Vanguard

Chapter 36

MIA

Vanguard takes me back down the elevator and to his penthouse and sits me down on the couch, wrapping a large, plush blanket around me.

The air in here is blissfully warm but I’m not sure when I’ll stop feeling the cold from outside, the way it’s settled into the marrow of my bones.

Then he steps back, putting distance between us.

It kinda feels like I had a near death experience. No, bugger that, it feels like I did die and somehow he brought me back to life and now I’m inside his penthouse and it’s like learning to be a human all over again.

He nearly killed me.

He caught me.

And now we’re here.

Is this where I’m supposed to start over?

“Drink?” he asks.

I nod, my throat dry as shit, and he moves to the wet bar. He pours two glasses of whiskey, a striking image since he’s still in his superhero suit, and brings one to me.

Our fingers brush when I take it.

I flinch.

He notices and looks crestfallen for a moment before he sits in the armchair across from me and stares at the amber liquid in his glass.

The silence weighs a ton. I can feel it pressing against my chest, filling my lungs, making it hard to breathe. My throat keeps wanting to close up. My hands won’t stop trembling, no matter how tightly I grip the glass.

I’ve been trained for interrogation, for torture. I’ve sat in cells in three different countries and given nothing—not a name, not a detail, not a flicker of recognition when they mentioned things they shouldn’t know.

But I’ve never been trained for this.

For him.

For the aftermath of a man who threw me off a building and then fucked me against the side of one. For the way he’s looking at me now—not with anger, not with desire, just with this terrible, exhausted patience. Like he’s waiting for something he’s not sure will come.

I think my goose is cooked.

“Your name,” he says finally. “I want to know your real name. I think you owe me that much.”

My jaw tightens. The muscle memory of silence is strong—names are weapons and truth is a liability.

But he dropped me.

And he caught me.

And maybe that changes things.

“Mia’s real,” I hear myself say. “It’s short for something else.”

He waits, ever so patient, eyeing me over his glass.

“Erasmia,” I go on, the name feeling foreign in my mouth. I haven’t said it out loud in a very long time. “Erasmia Reeves.”

“Erasmia.” He turns it over on his tongue like he’s tasting the scotch. “That’s unusual. Pretty, though.”

“It’s Greek. It means beloved, if you can believe that.” I let out a caustic laugh. “And there’s a moth. Erasmia pulchella.”

I set my whiskey down, my hands shaking too badly to hold it. The glass clinks against the table, loud in the silence.

“Also pretty,” I continue. “For a moth, anyway. Turquoise with iridescent patterns and splashes of orange and black. Seem harmless. At first.” I stare at the chipped nail polish on my fingers, at my hands, so small and ordinary, and yet capable of terrible things.

“But they carry poison within them, cyanide. One taste, and predators learn not to make that mistake again.”

He puts his glass down and I feel him staring intently, listening.

“That’s what I am.” The truth feels like it’s being pulled out of me, word by word, against every instinct I have. “What I was made into. I’m poison. Literally. My body produces a compound that’s lethal to humans. It’s in my tears. My saliva. Everything that’s…wet.”

I glance up at him and meet his eyes.

“My kiss kills, Nate. I’m poison. I’m…a monster.”

The admission seems to float between us in the air. I watch his face for some sort of reaction, disgust or horror, but he’s not giving me much. Just that careful stillness, that patient waiting.

“You kissed me,” he says carefully. “You’ve kissed me a lot.”

“Yes.”

“We’ve had sex…a lot.”

“We have.”

“I’m not dead…”

“No.”

“So either you’re lying, or—”

“I’m not lying.”

He stands. The movement is abrupt and uncontrolled, the first crack in his composure. He walks to the window, whiskey sloshing in his glass, and stares out at the city like it will help any of this make sense.

I watch his shoulders. The tension in them. The way his free hand keeps flexing at his side. I know how it all must sound, how crazy and fantastical, but he must know somehow, deep down, that I’m telling the truth.

“I’ve thought about it constantly,” I say to his back. “Believe me. Since that first night. Since you kissed me and you just…kept breathing. You’re the only person I’ve ever kissed who didn’t die.”

He doesn’t turn around.

“The only person,” I repeat, swallowing hard, feelings bubbling up and out of those locked boxes inside me. “I’ve never…”

I stop. The words are getting tangled up with memories I can’t afford to access right now. A face I try not to picture. A name I never say.

“I learned not to try,” I manage. “Not to want. Not to let anyone close enough. To be okay with being a ghost for the rest of my life.”

The silence stretches. The fridge kicks on.

“The first time we kissed.” His voice is quiet as he speaks, though he still hasn’t turned around. “On the rooftop after the gala. At first you looked scared, you were scared, and I thought I did something really wrong, like I hurt you.”

My throat constricts.

“I thought I was coming on too strong,” he continues, “that maybe you just didn’t feel the way I did and I got the signals all wrong…”

“You didn’t.”

“But you expected me to die. You were waiting for it.”

The accusation lands like a blade between my ribs.

