Chapter 39
VANGUARD
Julia’s message arrived twelve minutes ago and in that space I’ve watched the surveillance footage nine times.
A man with dark hair, lean build, moving with the easy confidence of a trained spy enters the frame. He walks up to Mia’s hotel door. Knocks twice. She opens it in a only a bathrobe, and she lets him in.
The door closes.
Forty-five minutes later, he leaves.
The rational part of my brain—the part that sounds increasingly far away these days—knows I’m spiraling.
Knows that watching the footage a tenth time won’t change what I’m seeing.
Knows that Julia sent this to me for a reason, and that reason probably isn’t my wellbeing, that this video is a Trojan horse.
I hit replay anyway.
She let him in.
The thought lodges in my chest like shrapnel. I can feel my heartbeat in my temples, in my throat, behind my eyes. My hands won’t stop moving—opening and closing, opening and closing—and there’s a tremor in my left one that wasn’t there an hour ago.
While you were sitting here like a goddamn idiot, she let another man into her room.
I shove away from the window and stare at the dark clouds gathering past the skyscrapers, wondering how one woman could have undone everything I’ve tried so hard to become.
A woman who’s been lying to me from the start.
A woman I told we could start over.
Forty-five minutes.
What the fuck takes forty-five minutes?
You know what takes forty-five minutes.
The voice in my head isn’t quite mine anymore. Sometimes it sounds like static. Sometimes it sounds like orders. Right now it sounds like the worst version of myself, the one I keep locked in a box wrapped in police caution tape.
She’s yours. He touched what’s yours.
“She’s not mine,” I say out loud. The penthouse swallows the words. “She was never mine.”
Then why does it feel like someone’s ripping your guts out?
I don’t have an answer for that.
What I have is a balcony door and a city between me and her hotel room.
The flight takes four minutes. I spend every second of it trying to talk myself out of what I’m about to do.
Her curtains are drawn but I can see the lights are on. I land on the balcony harder than I mean to, hard enough that the glass rattles in its frame, hard enough that she’ll know I’m here before I even touch the door. The best warning I can give.
The lock gives under my hand with a grinding shriek of metal, my strength overpowering my intention. I step inside and the smell of her hits me first, the scent that’s made a nest in my bones.
She spins from where she’s standing by the bed, still in that white robe, her hair loose around her shoulders in soft waves. Her eyes are already wide, her body having shifted into something defensive, feet apart, weight balanced. Ready to run or fight. I know she can do the latter.
“Who is he?”
The words come out steadier than I feel and I chalk that up to my own training. Decades of learning to keep my voice level while everything inside me screams.
“Who is who?” She doesn’t move, doesn’t blink.
I stride over to her, fists clenched, but she holds her ground, chin up, those dark eyes tracking my every movement. “The man who was here tonight. Dark hair. Stayed for almost an hour.” I stop close enough to see her pupils contract. “Who. Is. He?”
“You’re spying on me?” she asks, her posture stiffening.
“Don’t make me ask you again,” I say, my voice quieter now.
“Or what? You going to throw me off a different roof this time?”
I only stare at her. She eyes my fists, then takes in the expression on my face. Something in her concedes.
“His name is Cal,” she says. “He’s SOE. He’s a colleague.”
“A colleague,” I sneer. I know how ugly I must sound. “That’s what we’re calling it?”
“That’s what it is,” she says, defiant fire in her eyes. “He’s an agent and a friend.”
“Julia sent me the surveillance footage.” I tap my watch and the holographic screen rises in front of her face, the scene replaying. “I watched him walk into your room, Mia. I watched you let him in wearing nothing but a fucking bathrobe while I was—”
I stop. Swallow. My watch hand is shaking, making the screen blur, and I hate that she can see it.
“While you were what?” Her voice is quiet.
While I was sitting in my penthouse trying to figure out how to deserve you.
