Chapter 32 #2
“No.” Mia’s voice changes. Softer. Pained. “Not since…not for a few days.”
“Good. Keep it that way until we figure out what we’re dealing with. Now that we know what Global Dynamix and Marsh are capable of…well, it’s looking more likely that Vanguard is a weapon after all.”
I want to break through the window and ask them what they mean. What is Global Dynamix capable of? And why was Marsh involved with a Russian Mobster?
“Don’t say that,” Mia says, voice razor sharp. “We don’t know that.”
“We don’t know anything for certain, that’s the problem. But Mia…” The woman pauses. “If London decides he’s a threat, you know what happens. You know what you might have to do.”
The silence that follows is heavy. Loaded.
“I know,” Mia says finally. “I know.”
I stop breathing.
If London decides he’s a threat.
You know what you might have to do.
She’s not just a spy, and she’s not just gathering intelligence. She’s been sent to assess whether I need to be eliminated.
She’s a motherfucking assassin.
The whole thing—every touch, every kiss, every moment I thought was real—it was all just reconnaissance. She was studying me. Cataloging my weaknesses. Figuring out the best way to put me down if her masters decided I was too dangerous to live.
“This is the most real thing in my life.”
That’s what I told her. On Lady Liberty’s torch, with the city twinkling below us and her head on my shoulder and my heart opening for the first time in years.
“The only thing that feels like it’s actually mine.”
And she sat there and listened and let me believe it!
Let me fall.
Something tears inside me, a seam giving way under too much strain, thread by thread, the fabric that’s been holding me together starting to pull apart enough for the darkness to slip through.
It’s different this time. Not the blind rage from the warehouse, nor the combat high of violence without consequence.
This is something colder and deeper, a vast black nothing that swallows everything else—the grief, the shame, the pathetic fucking hope I’ve been carrying around like a wounded animal.
She never cared about you.
She used you.
I think about Montana. The barn. Her face in the golden light, telling me I was still human.
Lies.
I think about the diner, that first night, the way she looked at me like I was worth looking at.
Performance.
I think about the rooftop. The first kiss. The moment I thought maybe, maybe, there was someone in this world who could see past what they made me into.
A fucking mission.
Absently I start to drift away in the air, while below me, in the safe house, Mia is talking about extraction protocols. About next steps. About what to do with the intelligence she gathered while I was busy falling in love with her like some goddamn fool.
“I see you,” she had said. “The real you. And I’m not going anywhere.”
The laugh that escapes me is not a human sound. It’s something else entirely. Something that’s been sleeping inside me for a long time, waiting for exactly this moment, when the last thread holding Nate Whitaker together finally snaps.
She was going to kill you.
The thought spikes into my brain like a splinter of ice.
Not was. Is. She’s still going to kill you if her handlers give the order.
Every time she touched you, she was thinking about how to do it.
Every time she kissed you, she was cataloging vulnerabilities.
Every time she looked at you with those big dark eyes and made you feel like something other than a weapon—
She was lying.
She was always lying.
And you believed her because you wanted so badly for something to be real.
I think about my hand around her throat. The way she fought back, trained and vicious. I thought I was the monster.
It turns out we both are.
I start flying but I don’t know where. The city sprawls beneath me, lights winking in the darkness like stars that have fallen to earth. Somewhere down there, Mia is planning her next move while keeping secrets from her own team about what really happened in that warehouse.
She suspects it was me. I suppose it was pretty obvious.
And yet she didn’t tell them.
Why?
The question flickers at the edge of my rage, an ember that refuses to be stamped out. If I’m just a target, just an asset to be assessed and potentially eliminated, why would she protect me? Why lie to her fellow agents about what she saw?
I shove the thought down. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except the betrayal burning a hole through my chest.
Integration complete, whispers a voice that might be mine. Awaiting directives.
No.
Not awaiting directives.
Not this time.
Generating directives.
I turn toward her hotel. Toward the room where she’ll go to lick her wounds and plan her next betrayal. Toward the woman who made me believe I could be something other than what they made me.
She wanted to see the weapon?
Fine.
I’ll show her the fucking weapon.