“I was. Then I was waiting to see if I’d finally found someone who could survive me,” I explain.

Now he turns. His brow is furrowed, lines creasing on his forehead.

“And I did.”

“You did.”

Another long pause. I’m acutely aware of my own heartbeat, the way it thuds against my ribs like it’s trying to escape, knowing he can hear it too. My palms are damp. My mouth is dry. Every instinct I have is screaming at me to stop talking, to retreat, to give him nothing else.

But I’m so tired of silence.

So tired of hiding.

“I’m like you,” I say, though I know I won’t throw my parents under the bus by telling him the whole truth. “Engineered. Enhanced. Made into something more than human.” I pause. “Or less, depending on how you look at it.”

His expression changes. “What do you mean?”

“I wasn’t born this way by accident. I was modified. At a genetic level.” The words feel like pulling teeth. “Turned into a weapon.”

“By who?”

I shake my head. That door stays closed. I’m not ready—may never be ready—to talk about the people who should have protected me.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.”

“Then it matters to you.” I raise my chin. “But I’m not going there. Not tonight.”

He seems to understand that, nodding imperceptibly.

“Your team,” he says, moving on. “The ones at the safehouse.”

“Bayo and Kat,” I tell him, though I know I’m breaking a pretty sacred rule here.

“Bayo’s my handler—been with SOE longer than anyone I know.

Runs comms, coordinates logistics, yells at me when I go off script.

Kat’s Russian. Defector. Long story. She handles extraction, cleanup, the dirty work nobody else wants. ”

“SOE…”

“Special Operations Executive. British intelligence. The ones who assigned me to go after you. Our motto is Reap What You SOE. It’s on our mugs.”

He processes this. I can see him filing it away, adding it to whatever mental dossier he’s building. We are way too alike.

“And the mission,” he says. “The real one. Tell me about that.”

Here’s where it gets harder.

I pick up my whiskey again, mostly for something to do with my hands. Take a sip. Let the burn steady me.

“I wasn’t lying when I said what I said in London.

Other countries think you’re a weapon. That someone with all your power can’t be trusted, doubly so for the company that created you.

My mission was to evaluate you. Determine if you are an actual threat to British interests, and if so, what kind.

Gather intelligence on Global Dynamix and their involvement with Paragon.

” I force myself to hold his gaze. “And if London decided you were too dangerous to let exist…”

“You were to take me out.”

“Yes.”

“With a kiss.”

“That was the plan.”

“But you didn’t,” he says after a moment.

“Obviously not.”

“Even though you could have. Even after you found out that your kiss couldn’t poison me. Any time we were together, well, I suppose you could have picked up a shotgun and blown my damn head off so long as I wasn’t wearing my suit.”

He says this like it amazes him.

“I know what I could have done,” I say sharply. “I also know that the longer I was with you, the more likely that wouldn’t have happened.”

He frowns, wiggling his jaw back and forth. “You mean to tell me that if you discovered I was a weapon, if I started killing innocent people, that you wouldn’t have found some way to kill me?”

I go quiet. “I’m saying, that if London put in a directive to take you down, right now, as of today, I wouldn’t be able to do it.”

He lets out a dry laugh. “Well, today is my lucky fucking day isn’t it.”

I take another sip. The whiskey is starting to hit, warming my chest, loosening some of the tightness.

“I still don’t know why you’re different, why the poison doesn’t work.

I assume it has something to do with your ability to not catch diseases or whatever.

You can’t be poisoned, at least not by me.

You survived me. You keep surviving me.”

“And you keep not killing me.”

We stare at each other. The air between us feels charged, but not with desire, not the way it was before. This is something else. Something vulnerable and more uncertain.

He sets his glass down on the windowsill and walks toward me. Slowly. Carefully. Like he’s approaching something that might bolt.

He stops a few feet away.

“I don’t trust you,” he says.

“I can tell.”

“I don’t know if I can ever trust you.”

“And I don’t blame you.”

“But I don’t want you dead, as much as you don’t want me dead.

” He crouches down so we’re eye level, and the earnest look on his face makes my stomach flip despite everything.

“I had you falling, and all I could think was catch her. Even after everything. Even knowing what you are. I had to catch you. I couldn’t lose you. ”

I don’t know what to say. My throat is too tight for words anyway.

“So, here’s what I’m thinking,” he continues, his voice rough. “We start over. Not as…” He pauses. “Not as anything we were before. Just two people who’ve both been turned into weapons, trying to figure out what the hell to do about it.”

“What does that look like?” I ask softly, feeling that this as close to a happy ending as we’re ever going to get.

“I don’t know.” His mouth twists into a wry smile. “I’ve never done this before.”

“Neither have I.”

Silence fills the room again.

He holds out his hand. Not to touch—just an offering. A question posed in flesh and bone.

I look at his hand. At his beautiful, wicked face. At the man who threw me off a building and caught me before I hit the ground.

I take it.

His fingers close around mine. Warm. Solid. Alive.

Neither of us says anything else.

Maybe there’s nothing else to say.