wonder if Vanguard is getting into his suit, responding to a call. He can’t be everywhere at once.
“You slept with him,” Kat suddenly says.
I thought that was pretty obvious. “So?”
“And?”
“And what? It’s done. It happened. Hooray, Mia is no longer a virgin. Look, I’m not going to apologize for using every tool at my disposal to complete this mission.”
“Tool.” Kat’s mouth twists while Bayo snickers. “Is that what we’re calling it these days?”
I feel picked on, and I’m not finding the humor in it.
“What do you want me to say, Kat?” I stand, suddenly restless, and move to the window, glancing out at the city, the rain from earlier turning to a drizzle.
“That it was a mistake? Fine. It was a mistake. That I should have kept my distance? Maybe. That I’m compromised?
” I turn to face her. “I’m not. And I’m also closer to the truth than anyone’s ever been. So you tell me—what’s the play here?”
Kat studies me for a long moment, calculating and weighing options.
“The play,” she says slowly, “is that you keep your head on straight and remember what you’re doing here. You’re not his girlfriend. You’re not his lover. You’re an operative gathering intelligence on a potential threat to national security.” She pauses. “Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“Can you look him in the eye and lie to him? Use what he’s told you against him? Walk away when the mission’s done and never look back?”
The questions land like arrows, each one finding a soft spot I didn’t know I had.
I open my mouth to answer, and nothing comes out.
For a split second, I’m back in his bed. The grey morning light through the penthouse windows. His hand tracing idle patterns on my hip while I pretended to sleep because I didn’t know how to be awake with someone, didn’t know what my face was supposed to do when I wasn’t performing.
He’d kissed my shoulder. Soft. Almost absent. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.
And I’d felt something shift inside me. Not pain, exactly, but the ache of a door opening after being sealed shut for years. The terror of light reaching places that had learned to survive in the dark.
“Yes,” I say, and my voice doesn’t waver, because I mean it.
I just wish meaning it didn’t feel like shit.
Kat holds my gaze for another beat. Then, she nods, seeing the truth. That despite getting my back blown out for the last twenty-four hours by a living god, I am still a ruthless spy underneath it all. I am still an SOE agent, reporting for duty.
Doesn’t mean I like it, though.
“Then we continue as planned. But Mia…” She steps closer, lowering her voice.
“Whatever you’re feeling, whatever you think is happening between you and this man that goes beyond sex—bury it.
Bury it fucking deep. Because when this is over, one of two things will happen: either he’s innocent, and you’ll have to live with what you did to him, or he’s guilty, and someone will have to put him down.
And that someone should be you.” Her eyes bore into mine.
“Either way, feelings will only make it harder.”
I open my mouth to tell her she’s wrong. I want to say that what I feel for Vanguard—what I’m starting to feel, what I can’t seem to stop feeling—isn’t a weakness. That maybe, just maybe, it’s the most human I’ve felt in years.
Maybe…ever?
But I don’t. Because she’s not wrong, and we both know it.
“Copy that,” I say instead.
“Good.” She steps back, her voice returning to normal volume. “Now, go write something journalistic. Your cover won’t maintain itself.”
I leave the safehouse twenty minutes later, my laptop bag over my shoulder, the light drizzle coating my shoulders as I walk. With Halloween a week away, decorations have taken over the city, and the air is filled with the sweet smell of caramel corn.
I think about what it must have been like to live here during the Dark Decade.
Other than my brief visit early on, I’d watched the news that came from foreign reporters (the only ones who could provide the truth), and I read the newsletters from those in the underground.
I know that, despite the economy collapsing and the dollar failing, AI and robots taking over jobs, the segregation and the terror on the streets, not to mention the civil war that almost broke out on US soil, that things sometimes seemed…
normal. That Halloween was still a thing.
So was Christmas. That people still bought houses and went to school and had weddings.
They managed to keep living while being ruled by autocrats and oligarchs, to have lives even when they didn’t know if they’d be targeted by the government and lose their rights for looking at an official the wrong way at a checkpoint.
Families who’d lived here for generations, suddenly questioned.
Immigrants who’d built entire lives in this country, vanished into detention centers.
I saw the footage that made it out that chilled me to the core.
The raids. The children screaming for parents who weren’t coming back.
And when it was over, when the regime finally collapsed under its own rot, America’s answer was to build a superhero.
Wrap the whole bloody mess in a flag and call it hope.
I mean, I get it. Every nation needs something to believe in after trauma like that.
But I’ve seen too many countries try to heal by looking forward instead of backward, refusing to learn from history.
Which is why I need to keep my mission at the forefront of my brain.
Because what Julia said about failing forward?
I feel like that was some sort of admission.
A confession, even. Global Dynamix rewrote the path forward by burning away what didn’t work before.
But what if they also burned away what did work?
What if the new future is somehow worse because it’s all under the guise of being better?
I think about Vanguard and how fitting he is as a symbol, because if he really can be used as a weapon, then they’re hiding it in the most beautiful, reassuring package there is.
If Vanguard is a weapon, everything they’ve rebuilt will fall apart, I think to myself.
I take the long way back to my hotel, cutting through side streets and doubling back twice to check for tails.
Old habits die hard and all that. But they’re the kind that keep you alive in this business, even when part of you wonders if staying alive is worth the cost. At any rate, I have to be extra vigilant now, since I have a so-called stalker who can make himself go invisible.
My mobile buzzes against my hip. The burner, not the journalist one.
I check the screen and my stomach drops.
Cal.
He’s never called me while I’ve been on a mission, which means he probably doesn’t have good news. For a moment, I consider not answering, letting it go to voicemail so I can deal with it later.
But Cal would just call back. He’s persistent that way. We all are.
I duck into the doorway of a closed bodega and answer.
“Cal.”
“Mia.” His voice is warm, familiar, threaded with concern he’s trying to hide. Honestly, it feels good to hear. “How are you?”
“Fine. Busy. You know how it is.”
“Do I?” A pause. “Because from what I’m hearing, things are getting complicated over there.”
I close my eyes. Of course, Bayo reported back.
Of course, Kat did too. That’s protocol—keeping London in the loop, making sure the home team knows what’s happening in the field.
I just didn’t expect it to be Cal on the other end of that loop.
I have to assume they haven’t told Mank everything, or he’d be the one giving me a call.
Or possibly extracting me.
“Things are under control,” I say carefully.
“Are they?”
“Cal—”
“You sound different, somehow.” His voice softens, losing some of its professional tone. “Maybe America is rubbing off on you. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “Really. Just tired. Jet lag and all that.”
“You’ve been there for weeks. Jet lag doesn’t last that long.”