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)
“I’ll show you what I really am.”
The door closes behind me.
The lock clicks.
And somewhere in the back of my mind, the voice whispers: Integration complete. Awaiting directives.
No, I think.
Generating directives.
CHAPTER 35
MIA
The penthouse is quiet when I wake. No footsteps in the hallway, no muffled sounds of Nate moving through his morning routine. Just the hum of the climate control and the distant pulse of the city far below, living its life without any knowledge of the two people trapped in this glass tower, orbiting each other like dying stars.
I lie still for a long moment, staring at the ceiling, noting the aches in my body. The bruises from the warehouse have faded to yellow-green. The ones from last night are fresher—fingerprints on my hips, a tender spot on my neck where his hand pressed too hard. Evidence of what we did. What I tried to do after.
Clearly you are that stupid.
I close my eyes against the memory of his face when I said that. The way something shuttered behind his eyes, like a door slamming closed. I was trying to hurt him. Trying to remind us both that I’m not the woman he thought I was—that I’m a weapon, same as him, and weapons don’t get to have feelings.
But the truth is uglier than that.
The truth is I wanted him last night. Not as a tactic, or as an escape strategy. I wanted him because some broken part of me still believes that if we touch enough, fuck enough, maybe we can find our way back to what we had in Montana. Maybe we can pretend none of this happened.
Clearly, I’m fucking stupid too.
I roll onto my side and curl my knees to my chest, making myself small.
This was the worst-case scenario.
I’ve run it in my head a thousand times since training, what happens when a NOC gets burned. The protocol is clear: deny everything, protect your network, hold out as long as possible while your team extracts or eliminates the threat. You don’t break. You certainly don’t confess. You take whatever they do to you and you survive it, because the mission is more important than any individual operative.
But the protocol never accounted for this.
It never accounted for falling in love with the target.
It never accounted for watching his face crumble when he realized everything he believed was a lie. For hearing the crack in his voice when he asked was any of it real and knowing the answer would only hurt him more.
It never accounted for him.
Nor for my weak little heart.
“I don’t know if I want to kill you or keep you.”
The words echo through me, sharp as razors. He said them like a confession, as if he was ashamed of both options equally.
And the worst part, the part that makes me want to scream into the expensive Egyptian cotton pillowcase, is that I totally understand. Because I feel the same way. This impossible push-pull between wanting to run and wanting to stay. Between knowing I should hate him for keeping me prisoner and knowing I deserve so much worse than this.
He’s been gentle, in his own way. He tends my wounds. He feeds me, even when I don’t want it. He washed my bloody clothes and folded them. It’s almost honorable.
And then he fucks me like he’s trying to break us both.
I don’t know which version of him is real anymore. Maybe they both are. Maybe that’s the problem.
He keeps asking about Marsh. About what I heard at the warehouse. About the connection between Global Dynamix and Kozlov.
And I keep giving him nothing. I want to tell him, believe me, I want him to be as informed as I am, but I know what would happen if I did at this point, when he’s in this state. If I tell him what I recorded—the trafficking, the “subjects,” the references to consciousness transfer—he’ll do something stupid. He’ll confront Julia. He’ll go after Marsh. He’ll try to tear down the whole rotten structure from the inside, and they’ll see him coming from a mile away.
And then they’ll reset him. Or kill him. Or turn him into whatever Paragon is supposed to be.
I can’t let that happen.
Not yet.
So, I stay silent. I let him think I’m protecting SOE, protecting the mission, when really I’m protecting him from himself. From the truth that might break him worse than my lies ever did.
You can tell yourself that, but you’re still a bloody fool, I think. He deserves to know what his employers are capable of. What the system is that he’s a part of.
But deserving something and surviving it are two different things.
For now, I’m keeping my mouth shut.
I sit up slowly, running my hands over my face. The clean laundry sits on the dresser where he left it in a neat stack. My bra and knickers, washed and folded by the hands of a man who could crush my skull without effort.