Chapter 45
VANGUARD
She can’t stop shaking.
Not the adrenaline tremors from before—this is different. Deeper. Her whole body vibrating against my chest as we cut through the clouds heading north, and her skin is like ice where it presses against my neck.
“Mia.” I angle us lower, beneath the cloud cover, scanning the darkness below for lights. “Talk to me.”
“C-cold,” she manages through chattering teeth. “Really f-fucking cold.”
Shit. Of course she is. We’re at ten thousand feet in November, she’s soaked in sweat and blood, and I’ve been flying her through freezing air for twenty minutes like an idiot. Just because temperature doesn’t affect me doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect her.
I need to land ASAP.
The Catskills spread beneath us, a dark carpet of forest broken by the occasional glint of water. Lakes. Summer homes. The kind of places that empty out after Labor Day and don’t fill up again until Memorial Day.
Perfect.
I find what I’m looking for on the third pass—a large summer house set back from a private lake, no lights in any window, no cars in the long gravel driveway.
The nearest neighbor is at least half a mile through dense woods.
I circle once, scanning for security systems. There are cameras on the porch and by the garage, the little red lights blinking steadily in the darkness.
Easy enough.
I land in the backyard, setting Mia down gently on a wooden deck that overlooks the water. She sways, nearly goes down, and I catch her elbow.
“Stay here. One minute.”
I move fast, hitting each camera with a focused burst of gravitational pressure—not enough to destroy them, just enough to fry the electronics. The blinking lights go dark one by one. Then I’m at the back door, and a gentle push is all it takes to splinter the lock.
The inside smells like dust and cedar and old books.
Summer people. The kind who have a lake house and a city apartment and probably a third place in Florida for the winters.
I find the thermostat and crank it up, then the circuit breaker, then back to the deck where Mia is exactly where I left her, hunched over, arms wrapped around herself.
“Come on.” I lift her again—she doesn’t protest, which worries me more than anything—and carry her inside.
I take her straight to the nearest bathroom, which is all rustic wood and expensive tile and sit Mia on the closed toilet lid and start running the shower, testing the temperature until steam starts to rise.
“Can you stand?”
She nods, but when she tries to get up her legs buckle. I catch her before she hits the floor.
“Okay. Okay, new plan.” I take a breath. “I’m going to help you. Just…tell me if you want me to stop.”
She looks up at me with her one good eye—the other is still swollen shut, a mess of purple and black—and a look of trust passes over her face. Or just exhaustion too deep for modesty.
I peel the ruined shirt off her as carefully as I can, but she still hisses when the fabric pulls away from dried blood. Her torso is a map of violence—bruises layered on bruises, boot prints on her ribs, finger marks on her arms. I’ve seen battlefield injuries that looked better than this.
My hands are shaking now, nausea rolling through me.
“Oh, darlin’,” I say thickly, a million emotions all stuck in my throat.
The rest of her clothes come off with clinical efficiency. I don’t let myself look, don’t let myself think about anything except getting her clean and warm and safe. I guide her into the shower and she leans against the tile, letting the hot water sluice over her.
The water runs red at first. Then pink. Then finally clear.
“There’s shampoo,” I say, my voice rough. “Some kind of fancy stuff. You—”
“Please. Can you do it?”
I swallow hard and nod, grabbing the shampoo and pouring it into my hands.
Then I step into the shower, still in my suit, not caring if I get wet, and start massaging it into her hair, ever so gently.
She lets out a low hiss and I stop but she mumbles for me to keep going, so I do.
The whole time my chest feels constricted, like there’s a hand in there closing over my heart, because this is the woman I love, still, now, more, and every wince makes me realize how close I was to losing her for good.
It makes it so hard to breathe.
“Conditioner?” I manage to say, after getting her back under the spray and gently washing the shampoo out. “Your hair is a little tangled.”
“Pile it on,” she says. “Tangled is an understatement.”
She’s not wrong. Though a lot of blood and grime and who knows what else has been washed away, swirling in the drain along with all the blood that was caked onto my suit, her hair is a rat’s nest. I pour conditioner on her head and start working it through, being as gentle as possible and taking my time.
