“Explain what?” He picks up the notebook and waves it at me before he tosses it onto the bed. “How you seduced me for information? How every confession I gave you went straight back to, what, British intelligence?” He’s shaking now, tremors running through his massive frame, like a volcano about to erupt. “How you wereevaluatingme? Deciding whether I needed to beeliminated?”
Oh god, oh god.
“It wasn’t?—”
“I. Heard. Everything.” His other hand comes up, caging me completely. “At your little safehouse. Your friends, your fellow spies, whatever they are. I heard what you are. What you were sent to do.” His face twists. “If London decides he’s a threat, you know what you might have to do.That’s a direct quote, sweetheart. From the woman you work with.”
I can feel the blood drain from my face. He was there. Invisible, listening to everything. He heard Kat’s warning, heard me defend him, followed me from Red Hook.
“I killed a dozen men for you tonight,” he goes on, eyes boring holes into me. “Tore them apart with my bare hands. And the whole time, you were lying to me. The whole time, you were planning how to kill me if your masters gave the order.”
“That’s not?—”
“Emotional attachment forming despite countermeasures.”He throws my own words back at me, quoted from the notebook. “Countermeasures. You hadcountermeasuresin place to keep yourself from caring about me. Like I was a disease you were trying not to catch.”
“Most of those notes were from the beginning!” The words tumble out, desperate. “Before I really knew you, before I?—”
“Before what?” He leans closer, his lips nearly brushing my ear. “Before you realized I was useful? Before you figured out how to manipulate me for maximum intel extraction?”
“Before I fell for you, you bloody idiot!”
The words ring in the silence between us.
His expression falters for a second. A crack in that fiery ice that lets something raw and wounded peek through before it’s sealed back up again.
“Fucking lies,” he seethes, but there’s less certainty in his voice now. “Everything you told me was a lie.”
“Not everything.” I hold his gaze, willing him to see past the spy to the woman underneath. “The mission was real. The cover was real. But what I felt—what Ifeel—that’s real too.”
“And I’m supposed to believe that?” he says that with an acidic huff.
“I don’t know.” My voice cracks. “I don’t know what you’re supposed to believe or what you want to believe. But I’m telling you the truth.”
He stares at me for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind his eyes.
Then his hand shoots out and closes around my throat, squeezing ever so slightly. A reminder of what he can do.
Of what he has done.
Suddenly I hear Bayo in my ear. “Uh, Mia I just caught the end of that. Are you okay?”
I freeze.
Nate freezes. His nostrils flare.
He fucking heard that.
He fucking heard Bayo!
“What is that?” Vanguard growls, his laser focus going to my earrings as Bayo calls out my name again.
“Mia, do you copy?”
The realization that my earrings are comms, that people have been listening every time I wear them, dawns on Vanguard’s face. His expression turns uglier than I ever thought possible. It’s like he transforms into someone else entirely.
He reaches out and rips the earrings out, nearly taking out my lobes as he does so. I yelp in pain, my hands flying up to my ears and he takes the earrings and puts them in his mouth, swallowing them dry.
What the actual fuck?
