His response is immediate, concerned. “You sure, boss? That’s pretty far outside your usual?—”
“I’m sure. I’m going alone. Call if I need you.”
“Sure thing.”
I slide on my suit then head out onto the balcony. With a gentle push, gravity manipulated, I’m in the air, the city falling away beneath me.
I go invisible before I clear Midtown.
The warehouse is a war zone.
I hover above it, watching through walls that might as well be glass. The thermal signatures tell the story—clustered bodies, some still warm, others cooling, and there’s movement in the central space, figures running, fighting, dying.
And in the middle of it all, a single heat signature moving with a speed and precision that is much smaller than the rest.
Interesting.
A busted skylight gives me my entry point. I slip through the gap and land silently on a rotted support beam above the carnage, invisible, watching. The scene below is chaos—men shouting in Russian, gunfire echoing off metal walls, the iron stink of blood thick enough to taste.
And there, in the center of it, is?—
My brain stutters.
Mia?
She’s wearing all black and carrying a fucking gun. And she’s fighting off two men at once with a brutal efficiency that rivals my own combat training.
What the fuck?
I watch her drive an elbow into one man’s throat, watch him stagger, watch her pull a knife from somewhere and bury it in his chest. No hesitation. No mercy. Just clean, professional-styleviolence that ends with his blood seeping out on the concrete while she’s already moving to the next threat.
This is not Mia.
Thiscan’tbe.
This can’t be the woman who laughs at the Muppets and moans over patty melts and looks at me like I’m someone, not something. This is not the journalist who asks the hard questions and takes careful notes and blushes when I catch her staring.
This is someone else entirely.
A killer.
She’s a trained fucking killer.
Like me.
She shoots a man in the thigh, then kneecap. He goes down screaming, a massive guy with a shaved head who looks vaguely familiar and is clearly the one in charge. Then she’s running, returning fire over her shoulder, moving through the warehouse like she’s done this a thousand times before.
Because she has.
She’s a fucking spy.
The realization lands in my chest like a fucking hand grenade. Every dinner, every interview, every soft smile and lingering touch? Oh, that wasperformance.Every confession she drew out of me, every vulnerability I showed her?Intelligence gathering.Every time she looked at me like I mattered, like I was more than what they made me?—
Lies. All of it. All of it fucking lies!
Below me, Mia is losing ground. Too many of them, not enough of her. I watch her take down two more—a front kick, a palm strike, a knee to the groin followed by a skull against a crate—but they keep coming. They grab her. Force her to her knees. Press a gun to the back of her head.
The bald man limps toward her, pipe in hand, blood soaking his trouser leg. He’s saying something I can’t quite hear, gloating, savoring the moment.
