Vanguard

Chapter 40

MIA

I know the exact moment Nate leaves his body.

One second, he’s standing there holding Cal’s jewelry box, which hold my new comms in it, his jaw tight, his eyes blazing with that jealous fury I’ve been trying to talk him down from.

And then something changes. The muscles in his face go slack.

The light behind his eyes dims and then winks out entirely, like someone blew out a candle.

What’s left isn’t Nate.

What’s left is smiling.

My whole body goes numb.

“You should go,” I say to Cal, my voice coming out strange and thin. “Right now. You need to leave.”

Cal doesn’t move. He’s watching Nate with the focused stillness of a man who’s walked into an ambush and knows it. His hand drifts toward his hip, toward the weapon I know he keeps holstered under his jacket.

“Mia,” he says carefully, “step away from him.”

“Cal, just go. Please.”

“I’m not leaving you here with—”

Nate laughs, the sound cold, bitter and slightly unhinged. “With who? America’s savior? Its golden boy? Don’t you know who I am? I’m the safest person on the planet, Cal.”

He sets the jewelry box down on the dresser with exaggerated care, his movements slow and deliberate, and when he turns back to face us his smile has widened into something that makes the numbness take hold in my chest, freezing my heart in place.

“Cal,” he says, tasting the name. “The colleague. The friend.” His head tilts to one side, birdlike and predatory, like a hawk. “The one who’s in love with her.”

Swiftly, Cal draws his gun, has it pointed at Nate.

“Don’t move.” His voice is steady, professional, but I can see the sweat beading at his hairline.

He knows what Nate is. He’s read the files.

He knows a 9mm won’t stop him, knows that nothing short of a direct shot to the brainstem might slow him down, and even then it’s not a guarantee.

But right now, Vanguard is not in his suit and doesn’t have special protection and I know Cal is willing to take those odds.

Nate doesn’t flinch at the weapon pointed at him. Doesn’t even look at the gun. His eyes stay fixed on Cal’s face, that terrible smile never wavering.

“Go ahead,” he says. “Shoot me. I’d love to see you try.”

“Nate, stop, please.” I step between them, my hands up, my heart slamming against my ribs so hard I can feel it in my throat. “This isn’t you. Whatever’s happening right now, whatever voice is in your head, you have to fight it. You have to—”

“Move out of the way, Mia,” Cal says sharply, his eyes laser focused on Nate. “Get out of the line of fire.”

“No one’s firing anything!” I’m shouting now, my voice cracking. “Both of you, just stop, just wait—”

Nate’s smile falters, just for a second, but enough that I see a glimpse of something else underneath, confusion, maybe, or fear.

Yes, Nate, come back, fight it, you’re still in there, please—

Then it’s gone and that unnerving blankness is back, like his soul has been wiped clean.

“You know what I think, Mia?” Nate says, conversational, like we’re discussing celebrity news.

“I think he came back tonight because he couldn’t stand it.

Couldn’t stand knowing you were with me.

Couldn’t stand that you chose me over him.

” He takes a step forward. Cal’s finger tightens on the trigger in response.

“I think he’s been waiting years for you to change your mind, and now he knows you never will, and it’s eating him alive. ”

“That’s not—” Cal starts, his jaw going tight, his finger steady on the trigger.

Nate goes on. “I think he tells himself he’s here for the mission.

For you. But really he just wanted to see it for himself.

Wanted to look me in the eye and know that I’m the one who gets to touch you.

The one who gets to taste you.” Another step.

The barrel of Cal’s gun is a foot away from Vanguard’s head. “The one who gets to make you scream.”

“Last warning.” Cal’s voice has gone cold now, all the fear locked away somewhere deep. This is the operative talking, the killer, the man who’s put down threats before and will do it again. “Stand down or I fire.”

Nate stops.

The room holds its breath.

I can hear the blood rushing in my ears, can feel the robe clinging to my sweat-damp skin, can smell gunmetal and Cal’s cologne and something sharp and electric, like the air before a lightning strike.

“Nate,” I whisper. “Please.”

He looks at me.

For one impossible second, I think I’ve reached him. I think I see Nate somewhere behind those empty eyes.

Then he moves.

It happens too fast to track. One moment he’s standing still, the next he’s a blur of motion, his hand closing around Cal’s wrist, breaking his bones in half with a sickening snap before he even gets a chance to fire the gun, which falls to the carpet.

Cal screams in agony, but even then he doesn’t falter, doesn’t stop fighting back. He’s good, one of the best I’ve ever worked with, and he almost manages it. Almost gets his elbow into Nate’s throat, almost creates enough space to—

Nate’s other hand comes up.

It closes around the top of Cal’s head.

And twists.

The sound of his death imprints itself on me. It’s wet and dense and final, a muffled crunch that I feel in my own spine, in my own neck, in every part of me that understands exactly what just happened.

Cal’s body drops.

He falls like a puppet with cut strings, boneless and heavy, and I can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t do anything except stand there with my hand pressed over my mouth while my brain tries to catch up with what my eyes just saw.

Cal.

His name echoes through me but no sound comes out.

No, not Cal.

Cal can’t be dead.

I’ve seen death before. I’ve caused death before, more times than I can count.

