Chapter 35
MIA
The penthouse is quiet when I wake. No footsteps in the hallway, no muffled sounds of Nate moving through his morning routine.
Just the hum of the climate control and the distant pulse of the city far below, living its life without any knowledge of the two people trapped in this glass tower, orbiting each other like dying stars.
I lie still for a long moment, staring at the ceiling, noting the aches in my body.
The bruises from the warehouse have faded to yellow-green.
The ones from last night are fresher—fingerprints on my hips, a tender spot on my neck where his hand pressed too hard.
Evidence of what we did. What I tried to do after.
Clearly you are that stupid.
I close my eyes against the memory of his face when I said that.
The way something shuttered behind his eyes, like a door slamming closed.
I was trying to hurt him. Trying to remind us both that I’m not the woman he thought I was—that I’m a weapon, same as him, and weapons don’t get to have feelings.
But the truth is uglier than that.
The truth is I wanted him last night. Not as a tactic, or as an escape strategy. I wanted him because some broken part of me still believes that if we touch enough, fuck enough, maybe we can find our way back to what we had in Montana. Maybe we can pretend none of this happened.
Clearly, I’m fucking stupid too.
I roll onto my side and curl my knees to my chest, making myself small.
This was the worst-case scenario.
I’ve run it in my head a thousand times since training, what happens when a NOC gets burned.
The protocol is clear: deny everything, protect your network, hold out as long as possible while your team extracts or eliminates the threat.
You don’t break. You certainly don’t confess.
You take whatever they do to you and you survive it, because the mission is more important than any individual operative.
But the protocol never accounted for this.
It never accounted for falling in love with the target.
It never accounted for watching his face crumble when he realized everything he believed was a lie. For hearing the crack in his voice when he asked was any of it real and knowing the answer would only hurt him more.
It never accounted for him.
Nor for my weak little heart.
“I don’t know if I want to kill you or keep you.”
The words echo through me, sharp as razors. He said them like a confession, as if he was ashamed of both options equally.
And the worst part, the part that makes me want to scream into the expensive Egyptian cotton pillowcase, is that I totally understand.
Because I feel the same way. This impossible push-pull between wanting to run and wanting to stay.
Between knowing I should hate him for keeping me prisoner and knowing I deserve so much worse than this.
He’s been gentle, in his own way. He tends my wounds. He feeds me, even when I don’t want it. He washed my bloody clothes and folded them. It’s almost honorable.
And then he fucks me like he’s trying to break us both.
I don’t know which version of him is real anymore. Maybe they both are. Maybe that’s the problem.
He keeps asking about Marsh. About what I heard at the warehouse. About the connection between Global Dynamix and Kozlov.
And I keep giving him nothing. I want to tell him, believe me, I want him to be as informed as I am, but I know what would happen if I did at this point, when he’s in this state.
If I tell him what I recorded—the trafficking, the “subjects,” the references to consciousness transfer—he’ll do something stupid.
He’ll confront Julia. He’ll go after Marsh.
He’ll try to tear down the whole rotten structure from the inside, and they’ll see him coming from a mile away.
And then they’ll reset him. Or kill him. Or turn him into whatever Paragon is supposed to be.
I can’t let that happen.
Not yet.
So, I stay silent. I let him think I’m protecting SOE, protecting the mission, when really I’m protecting him from himself. From the truth that might break him worse than my lies ever did.
You can tell yourself that, but you’re still a bloody fool, I think. He deserves to know what his employers are capable of. What the system is that he’s a part of.
But deserving something and surviving it are two different things.
For now, I’m keeping my mouth shut.
I sit up slowly, running my hands over my face. The clean laundry sits on the dresser where he left it in a neat stack. My bra and knickers, washed and folded by the hands of a man who could crush my skull without effort.
What are we doing?
The question has no answer. Or too many answers, all of them terrible.
I think about what could have been. In another life—one where I wasn’t an agent, where he wasn’t a superhero, where we met at a coffee shop or a bookstore like normal people—maybe we could have had something real.
Something that didn’t involve lies and missions and the constant threat of violence and betrayal.
