Page 96 of Villainous Intent

The words registered. I understood their meaning. But all I could hear was the thud of my own heartbeat in my ears. It was the only sound in the universe. A steady, violent metronome counting down to something inevitable.

The obligatory banter I had been mentally preparing for, evaporated. It was irrelevant now. There was only the cold, the steady beat in my ears, and the man in the tank who had just signed his own death warrant with his fucking mouth.

“Number Fifteen,” I said. My voice emerged flat, devoid of any human inflection.

The henchman stepped forward. “Sir.”

“Take her to my office.”

Number Fifteen stepped toward Annie and reached out, his fingers closing around her upper arm to guide her toward the exit.

The reaction was instantaneous. Annie jerked her arm out of his grip and scrambled around the chair to put it between the two of them. She locked her furious gaze on me.

“It’s one thing for you to put your hands on me,” she said. “But if you think for one second I am going to let your men manhandle me, we are going to have a massive fucking problem.”

I looked at Fifteen. The henchman was still holding his hand out in the empty space where Annie’s arm had been a second ago.

“Fifteen, did I instruct you to touch her?”

The henchman stiffened and dropped his hand to his side. His eyes darted between me and Annie as he swallowed hard. “No, sir. I apologize. I just... I didn’t understand what she was.”

I shifted my gaze from Fifteen and eyed the rest of the bridge crew. Every single henchman was frozen under my attention.

“Let me clear up the confusion for all of you,” I said, projecting my voice so it carried to every console and station in the room. “She is mine. You will treat her with the exact same deference and respect you show me. No one lays a finger on her. You speak to her when spoken to, and you accommodate her every need. If any of you forget this and treat her like a prisoner, you will be terminated. Do you understand?”

A chorus of confirmations echoed across the bridge.

Fifteen bowed his head in submission toward Annie. “My apologies, Miss.”

I turned my attention back to her. “Go with Fifteen to my office.”

She lifted her chin. “No.”

“Excuse me?”

“What are you going to do with him?” She nodded toward the containment cell.

“That’s none of your fucking business.”

“If you kill him, you’ll face maximum penalties.” The words spilled from her in a rapid, clinical cadence. “He is a newer Hero. Barely out of the junior league. The Alliance will classify it an execution which means you could be demoted.”

Her mind remained fixated on the rules. On the paperwork. She was desperately trying to logic her way through the blood haze thickening in my head, using the Keeper handbook to shield herself against the reality of my violence.

“A Hero insulting your...” She paused, like the next word tasted foul on her tongue. “...plaything, doesn’t rise to a death warrant in the Alliance.”

I moved until I towered over her. “It’s enough in the League.”

She held her ground. “Velocity isn’t League.”

She was quoting jurisdiction statutes while I was actively calculating the tensile strength of a Hero’s spine. It was absurd and fucking maddening. It was exactly why I wanted her.

I reached out and wrapped my hand around her throat, holding her. I pressed my thumb against the erratic pulse jumping beneath her skin. The contact was electric, a jolt of warmth against the cold within me.

“You think I care about jurisdiction, Annie? You think I care about ratings or demotions?”

She swallowed against my palm. Her eyes were wide behind the mask, but she didn’t pull away.

“He insulted you,” I said, the words simple and absolute. “He breathed the same air as you and used it to speak filth. That makes him mine.”