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)
Maybe.
But God, what a thing to be obsessed with.
CHAPTER 21
JULIA
Julia Van Veen stands before the wall of screens in her private monitoring station, arms crossed, watching the numbers scroll with detached focus. It shows her his heart rate, cortisol levels, dopamine spikes, the intricate dance of neurochemistry that tells her everything Vanguard won’t because the data doesn’t lie.
He spent the night with her.
With her.
Mia Baxter.
The biometrics confirmed it hours ago with an elevated heart rate sustained through the early morning hours, oxytocin flooding his system in patterns she hasn’t seen since the early days of his conditioning. Bonding hormones. Attachment chemicals. The biological machinery of a man falling for someone he shouldn’t, for someone he can’t.
Julia enlarges the overnight data, studying the peaks and valleys like a seismograph of desire. There—11:47 p.m. A sustained spike in dopamine and endorphins, followed by the unmistakable plateau of physical release. And then again in the middle of night, and then in the morning, a slower build this time, but no less intense.
Not to mention earlier in the day, when Mia went straight from her tour with Julia right into Vanguard’s damn bed.
She closes the data window angrily.
It’s not the sex that concerns her. Vanguard has had sex before—carefully managed encounters with women who signed NDAs and understood their role was temporary. Julia has always allowed him that much. A certain amount of physical release is healthy, even necessary. Keeps him stable. Keeps him happy.
And with his engineering, he can’t catch or spread any diseases. Plus, his semen is sterile now, even though she does have more than a few tubes of it that she collected and froze prior to his surgeries, as a failsafe. Either way, there’s no risk of him accidentally impregnating someone looking for the ultimate sugar daddy.
No, what concerns her is what came after the sex.
She pulls up his location data from the past twelve hours. She stayed. All night. Didn’t leave until nearly noon, and even then, his vitals showed reluctance—the stress markers of someone who didn’t want her to go.
Julia moves to her desk, pulling up the neural mapping she’s been running since the journalist arrived. The cluster of activity she noticed two weeks ago has doubled in size, spreading like a vine through his limbic system. Attachment pathways lighting up. Memory centers firing every time he thinks of her—which, based on the patterns, is nearly constant.
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 thing they’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 enhancing everything. 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—if it 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.”