Vanguard

Chapter 35 #2

“But that’s not what I really need to know, is it?” He steps closer, and I step back—but the wall is right there, pressing against my thighs, the only thing keeping me from falling to my death, and there’s nowhere left to go. “What I really need to know is simpler than that.”

“What?” The word comes out barely a whisper.

He leans down, his face inches from mine, and his voice drops to something soft and terrible.

“I need you to give me a good reason to let you live.”

And then his hand closes around my arm.

“No, Nate!” I try to pull back, but he’s already moving, already lifting me over the wall like I weigh nothing, and suddenly I’m standing on a narrow ledge with nothing between me and a seven-hundred-foot drop but his hand on my arm.

“Do you know what’s down there?” he asks, almost pleasantly.

“At the bottom?”

I can’t answer. Can’t breathe. The wind is screaming past us, and all I can see is the street far below, the tiny cars, the specks of people like ants. I think I’m about to pass out, my vision going grey at the edges, and that makes me tremble even more.

“Concrete,” he continues. “It’s the foundation of this fair city. And at this height, hitting it would be like hitting a brick wall at terminal velocity. Every bone in your body would shatter. Your organs would rupture. You’d be dead before you had time to feel it.”

I try to say please but it comes out garbled, my heart in my throat, my eyes rolling back from the sheer vertigo panic-inducing drop of it all.

His hand leaves my arm.

It closes around my throat instead.

And then he lifts.

My feet leave the ledge.

My legs dangle over nothing.

The only thing keeping me alive is his grip on my throat—tight enough to keep me in his grasp and make breathing difficult.

“I could break your neck right now,” he says, and his voice has gone quiet, almost contemplative. “Right here, with just a little more pressure. Watch the light go out of your eyes. Drop your body and let gravity do the rest.”

I claw at his wrist, but it’s like scratching at steel. The suit. The strength. I’m outmatched in every single way.

I always was.

“But that would be too easy.” His grip shifts, and I gasp for air. “I think I’d rather see you fall. Give you time to think on the way down. About what you did. About all those lies. About how it feels to know you’re going to die.”

Tears are streaming down my face—from the wind, from the fear that’s eating me alive, from everything. The city blurs into streaks of light below me.

“So, here’s what’s going to happen.” His face swims into focus, and I see something crack through the emptiness. Desperation. “I’m going to ask you one question. And if you don’t answer, if you lie, if you deflect, if you give me the silent treatment one more fucking time, I’m going to let go.”

I can barely hear him over the wind and the roaring of my heart in my ears.

“Was any of it real?” he asks, pained.

The question hangs between us.

After everything—the interrogations, the silence, the violence and the sex and the endless, exhausting push-pull—he’s not asking for names or intel or operational details.

He’s asking if I loved him.

And I can’t lie about this. Not now. Not with death yawning beneath me and his eyes boring into mine and the terrible weight of everything I’ve done pressing down on my chest.

“Yes,” I choke out, my throat burning against his palm. “It was real. You were real. The only real thing I’ve ever had.”

His expression wavers but his grip tightens.

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s the truth!” I eke out.

“I don’t know what truth means anymore!”

“Then drop me!” The words tear out of me, raw, rough, and barely audible.

“If you don’t believe me, if you’re never going to believe me, then just fucking drop me!

I can’t—I can’t do this anymore, Nate. I can’t keep defending something I know I destroyed.

I loved you. I love you. And I ruined it.

I ruined us. And if you want me dead for that, then fine.

Fine. At least I won’t have to live with what I did. ”

It’s a Hail Mary, but it’s the truth.

The wind screams past us.

His hand trembles around my throat.

And then—

He lets go.

I fall.

The world inverts—sky below, city above, everything spinning and tumbling as gravity takes hold. The wind is a living thing, tearing at my clothes, my hair, my lungs as I try to scream but can’t find the air.

I fall and I fall.

And I fall.

This is it.

This is how I die.

Because I fell in love with the wrong person and broke him so badly he broke me back.

The ground rushes up. The cars grow larger. The people—

Something slams into me from the side.

Arms. Impossibly hard, strong arms wrapping around my waist, around my chest, yanking me out of free-fall so violently my neck snaps back, whatever air left inside me has been knocked clean from my lungs.

The world spins again—down becomes up, up becomes sideways—and then we’re flying, the city wheeling beneath us as he carries me away from death.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t think.

I can only hold on to him—fisting my hands in his suit, pressing my face against his enforced chest—and shake.

“I’ve got you, darlin’.” His voice is raw and rough. “I’ve got you.”

We’re hovering now. Somewhere in the middle of the skyline, suspended between earth and heaven, wrapped around each other like two magnets.

“You—” I try to speak but for a moment my voice won’t work. “You dropped me. You actually—”

“I know.” His arms tighten as the air swirls around us. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry, Mia, I had to—I needed to know if—”

“If I would tell you the truth? I told you the truth! And you dropped me anyway!”

I realize that we’re suspended in the air a hundred feet above the ground and he could drop me again if he wanted to, but anger is pushing past all the fear, finding a home in my chest now that the adrenaline of my near death is starting to fade.

He pulls back just enough to look at my face, and what I see there isn’t remorse. It’s rage. Barely contained, jaw tight, eyes blazing with something that looks a lot like betrayal.

Good. Because I have bloody rage too.

“Three days you gave me nothing,” he grinds out. “Three days of silence while I was falling apart, while that voice kept getting louder, and I needed, I needed to know there was something worth saving. Something real.”

