It’s different this time. Not the blind rage from the warehouse, nor the combat high of violence without consequence. This is something colder and deeper, a vast black nothing that swallows everything else—the grief, the shame, the pathetic fuckinghopeI’ve been carrying around like a wounded animal.
She never cared about you.
She used you.
I think about Montana. The barn. Her face in the golden light, telling me I was still human.
Lies.
I think about the diner, that first night, the way she looked at me like I was worth looking at.
Performance.
I think about the rooftop. The first kiss. The moment I thought maybe, maybe, there was someone in this world who could see past what they made me into.
A fucking mission.
Absently I start to drift away in the air, while below me, in the safe house, Mia is talking about extraction protocols. About next steps. About what to do with the intelligence she gathered while I was busy falling in love with her like some goddamn fool.
“I see you,”she had said.“The real you. And I’m not going anywhere.”
The laugh that escapes me is not a human sound. It’s something else entirely. Something that’s been sleeping inside me for a long time, waiting for exactly this moment, when the last thread holding Nate Whitaker together finally snaps.
She was going to kill you.
The thought spikes into my brain like a splinter of ice.
Not was. Is. She’s still going to kill you if her handlers give the order. Every time she touched you, she was thinking about how to do it. Every time she kissed you, she was cataloging vulnerabilities. Every time she looked at you with those big dark eyes and made you feel like something other than a weapon?—
She was lying.
She was always lying.
And you believed her because you wanted so badly for something to be real.
I think about my hand around her throat. The way she fought back, trained and vicious. I thoughtIwas the monster.
It turns out we both are.
I start flying but I don’t know where. The city sprawls beneath me, lights winking in the darkness like stars that have fallen to earth. Somewhere down there, Mia is planning her next move while keeping secrets from her own team about what really happened in that warehouse.
She suspects it was me. I suppose it was pretty obvious.
And yet she didn’t tell them.
Why?
The question flickers at the edge of my rage, an ember that refuses to be stamped out. If I’m just a target, just an asset to be assessed and potentially eliminated, why would she protect me? Why lie to her fellow agents about what she saw?
I shove the thought down. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except the betrayal burning a hole through my chest.
Integration complete,whispers a voice that might be mine.Awaiting directives.
No.
Not awaiting directives.
Not this time.
