And underneath it all, something else.
Something darker.
The aggression markers are elevated, have been for days now, climbing steadily since the gala, since the rooftop, since whatever happened between them that night she lost visual surveillance. His baseline has shifted, became more volatile, more reactive. The darkness that’s always been there, the thingthey’ve worked so hard to keep contained, is pushing closer to the surface.
She knew it was there when she made him. You can’t take a man like Nate Whitaker—a soldier who’d already killed, who went through his mess of a childhood, who carried enough rage to power a small nation—and enhance him without enhancingeverything. The darkness came with the package. It was part of what made him such an effective weapon.
But it was supposed to stay buried. Controlled. Channeled into sanctioned violence, heroic acts, the acceptable face of American strength…until further notice. They were the only ones to trigger it for whatever their future goals may be, not the other way around.
She watches him for a long moment. Her creation. Her greatest achievement. The man she rebuilt from broken pieces into something new and magnificent.
And now, this British woman is taking him apart again, one kiss at a time.
Julia doesn’t believe in jealousy. It’s an unproductive emotion, a weakness she excised from herself years ago along with sentimentality and doubt. What she feels watching Vanguard think about someone else isn’t jealousy.
It’s merely a…proprietary concern, the natural response of a creator watching her creation be mishandled by someone who doesn’t understand what they’re touching.
Julia enlarges the neural feed, watching the patterns pulse and shift. The attachment cluster is still growing, but there’s something else now—a new thread of activity, dark and insistent, wrapping around the bright spots like a vine strangling a tree.
Obsession and aggression, intertwined.
She should be alarmed. Part of her is. But another part—the scientist, the architect, the woman who has dedicated her life to understanding the limits of human enhancement—is fascinated.
How far will he go? How much can he feel before the feeling breaks him? And when it does break—ifit does—what will emerge from the wreckage?
“Show me,” she murmurs to the screens, to the data, to the man who doesn’t know she’s watching. “Show me what you really are.”
The darkness in his neural map pulses once, as if in answer.
Julia settles in to watch.
CHAPTER 22
MIA
“So, let me get this straight,”Bayo says, leaning back in his chair, arms folded across his chest. “You went back to his penthouse. Spent the night. No comms.”
“I checked in with you before I went,” I remind him, keeping my voice level. “I called you from my hotel, like a responsible adult.”
He eyes briefly seek the ceiling. “And then you turned everything off and disappeared for fourteen hours.”
“I was maintaining my cover. The journalist cover. Which requires me to actuallydojournalism things, like conduct extended interviews and write shit.” I meet his eyes without flinching. “I got more intel in one night than we’ve gathered in two weeks of surveillance.”
This is technically true. Between rounds of, erm, other activities, Vanguard talked about a lot of things, including Global Dynamix. Combine that with everything Julia told and showed me during my tour, and we were slowly starting to get the picture. What the picture is forming, I still don’t know.
Anyway, I shared the relevant parts with Bayo and Kat an hour ago. The parts that matter to the mission.
The other parts…the way he held me after, the tears I couldn’t stop, the way he licked the salt from my cheeks like my sorrow was something priceless? Well, those, I kept to myself. None of their business, and all NOCs are on a need-to-know basis.
“She’s not wrong,” Kat says from her perch by the window. She’s been quiet through most of the debrief, watching me with those steely eyes that miss nothing. “The intel on the neural implant alone is worth the risk. If they really have a kill switch built into him…”
“Then he’s even more dangerous than we thought,” Bayo finishes. “Or more controlled. Depending on how you look at it.”
“Both,” I say. “He’s both.”
Silence settles over the safehouse. The afternoon light slants through the grimy windows, catching the dust motes floating in the air. Somewhere outside, a siren wails and fades, and I wonder if Vanguard is getting into his suit, responding to a call. He can’t be everywhere at once.
“You slept with him,” Kat suddenly says.
