Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
Now I wonder if she was taking notes.
“You’re going to kill me,” I told her on Lady Liberty’s torch, after she’d taken me in her mouth.
She didn’t laugh. At the time I thought it was odd.
Now I know.
Because it wasn’t a joke to her.
Her hotel looms ahead, a glass-and-steel tower catching the city lights. I head straight to her hotel room. It’s dark right now but I figured that. There’s no way she would have made it back so fast.
The balcony door is locked for once, but locks don’t mean much when you can bend steel. I ease it open, slip inside, and let the invisibility hold as I stand in her hotel room. The space smells like her but the context of who she is has changed. She no longer smells like hotel shampoo and coconut vanilla deodorant.
She smells like violence and lies.
I move through the room, still invisible, touching things she’s touched, things I’d seen before but never gave much thought to. The clothes in the closet, the kind a journalist would wear, the laptop on the desk that is no doubt encrypted and protected by a million passwords, the notebook beside it—
The notebook.
I pick it up. Flip through pages of neat handwriting, sketches, observations. Some of it is in code, but enough is in plain English that I can piece together what I’m looking at.
Subject exhibits signs of dissociation during high-stress encounters.
Noted memory gaps—possible induced amnesia? Investigate programming protocols.
Physical capabilities exceed published parameters. Suspect additional undisclosed enhancements.
Emotional attachment forming despite countermeasures. Complication for mission extraction. Recommend—
I stop reading and drop the notebook.
My hand is shaking, tremors running through my fingers.
Emotional attachment forming despite countermeasures.
Despite countermeasures.
She tried not to care about me.
She had countermeasures in place to prevent exactly what happened between us.
And it still wasn’t enough.
Performance, the darkness whispers. All of it. Performance.
But.
But.
There’s a thread here. A loose end that doesn’t fit the narrative I’ve been constructing. If everything was fake, if every moment was calculated, then why would she need countermeasures against caring? Why would her voice sound like that when she talked about me to her handlers? That soft edge of pain that bled through despite her best efforts?
“Don’t. We don’t know that.”
She was defending me.
And she didn’t tell them about the warehouse. About what she must have sensed. About me.
Why would she do that if I was just a target to her?
She lied to you.
Yes.
Everything was fake.
Maybe.
She never cared.
I…don’t know.
The certainty I felt minutes ago is starting to fragment. The pure black rage giving way to something messier, more complicated. Grief and anger and something that might be hope, tangled together in a knot I can’t untie alone.
She was going to kill you.
Or.
Or she was going to try to save you.
I don’t know which is worse.
The sound of footsteps in the hallway reaches me—her footsteps, that particular rhythm I’ve memorized. A key card beeps. The door opens.
Light spills into the room.
And Mia walks in, battered and bleeding and more beautiful than anyone has a right to be after the night she’s had.
She doesn’t see me. She can’t. I’m still invisible, in the shadows by the desk, holding my breath.
She flips on the light and moves to the bathroom. I hear water running. The shower. A sharp hiss of pain—probably tending to her wounds. The clink of something against porcelain.
I know I should probably go back to my penthouse and pretend I don’t know what I know. Play the fool a little longer while I figure out my next move. Be strategic. Be fucking smart.
But the darkness doesn’t want to be smart.
The darkness wants answers.
I hear the water shut off. Hear the door open, see her coming toward me, looking through me.
Then she stops.
Stares at the desk, at the notebook that is no longer in the same spot because I dropped it. She inhales sharply at the realization.
I drop the invisibility.
“Hello, Mia.”
CHAPTER 33
MIA
The voice comes from nowhere and everywhere at once, and every nerve ending in my body ignites.
“Hello, Mia.”
I spin, hand already reaching for the gun I don’t have—fuck, I left it with Kat—and my eyes find him standing by the desk. Not a shadow. Not a trick of the light.
Vanguard
He’s in the suit. The full tactical armor, all black and gleaming in spots with something that could be blood, the kind of thing that makes him look less like a man and more like a weapon of mass destruction.
And on the desk, my notebook lies splayed open where he must have dropped it.
My notebook. The one with all my observations, my intel, my—
Oh god.
Oh fuck.
“Or should I say—what’s the proper term?” He steps toward me, and I step back before I can stop myself. His eyes are flat. Dead. The impossible blue I’ve memorized has gone icy cold and distant, like something vital behind them has been switched off. “Agent Baxter? Operative Baxter?” He takes another step forward, I take another backward. “What do your handlers call you when you’re reporting on the asset you’ve been fucking? Baxter’s not even your real name is it? Is Mia?”