Page 41 of Villainous Intent

“Truce.” It was bitter, but it fit. We were technically enemies, after all. “But understand this, Bishop. That word is a nuclear option. It is a last resort. Until you say that word, you are mine. Until you say that word, I will do whatever I want to you. Do you understand?”

She stared up at me, the reality of the bargain sinking in. I took her silence as consent.

“Say it now. Prove you can use it.”

Her lips parted. Nothing came out. She didn’t want to accept the weapon because she knew it came with a cost.

“Say. It.”

“Truce,” she whispered.

I smirked, though my blood was running hot. “Good girl.”

I felt the exact moment those two words hit her system.

Her jaw clenched in immediate annoyance, bristling at the condescension. But beneath my hand, her pulse hammered a different rhythm against her throat. Her pupils dilated, swallowing the fake brown irises, betraying the thrill it had given her.

She hated that she liked it. She hated that her body was already surrendering to the leash.

“Sir, we’ve arrived at the destination,” Number Three announced.

I didn’t step back immediately. I let her stay trapped for five more seconds, letting her feel the inevitability of what was coming. I trailed my fingers down her delicate throat, brushing down the valley of her breasts before I dropped my hand to my side.

“Are you ready?”

Annie took a deep breath, squaring her shoulders. She looked like she was stepping onto an executioner’s scaffold, but her chin was high.

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

Through the viewport, the blood-red lights of the Continuum stained the night sky. The wolves were gathering.

I offered her my arm and she took another steadying breath. Then, with a look of resignation, she slipped her hand through it.

“Showtime,” I murmured as the loading ramp began to descend.

CHAPTER 9

ANNIE

I couldn’t breathe. The moment we stepped through the entrance, the noise hit me like a wall, camera shutters clicking, voices overlapping, bass thudding through my ribs as the Continuum swallowed me whole.

The ceiling writhed above us, stars bleeding into constellations that pulsed like a living thing. Cipher said it displayed the power dynamics of the League, like they had turned the sky into a scoreboard. I tried to appreciate the beauty of it, but all I felt was the gaze of countless eyes.

Cipher’s arm slid around my waist, pulling my body flush against him as he leaned down.

“Let them look. Let them want. But remember who has his hands on you. Remember that tonight, you exist only for me.”

His arrogance was a poison I couldn’t spit out and I needed to focus on the mission before I drowned in him. I forced my focus away from his grip on my hip and let my awareness bleed out, the gift I’d stolen from Havoc, still mine to wield.

It was a catastrophic mistake.

The room was a riot of signatures, no two alike, each one slamming into my mind like its own separate assault. Roaring furnaces. Screaming static. Acid-bright flares of serum-induced chaos. Every Super in the building had a print as distinct as a face, and I was staring at all of them at once. The cacophony of raw energy threatened to split my skull, a sickening pressure building behind my eyes.

Then I felt Cipher.

His signature defied the rest of the room. It felt wrong, a complete contradiction to the erratic frequencies of manufactured Supers. His signature was a wall, smooth and terrifyingly stable, lacking the frantic, burning edge of the serum. Suddenly, his reliance on technology made sense. The serum hadn’t taken properly to him.

But how the hell would I even bring that up to confirm? It seemed really fucking rude to ask him if the serum administration had gone wrong.