The image changes before I can process it fully. Before I can believe it. I laugh out loud like this is some kind of joke, my eyes looking around for the hidden cameras, but as I meet the appalled gazes of those around me, the bottom drops out from under me. All I can do is look back at the screen in front of me and wait for the image to appear again in the series of photographs.

I’m staggered. Confused. Broken. Disbelieving.

I struggle to draw in a breath, fight incoherency as I try to process thoughts, wince as the pain in my chest constricts so tightly, I feel as if someone is pulling my heart out and not letting go of it all at the same time.

There’s no way she’s dead. Can’t be.

My thoughts run rampant as I slide to the edge of my seat, willing the picture to appear again. And when it does, I blink my eyes rapidly and wish the image away.

Because it’s Beaux. There’s no denying it. The picture may be older and of Beaux dressed in a business suit, but it’s her, the woman I love, raven hair, green eyes. I hear her laugh, see her smile, smell her perfume, and miss the sound of her voice.

The projector turns off, the screen goes black, and yet I still stare.

This can’t be happening. Fractured thoughts break free and crash around in my head, but the one that sticks the most is that I’m too late. Through the fog of emotion, that’s the only thing I can process right off the bat. I never even had the chance to fight for her again, win her back, tell her I love her… Once again I’m too late.

The vise grip of disbelief squeezes tighter as the speaker drones on, and I hear nothing, see nothing, except for the look on Beaux’s face the last time I saw her. Conflicted, compliant, flushed, beautiful, and still mine despite being married to another man.

Shock numbs me at first. Doesn’t allow me to accept the truth of what I just heard, that Beaux’s gone. That I’ve lost yet another woman to this violent lifestyle I’ve chosen to live.

And even though it feels like a lifetime, I’m sure only seconds pass as the second what-the-fuck moment hits me like a wrecking ball. Only tiny slices of reality are able to slip through at a time, but all of a sudden I realize that I didn’t lose her because she was a photographer in the wrong place at the wrong time. No. I lost her because she was with the CIA, an intelligence officer, Special Agent BJ Croslyn.

Disbelief wars with grief, and a whole shitload of confusion in a matter of seconds as I realize Beaux was a spy. A fucking spy. At first I reject the idea despite where I’m sitting and what I’m hearing in the briefing, because there’s not a chance in hell that she was an agent. She was small and naive and didn’t even know how to shoot a gun for Christ’s sake.

But as soon as that thought hits me, a dozen others flicker and fade in my mind’s eye and neutralize the bitter taste of rejection on my tongue: her fluent Dari, the pictures she’d take at night when she’d sneak out time-stamped for proof, secret phone calls in the hallway, keeping her past a secret, so many things that appeared unrelated at the time. But now this common denominator blinking like a huge arrow overhead makes the truth seem so obvious.

But more than anything is the feeling that from day one I was being played somehow, some way. That notion she wiped away with her defiant nature and addictive body. The one she made me forget all about with words like I love you and I can’t. She used me, used false emotions in a real world.

Except my emotions weren’t fake. They were real. Still are real.

She’s gone.

This can’t be real.

But they are saying it’s real. The woman at the front of the room is telling me she pretended she couldn’t shoot a gun when I knew her. That she was faking it and used it as a perfect way to play someone like me and make sure that I believed she was this naive little thing in this big bad far-off land.

I’m completely disengaged during the rest of the briefing, overwhelmed with memories that won’t release me. With feelings on my end that were one hundred percent genuine that now make me feel so ridiculous and yet hurt nonetheless. She wasn’t some little inexperienced freelancer. She was a spy who came overseas, used me for cover, and then when she was done, came back home to her husband and everyday life until it was time for her to leave again on another mission.

An agent who was playing me at every turn. And I had no idea.

I thought I knew her. Thought the love I felt in her touch and saw in her eyes was real. How did I misread every single fucking moment when they were so damn perfect, so sincere, just so much more than I’ve ever allowed myself to feel before?

