Chapter 32
VANGUARD
I’m standing at my penthouse window, watching the city bleed into night, when the alert comes through my watch.
Not the priority klaxon that means someone important needs saving, just a standard notification, the kind that usually gets routed to local authorities, the kind that doesn’t normally alert me.
Shots fired. Red Hook industrial district. Multiple casualties reported.
I almost dismiss it. The NYPD handles this kind of thing, not me. Anything to do with gang violence, drug deals gone wrong, or just the everyday brutality of a city that’s still healing from the Dark Decade is not my jurisdiction.
Not my problem.
But something makes me hesitate.
Maybe it’s the location—Red Hook, down by the waterfront, the kind of place where things happen that never make the news. Or maybe it’s because these police reports don’t normally show up on my watch, or else I’d be bombarded by them all the live long day.
Or maybe it’s the restlessness that’s been crawling under my skin all night, the need to do something instead of standing here marinating in my own guilt over Mia.
It’s been four days since I last saw her, since she left my penthouse with my fingerprints on her neck, and I’ve been doing nothing but wallowing in self-pity, torn between needing to see her and talk to her, but also giving her all the space she needs, because I certainly don’t deserve to be in her presence, not after what I did.
So this alert is certainly a good distraction.
I tap the watch. “Show me.”
The holographic display blooms to life, painting the air with satellite imagery and police scanner chatter. The warehouse in question is a dark rectangle at the end of a pier, and the thermal overlay shows heat signatures moving inside—some running, some stationary, some cooling rapidly.
Those people are dead. This isn’t your normal gang shoot-out, I can tell.
You should go.
The thought arrives without explanation, a gut-level certainty that cuts through the noise. I’ve learned to trust that instinct. It’s what has kept me alive in the past more times than I can count.
“Danny,” I say into the comm. “I’m heading out. There’s an altercation at Red Hook, gun fight I think. Something doesn’t feel right.”
His response is immediate, concerned. “You sure, boss? That’s pretty far outside your usual—”
“I’m sure. I’m going alone. Call if I need you.”
“Sure thing.”
I slide on my suit then head out onto the balcony. With a gentle push, gravity manipulated, I’m in the air, the city falling away beneath me.
I go invisible before I clear Midtown.
The warehouse is a war zone.
I hover above it, watching through walls that might as well be glass. The thermal signatures tell the story—clustered bodies, some still warm, others cooling, and there’s movement in the central space, figures running, fighting, dying.
And in the middle of it all, a single heat signature moving with a speed and precision that is much smaller than the rest.
Interesting.
A busted skylight gives me my entry point. I slip through the gap and land silently on a rotted support beam above the carnage, invisible, watching. The scene below is chaos—men shouting in Russian, gunfire echoing off metal walls, the iron stink of blood thick enough to taste.
And there, in the center of it, is—
My brain stutters.
Mia?
She’s wearing all black and carrying a fucking gun. And she’s fighting off two men at once with a brutal efficiency that rivals my own combat training.
What the fuck?
I watch her drive an elbow into one man’s throat, watch him stagger, watch her pull a knife from somewhere and bury it in his chest. No hesitation. No mercy. Just clean, professional-style violence that ends with his blood seeping out on the concrete while she’s already moving to the next threat.
This is not Mia.
This can’t be.
This can’t be the woman who laughs at the Muppets and moans over patty melts and looks at me like I’m someone, not something. This is not the journalist who asks the hard questions and takes careful notes and blushes when I catch her staring.
This is someone else entirely.
A killer.
She’s a trained fucking killer.
Like me.
She shoots a man in the thigh, then kneecap. He goes down screaming, a massive guy with a shaved head who looks vaguely familiar and is clearly the one in charge. Then she’s running, returning fire over her shoulder, moving through the warehouse like she’s done this a thousand times before.
Because she has.
She’s a fucking spy.
The realization lands in my chest like a fucking hand grenade.
Every dinner, every interview, every soft smile and lingering touch?
Oh, that was performance. Every confession she drew out of me, every vulnerability I showed her?
Intelligence gathering. Every time she looked at me like I mattered, like I was more than what they made me—
Lies. All of it. All of it fucking lies!
Below me, Mia is losing ground. Too many of them, not enough of her. I watch her take down two more—a front kick, a palm strike, a knee to the groin followed by a skull against a crate—but they keep coming. They grab her. Force her to her knees. Press a gun to the back of her head.
