Page 156 of Villainous Intent

My breath came in harsh gasps as I stood in the center of the wreckage, surrounded by the broken remnants of my carefully ordered world. The silence that followed the crash was heavy, but it was nothing compared to the void that had opened up inside me the moment I’d found Annie in the tunnels.

I had always prided myself on my control. On the ability to detach, to view the world as a series of problems to be solved. People were variables. Emotions were chemical reactions.

But when I turned that corner and saw Ash’s bulk pinning her to the concrete, saw his hand on her skin, the detachment evaporated. There was no logic in the way my heart had slammed against my ribs. There was no strategy in the blinding terror that had seized me.

For a split second, before the rage took over, I had felt… Small.

I gripped the edge of the ruined workbench, the metal biting into my palms. I needed to call it obsession. I needed to file it under “fixation” or “territorial instinct.” Those were manageable. Those were things I could starve out or indulge until I was bored.

But obsession didn’t make you feel like you were bleeding out just because she was in pain. Obsession didn’t make a man who valued his intellect above all else suddenly willing to burn his entire life to the ground just to keep one person breathing.

If she had died in that tunnel, the rest of it, the League, the years of planning, would have meant nothing. I would have been king of a graveyard.

She wasn’t just a part of the game anymore. She was the only thing that made the game worth playing. She was the quiet in the noise of my head, the only reality in a life built on lies.

Annie’s face floated before me, the hurt in her eyes when I’d dismissed her, the acceptance when I’d confessed to enjoying the kill.

She had accepted something she shouldn’t have. When I backed her against that wall, my hands still slick with blood, she hadn’t recoiled. I had fucked her while still riding the euphoric high of a brutal execution. I used her body to process my rage and my bloodlust. I poured every ounce of my violence into her, and she took it. She swallowed the worst parts of me and offered me her own ruin in return.

I had spent my entire life starving the worst parts of my nature. That isolation was what kept everyone safe. But Annie had looked at the blood on my hands and pulled me in. After decades of hiding everything about myself, she’d listened to the obsessive way my mind worked at the Colosseum and shrugged it off like it was the easiest thing in the world to digest.

If I let her accept me, my control would shatter. The tight grip I kept on my own darkness only existed because I knew how poorly it would end for me if the world saw me for what I truly am. If she took away that barrier and proved I am allowed to exist exactly as I am, I would stop holding back. I would let the monster off the chain. I would wrap all that possessive need around her and consume her. And she would let me do it.

Her acceptance was a death sentence for my sanity.

I had to push her away. I had to order her out of that room with cold indifference because if she had stayed for one more second, the mask would have shattered. If she had stayed, I would have taken her and never let her leave. I would have dragged her down into the darkness with me forever.

I sank to my knees among the debris, glass crunching beneath me.

In the silence of the destroyed lab, another sound filtered through the chaos of my mind. Baron Ash’s voice. The memory of it so vivid it might have been playing through hidden speakers.

“You’re dressed like a little slut, so why not treat you that way?”

I slammed my fist into the floor and the surface cracked under the impact.

“I’m going to take your pussy right there, so he has to watch a real man pound into his bitch and take her.”

I made a sound I’d never heard from my own throat before, something between a sob and a roar. My hand shot out and grabbed a jagged piece of glass from the floor. I squeezed until it shattered further, blood running between my fingers.

If I’d been even thirty seconds later, he would have raped Annie while she was drugged and terrified.

I’d watched the security footage. After Havoc had taken her. After I’d made sure she was safe. I’d hacked into the Colosseum’s underground security system and found the footage of what had happened before I arrived.

“I want to watch the light go out in your eyes properly⁠—”

“FUCK!” I hurled a twisted piece of metal across the lab where it embedded itself in the wall.

I wanted to kill him all over again. I wanted to break more than just his limbs this time. I wanted to crush his fucking skull between my hands, feel the bone give way, and watch the light die in his eyes.

I’d been too merciful in the arena. Too quick. He deserved so much worse for what he’d done to Annie.

The memory of her bruised throat flashed through my mind, those massive fingerprints marking her delicate skin. The way she’d trembled in my arms as I carried her through those tunnels. The tiny, broken sound she’d made when she tried to speak my name.

I hadn’t spoken to her. Not a single word of comfort or reassurance. I’d carried her to safety and then walked away because I knew—I fucking knew—that if I opened my mouth, all that would come out was rage. And she’d been through enough without having to witness that.

So I’d stayed silent. I’d let Havoc take her. I’d sat in my chair, staring at nothing, while the only person I’d ever cared about was carried out of my life.

“Cipher?”