Chapter 34
VANGUARD
I can’t sleep.
It’s been hours since I left Mia locked in the guest bedroom, and I’ve spent every single one of them pacing my penthouse like a caged animal, trying to ignore the fact that she’s there, her presence haunting me like Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart.
I sigh and press my head against the cool glass, watching as Manhattan churns on under dark skies, oblivious to my unraveling.
Mine.
The thought surfaces, all primal and absolute. I shove it down.
The thing is, the painful, ironic thing is, she’s not mine.
She was never mine. I was a mission, an assignment, and she was a carefully constructed lie designed to get inside my head and my bed and extract everything useful before discarding the rest. She used me, just like everyone else does.
She’s just the first person to fool me so entirely.
But she’s here now. In your space. Under your control. Right now, she is yours.
I push off the window and stop at the wet bar, pour three fingers of whiskey, and drain it in one swallow. The burn doesn’t help. Nothing helps.
Eliminate the threat.
The voice whispers from somewhere deep in my skull, that cold, mechanical part of me that sounds like my own thoughts but isn’t quite. It’s been louder since the warehouse.
She’s compromised you. She knows too much. End it.
My hand tightens on the glass until it cracks.
No.
I set the broken glass down carefully, watching blood well from the cuts on my palm. The wounds slowly begin to heal before my eyes, but for a moment, I feel pain. Actual physical pain that I so rarely feel.
It’s clarifying.
I’m not going to kill her.
I’m not.
But I don’t know what the fuck I am going to do.
I find myself outside her door at three a.m.
I don’t remember walking here. One second, I was standing at the window, watching the lights of the city blur through exhaustion, and the next I’m in this hallway with my hand on the doorknob and no idea how long I’ve been standing here. Like time has been whisked from my memory.
This is bad, I think distantly. This is really fucking bad.
I can hear her breathing on the other side. Slow and steady—she’s asleep. Or pretending to be. With her, I can’t tell anymore.
Go back to bed.
I don’t move.
She’s a spy. An assassin. She was sent to evaluate you. To decide if you needed to be shot like a rabid dog.
I know.
She doesn’t care about you. Everything was fake.
I know.
Then why are you standing outside her door in the middle of the night like some lovesick teenager?
I don’t have an answer for that.
My hand drops from the knob. I force myself to turn around, to walk back to my bedroom, to lie down on sheets that still smell faintly of her from before everything went to shit.
I don’t sleep.
The morning comes, grey and cold and wet with rain. I’ve been up all night, leaving briefly at four a.m. to assist the police in stopping a high-speed chase in Newark, before coming back here to revel in my discontent.
I shower, trim my beard, dress, make coffee I don’t drink. Check my watch—no other urgent alerts, no crisis requiring Vanguard’s attention. The city is quiet for now.
Good. You have work to do.
I make breakfast. Eggs, toast, fruit. Enough for two.
When I unlock her door, she’s already awake, sitting on the edge of the bed in my too-big clothes, watching me with those big dark eyes that see too much.
That have always seen too much.
“Breakfast,” I say, setting the tray on the dresser.
She doesn’t move, doesn’t even look at it.
“You need to eat,” I tell her, hoping she doesn’t pull this hunger strike shit again.
“Why? So I’m healthy enough for whatever you’ve got planned?”
“So you don’t pass the fuck out when I’m trying to have a conversation with you.”
Her mouth twists. “Is that what we’re doing? Having conversations?”
I cross my arms and lean against the wall, keeping distance between us. “You could make this easier on yourself.”
“I could but I won’t.”
“Why?” I practically growl, the frustration rising. “What’s the point? Your cover’s blown. Your team knows you’re compromised. Whatever mission you were running is over. So why not just tell me?”
She tilts her head, studying me like I’m a puzzle she’s trying to solve. “Would you? In my position? Would you betray everyone you’ve ever worked with because some man you fucked asked nicely?”
Some man you fucked.
Whoa.
Those words hit like a knife between the ribs.
“That’s all I was to you?” I say, trying to keep my voice as calm as possible. “Just some man you fucked?”
She stares at me for a moment, so many things swimming in her eyes like fish in a dark pond.
“No,” she says quietly. “That’s not all you were.”
“Then what—”
“It doesn’t matter.” She looks away. “None of it matters now.”
I want to grab her, shake her, force her to look at me and tell me the truth—about her mission, about her feelings, about any of it.
