Page 187 of Villainous Intent

This was for the best. Now, I could refocus. Get back to the objectives that actually mattered. The Tinkerer’s Hammer. Ripping Dread’s head from his shoulders. My ascension through the ranks.

I repeated those goals like a mantra as I tore through the sky. The Hammer. Dread. Ascension. I chanted it to drown out the relentless, echoing voice in the back of my skull, the terrifying, logical voice of my own genius, whispering that I had just made the single most catastrophic mistake of my life.

CHAPTER 38

ANNIE

Havoc hadn’t wanted me to leave the Tower. I’d seen it in his eyes, that protective, parental concern. But I couldn’t bear those familiar walls, couldn’t handle one more sympathetic glance.

My apartment was dark, Dawn most likely spending the night with Hunter again. I didn’t turn on a single lamp when I walked through the door. I just went to my bedroom and sank onto the edge of my mattress, staring out the window.

I was wrong about Cipher. So fucking wrong.

It hurt to breathe. He had looked me in the eye and severed everything about us. He reduced what we did, everything we shared, to a physical transaction. A game he had finally grown bored of playing.

He was exactly the monster he always claimed to be.

I dragged my hands down my face, digging the heels of my palms into my eyes until sparks danced in the blackness. I was furious with him. I wanted to scream, to find him and shove his cruel indifference right down his fucking throat.

But the fury I felt toward him was nothing compared to the rage I felt toward myself.

I ignored every instinct of self-preservation when I invited him in. I let him strip away my sanity and I begged him for more. My body still ached for him. Even now, sitting in the dark, humiliated and discarded, my heart beat faster at the memory of his hands on my skin.

And beneath the humiliation was the ultimate, pathetic truth. I loved him. I loved a man who viewed human connection as a strategic vulnerability to exploit.

I shook my head as if I could dislodge that thought. No. I loved a lie. All that time we spent together, the late nights in his lab, the man who held me in the aftermath of violence—that man didn’t exist.

He had manufactured that vulnerability. He traded me carefully selected pieces of his trauma to disarm me, to ensure I would submit to his control.

I squeezed my eyes shut, fighting the burn of tears. The fury when Baron Ash had taken me. The exhausted, blood-soaked collapse in his lab after he’d killed Ash’s network.

I wondered if parts he shared were real, even if he weaponized them to keep me compliant. The trauma, the possessive rage, they were too visceral to be fabricated. He might have used those truths to manipulate me and bind me to him, but they were still truths.

And if that was the case, if the blood and the scars and the ruthless protection were genuine, then maybe I didn’t just love a lie.

I had to believe that or I was going to lose my mind.

I uncurled myself and lay back on my bed, staring at the ceiling.

You wouldn’t tell me even if my safety, my life, might depend on it?

God, it sounded pathetic now, echoing in my head. Of course he thought I was trying to trap him or trick him. That’s what he would expect, games and manipulation. But I’d just needed to know where I stood. If what we had was real or if I was just convenient.

And now I knew. His feelings didn’t matter because all he saw me as was a warm body. That was it.

I swiped angrily at my eyes.

I was still staring at the ceiling when the soft hum of my apartment went silent. The darkness deepened around me as the faint glow from my digital clock faded to nothing. Outside my window, the ambient light from neighboring buildings disappeared, plunging my street into darkness.

A power outage. Perfect. Just what this night needed.

I didn’t bother moving. What was the point? I’d been lying here in the dark anyway, torturing myself with thoughts of him. At least now the total darkness beyond my window matched my mood.

A bitter smile crossed my lips. At least I didn’t have to worry about Cipher watching me through security cameras. Not that he would. I was less than nothing to him now.

The soft breeze pushed through my open balcony door, making the curtains billow inward like ghostly hands reaching for me. For a moment, the full moon appeared, casting a silver glow across my bedroom floor before the curtains swallowed it again.

I watched the play of shadow and moonlight, remembering how Cipher’s eyes would catch the light sometimes, turning luminous. How they’d darkened when he wanted me.