She stares at me for a moment. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“And I don’t give a fuck what you think. You will tell me. You can even start now, with Marsh,” I say, crossing my arms. “I heard his name at your safehouse. Conrad Marsh, the CEO of Global Dynamix,myemployer. Why was he meeting with Russian mobsters in a warehouse in Red Hook?”
She gives me nothing. Not a flicker.
“What was he doing there, Mia? What’s the connection between this Kozlov and Global Dynamix?”
Silence. Her expression doesn’t change. She could be carved from stone.
“Fine.” I push off the wall, frustration boiling over. “Keep your secrets. But whatever you’re protecting, whatever you think is more important than telling me the truth, truth that I deserve to know—I hope it’s worth it.”
“It’s need to know,” she finally says. “That’s how we operate.”
“Howyouoperate!” My voice raises. “Not me! I’m not a fucking spy. I’m your…your…”
I turn to look at her, and I let her see what’s in my eyes. The desperation. The darkness. The thing that’s been growing inside me, feeding on doubt and fear and the voice that won’t stop whispering. “You’re going to tell me everything. One way or another. Because I’m running out of time. And I’m running out of patience and ideas and if you don’t start talking…” I trail off.
“What?” She sits up straighter, her eyes blazing with challenge. “What will you do?”
I think about the rooftop. About the wind and the drop and the darkness waiting at the bottom.
“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 isquiet 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 mestill 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.
