Page 86 of Villainous Intent

CHAPTER 16

CIPHER

The wind whipped past my face as I hurtled across the city. My mind calculated flight vectors even as I cursed Dread’s timing.

Urgent meeting. Now. Non-negotiable.

Dread was going to bleed for this because Annie was going to fucking run. It was a mathematical certainty. She was terrified of what she had done. Terrified of how effortlessly she had surrendered her control to me.

If that shadow-obsessed bastard hadn’t summoned me, I could have kept her from running. At least for a while. I would have kept her pinned to my mattress, buried deep inside her until her panic dissolved into exhaustion and acceptance.

The Abandoned District rushed up to meet me. It was a graveyard of corporate ambition. Twenty years ago, it had been Chroma Bay’s financial center until the crash turned glass towers into hollow shells. Now it was where we conducted business too unsavory for even the League’s official channels.

I hit the cracked pavement hard, not bothering to slow. Concrete shattered, dust and debris exploding outward in a shockwave rattling the windows of the dilapidated warehouse ahead.

I stood in the crater of my own making and breathed.

Seventeen minutes and forty-two seconds since I’d left Annie.

The fucking countdown. I had her. She was going to be mine. I’d tasted her cunt and knew what it took to make her lose control. The countdown shouldn’t be there.

But she consumed my thoughts. When I’d see her again. The seven freckles that dotted her left shoulder. The sound she’d made when I bit her. The exact shade of pink of her nipples.

My cock throbbed. The suit was too tight, feeling even more like the prison it was.

I still couldn’t comprehend the way my tattoos had reacted to her. The ink was engineered to sync with my undersuit, not touch. I’d been with plenty of women and they’d never caused them to react in any way. Yet the second Annie’s fingers traced the lines on my chest, she’d wired herself directly into my nervous system and fucked with my head.

I’d nearly lost my goddamn mind the moment her naked body crushed against mine. I felt her everywhere at once, the rhythm of her pulse had pounded inside my own veins. She was under my skin in the most literal sense possible, an obsession permanently embedded in my bones.

The static crackle of my internal comms popped.

“Sir,” a voice clipped. “Ms. Bishop has left the penthouse.”

I didn’t even blink. She was a creature of habit, and flight was her default response to losing control.

“Keep eyes on her,” I ordered. “Don’t engage. If anyone so much as looks at her too long, break their legs. Otherwise, just watch.”

“Destination is currently unconfirmed,” the voice added.

I’d bet my entire R&D budget she was making a beeline for the Tower. It was a fortress of rules where she could pretend the man who just fucked her hadn’t permanently marked her.

It didn’t matter. Running wouldn’t save her anyway.

I cracked my neck and stepped forward. The thing waiting in that warehouse needed Cipher the Villain, not the obsessive asshole I became when thinking of Annie.

My comm unit chirped in my ear again as I entered the warehouse. “Target location confirmed, sir. Dread is—,” Twenty-Three cut off and every light on my suit extinguished simultaneously. The heads-up display in my mask died and the subtle hum of power that constantly surrounded me vanished.

The suit became dead weight, while shadows shifted against the far wall. Dread. He watched, waiting for a reaction.

I forced my posture to relax.

“Well, well.” I injected boredom into my voice. “If you wanted to get me alone in the dark, Dread, you could’ve just asked me to dinner first.” I stood still, trying to map the warehouse. The echo of my voice bounced off pillars and revealed the cavernous space around me. My suit might be dead, but I was far from helpless.

I tracked a shadow moving to my left without turning my head to maintain the illusion that I couldn’t see in the low light.

The charade was a necessary evil. Taking the Serum years ago had been a purely theatrical exercise. The manufactured sludge did nothing to me considering my Trueborn biology. I could have walked into the registration office the next day and claimed the injection gave me my perfect night vision, flight, and my enhanced physical power.

Some manufactured Supers came away from the shot with top-tier abilities. But claiming that level of power invited a look closer—to figure out what it was that made the serum work so well on them.