In that life, I could have told him about my poison.
The thought surfaces before I can stop it, and it brings a wave of grief so sharp it steals my breath.
He’s the only person I’ve ever touched who didn’t die.
And I’ve kissed him countless times. Deep, desperate, hungry kisses that should have stopped his heart within seconds. Sweet, soft kisses that should have made him foam at the mouth. And every time, he just kissed me back, alive and warm and there. Making me feel like I’d never felt before.
I don’t know why it doesn’t affect him, if it’s something about his enhancements, his engineered biology, or something else entirely, or if it’s all designed by the universe to be yet another sick joke. But he survived me. He’s the first person in my entire life who has.
And I haven’t told him what it meant, that every single kiss was a miracle. I never told him that loving me is supposed to be a death sentence, and somehow he rewrote the rules just by existing.
I never got the chance to.
And now I don’t think I ever will.
Because even if we survive this—even if he decides not to kill me, even if I somehow make it out of his penthouse and back to my team—there’s no going back. The woman he thought he loved doesn’t exist. She was a cover, a performance, a carefully constructed lie.
The real me is the one who left bodies on that warehouse floor.
The real me is the one who was evaluating him for elimination.
The real me is the one who fucked him last night and then tried to run, because that’s what I was trained to do.
Monster, I think. He called me a little killer, but we’re both monsters.
Maybe that’s why we fit.
I get up and dress in my own tank top and knickers, forgoing the bra and tactical pants. No point in full gear when I’ve got nowhere to go.
I sit on the edge of the bed and wait.
He comes for me at dusk.
The door opens without warning, and he fills the frame the way he always does—too big for the space, too much presence for one room to contain. But it’s worse now, because he’s wearing the suit.
The full tactical armor, dark and powerful, the uniform he wears when he’s being Vanguard, America’s Hero, the symbol of everything the country wants to believe about itself.
A symbol of the lies.
“Get up,” he says. His voice is empty, his eyes are blank.
“Where are we going?” I ask warily.
“The roof.”
My blood goes cold. Is he taking me somewhere beyond that?
He doesn’t elaborate. Doesn’t explain. Just stands there in the doorway, waiting, and I understand with sudden clarity that something has changed. Something in him has broken loose, and I’m about to find out what happens when he stops holding back.
I stand on legs that feel like they might give out.
“I should put on pants…” I say, reaching for them.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says so sharply it’s enough to cut. “Just move.”
I move.
He walks behind me through the penthouse, and I’m hyperaware of his presence at my back. The whisper of the suit as he moves. The heat radiating off his body despite the Kevlar armor. He could grab me at any moment. Could snap my neck before I even knew what was happening.
But he guides me to the elevator with one hand on my shoulder—not gentle, not rough, just there. A reminder that I’m his, for now, and that I go where he takes me.
The elevator doors open. We step inside.
He hits the button for the roof.
The ride takes seconds. One floor. The doors barely close before they’re opening again and when I walk through them, the wind hits me like a fist.
We’re hundreds of feet up, and the November air is brutal, cold enough to make my eyes water, strong enough to whip my hair into my face.
The city sprawls below us, a glittering carpet of lights and life, and I’m tempted to scream for help, even though no one would hear me, and he’d probably stop me before I even opened my mouth.
He emerges behind me, the elevator closing with a finality that makes my stomach drop.
“You know what I realized last night?” His voice cuts through the wind, conversational, almost casual. “After you tried to run. After I stood in that hallway shaking like a fucking child.”
I can only suck in the cold air, trying to quell my racing heart.
He walks past me, toward the edge of the roof, and I have no choice but to follow, wincing with every step of my bare feet on the cold concrete.
Past the climate control units. Past the hover car pad that remains empty, Danny somewhere else.
He leads me all the way to the low wall that separates the roof from the void.
“I realized I’ve been asking the wrong questions.” He turns to look at me, and his eyes are even emptier than before, like someone carved out everything human and left only the weapon behind. “I’ve been asking what you know. What you reported, who you work for.”
The wind screams past us and I shiver uncontrollably.