The movement brought her face close to mine. Close enough to see a small scar at the edge of her left eyebrow. Close enough to spot the faint freckles that splattered across her skin, barely visible. Close enough that her scent—soap and sweat and something uniquely her—flooded my senses. Close enough to kill her in seven different ways without expending significant effort. Close enough to taste her.
“Here,” she offered, her voice gentle in a way no one spoke to me in. “Small sips.”
As I drank, her fingers brushed against my forehead, checking for fever. The casual intimacy of the gesture froze me in place. No one touched me like this. People feared me, fled from me, died beneath my hands. They didn’t offer comfort.
“I’m so sorry about the triggers,” she said, her eyes holding genuine remorse. “I shouldn’t have pushed so hard. It was cruel, even if I needed you to believe me.”
Her fingers traced lightly over my temple where the pain had been worst, and I found myself leaning incrementally into her touch. It was an involuntary response that alarmed me and went against everything in me.
But the contact anchored me to something beyond mission parameters. Something human.
“Why?” I managed, my voice rougher than intended, scraping against my throat like sandpaper.
Her brow furrowed. “Why what?”
“Why take care of me like this?” I gestured vaguely at the evidence of her care—the cloth, the water, her obvious vigilance during my unconsciousness. “You know what I am. What I’ve done. I was sent to kill you.”
The words hung between us, brutal in their simplicity. I didn’t understand this woman, this target who had now become something I couldn’t categorize in my operational parameters. No one had ever shown me this kind of attention without an agenda—without wanting something from the weapon they’d maintained.
Her expression shifted, something vulnerable breaking through her careful composure. Her throat worked as she swallowed.
“Because whatever they turned you into, that’s not who you are. And because…” she faltered, her gaze dropping momentarily to my mouth before returning to my eyes. “Because no one deserves what they did to you.”
The statement registered as tactically unsound. Naïve. People deserved whatever happened to them in this world. I’d delivered that deserved fate many times.
Hadn’t I?
But if Maeve was right—if I wastakenrather thanrecruited—then nothing was deserved. Nothing was chosen. Every kill was…
The thought fractured before completion, sending fresh pain lancing behind my eyes.
Her hand still rested against my face. My own hand rose, seemingly of its own accord, to cover hers. Her breath caught.
For a suspended moment, neither of us moved. The space between us was charged with possibility. Her lips parted slightly, and I found my gaze fixed on them, wondering with detached curiosity what they would feel like against my own.
Something primal rose through my conditioning—an instinct to claim, to take, to taste. My hand shifted to the nape of her neck, feeling the softness of her hair against my fingers, the warmth of her skin. Her pulse jumped beneath my touch.
She didn’t pull away, though fear flickered across her features. Not fear of pain, but something deeper. Fear of wanting this despite knowing what I was. The contradictionfascinated me: her body relaxed into my touch even as her mind fought it.
I knew I should stop. This proximity served no tactical purpose. But the part of me that was waking up—the part that might have existed before Reaper—didn’t want to stop.
The moment stretched, taut with tension—then broke as Maeve gently withdrew her hand, clearing her throat.
“You should rest more,” she said, her voice slightly unsteady. “It seems that the triggers take an awful physical toll.”
A soft chime interrupted the moment between us. Maeve pulled her phone from her pocket, her expression changing as she read the screen. The sudden shift jarred me—her face transformed from vulnerable to vigilant in the space between heartbeats. Another mask falling into place.
“It’s from my informant,” she said, turning the display toward me.
TOO DANGEROUS TO MEET. COME TO THE DEN. I’LL SEND COORDINATES. PASSWORD: WALLFLOWER.
“What’s ‘the den’?” I asked.
“The place where he said he has been working here in São Paulo. A secure location. My informant maintains a sort of… intelligence hub. Off-grid. That’s what he told me.”
And she so blindly believed everything he had told her? That went against everything I had ever learned within my protocol. I weighed the options with cold calculation. The probability of a trap was high. The informant could be tryingto trick Maeve. But if he was, he could have taken her down a long time ago.
The nightmare replayed behind my eyes. The sterile room. The electrical currents tearing through my skull. Brock watching as technicians dismantled whoever I had been.
