Page 172 of Vanguard


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I hit replay anyway.

She let him in.

The thought lodges in my chest like shrapnel. I can feel my heartbeat in my temples, in my throat, behind my eyes. My hands won’t stop moving—opening and closing, opening andclosing—and there’s a tremor in my left one that wasn’t there an hour ago.

While you were sitting here like a goddamn idiot, she let another man into her room.

I shove away from the window and stare at the dark clouds gathering past the skyscrapers, wondering how one woman could have undone everything I’ve tried so hard to become.

A woman who’s been lying to me from the start.

A woman I told we could start over.

Forty-five minutes.

What the fuck takes forty-five minutes?

You know what takes forty-five minutes.

The voice in my head isn’t quite mine anymore. Sometimes it sounds like static. Sometimes it sounds like orders. Right now it sounds like the worst version of myself, the one I keep locked in a box wrapped in police caution tape.

She’s yours. He touched what’s yours.

“She’s not mine,” I say out loud. The penthouse swallows the words. “She was never mine.”

Then why does it feel like someone’s ripping your guts out?

I don’t have an answer for that.

What I have is a balcony door and a city between me and her hotel room.

The flight takes four minutes. I spend every second of it trying to talk myself out of what I’m about to do.

Her curtains are drawn but I can see the lights are on. I land on the balcony harder than I mean to, hard enough that the glass rattles in its frame, hard enough that she’ll know I’m here before I even touch the door. The best warning I can give.

The lock gives under my hand with a grinding shriek of metal, my strength overpowering my intention. I step inside and the smell of her hits me first, the scent that’s made a nest in my bones.

She spins from where she’s standing by the bed, still in that white robe, her hair loose around her shoulders in soft waves. Her eyes are already wide, her body having shifted into something defensive, feet apart, weight balanced. Ready to run or fight. I know she can do the latter.

“Who is he?”

The words come out steadier than I feel and I chalk that up to my own training. Decades of learning to keep my voice level while everything inside me screams.

“Who is who?” She doesn’t move, doesn’t blink.

I stride over to her, fists clenched, but she holds her ground, chin up, those dark eyes tracking my every movement. “The man who was here tonight. Dark hair. Stayed for almost an hour.” I stop close enough to see her pupils contract. “Who. Is. He?”

“You’re spying on me?” she asks, her posture stiffening.

“Don’t make me ask you again,” I say, my voice quieter now.

“Or what? You going to throw me off a different roof this time?”

I only stare at her. She eyes my fists, then takes in the expression on my face. Something in her concedes.

“His name is Cal,” she says. “He’s SOE. He’s a colleague.”

“A colleague,” I sneer. I know how ugly I must sound. “That’s what we’re calling it?”