The bald man limps toward her, pipe in hand, blood soaking his trouser leg. He’s saying something I can’t quite hear, gloating, savoring the moment.
Her shoulders are squared. Her chin is up. Even now, even like this, she’s not begging.
“Tell them I was still fighting.”
I hear that. Hear the steel in her voice. The defiance.
She’s going to die.
The thought cuts through everything else—the rage, the betrayal, the howling darkness that’s been building since I saw her pull that knife. She’s going to die, and part of me thinks good, let her, she deserves it for what she did to you, she’s a liar and—
But my body is already moving.
I drop from the beam, still invisible, and land behind the man with the gun.
His skull cracks against my fist before he even knows I’m there.
The one beside him turns, confused, and I grab his face and squeeze until something gives way beneath my fingers and it all crumbles away, choking out his scream.
Too much force, an inner voice yells. You’re using too much force.
Good, I think, and I grin.
The darkness is singing now, a symphony of violence that drowns out everything else.
Two more guards rush toward the sound, toward their fallen comrades, and I meet them with fists and fury.
One goes down with a shattered jaw, nose, brain.
The other I throw, like he weighs nothing at all, into a stack of shipping crates that collapse on top of him with a satisfying crash.
The bald man is screaming orders, but his men are panicking. They’re firing blind, bullets chewing up the air around an enemy they can’t see. I move through them like a scythe through wheat, breaking bones and ending their lives with mechanical efficiency.
She lied to you.
A man’s arm snaps in my grip like a twig.
She used you.
Another one drops, gasping, clutching his crushed windpipe.
She made you feel like a person, and it was all just pretend.
By the time I’m done, the warehouse floor is littered with bodies. Pretty sure all of them are dead.
And Mia is gone.
I catch a glimpse of her through the shattered loading dock—running, limping, disappearing into the night with someone else, a dark-haired woman I don’t recognize.
Good. You run along now, darlin’.
I’ll find you.
I find their rendezvous point in a Hell’s Kitchen walk-up and hover just outside of it, totally invisible, and listening. My enhanced hearing picks up everything—the hum of electronics, the distant wail of sirens, and the voices inside. There are three of them. Mia and two others.
A man’s voice, accented, furious says, “That wasn’t the plan, Mia. You were supposed to do recon, not start a bloody war.”
“I had a shot at the laptop, at the files.” Her voice is tight, pained. “I had to take it.”
“And look where that got you! You nearly died in there. I lost your feed for three minutes—three minutes, Mia. Thermal went to shit the second the shooting started. Too many heat signatures, too much chaos. I still don’t know what happened in there.”
“I handled it.”
“You got lucky.” A woman now, her voice sharp and clipped and Russian, or at least Slavic, probably the one who extracted her. “This isn’t Tehran. You don’t have deep cover backup this time. You have us, and we are not equipped to pull you out of a firefight with the Russian mob.”
Silence. Then Mia, quieter, says, “I’m sorry. I should have stuck to the plan.”
“Damn right you should have.” The man again. “Now we’ve got Kozlov’s people on high alert, Marsh knows someone’s onto him, and we still don’t have the files we needed. SOE is going to have our heads.”
Marsh. Wait a minute. Conrad Marsh?
What the hell does the CEO of Global Dynamix have to do with a warehouse full of Russian traffickers?
“Walk us through the extraction,” the woman says. “Did you leave anyone alive, any witnesses? Last I saw, you were running toward me.”
A pause. Too long.
“Things got…chaotic,” Mia says carefully. “Kozlov’s men started dropping. I don’t know if it was infighting, or if someone else hit the warehouse at the same time, but I saw my window and I took it.”
She’s lying. I can hear it in her voice—that slight hesitation, the way she’s choosing her words too precisely. She knows something and she’s not telling them.
Fuck. She knows it was me.
And she’s keeping it to herself.
“Infighting?” The man sounds skeptical. “In the middle of a firefight with an intruder?”
“I don’t know what it was, Bayo. I just know I might be hurt but I’m not dead, and I’d like to keep it that way.” An edge of finality in her tone. Subject closed.
The woman lets out a frustrated breath but doesn’t push. “Fine. We’ll debrief properly tomorrow when you’ve had medical attention. What about Vanguard? Have you heard from him?”
My chest tightens as I wait for her response.