“Mia…” I say softly, working it through her ends.
She makes a small sound in reply. When I don’t answer she says, “Yeah?”
There’s so much I want to tell her, but all the emotions slide around in my chest, unmoored and dangerous.
I don’t even know how to articulate them, how to pick them apart from each other and offer them to her.
This woman is so strong, so fierce, and so damaged that it’s undoing me, thread by thread.
I love her. I really fucking love her, the feelings want to come pouring out of me because they’re strong, so damn strong and unstoppable. I want to tell her and then…
Well, what good will that do for us? Will that make me feel better? Will it make her feel better? Or will it only make her feel worse. Because whatever love she had for me, if she had any at all, is gone now. I saw it disappear the moment I dropped her off the roof.
And then there’s the voice.
The fucking voice is still there. Quieter now, almost a whisper, but still there. Not commanding, not pushing, just…present. Like a splinter lodged somewhere I can’t reach, reminding me it exists.
I thought destroying the remote would fix it. I was wrong. I thought Julia kept that voice alive. I was wrong.
Julia. I know that Mia killed her. She didn’t have to tell me but I know. Whether she kissed her with her poison lips or used some other instrument at her disposal or just plain strangled her to death, because Mia is a little killer at heart, Julia is gone.
I should feel something about that. Relief, maybe. Or triumph. The woman who controlled me, manipulated me, used me as her personal attack dog for a decade—she’s gone. I should be celebrating.
Yet, I just feel strangely hollow.
Julia was a monster. I know that. I know that so fucking well.
She tortured Mia, ordered Cal’s death at my hands, treated me like property instead of a person.
But she was also the only constant in my life since Emma died.
She was there when I woke up confused and terrified after whatever they did to me.
She talked me through the nightmares, the blackouts, the moments when I wasn’t sure what was real.
She told me I was special. Important. Necessary.
She told me I was hers.
And now she’s dead on the floor of that facility, killed by the woman I chose over her.
I know Mia did the right thing and the only thing, that Julia would have never let either of us out of their alive, that she would have destroyed me in the end if she couldn’t have me the way she wanted. But it doesn’t make things any less complicated. In fact it only makes it more so.
“Nate?” Mia say quietly. “I think you can rinse now.”
I stare at my hands that have been working in that conditioner over and over again.
“Of course,” I say, snapping back to the present, shoving my mess of feelings aside.
I get her under the spray, rinsing it out, then when she steps out of the shower, I go ahead and remove the rest of my suit.
Mia modestly looks away from my nudity and covers herself in a towel and leaves the bathroom to give me privacy and the idea that we might be strangers to each other now feels like a stain that no amount of soap and hot water can scrub away.
The owners of this cottage have excellent taste in first aid supplies.
After I get out of the shower and wrap a towel around my waist, I find a full kit under the bathroom sink—bandages, antiseptic, butterfly closures, even a few prescription painkillers that expired two years ago but will have to do.
Mia sits on the edge of the massive bed in the master bedroom, now wrapped in a bathrobe that’s too big for her, her wet hair dripping onto the collar.
She looks ruined. In some ways it’s hard to reconcile that with the way she fought her way out of that facility.
It’s not too hard for me to take down a bunch of trained guards, but she did it over and over again, through more pain than I can imagine.
“This is going to sting,” I warn her, dabbing antiseptic on the worst of the cuts.
She winces. “You don’t need to warn me.”
“Right. Sorry. Just—”
“Stop apologizing and fix me,” she says with a small smile.
So I fix her. Or I try to. I clean every wound I can find, close the ones that need closing, bandage the ones that need bandaging. Her wrists are the worst—raw and weeping where the restraints chewed through skin—and I wrap them carefully in clean gauze, trying not to think about how she got them.
Trying not to hear her screams in my imagination.
“How many times you’ve done this for me already,” she murmurs as I tape down the last bandage.
I pause, then continue, guilt pinching my heart because the last time I fixed her up was when I was keeping her captive in my penthouse. “Sorry.”
“Again, don’t apologize. It’s a good skill to have. I’m just glad I could help you practice.”