Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
“I’ll warm you up when I get back,” he says, and then he’s gone, launching himself into the sky, a dark shape against the glittering city.
I stand alone on the rooftop, his jacket wrapped around me, the wind whipping my hair, the taste of him still on my lips.
What the hell just happened?
I kissed someone, and they didn’t die.
The wind cuts through his jacket, but I don’t feel it. I’m standing very still, the way you do when something lands on you that might be a butterfly or might be a bomb, and you don’t know which one it is.
I came three times from another person’s touch. I was about to lose my virginity to my surveillance target on a rooftop in Manhattan.
And now, I’m standing here in a ruined dress, my mission completely and utterly compromised.
This is fine, I tell myself. It’s just physical. I’m allowed to have fun and get off. I’m just using him to get closer. It doesn’t mean anything.
But even as I think it, I know it’s becoming a lie.
Somewhere out there, Vanguard is saving lives. Being a hero. Doing the job I’m supposed to be investigating him for.
I pull his jacket tighter around my shoulders and wait.
CHAPTER 16
VANGUARD
The fire is a beast, a residential building in the Bronx, twelve stories high. The blaze started on the sixth floor and ripped upward through ancient ventilation shafts that should have been replaced decades ago. By the time I arrive, the top four floors are fully engulfed, and people are hanging out of windows, crying for help.
I pull a family of four from the eleventh floor—mother, father, two kids under ten, and a golden retriever who licks my face the whole way down. The father keeps thanking me, over and over, tears cutting tracks through the soot on his face, and the little girl clutches my arm like I’m the only solid thing in a world that’s turned to smoke and ash.
“It’s okay,” I tell her as I set them down on the street, far from the flames. “You’re safe now. You’re all safe.”
The dog licks my face again.
I did my job.
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 under my 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 just left. 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. The kind 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 just decide to disappear, and I do.