For one impossible second, I think I’ve reached him. I think I see Nate somewhere behind those empty eyes.
Then he moves.
It happens too fast to track. One moment he’s standing still, the next he’s a blur of motion, his hand closing around Cal’s wrist, breaking his bones in half with a sickeningsnapbefore he even gets a chance to fire the gun, which falls to the carpet.
Cal screams in agony, but even then he doesn’t falter, doesn’t stop fighting back. He’s good, one of the best I’ve ever worked with, and he almost manages it. Almost gets his elbow into Nate’s throat, almost creates enough space to?—
Nate’s other hand comes up.
It closes around the top of Cal’s head.
Andtwists.
The sound of his death imprints itself on me. It’s wet and dense and final, a muffled crunch that I feel in my own spine, in my own neck, in every part of me that understands exactly what just happened.
Cal’s body drops.
He falls like a puppet with cut strings, boneless and heavy, and I can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t do anything except stand there with my hand pressed over my mouth while my brain tries to catch up with what my eyes just saw.
Cal.
His name echoes through me but no sound comes out.
No, not Cal.
Cal can’t be dead.
I’ve seen death before. I’ve caused death before, more times than I can count. But this…this is different. This is Cal, who ran along the Thames with me at five in the morning when we both couldn’t sleep between missions, Cal, who held my hair back when I got food poisoning in Marrakech. Cal, who told me he loved me and then stayed anyway when I couldn’t say it back.
Cal, who came back tonight with a pair of earrings because he wanted to make sure I could call for help.
And now he’s lying on the floor of my hotel room with his head at an angle that makes my stomach heave, his eyes empty, and Nate is standing over him with trembling hands, hands that killed my friend, staring down at the body like he doesn’t understand how it got there.
“What did I do?”
His voice sounds different. Smaller. The smile is gone and what’s left is a broken man waking up from a nightmare to find the nightmare was real.
But I have no pity for him and I can’t answer him. My throat has closed up, my tongue thick and useless, every word I’ve ever known scattered like leaves in a storm.
“Mia.” He looks up at me and his eyes are wet. “What did I—I didn’t mean to—she made me…Julia. She sent me the footage. She wanted me to come here. She wanted me to find him and she—” He looks at his hands, at Cal, his whole body shudders. “She made me do this. The voice, it just—it took over and I couldn’t stop it, I couldn’t?—”
Something hot and sharp is building in my chest. Grief and rage tangling together, climbing up my throat, pressing against the backs of my eyes.
“No,” I manage to say.
The word stops him cold.
“I don’t think she made you do anything.” My voice is steadier now, harder, the shock crystallizing into something I can use. “I think this is what you are. I think this is what you’ve always been, underneath everything else. A weapon. A killer.” I gesture at Cal’s body—hisbody—at the ruin of my friend crumpled on the carpet. “This is what happens when they point you at a target and pull the trigger.”
He blinks in horror. “That’s not—I would never?—”
“But you just did!”
The words hang between us for a moment and he’s fighting hard not to take it in, not to believe it.
There is some part of me that wants to take it back. A small part. A part of me knows I’m being cruel, that whatever happened wasn’t entirely his fault, that Julia manipulated this from the start. But Cal is dead,he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, and I can still hear the sound of his neck breaking and I can’t, Ican’tbe gentle right now.
I don’t have it in me anymore.
