Page 155 of Villainous Intent

He was pushing me away now, when I’d accepted the darkest parts of him. When I hadn’t run screaming after watching him execute someone. When I’d stayed and touched him and wanted him despite, or maybe because of, what he was.

I’d seen the monster and reached for him. And this was my reward.

Dismissed like I was nothing.

Whatever connection I thought we’d shared existed only in my head. Whatever vulnerability he’d shown was just another performance.

“Miss?” Five prompted from the doorway, his voice uncomfortably gentle, as if he could sense the fragility of the moment.

One last chance. I gave Cipher one last moment to say something, anything, that might suggest I mattered beyond what my body could give him.

The moment passed.

I swallowed hard. “I’m coming.”

My voice didn’t break. I was proud of that, at least.

CHAPTER 31

CIPHER

I couldn’t stop staring at my hands. Dried blood crusted in the creases of my knuckles, flaking off like rust onto the lab floor. I didn’t even remember flying back to the Labyrinth, didn’t remember walking through the corridors. All I knew was that people had scattered when they saw me coming.

But before that, before the blood and the silence and the empty flight home, there had been Annie.

Annie, who hadn’t run when I told her exactly what I was, who hadn’t flinched when I confessed to enjoying Ash’s death. Annie, whose eyes had widened behind her mask not with horror but with something dangerously close to understanding.

She’d kissed me with Baron Ash’s blood still on my hands.

My fist slammed into the nearest workbench, the impact sending tools scattering across the surface. The pain barely registered, just another set of numbers cataloging nerve endings and pressure thresholds.

“FUCK!” The word tore from my throat, echoing off the sterile walls.

My thoughts were everywhere and overwhelming in a way they hadn’t been since I was a child. The exact force needed to shatter the reinforced glass of my fabrication station—the precise words Annie had whispered against my mouth— the statistical probability that I was completely fucking losing it⁠—

And on and on and on.

I’d sent her away. After fucking her against that wall, after showing her the darkest, most twisted parts of myself, I’d dismissed her like she was nothing. No one was supposed to see that side of me. No one. That particular part of me wasn’t for public consumption, it was the ugly truth behind the carefully crafted Villain persona. The part I kept locked away so it would hopefully never see the light of day.

Annie had seen it and she hadn’t run. She’d pressed herself against me and pulled me closer.

My arm swept across the workbench, sending equipment crashing to the floor. The sound of breaking glass and twisting metal was oddly satisfying. It was destruction I could control, chaos I could create.

I grabbed the edge of the table and flipped it, the heavy graphene composite crashing down with a thunderous boom. My mind calculated the trajectory, the point of impact. All meaningless numbers that didn’t drown out Annie’s voice in my head.

“I’m glad he’s dead,” she’d whispered, and something in me had broken open.

I stalked to the fabrication station, my reflection warped in the curved glass. I drove my fist through the transparent barrier. It shattered exactly as predicted, the material giving way with a satisfying crack that sent shards exploding outward.

Blood dripped from my knuckles. The cuts would heal in seconds. The memory of Annie’s face wouldn’t.

I tore through the lab, destroying everything within reach. Monitors shattered under my fists. Prototypes I’d spent weeks perfecting crumpled in my hands.

“You fucking idiot,” I snarled at myself, kicking over a storage unit. Components worth millions scattered across the floor. “You absolute fucking idiot.”

I wasn’t supposed to care. She wasn’t supposed to matter. This was just sex, just a convenient arrangement. Just bodies, fucking, and a way to get at her secrets.

I had wanted to own her, every part of her, but she wasn’t supposed to fucking matter.