“I told you something real!” I cry out. “Right before you let go. I told you I…” I swallow hard, the emotion so hard to understand, making me second guess ever feeling it at all. “I told you I loved you.”

For a second his expression wavers, then becomes steel again.

“You don’t get to use that,” he says quietly. “Not after weeks of lies. Not when you’d say anything to save yourself.”

“I wasn’t trying to save myself.” I shove at his chest, which is pointless because it’s like pushing a wall. “I was trying to save you, you absolute fucking dunce. From whatever’s in your head. From yourself. And you—” My voice cracks and I hate it. “You let me fall.”

“I caught you.”

“You dropped me first.”

“And I knew I’d catch you.”

We stare at each other, breathing hard, suspended in nothing. His eyes are wild and I’m sure mine are the same. I have never wanted to hit someone so badly in my life. Never wanted to scream at someone, claw at them, make them hurt the way I’m hurting.

Never wanted someone this much while wanting to destroy them.

“I hate you,” I whisper, wondering how I can love and hate someone at the same time.

“I know,” he says. “I hate me too.”

Then I kiss him.

Because I’m a bloody idiot and all this adrenaline has no place else to go.

The kiss is desperate and graceless and tastes like tears and terror, and I bite his lip hard enough to hurt because I want him to feel something. I want him to bleed for me.

He kisses me right back like he’s trying to punish me in the same way.

The kiss turns vicious, tasting of his blood. All that familiar heat, but sharper now—edged with fury and epinephrine and the sick relief of still being alive when I shouldn’t be. His hands are rough, fisting my hair, dragging down my back, gripping my hips hard enough to bruise.

Good. I want the bruises.

“I hate you,” I gasp against his mouth.

“You keep saying that.” He bites my jaw, my throat, and I arch into it like the traitor I apparently am. “Maybe I hate you too.”

“Then put me down.”

“No.”

“Then fuck me.”

Something snaps behind his eyes. He flies us sideways, fast, toward the nearest building, our reflection in the glass getting closer and closer, me in my knickers and singlet and him in his superhero suit.

At the last minute he spins me around and slams my back against the glass, enough that I hear a faint crack splintering.

“Someone could see—” I start.

“Empty floor. So far.” He’s already shoving my knickers aside. “And I don’t care if they do.”

His fingers slide between my thighs, rough and searching.

“You’re soaked.” He sounds almost angry about it.

“It’s the adrenaline,” I say, doing all I can to stay focused on the wildness in his eyes and not on the drop beneath me.

“Sure it is.” He presses harder, and my head falls back against the glass. “You’re always lying.”

“And you’re always—” I lose the sentence when his fingers curl. “Fuck.”

“That’s the idea.”

Then spins me around so my chest and side of my face is pressed against the glass and he’s holding me from behind. I can see the crack getting larger, snaking out along the pane, and the empty conference room beyond that.

I hear something shift in his suit, the sound of a zip, and then he’s pushing his cock inside me, no gentleness here, just one hard thrust that pins me between his body and the window and punches the air out of my lungs.

I cry out, with want, with fear, with everything. He bites my neck in response, and reaches around, yanking down my tank top, my breasts spilling out. He pinches one nipple hard and then I’m squeezed against the window again.

God help me, the only thing really holding me up is his cock.

His hips move in sharp, punishing strokes, and I take it—take him—because this is the only language we have left. The only honest thing between us. He’s full of rage and I’m furious and we’re both so fucking broken that this is the best we can do.

“Look down,” he growls against my ear.

I do, past my toes, down to the street far below. The cars are toys. The people are specks. We’re suspended against nothing, held up by his power alone, and he’s so deep inside me I can’t tell where I end and he begins.

“This is what you do to me.” His voice is ruthless, his teeth nipping at my neck.

“You make me insane. You make me dangerous. I dropped you off a building because I don’t believe a fucking word you say anymore, and I still—” He thrusts harder, and I moan, the crack in the glass getting longer. “I still couldn’t let you fall.”

“So don’t pretend this is love.”

“I’m not.” His teeth graze my shoulder. “This is something worse.”

Whatever it is, he fucks me like he’s trying to excise something, like if he can just get deep enough, he can carve out whatever poison I’ve put in him. And I let him—impaled against the cracking glass, meeting every brutal thrust because I’m trying to do the same thing.

Burn it out. Fuck it out. Get free of this thing that won’t let either of us go, that has ensnared us like two hunters caught in the same damn trap.

“I could have let you fall,” he pants. “I should have.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.” His chin drops on my shoulder, eyes squeezed shut like it all hurts. “I never fucking can.”

I come first—sudden and vicious, coming so hard I see stars, and feel him follow a moment later. He buries himself deep and groans against my neck, and for a few seconds we’re just two people destroying each other in the night air.

When it’s over, neither of us moves. We hover.

His breath is ragged against my neck. The glass is cracked and cold against my breasts and he’s still inside me and I have no idea what any of this means.

He pulls out slowly, and I feel the loss like something being torn away.

Neither of us speaks.

He carries me back to the roof silently, two ghosts who just tried to break each other and failed, and carefully sets me down on solid concrete.

I fix my knickers. Put my boobs back into my singlet.

I do my best not to look at him because I’m not sure if it will ruin me or not.

“Mia—” he starts.

“Save it,” I tell him. “There’s nothing else we can really say to each other right now.”

So we stand there in the dark, breathing, bleeding from wounds neither of us can see.

Nothing fixed. Nothing forgiven.

Just alive, somehow.

For now.