Page 165 of Villainous Intent

Fair enough. She owed me nothing. Less than nothing.

I closed my eyes, the events of last night replaying behind my eyelids. The way she’d reached for me, the fucking heat of her pussy taking me. Followed immediately by the wall I’d erected between us. The cold dismissal. The way her face had fallen, confusion and hurt evident in those beautiful blue eyes before she’d masked it.

I’d fucked her then fucked her over. And why? Because I’d been terrified that she hadn’t turned away? That I’d begged her to tell me to stop, and she’d clutched me tighter?

Annie filled something in me I hadn’t even realized was missing. Some fatal flaw in my construction, some empty space I’d never acknowledged. She saw me, not just Cipher the Villain, not just Cipher the man, but something deeper, something I tried not to look at too closely myself. I didn’t know how to handle that aside from pushing her away.

I forced my attention back to the workstation, trying to focus on the lines of code scrolling across my screen. The text blurring no matter how many times I blinked.

A notification pinged. Dread again.

Nightshade has been eliminated. Status update on the Warden files?

I wanted to tell him to have some fucking patience. Instead: Soon. Working through the final encryption layer.

My program working on the decoding could only go so fast. Dread would just have to wait.

I turned back to the project I was attempting to work on, fingers moving across the keyboard by muscle memory more than conscious thought. The algorithms were complex but nothing I couldn’t handle. I glanced at the timestamp on Dread’s message again and froze. An hour and twenty-seven minutes had passed since I’d responded. The project on my screen had advanced significantly, but I had no memory of doing the work.

I jerked upright, cold sweat breaking out across my skin. An hour and twenty-seven minutes. Gone. Vanished like they never existed.

“No, no, no,” I whispered, fingers digging into my scalp. The sound of blood rushing in my ears was all I could hear. The familiar panic clawed its way up my throat. The same terror that used to paralyze me as a child when I’d “come back” to find my parents staring at me with those worried expressions.

What happened this time, Tommy? You were gone again.

Then came the doctors with their clipboards and cold hands. The tests. The needles. The medications that turned my beautiful, lightning-fast mind into a sluggish, broken thing.

This will help you focus, Thomas. This will keep you present.

Present. As if absence was the problem rather than my brain working too quickly for my body to keep up.

I forced myself to breathe, counting each inhale. One, two, three. My fingers trembled as I pulled up the security footage, needing to see what I’d done during the blackout.

There I was. Working. Just working.

“Fuck,” I muttered as relief washed through me. Not a seizure or a breakdown. Just exhaustion pushing me past my limits.

I forced myself to take deep breaths. There were no doctors here. No parents watching with worried, fearful eyes. No siblings mocking me for being broken. I was Cipher now. I controlled my environment.

I closed my eyes, counting breaths again.

“You look terrible.”

My eyes snapped open. Annie stood in the doorway, arms crossed over her chest, her expression unreadable. She wore casual clothes, jeans and a plain sweatshirt, her hair loose around her shoulders.

I stared at her, unblinking. Was she really here? Or had I finally reached the hallucination stage of sleep deprivation?

“Annie?” My voice came out rough, uncertain.

I blinked, trying to process her sudden appearance. I smelled her perfume from across the room. She was real then, not a hallucination.

“What are you doing here?”

Instead of answering, Annie stepped further into the room, her eyes scanning the unfamiliar space. “What happened to your lab?”

“It’s undergoing renovations.”

Her eyes narrowed, clearly not buying it. “Renovations? It looks like someone took a sledgehammer to everything in there.”