“You’re running away.”
“I’m not running. I’m admiring the view.”
“So am I.”
My mouth goes dry. I take another step back and feel the glass barrier press against my spine. Nowhere left to go. He advances, slow and deliberate, until he’s standing right in front of me, close enough to smell him, feel the heat rolling off him in waves.
He could kill you, the thought flits across my brain.He could kill you before you’d even have a chance to act.
“Nate,” I say his real name, breathless and unsure.
“Mia.” He reaches up, and I flinch, but he only tucks a strand of wind-whipped hair behind my ear. His fingers graze my cheek, feather-light, and I feel it everywhere. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m cold.” It’s a half truth.
“I’m sorry, I forgot,” he says, starting to take off his jacket. “Here, let me give?—”
“No,” I say quickly. “I’m fine. Please. I like the cold.”
And the last thing I need is to see him with one less layer of clothing right now. Besides, I’m burning up from the inside.
“We should go back,” I say. “People will notice we’re gone. Julia?—”
“I don’t care about Julia.”
“The cameras?—”
“I don’t care about the cameras.” He braces one hand on the barrier beside my head, caging me in, not touching, but close enough. “I don’t care about any of it. Not tonight.”
“What do you care about, then?”
The question slips out before I can stop it, and I watch something dark pass across his face, something hungry and desperate and almost frightening in its intensity.
“You know the answer, darlin’.”
Fuck.
I duck under his arm, escaping, and put several feet between us. My legs are still unsteady, the high heels and the vertigomixing with a million other feelings, like arousal and fear and a desperate, aching loneliness I tried so hard to bury.
He wants me.
He actually wantsme.
And I want him too, God help me. I want him so badly, it hurts deep inside, like I’m being stabbed with a hundred knives.
But I can’t have him. Can’t have anyone. That’s the curse I was born with, the poison my mother engineered into my blood before I even existed.
One kiss, and he dies.
One moment of weakness, and I become a murderer yet again. And I know that is the point of all this, that if I ever find out Vanguard is more than he presents himself as, that he’s a weapon that could threaten humankind, that I am supposed to take him out, whether that be by a kiss or by any other means necessary.
It only makes all of this so much harder.
I walk to the opposite corner of the rooftop, wrapping my arms around myself against the wind. The city blurs through the poison tears I refuse to let fall. Behind me, I hear his footsteps again. Following. Always following.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says quietly.
No, but I might hurt you.