“Nothing happened,” she goes on, her forehead scrunching up. “He came to check on me, as a colleague, as a friend. I went dark for three days—my team was worried and he was sent in to find out why.”
I tap the watch so the footage disappears. “So worried he had to come all the way from London? You can’t talk on the phone?”
“It’s his job.”
“His job.” I’m pacing now, back and forth across her hotel room, too much energy in my body and nowhere for it to go. “What else is his job, Mia? What else does he do for you?”
Her jaw tightens. “Oh, give me a fucking break. Are you seriously jealous? Over nothing?”
“So what if I am jealous?” I say, hating that I have to admit it. “What if I don’t like the idea of some guy, some so-called friend, just showing up at your door when you’re half-dressed.”
“Then you have to bloody deal with it because he’s just a friend and nothing happened.”
“And I’m supposed to trust you? You’re a fucking spy.” I jab my finger at her.
“Then don’t trust me,” she says, throwing out her arms. “I don’t really care at this point. Either you take me at my word or you don’t, and frankly, I don’t think you even have a right to be jealous since whatever we were, whatever we had, is no more. You said it yourself. We start over.”
I grind my teeth together, knowing that she is right, that even if she’s lying, I still don’t have a right to be angry about who she spends her time with.
“But he is just a colleague and a friend. A good one,” she says again, and this time a flash of pain comes across her brow.
“You keep saying that. But you’re leaving something out. I can hear it.”
And whatever it is, it’s the thing that’s driving me the most mad.
She’s quiet for a long moment. Her hands are steady at her sides, fingers loose, but I can see the tendons standing out in her neck. The micro-expressions she can’t quite control. Her training is slipping.
“A long time ago, he told me he was in love with me,” she says with a sigh, folding her arms across her chest and looking away.
The words are like a punch to the solar plexus.
“And?” My voice comes out rough. “What did you say? Were you in love with him?”
“I turned him down.” She turns her head to hold my gaze. “I told him it couldn’t happen. That I couldn’t give him what he wanted.”
I swallow hard. “Why not?”
“Because I can’t—” She stops. Presses her lips together. “You know why not. I told you why.”
Because her kiss is poison. Because she’s never been able to touch anyone without killing them. Because until you, she thought she’d spend her whole life alone.
“So he’s in love with you,” I say slowly, “and he flew across an ocean to see you, maybe save you, and he showed up at your hotel room and I’m supposed to believe nothing happened.”
Her voice rises, frustration bleeding through, her eyes sparking. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Nate! I can’t even kiss him without killing him. What exactly do you think we did?”
I know she’s right, know that her particular brand of lethality makes my jealousy absurd, know that I’m being beyond irrational and possessive and everything I swore I wouldn’t be.
But the voice in my head doesn’t care about logic.
It keeps talking.
It keeps wearing me down and winding me up.
She let him in. She let him close. She talked to him for forty-five minutes about things she won’t tell you. You’re nothing anymore, you know this. You never were anything.
“So, what did you talk about?” I ask, trying to gain some sort of control back, feeling that darkness hovering above me like a net ready to drop. “For forty-five minutes. What was so important?”
She gives me an incredulous look. “What do you think? The mission. We talked about what happened at the warehouse. What I’ve learned about Global Dynamix.” She takes a breath. “He asked about you, of course.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“That things got…complicated.”
“Complicated.” I let out a huff of frustration. “Is that what we are? Complicated?”
“Are you trying to tell me that we’re not?” Her voice cracks on the last word. Just barely, just for a second, but I hear it. “Complicated is all we have. Nate, I don’t know what any of this is. I don’t know what’s real anymore.”
The crack in her armor makes something twist in my chest. Part of me wants to pull her into my arms and tell her I’m sorry and that I forgive her, even if there’s nothing to forgive. It wants to be the man I was in Montana, before everything went to shit.
But there’s something else in me now. Something cold and watchful that won’t let go of the image of Cal walking into her room. Something I don’t think even belongs to me anymore.
That something is winning.