Dropping my head in my hands, I try to comprehend how I was willing to go back on every single principle I’ve ever held. How was it just hours ago I was more certain than anything I’d ever felt in my life that she was the one? When I got back from this assignment, I was planning to show her I was willing to give up my career for her, take a chance at getting arrested considering the restraining order, and fight like hell to prove that even though she was married, I was the right one for her. Not John. Not anyone else. Just me.

Because it was that fucking real.

But obviously I don’t know shit, least of all what real love is, because every single thing was a lie. A big fat lie.

Why couldn’t she have done her job and been my partner without luring me in? In time I’m sure I’ll understand that maybe she was protecting her family and John back home by saying she wasn’t involved with somebody, but why do this to me too?

But she’s gone. I wish I could ask her, wish I could shake her shoulders and demand an answer, and then I wish I could kiss her senseless and feel her pulse race beneath mine. I’d give anything to get the chance to be mad at her, fight with her, tell her how much I hate her for putting me through this and then leaving me to sort through it all, but I’ll never get the chance.

Rage burns through my veins, leaving ash piles of heartache and disbelief behind. That staunch determination I walked in here with to get the story first, then get the girl and make a life with her is gone just like she is. I have nothing left to hold on to, least of all confidence in my own judgment.

I don’t know how long I sit in the meeting room with a broken heart, an aching soul, and a damaged psyche, but when I break from my thoughts, I realize the conference room is almost empty with a line at the door as people wait to file out. And I really don’t care, because a huge part of me that prefers the dark places I’ve learned so well to hide in after Stella’s death knows that the minute I leave this room, I fear she’ll cease to exist. As much as I’m hurt and angry and devastated, the notion still stabs deep within me because fuck yes she played me, made me fall in love with a woman who didn’t really exist, but the emotions I felt for her were incredibly real to me.

So a small part of me worries that if I step out of this room, I’ll then have to admit it was all a fake, and I can’t do that just yet because, call me a fucking sap, but I still love her. None of this takes that away.

The hand on my shoulder startles me. I’m on my feet and turning around in an instant and without a second thought when I see John’s face before me, my arm is cocked back, my fist flying. I connect with his right eye with a satisfying reverberation traveling up my arm and into my body but abating none of the emotional distress I feel.

“You son of a bitch!” I yell as bone meets bone again, every ounce of emotion I have fueling the impact of the punch. I hate him. I hate him with everything I have because he didn’t protect her. He had her when I didn’t, kept her when I couldn’t, and he failed as a husband to do the one thing he was supposed to do, keep her safe. And I know I’m being irrational and there’s no way he could keep her safe when she was off doing God knows what, but it feels good to unleash my confused fury on someone else for a change rather than let it eat me apart.

“You didn’t keep her safe! I loved her! I loved her!” I shout as flesh gives way to force, my voice breaking, my body vibrating with everything that I refuse to accept.

People in the room move, gasp, and I can’t even process how many punches it takes for one of their hands to grip my shoulders and pull me off him at the same time I realize that John isn’t resisting me. He isn’t even flinching with each punch I land, and all of a sudden it registers that he might be in the same boat as I am. He may have never known Beaux was a spy. He may have just lost the love of his life too.

I can’t hold on to the thought for more than a second because all I can hold on to is the grief that owns my every action and reaction right now, robbing my breath, stealing my tears, and annihilating the very idea of fate.

I fight against the hands pulling me off John, and then I just give up and roll onto my back atop the broken pieces of a chair that we just obliterated. My chest is heaving; the sound of my labored breathing is the only thing I can hear besides my heart breaking as I lie there, John battered beside me, and despair stretched out in front of me.

“She loved you.” I freeze at the strained words coming from him lost in the shuffle of feet moving around us now that the show is over. I blink several times as I lie there, trying to make sure I’ve heard him correctly, because they were the last things I ever thought I’d hear come from him. I open my mouth to speak but shut it when I’m not sure exactly what to say. “We need to talk in private.”