“Mia—” he starts.
“Save it,” I tell him. “There’s nothing else we can really say to each other right now.”
So we stand there in the dark, breathing, bleeding from wounds neither of us can see.
Nothing fixed. Nothing forgiven.
Just alive, somehow.
For now.
CHAPTER 36
MIA
Vanguard takesme back down the elevator and to his penthouse and sits me down on the couch, wrapping a large, plush blanket around me. The air in here is blissfully warm but I’m not sure when I’ll stop feeling the cold from outside, the way it’s settled into the marrow of my bones. Then he steps back, putting distance between us.
It kinda feels like I had a near death experience. No, bugger that, it feels like Ididdie and somehow he brought me back to life and now I’m inside his penthouse and it’s like learning to be a human all over again.
He nearly killed me.
He caught me.
And now we’re here.
Is this where I’m supposed to start over?
“Drink?” he asks.
I nod, my throat dry as shit, and he moves to the wet bar. He pours two glasses of whiskey, a striking image since he’s still in his superhero suit, and brings one to me.
Our fingers brush when I take it.
I flinch.
He notices and looks crestfallen for a moment before he sits in the armchair across from me and stares at the amber liquid in his glass.
The silence weighs a ton. I can feel it pressing against my chest, filling my lungs, making it hard to breathe. My throat keeps wanting to close up. My hands won’t stop trembling, no matter how tightly I grip the glass.
I’ve been trained for interrogation, for torture. I’ve sat in cells in three different countries and given nothing—not a name, not a detail, not a flicker of recognition when they mentioned things they shouldn’t know.
But I’ve never been trained for this.
For him.
For the aftermath of a man who threw me off a building and then fucked me against the side of one. For the way he’s looking at me now—not with anger, not with desire, just with this terrible, exhausted patience. Like he’s waiting for something he’s not sure will come.
I think my goose is cooked.
“Your name,” he says finally. “I want to know your real name. I think you owe me that much.”
My jaw tightens. The muscle memory of silence is strong—names are weapons and truth is a liability.
But he dropped me.
And he caught me.
And maybe that changes things.
