Chapter 1: She's Useless

"She's useless. If it wasn't for the benefits I get from her, I would've dumped her ages ago."

Vanessa Sterling stopped with her key still in the lock.

She had heard a lot of things in twenty-seven years. Gunfire. Interrogations. Her father's disappointed sigh, which somehow hurt more than both.

But never this. Never from him.

The bedroom door hung open a few inches. She pushed it with two fingers.

Ethan Cole sat in the middle of the bed. Her bed. The one she had paid for, along with the sheets, the mattress and the rent on the room around it. He was shirtless and comfortable, one arm draped around a woman in a silk robe.

The robe was hers too. Probably.

The woman noticed Vanessa first. She didn't gasp. She didn't grab a blanket. She just looked annoyed.

Then she turned to Ethan. "Who is this woman? What if she had caught us?"

The room went very quiet.

Ethan looked at the doorway. All the color left his face.

"Babe," he whispered, "she did."

Vanessa stood there, and something inside her sat up. Something that two years of overtime and excuses had kept buried.

Twenty minutes ago, she had been running red lights to get home. She had been rehearsing how to explain the end of the world to this man without scaring him.

She had been worried about him being scared.

Cute.

"Vanessa." Ethan scrambled upright, hands raised. "It's not what it looks like."

"It looks like you're cheating on me in a bed I paid for."

"...Okay. It's exactly what it looks like."

Isabella rolled her eyes and reached for her phone, as if this were a slow waiter at a restaurant.

"I heard what you said," Vanessa told him. Her voice was calm. That should have been his first warning. "Say it again. I want to quote you correctly."

Ethan hesitated. Then his pride, which had never once paid a bill, took over.

"Fine. You want the truth?" He crossed his arms. "You're boring. You're always tired. You're useless, Vanessa. Without the benefits I get from you, I wouldn't have stayed a week."

Vanessa nodded slowly.

"Thank you," she said. "That was very clear."

She walked to the bed.

SLAP.

Ethan's head snapped sideways.

"That was for wasting my money."

SLAP.

"That was for humiliating me."

Isabella finally gasped and scooted backward. Smart woman.

Vanessa grabbed the front of Ethan's shirt the way she had once pinned an armed smuggler twice his size.

"And this one," she said quietly, "is for making me believe you were worth losing my family for."

SLAP.

The sound bounced off the walls. It was the most satisfying thing she had heard in two years.

Ethan pressed a hand to his cheek. "You hit me three times."

"I was going to do four," Vanessa said. "But I ran out of reasons."

Isabella, to her credit, said nothing. She stared at the ceiling like she was trying to remember whether she'd left the stove on.

"What is going on here?!"

Clara Cole filled the doorway in a floral robe, a green face mask cracking around her mouth. Her eyes landed on her son's red cheek.

"You hit my son?" Her voice climbed. "You ungrateful little... after everything I've done for you!"

"Everything you've done?" Vanessa asked.

Clara charged, hand raised, aiming for Vanessa's face.

Big mistake.

Vanessa caught her wrist in mid-air. She didn't even look at it.

"Ma'am."

Clara froze. A flake of face mask fell off her chin.

"Let me tell you what I've done," Vanessa said, in the pleasant tone of a woman reading terms and conditions. "I paid for your medication. I paid for your salon appointments, which I'm told are also medication. I paid for your son's new phone, which he is currently using to text her."

Isabella quietly slid her phone under the pillow.

"I have tolerated you for two years. Today, I am officially unemployed from the position of your personal ATM."

She pushed Clara's hand away. Not hard. Just enough that the older woman stumbled into the dresser.

"You'll regret this!" Clara shrieked. "You'll come crawling back!"

"Bold prediction," Vanessa said, "from a woman who owes me four thousand dollars."

She opened the closet. At the very back, behind a mountain of Ethan's unwashed hoodies, sat a black duffel bag.

She had never unpacked it. Not once in two years. Her father had drilled that rule into her: always keep a bag ready. She'd laughed at it. She'd almost thrown it out.

She hated that he had been right.

She slung it over her shoulder and walked out.

Nobody stopped her. Behind her, Ethan was yelling something about "a misunderstanding," and Clara was wailing about her heart. Isabella was very quietly putting on pants.

The front door slammed.

Vanessa made it to her car before her hands started shaking.

She gripped the steering wheel. Breathe in. Breathe out. She wasn't going to cry. Crying was a waste of water, and she had a feeling water would be valuable soon.

Two years.

She had walked away from everything for that man. Her father. Her name. A wedding she never wanted, to a man named Adrian Blackwood, who had looked at her across a room once like she was a line in a budget.

Victor Sterling had given her one choice: come home and marry Adrian, or leave and never come back.

She had chosen Ethan. Handsome, wounded Ethan, whom she'd dragged out of a burning warehouse on her last mission. He had looked at her like she'd hung the moon.

Turns out he'd just been looking at her wallet.

Since then, it had been Clara's medication. Clara's salon. Ethan's phone. Ethan's other phone. Vanessa had worked so many hours that she'd started to suspect there was a twenty-fifth one hiding in the day.

And through all of it, she had made excuses. Because if he was a mistake, then she had thrown away her whole family for nothing.

Her phone lit up with the voice memo she had listened to four times that afternoon.

Miriam's voice, thin and rushed. Her little sister never sounded rushed.

"Van, I'm not supposed to be calling you. The experiment at the lab didn't fail the way Dad's people are saying. It's spreading, and the government is hiding it. By my numbers, we have six months before everything falls apart. Maybe less."

A pause. A shaky breath.

"Go to Dad. Get inside the bunker. Take everyone you love. And don't trust anyone."

Everyone you love.

Vanessa had driven home to take Ethan with her. She had rehearsed the whole speech at every red light.

She looked up at the third-floor window. The light was still on. A shadow moved behind the curtain, probably Clara, probably sobbing into a very expensive tissue.

Her thumb hovered over Ethan's number.

Then she locked her phone.

If the world was ending, Ethan Cole could end with it.

She started the engine. "Right," she muttered. "Doomsday list."

Food. Medicine. Fuel. Weapons. A truly unreasonable amount of weapons. Possibly a generator.

She added three rules at the bottom. One: no more men. Two: no more people who charged her for breathing. Three: if anyone ever said "just this once," she would say no first and think later.

She pulled away from the curb, and for the first time in two years, she felt light.

Her phone buzzed on the passenger seat.

Miriam.

I know who did it. Don't tell Dad.

Vanessa stared at the screen. The red light ahead turned green.

She didn't move.