But I know it won’t work. She’s been trained to resist interrogation.
It makes me wonder how many times she’s been in this situation, if her captors were worse than me, if they hurt her and…
I stop myself from thinking that. Now is not the time to make this more complicated than it already is.
Regardless, she won’t break from pressure.
So I’ll have to try something else.
“Eat,” I say again, pushing off the wall. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
“For what?”
I pause at the door. “To try again, little killer.”
The second interrogation goes worse than the first.
I ask questions. She gives me nothing. Not a word, not a flash, not a single goddamn tell that I can use.
It’s infuriating beyond words
It’s also, in some sick way, impressive.
“You’re good at this,” I say, pacing in front of her while she sits on the bed, spine straight, expression blank. “The silent treatment. The resistance. They trained you well.”
Nothing.
“What do they do at spy school, anyway? That’s where you went, right?
The Rookery? Like James Bond? They teach you how to withstand torture?
How to keep your mouth shut no matter what?
” I pause. “I have to say, we aren’t so different in that regard.
In SERE school, the Green Berets are taught to resist, too.
So, I know exactly what I have to do to break you. ”
Still nothing.
“Or maybe it’s simpler than that.” I stop in front of her, close enough that she has to tilt her head back to meet my eyes. “Maybe you just don’t care enough to break. Maybe I never meant anything to you at all, so there’s nothing I can threaten that would—”
“Stop.”
The word is barely a whisper, but it cuts through my monologue like a blade.
“Stop what?”
“Stop trying to convince yourself I didn’t care.” Her voice is steady, but I can see the cracks now. The strain around her eyes, tick in her jaw. “You know that’s not true. You know it. Deep down, you do.”
“I don’t know anything anymore.” I crouch down so we’re eye level, close enough to see the pulse beating in her throat. “That’s the problem, Mia. You’ve made it so I can’t trust a single memory I have of you. Every smile, every touch, every fucking I see you, Nate—how do I know any of it was real?”
“You don’t.” Her eyes are bright now. Too bright. “You can’t. That’s the point. That’s what I was trained to do. Make you trust me. Make you open up. And you did, and I…” She stops. Swallows hard. “I did my job.”
“Your job.” I let out a broken laugh. “Right. Your job was to fuck me and file reports. Your job was to kiss me and tell me I was someone you cared about while you were calculating the best way to put me down, like a fucking dog.”
“That’s not—”
“Not what? Not how it happened? Not what you were thinking?”
I grab her chin, forcing her to look at me. She doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t pull away. Just meets my gaze with those dark, steady eyes that have haunted me since London.
“Tell me what you were thinking,” I say quietly. “When you were in my bed. When you were on your knees for me. When you were screaming my name. What was going through your head?”
Her breath catches.
“Nothing,” she whispers.
“For once, you’re a terrible liar,” I sneer.
“I wasn’t thinking about the mission!” Her voice cracks. “When I was with you—when we were together—I wasn’t thinking about anything except you. How you felt. How you tasted. How you—” She stops herself. Shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Well, it matters to me.”
“Why?” she says, the word ragged and breathless. “What difference does it make? I’m still an agent. You’re still my captor. Nothing I say is going to change what happens next.”
“Oh, but you don’t know what happens next.”
“Yeah? Well, neither do you.”
We’re too close. I’m still holding her chin, my thumb pressing into the soft skin under her jaw, and I can feel her pulse racing against my fingers.
Her lips are parted, her breath coming fast, and that familiar heat is building between us—that magnetic pull that’s been there from the very beginning.
I want to kiss her.
But it’s more than that.
There’s more and it comes from somewhere dark and hungry.
Take what’s yours.
I jerk back like I’ve been burned.
“You need a shower,” I tell her.
So I make her shower again, and for once she doesn’t protest.
Not because she needs it—she doesn’t—but because I need the distance, and from her willingness, it’s apparent she does too. I need to hear water running and know there’s another a door between us, even if it’s a door I could walk through any time I wanted.
And you want to.
I do. I fucking do.
But instead of leaving, I stand outside the bathroom, listening to the water, imagining her naked under the spray, and I hate myself for how hard I am. For how much I want to walk in there and press her against the tile and fuck her until neither of us can think.
She’s your prisoner.
She lied to you.
She was going to—
The water shuts off.
I take a step back, trying to arrange my face into something neutral, trying to will away the evidence of how affected I am.
The door opens.