He stays for less than an hour.
When he leaves, his body language has changed. Shoulders tighter. Jaw set. The posture of a man who’s learned something he didn’t want to know.
She told him. About Vanguard. About whatever’s happened between them. About the mess she’s made of her mission, because she must know how badly she fucked up.
And now he’s here. A new variable. A rival. A threat that Vanguard’s programming will identify and categorize automatically.
Julia allows herself a small smile.
This could be exactly what she needs.
She gets to work and composes the message carefully.
Not a summons, no that would be too obvious. Not a direct order—that might trigger resistance. Just information, delivered in exactly the right way, at exactly the right moment, to produce exactly the right response.
Mia Baxter had a visitor. A man. British. He arrived this afternoon and went directly to her hotel room. He stayed for forty-five minutes.
She attaches the surveillance footage. The hallway camera. Cal’s face, clearly visible. The time stamp showing his arrival and departure.
Then she adds the last piece—the one that will burrow into Vanguard’s brain and fester there, activating pathways she laid down years ago.
I thought you should know.
She sends the message and leans back in her chair, watching the screen.
It takes less than thirty seconds.
His vitals spike immediately. Heart-rate jumping, cortisol flooding his system, the neural patterns shifting into something darker and more dangerous. The possessive clusters light up, while the aggression parameters climb toward the red zone.
Julia watches him for a long moment, her creation, her masterpiece, responding exactly as designed.
Then she pulls up Mia Baxter’s file one last time.
Such a pretty girl. Such a waste.
But weapons aren’t meant to have love stories. Julia knows this better than anyone. She’s spent her entire career building weapons, refining them, perfecting them. And the first rule of weapon-making is simple: You don’t let them choose their own targets because then they’ll never fire.
She closes the file and dims the screens, leaving only Vanguard’s tracking dot pulsing in the darkness. His location is already changing—moving toward the journalist’s hotel.
Going to see for himself.
Julia smiles.
One way or another, one body or another or both, this ends soon.
CHAPTER 39
VANGUARD
Julia’s messagearrived twelve minutes ago and in that space I’ve watched the surveillance footage nine times.
A man with dark hair, lean build, moving with the easy confidence of a trained spy enters the frame. He walks up to Mia’s hotel door. Knocks twice. She opens it in a only a bathrobe, and she lets him in.
The door closes.
Forty-five minutes later, he leaves.
The rational part of my brain—the part that sounds increasingly far away these days—knows I’m spiraling. Knows that watching the footage a tenth time won’t change what I’m seeing. Knows that Julia sent this to me for a reason, and that reason probably isn’t my wellbeing, that this video is a Trojan horse.
