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 askedwas any of it realand knowing the answer would only hurt him more.
It never accounted forhim.
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 deservesomuch 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. Mybra and knickers, washed and folded by the hands of a man who could crush my skull without effort.
What are we doing?
The question has no answer. Or too many answers, all of them terrible.
I think about what could have been. In another life—one where I wasn’t an agent, where he wasn’t a superhero, where we met at a coffee shop or a bookstore like normal people—maybe we could have had something real. Something that didn’t involve lies and missions and the constant threat of violence and betrayal.
In that life, I could have told him about my poison.
The thought surfaces before I can stop it, and it brings a wave of grief so sharp it steals my breath.
He’s the only person I’ve ever touched who didn’t die.
And I’ve kissed him countless times. Deep, desperate, hungry kisses that should have stopped his heart within seconds. Sweet, soft kisses that should have made him foam at the mouth. And every time, he just kissed me back, alive and warm andthere. Making me feel like I’d never felt before.
I don’t know why it doesn’t affect him, if it’s something about his enhancements, his engineered biology, or something else entirely, or if it’s all designed by the universe to be yet another sick joke. But he survived me. He’s the first person in my entire life who has.
And I haven’t told him what it meant, that every single kiss was a miracle. I never told him that loving me is supposed to be a death sentence, and somehow he rewrote the rules just by existing.
I never got the chance to.
