The whole time, my mind is somewhere else. On a rooftop. On a woman in a red dress. On the taste of her still lingering on my tongue, the sounds she made when she came apart undermy mouth, the way she looked at me when she admitted she’d never?—
Focus.
I land back on 30 Rock with my heart hammering and my cock already stirring again at the memory of her. The rooftop is empty. Mia—and my jacket—are gone.
I ring up Danny from my watch.
Danny’s voice crackles. “Boss? You good?”
“Where is she?”
“Who?”
“Mia.” I scan the rooftop like she might be hiding behind an air conditioning unit. “I told her to stay here. I also told you to get her.”
“I brought the car like you asked, but she wasn’t there when I arrived. Must’ve found her own way down.” A pause. “Everything okay?”
No. Nothing is okay. I left her here—left her wet and wanting and wrapped in my jacket—and she justleft. Without a word. Without waiting.
The rational part of my brain knows she probably got cold, got tired of waiting and left through the door. The irrational part—the dark part that’s been clawing at the edges of my consciousness all evening—wants to tear the city apart until I find her.
“I’m going to check her hotel,” I tell Danny. “Go home. I’ll be fine.”
“You sure? It’s late?—”
I cut the comm link and launch myself into the sky.
The flight to Midtown takes less than a minute. I know which hotel she’s staying at and I know which floor, because I may have asked Danny to do some digging after our first interview. At the time, I told myself it was security protocol. Due diligence. Thekind of thing any reasonable person would do when a foreign journalist starts asking questions about their employer.
I was lying to myself even then.
You’re a stalker in the making, I chide myself.
I go invisible as I approach the building, which is for the best, since my tuxedo shirt burned off somewhere around the eighth floor and showing up shirtless outside a woman’s hotel window is a look even I can’t pull off.
The invisibility is one of my stranger abilities, and one of my favorites. It’s not true invisibility, not like in the comics. It’s active camouflage, a manipulation of the electromagnetic spectrum that bends light waves around my body instead of letting them bounce off. I activate it the same way I activate flight: by thinking about it hard, until something clicks in my brain like a switch being flipped. Julia once explained that they wired the control directly into my motor cortex during one of the procedures—the same part of the brain that handles voluntary movement. So, going invisible is as natural as raising my arm or taking a step. I justdecideto disappear, and I do.
The sensation is hard to describe. It starts with a tingling across my skin, like static electricity, as the field activates and expands outward about an inch from my body—just far enough to usually encompass whatever I’m wearing. It’s not my skin doing the work, but something deeper, some kind of localized spacetime distortion that redirects photons around me like water flowing around a stone. For about two hours—give or take, depending on what else I’m doing—I’m a ghost. Cameras can’t see me. Only heat sensors can. I leave no shadow, cast no reflection. The only sign I exist is a faint shimmer in the air if someone knows exactly where to look, a slight distortion, like heat rising off summer pavement. And of course, if someone threw a bag of flour on me or something.
It’s a useful trick, and it lets me do things that would otherwise cause international incidents—like hovering outside hotel windows at midnight, looking for a woman I can’t stop thinking about.
Creepy, the rational part of my brain observes.This is creepy behavior.
I don’t care. I think I’ve earned my right to be a creep.
I circle her floor slowly, peering through each window in turn. Most of them have their curtains closed; most people are asleep, but there are some outliers. A businessman watching TV. An elderly couple reading in bed. A family with two kids sprawled across a pullout couch. Room after room after room, and none of them contain Mia.
She’s probably asleep, curtains closed, end of story.
But what if she’s not? If she’s not here, and she’s not at 30 Rock, then she’s somewhere in this city of eight million people, and I have no idea where.
The darkness pulses at the edges of my vision.
Find her. Take her. Keep her.
I shake my head, trying to clear it.
I force myself to turn away from her empty window and fly home.