“Does he know?” I ask. “About us?”
She hesitates. “He knows I’ve gotten close to you. The team—they’re worried I’ve lost perspective. I guess they passed that message along.”
“Have you lost perspective?”
Another pause. Longer this time.
“I don’t know. I think so.”
The honesty helps, enough for me to be honest too.
So that when Mia says, “The voice is getting louder, isn’t it?” I can’t help but tell her the truth.
“Every day,” I say, my voice a whisper. I’m telling her this like it’s a secret, like I’m not supposed to, like someone will hear me.
“Fight it,” she implores me, searching my face. “Whatever it is, whatever they did to you—you’re stronger than that. That voice isn’t you. You have to push back.”
“But how do you know?” I look at her, really look, and I don’t know what she sees in my face but it makes her stop.
“How do you know this isn’t exactly what I am?
How do you know the thing in my head isn’t the real me, and everything else is just…
programming? Just what they wanted me to believe so I’d be easier to control? ”
“Because I’ve seen you.” She takes a step closer and my skin vibrates, craving her. “The real you. The one who flew me to Montana and showed me his childhood ghosts. That’s real. That’s you.”
“And the one who threw you off a building? The one who put his hand around your throat and didn’t let go until you hit me in the windpipe?” I lean in, close enough that my breath stirs her hair. “Is that real too?”
She doesn’t flinch. “Yes.”
“So, which one am I?”
“Both.” Her hand comes up, fingers brushing my jaw. The touch is feather-light but I feel it everywhere. “You’re both. You have darkness in your light and light in your darkness. That’s the duality of being alive in this world. That’s what makes you human.”
Human.
The word echoes in my skull, rattling around like a stone in an empty room.
You may be human, but you have no humanity. You’re a weapon. You’re a thing they built in a lab and programmed to follow orders and the only reason you think you have feelings is because they wanted you to think that.
“Stop,” I groan, my eyes pinching shut, but I don’t know if I’m talking to her or to the voice. “Please, just stop.”
Her hand falls away.
We stand there in the space between the bed and the window, neither of us moving, neither of us speaking. The sound of our breath fills the room, I can hear her heart beating so fast, like she’s afraid, or maybe that’s my own heart because I’m afraid too.
Then I hear something outside her door, the elevator opening somewhere down the hall. Followed by footsteps getting closer and closer. Mia is frowning at me, unable to hear what I hear, unable to know that someone is coming.
There’s a knock at the door.
Mia goes still.
I nod at her as if to say, you better answer that.
Mia crosses to the door and checks the peephole, while I stand back to the side and out of direct view.
All the color drains from her face and I already know who it is.
“It’s Cal,” she whispers.
Despite somehow knowing—smelling testosterone and his Armani cologne from the other side of the door, hearing his steady heartbeat—his name detonates in my chest like a grenade.
He came back. He came back to her.
“Open it,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound like mine anymore. It isn’t mine anymore.
Mia doesn’t move, stares at me with those big eyes of hers. She shakes her head.
“Open the door, Mia,” I say quietly. “Or I will.”
Seconds pass. He knocks again.
I make a slight movement for the door but she puts her hand on the handle and quickly opens it.
Cal stands in the hallway, a small jewelry box of all fucking things in his hand. His eyes find Mia first—relief flooding his features, then confusion at her expression—and then they slide past her to me.
The relief vanishes.
“Cal, what are you doing back here?” Mia asks, her voice steady despite her racing heartbeat.
“Uh sorry, I needed to give you these, uh…” he says, holding out the box, his eyes darting back and forth between me and Mia.
Before Mia can say anything, I cross the room and snatch the jewelry box from his hands and open them.
It’s a pair of earrings.
And just like that, something inside me lurches, rushing out cold and black, snaking over my entire body from the inside out until I can’t hear straight, can’t see straight, can’t think straight. All I feel is hate. All I feel is angry.
All I know is that I must do what I am told to do.
That box inside me has finally been opened.