Page 4 of Villainous Rise

I jerked awake, my body launching upright before my mind fully surfaced. The sensation of shadows tearing through my chest lingered along with the memory of my own blood spraying across Annie’s horrified face.

Death had tasted like copper and regret.

My heart hammered against my ribs. The same ribs that had been shattered, then knitted back together. It had been three months since Dread had killed me. Months filled with waking up like this, drenched in sweat, convinced I was dying all over again.

But this time something else had followed me from the dream. Annie’s voice screaming my name, the raw desperation in it. The certainty that she was in danger.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed, the cool air hitting my sweat-slicked skin. “Lights, twenty percent.”

The bedroom illuminated with a soft glow that revealed nothing out of place in my meticulously ordered sanctuary. No immediate threat. Just the same expensive furniture, the same pristine surfaces. The same emptiness.

“Security feed: Bishop residence.”

The wall opposite my bed transformed into a display showing Annie’s apartment. A quick scan confirmed no intruders, no emergency. Just Annie, alone in her bedroom, arms wrapped tightly around herself as she paced the length of her room, every light possible on.

She’d had a nightmare too.

I wasn’t surprised. She’d spent three hours at the Crucible today. I’d watched her through the facility’s security cameras, noting how she’d flinched whenever there was a loud noise.

I ran a hand through my hair, grimacing at the dampness. The nightmare was fading, but the feeling of wrongness persisted.

I couldn’t shake the thought that I was fucking failing Annie by allowing this separation to continue for too long. But what was I supposed to do?

How much time was enough for her anger to cool, for her loneliness to deepen. How much time for the scales to tip, and give me the opening I needed to reclaim her.

I watched her sink onto the bed, her fingers running through her hair in a gesture of frustration. Even through the security feed, I could see the exhaustion etched into her face. The shadows under her eyes had deepened over the past three months and I had documented every fucking hour of sleep she’d lost.

“Fuck,” I muttered, scrubbing a hand over my face.

The urge to go to her chafed at me. I could be at her window in minutes. I could slip past the security system Havoc had upgraded and just be near her. I tried my best to ignore the urge.

“Computer, pull up Bishop cuff diagnostics.”

The screen split, Annie’s image shrinking to make room for the technical readout of her cuff. The one she had no idea came from me. My creation was wrapped snugly around her wrist day and night. Even now, when she wouldn’t let me touch her, a part of me remained pressed against her pulse point.

Without that digital tether, the reality of her absence threatened to fracture my mind as my thoughts kept looping back to the devastation in her eyes when she realized exactly what I was. The need to go to her just to force her to look at me clawed at the inside of my skull. It was a raw panic that my usual logic failed to suppress.

I watched the rhythmic spike of her heart rate on the monitor. She wore my metal. She carried my engineering against her skin every single day. Knowing my creation was physically bound to her was the only thing stopping me from dragging her back to my bed. If I did that she would eventually give me her body, but the rest of her, my Annie, would be fucking lost to me forever.

I forced myself to focus on the scrolling numbers instead of the maddening distance between us but frowned at what I saw in the diagnostics. Power fluctuations in the third quadrant. Minimal, but there. The dampening field was holding, but not consistently enough. Not for something keeping Halcyon’s power locked away.

Another failure to add to my growing collection.

I’d been working on a better version for months, but each prototype fell short of what I needed. The problem was elegant in its simplicity and maddening in its complexity.

“Bring up prototype seven schematics.”

The holographic display materialized in front of me, the intricate design rotating slowly. Beautiful, complex, and completely fucking useless. Like most of my recent work.

Annie shifted on her bed, pulling her knees to her chest. The movement was so vulnerable it made something in my chest constrict.

“End surveillance.”

The feed cut out, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the rotating schematic. I leaned back on my bed, staring at the ceiling, surrounded by the invisible threads that kept her tethered to me.

Three months since I’d touched her. Three months of watching from a distance, tracing the electronic outline of her existence, collecting every scrap of data, telling myself it was better this way. That she was safer without me.

A noble-sounding lie to mask the simple truth: I was terrified of seeing the look in her eyes when she remembered exactly what I was. What I’d done.