I thought that was pretty obvious. “So?”
“And?”
“And what? It’s done. It happened. Hooray, Mia is no longer a virgin. Look, I’m not going to apologize for using every tool at my disposal to complete this mission.”
“Tool.” Kat’s mouth twists while Bayo snickers. “Is that what we’re calling it these days?”
I feel picked on, and I’m not finding the humor in it.
“What do you want me to say, Kat?” I stand, suddenly restless, and move to the window, glancing out at the city, the rain from earlier turning to a drizzle. “That it was a mistake? Fine. It was a mistake. That I should have kept my distance? Maybe. That I’m compromised?” I turn to face her. “I’m not. AndI’m also closer to the truth than anyone’s ever been. So you tell me—what’s the play here?”
Kat studies me for a long moment, calculating and weighing options.
“The play,” she says slowly, “is that you keep your head on straight and remember what you’re doing here. You’re not his girlfriend. You’re not his lover. You’re an operative gathering intelligence on a potential threat to national security.” She pauses. “Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“Can you look him in the eye and lie to him? Use what he’s told you against him? Walk away when the mission’s done and never look back?”
The questions land like arrows, each one finding a soft spot I didn’t know I had.
I open my mouth to answer, and nothing comes out.
For a split second, I’m back in his bed. The grey morning light through the penthouse windows. His hand tracing idle patterns on my hip while I pretended to sleep because I didn’t know how to be awake with someone, didn’t know what my face was supposed to do when I wasn’t performing.
He’d kissed my shoulder. Soft. Almost absent. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.
And I’d felt something shift inside me. Not pain, exactly, but the ache of a door opening after being sealed shut for years. The terror of light reaching places that had learned to survive in the dark.
“Yes,” I say, and my voice doesn’t waver, because I mean it.
I just wish meaning it didn’t feel like shit.
Kat holds my gaze for another beat. Then, she nods, seeing the truth. That despite getting my back blown out for the last twenty-four hours by a living god, I am still a ruthless spy underneath it all. I am still an SOE agent, reporting for duty.
Doesn’t mean I like it, though.
“Then we continue as planned. But Mia…” She steps closer, lowering her voice. “Whatever you’re feeling, whatever you think is happening between you and this man that goes beyond sex—bury it. Bury it fucking deep. Because when this is over, one of two things will happen: either he’s innocent, and you’ll have to live with what you did to him, or he’s guilty, and someone will have to put him down. And that someone should be you.” Her eyes bore into mine. “Either way, feelings will only make it harder.”
I open my mouth to tell her she’s wrong. I want to say that what I feel for Vanguard—what I’m starting to feel, what I can’t seem to stop feeling—isn’t a weakness. That maybe, just maybe, it’s the most human I’ve felt in years.
Maybe…ever?
But I don’t. Because she’s not wrong, and we both know it.
“Copy that,” I say instead.
“Good.” She steps back, her voice returning to normal volume. “Now, go write something journalistic. Your cover won’t maintain itself.”
I leave the safehouse twenty minutes later, my laptop bag over my shoulder, the light drizzle coating my shoulders as I walk. With Halloween a week away, decorations have taken over the city, and the air is filled with the sweet smell of caramel corn.
I think about what it must have been like to live here during the Dark Decade. Other than my brief visit early on, I’d watched the news that came from foreign reporters (the only ones who could provide the truth), and I read the newsletters from those in the underground. I know that, despite the economy collapsing and the dollar failing, AI and robots taking over jobs, the segregation and the terror on the streets, not to mention the civil war that almost broke out on US soil, that things sometimes seemed…normal. That Halloween was still a thing. So was Christmas. That people still bought houses and went to school and had weddings. They managed to keep living while being ruled by autocrats and oligarchs, to have lives even when they didn’t know if they’d be targeted by the government and lose their rights for looking at an official the wrong way at a checkpoint. Families who’d lived here for generations, suddenly questioned. Immigrants who’d built entire lives in this country, vanished into detention centers. I saw the footage that made it out that chilled me to the core. The raids. The children screaming for parents who weren’t coming back. And when it was over, when the regime finally collapsed under its own rot, America’s answer was to build a superhero. Wrap the whole bloody mess in a flag and call it hope. I mean, I get it. Every nation needs something to believe in after trauma like that. But I’ve seen too many countries try to heal by looking forward instead of backward, refusing to learn from history.
Which is why I need to keep my mission at the forefront of my brain. Because what Julia said about failing forward? I feel like that was some sort of admission. A confession, even. Global Dynamix rewrote the path forward by burning away what didn’t work before. But what if they also burned away what did work? What if the new future is somehow worse because it’s all under the guise of being better?
I think about Vanguard and how fitting he is as a symbol, because if he really can be used as a weapon, then they’re hiding it in the most beautiful, reassuring package there is.
If Vanguard is a weapon, everything they’ve rebuilt will fall apart, I think to myself.