But this…this is different. This is Cal, who ran along the Thames with me at five in the morning when we both couldn’t sleep between missions, Cal, who held my hair back when I got food poisoning in Marrakech.

Cal, who told me he loved me and then stayed anyway when I couldn’t say it back.

Cal, who came back tonight with a pair of earrings because he wanted to make sure I could call for help.

And now he’s lying on the floor of my hotel room with his head at an angle that makes my stomach heave, his eyes empty, and Nate is standing over him with trembling hands, hands that killed my friend, staring down at the body like he doesn’t understand how it got there.

“What did I do?”

His voice sounds different. Smaller. The smile is gone and what’s left is a broken man waking up from a nightmare to find the nightmare was real.

But I have no pity for him and I can’t answer him. My throat has closed up, my tongue thick and useless, every word I’ve ever known scattered like leaves in a storm.

“Mia.” He looks up at me and his eyes are wet.

“What did I—I didn’t mean to—she made me…

Julia. She sent me the footage. She wanted me to come here.

She wanted me to find him and she—” He looks at his hands, at Cal, his whole body shudders.

“She made me do this. The voice, it just—it took over and I couldn’t stop it, I couldn’t—”

Something hot and sharp is building in my chest. Grief and rage tangling together, climbing up my throat, pressing against the backs of my eyes.

“No,” I manage to say.

The word stops him cold.

“I don’t think she made you do anything.

” My voice is steadier now, harder, the shock crystallizing into something I can use.

“I think this is what you are. I think this is what you’ve always been, underneath everything else.

A weapon. A killer.” I gesture at Cal’s body—his body—at the ruin of my friend crumpled on the carpet.

“This is what happens when they point you at a target and pull the trigger.”

He blinks in horror. “That’s not—I would never—”

“But you just did!”

The words hang between us for a moment and he’s fighting hard not to take it in, not to believe it.

There is some part of me that wants to take it back.

A small part. A part of me knows I’m being cruel, that whatever happened wasn’t entirely his fault, that Julia manipulated this from the start.

But Cal is dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, and I can still hear the sound of his neck breaking and I can’t, I can’t be gentle right now.

I don’t have it in me anymore.

Nate nods slowly, accepting it. Believing it.

Then alarm suddenly dawns on his face.

“You need to go,” he says. “Right now. Before I—before it comes back. Before she makes me—”

“What about Cal?”

The question scrapes out of me. I don’t want to leave him here, lying on the floor like discarded trash. I can’t. He deserves better. He deserves so much better. He deserves a proper burial, a flag-draped coffin, someone to mourn him who isn’t just the woman who couldn’t love him back.

“I’ll handle it,” he says firmly, his eyes fixed on an empty spot on the wall.

“I’ll take care of him. I’ll make sure he’s—” His voice breaks.

“Just go. Get somewhere safe. Don’t tell me where.

If I know, she’ll know. If she activates me again—Christ, Mia.

She knew what she was doing when she sent me here.

She wanted this to happen. And for all I know, she wants you dead now, too.

And if I don’t do it, someone else will.

You hear me? Your cover has been blown. Julia, I think she knows. She has to know, she—”

He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t have to.

I move without thinking, shedding the robe as I cross to where my clothes are draped over a chair. Jeans. Boots. Bra. Shirt. Sweater. Jacket. I dress with mechanical efficiency, my hands steady even though the rest of me is shaking apart. Muscle memory taking over when my mind can’t.

The earrings catch my eye.

The jewelry box is still sitting on the dresser where Nate left it, lid open, the delicate gold pieces glinting in the lamplight. New comms. That’s what Cal was bringing me. New ears to replace the ones Nate ripped out and swallowed.

I grab them. Shove them in my pocket.

My go-bag is under the bed where I always keep it. A few passports under different names, cash, another burner phone, a change of clothes, a knife I shouldn’t have been able to get through customs. Everything a girl needs to disappear.

I sling it over my shoulder and turn back to Nate.

He’s standing exactly where I left him, motionless, a statue of a man carved from guilt and horror. Cal’s body lies at his feet and for a moment I sway, unmoored by the horror of it all.

“Mia,” Nate says softly. “I’m sorry. I’m so—”

“I know.”

I know he is, but I can’t hear his apologies right now. I can’t stand here and watch him fall apart while Cal’s blood is still warm, while the echo of that sound—that wet, final crunch—is still reverberating through my bones.

I glance at the gun on the carpet. I should probably take it but I know I can’t, can’t take anything that might connect me to this horrible scene. Vanguard will get rid of it.

I look at Cal one last time.

I’m sorry, I think. I’m sorry I couldn’t love you. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you. I’m sorry the last thing you saw was him.

Then I look at Vanguard, knowing it will be the last time I look at him too.

Then I run.

The hallway blurs past me. The elevator takes forever to come, long enough that I almost take the stairs, but then the doors slide open and I’m inside, jabbing the button for the lobby, watching the numbers count down while my reflection stares back at me from the polished steel—pale, hollow-eyed, a ghost of whoever I was twenty minutes ago.

Cal is dead.

Nate killed him.

And I’m running, just like Nate told me to, because that’s all I know how to do anymore. It’s all I’ve ever known how to do.