The flight to her hotel takes four minutes.
I spend every second of it replaying our history through new eyes. Reinterpreting it all, finding the lies hidden in every memory I treasured.
The way she always deflected when I asked about her past.
Operational security, obviously, can’t let the target know too much about the asset.
The way she never quite answered direct questions about her feelings.
Can’t compromise the mission with genuine attachment.
Even the sex. Even that.
I think about how she touched me. The way she mapped my body with her hands and mouth, learning every response, every weakness. I thought she was passionate. Thorough. Hungry for me the way I was hungry for her.
Now I wonder if she was taking notes.
“You’re going to kill me,” I told her on Lady Liberty’s torch, after she’d taken me in her mouth.
She didn’t laugh. At the time I thought it was odd.
Now I know.
Because it wasn’t a joke to her.
Her hotel looms ahead, a glass-and-steel tower catching the city lights. I head straight to her hotel room. It’s dark right now but I figured that. There’s no way she would have made it back so fast.
The balcony door is locked for once, but locks don’t mean much when you can bend steel.
I ease it open, slip inside, and let the invisibility hold as I stand in her hotel room.
The space smells like her but the context of who she is has changed.
She no longer smells like hotel shampoo and coconut vanilla deodorant.
She smells like violence and lies.
I move through the room, still invisible, touching things she’s touched, things I’d seen before but never gave much thought to.
The clothes in the closet, the kind a journalist would wear, the laptop on the desk that is no doubt encrypted and protected by a million passwords, the notebook beside it—
The notebook.
I pick it up. Flip through pages of neat handwriting, sketches, observations. Some of it is in code, but enough is in plain English that I can piece together what I’m looking at.
Subject exhibits signs of dissociation during high-stress encounters.
Noted memory gaps—possible induced amnesia? Investigate programming protocols.
Physical capabilities exceed published parameters. Suspect additional undisclosed enhancements.
Emotional attachment forming despite countermeasures. Complication for mission extraction. Recommend—
I stop reading and drop the notebook.
My hand is shaking, tremors running through my fingers.
Emotional attachment forming despite countermeasures.
Despite countermeasures.
She tried not to care about me.
She had countermeasures in place to prevent exactly what happened between us.
And it still wasn’t enough.
Performance, the darkness whispers. All of it. Performance.
But.
But.
There’s a thread here. A loose end that doesn’t fit the narrative I’ve been constructing.
If everything was fake, if every moment was calculated, then why would she need countermeasures against caring?
Why would her voice sound like that when she talked about me to her handlers?
That soft edge of pain that bled through despite her best efforts?
“Don’t. We don’t know that.”
She was defending me.
And she didn’t tell them about the warehouse. About what she must have sensed. About me.
Why would she do that if I was just a target to her?
She lied to you.
Yes.
Everything was fake.
Maybe.
She never cared.
I…don’t know.
The certainty I felt minutes ago is starting to fragment. The pure black rage giving way to something messier, more complicated. Grief and anger and something that might be hope, tangled together in a knot I can’t untie alone.
She was going to kill you.
Or.
Or she was going to try to save you.
I don’t know which is worse.
The sound of footsteps in the hallway reaches me—her footsteps, that particular rhythm I’ve memorized. A key card beeps. The door opens.
Light spills into the room.
And Mia walks in, battered and bleeding and more beautiful than anyone has a right to be after the night she’s had.
She doesn’t see me. She can’t. I’m still invisible, in the shadows by the desk, holding my breath.
She flips on the light and moves to the bathroom. I hear water running. The shower. A sharp hiss of pain—probably tending to her wounds. The clink of something against porcelain.
I know I should probably go back to my penthouse and pretend I don’t know what I know. Play the fool a little longer while I figure out my next move. Be strategic. Be fucking smart.
But the darkness doesn’t want to be smart.
The darkness wants answers.
I hear the water shut off. Hear the door open, see her coming toward me, looking through me.
Then she stops.
Stares at the desk, at the notebook that is no longer in the same spot because I dropped it. She inhales sharply at the realization.
I drop the invisibility.
“Hello, Mia.”