Chapter 9
ANNIE
I couldn’t breathe. The moment we stepped through the entrance, the noise hit me like a wall, camera shutters clicking, voices overlapping, bass thudding through my ribs as the Continuum swallowed me whole.
The ceiling writhed above us, stars bleeding into constellations that pulsed like a living thing. Cipher said it displayed the power dynamics of the League, like they had turned the sky into a scoreboard. I tried to appreciate the beauty of it, but all I felt was the gaze of countless eyes.
Cipher’s arm slid around my waist, pulling my body flush against him as he leaned down.
“Let them look. Let them want. But remember who has his hands on you. Remember that tonight, you exist only for me.”
His arrogance was a poison I couldn’t spit out and I needed to focus on the mission before I drowned in him. I forced my focus away from his grip on my hip and let my awareness bleed out, the gift I’d stolen from Havoc, still mine to wield.
It was a catastrophic mistake.
The room was a riot of signatures, no two alike, each one slamming into my mind like its own separate assault.
Roaring furnaces. Screaming static. Acid-bright flares of serum-induced chaos.
Every Super in the building had a print as distinct as a face, and I was staring at all of them at once.
The cacophony of raw energy threatened to split my skull, a sickening pressure building behind my eyes.
Then I felt Cipher.
His signature defied the rest of the room.
It felt wrong, a complete contradiction to the erratic frequencies of manufactured Supers.
His signature was a wall, smooth and terrifyingly stable, lacking the frantic, burning edge of the serum.
Suddenly, his reliance on technology made sense. The serum hadn’t taken properly to him.
But how the hell would I even bring that up to confirm? It seemed really fucking rude to ask him if the serum administration had gone wrong.
I tried to push past his signature, desperate to filter the surrounding noise, but the volume of power in the Continuum crushed down on me. My vision blurred and I was drowning in the undertow of a hundred Supers.
“—don’t you agree?”
Cipher’s voice snapped the tether.
I blinked, reality rushing back in a disorienting slide. We had moved. We were deep in the room now, standing before a massive, armored Villain whose scarred face swam in my vision.
“I—” The room spun. The power signatures pulsed brighter, closing in on my raw nerves.
“You’ll have to excuse us,” Cipher said smoothly.
Without missing a beat, he turned me. His shoulders and towering frame formed an impenetrable shield, blocking me from the room’s hungry stares as he guided me through the press of bodies.
“Easy,” he murmured. “Everyone is watching.”
I swallowed, trying to mask my panic as the crowd parted for us.
Cipher led me into a dimly lit alcove and hit a switch on the wall. A curtain fell, sealing us in. It shut out the bass of the music, amplifying the harsh rasp of my breathing.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded. “You look ready to pass out.” The corner of his mouth curved upward. “Surely you aren’t overwhelmed yet. My hands have barely been on you.”
I shook my head, fighting the sickening pressure building at the base of my skull. “I can’t find the rogue here. There’s too much...” I snapped my teeth together, catching myself before I revealed too much. “Too many people. Too many distractions.”
He tilted his head. “What exactly do you need to identify them?”
“I need...” I rubbed my temples, pressing my fingertips hard against the skin, trying to force the remnants of the screaming static out of my head. “Not so many Supers all in one place.”
A slow, devilish smile spread across his lips. “So what you’re saying is you can’t hunt your rogue, and you get to focus on being my plaything all night instead.”
I scowled at him, dropping my hands from my face. “Yes. That is part of the point of me being here.”
“Good.” He shifted his stance, trapping me with his body. “I was trying to be considerate before, since I knew you were searching. Now, I don’t have to be.”
“What does that—”
I gasped as his hand slid up my thigh, parting the high slit of my dress until his fingers brushed the edge of my panties. My pussy clenched against the ache of emptiness.
“There’s no one in here,” I choked out, my voice breathless and weak. “No one can see us.”
“I know,” Cipher murmured. “But I need to make sure you can play the part you’re about to play.”
His thumb traced the edge of my panties again before resting directly over the wetness gathering between my legs. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think as Cipher cocked his head and stroked his thumb along the lace right over my pussy.
I reached up to grab hold of him to support myself, feeling dizzy as his thumb continued to stroke. I arched into his touch, urging him to increase the pressure.
“How am I doing?” I hated the question the second it left my mouth. I shouldn’t care what he thought about my reaction. But the desperate, pathetic part of my brain that needed to execute every task flawlessly demanded to know if I was meeting his twisted expectations.
His thumb pressed firmly, right over my clit. I inhaled sharply and my hips jerked forward again, chasing the pressure. Cipher leaned in close enough that his lips brushed mine when he spoke.
“You’re performing perfectly.”
The praise settled deep within me. I hated that the overachieving, rule-following perfectionist inside me reveled in the fact that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do.
His thumb pressed hard against my clit one last time, pulling a soft whimper from me.
He smiled and withdrew his hand. The sudden loss left me feeling hollow.
Cipher wrapped his arm around my waist and pulled me out from behind the curtain, thrusting us back into the crushing noise and blinding lights of the Opener.
I should have smacked him or shocked him with my cuff the second he touched me. But the only coherent thought I had was a desperate question of if he would touch me exactly that way again.
It’s just acting, I told myself, swallowing hard against the tight knot in my throat. It’s all pretend. It’s an assignment.
Cipher paraded me directly into the teeth of the designated media area. Reporters clustered around the edges of the zone, desperate for a quote.
Cipher was in his element. His hand gripped my hip, his fingers biting into my flesh through the dress. I draped myself against him, resting my hand on his chest, playing the exquisite, silent prize.
Cameras flashed, blindingly bright.
Every touch burned through the fabric of my dress. Every possessive squeeze triggered a response I couldn’t suppress. I was an object to these people. Cipher’s new toy. And the thrill of being owned by him was a drug I hadn’t expected to like.
The night dissolved into a blur of heavy hands. Cipher’s fingers traced my spine, like he was memorizing the vertebrae. His touch lingered just long enough to make my skin prickle. Each time, I told myself to step away. Each time, I didn’t.
By the time he took a break from mingling and stopped at the bar, my skin felt too tight.
“You’re getting better at this,” he murmured.
I didn’t know if he meant the act or the submission.
I leaned against him and his hand immediately slid to my lower back, fingers stroking the bare skin there.
The bartender materialized.
“Whiskey. Neat,” Cipher ordered.
As we waited, I was hyperaware of the eyes crawling over us.
Over me. I needed to focus on the room. On the mission.
On anything other than the sensitivity between my thighs and the gravity pulling everywhere inside me downward.
I swept my gaze across the shifting nebula projections and the sea of designer armor, desperate to categorize the chaos into something manageable.
I noticed we weren’t the only pair at the Opener. Not by a long shot.
To my left, near a booth occupied by three massive brutes, a woman in a glittering diamond collar knelt on a cushion.
She held a silver drink tray perfectly level above her head, her spine locked in agonizing stillness.
Across the room, another Villain lounged, lazily feeding hors d’oeuvres to a young man wearing nothing but leather straps and a vacant, obedient expression.
Cipher’s drink arrived, the crystal glass clinking against the bar.
He turned us, boxing me in against the bar, his thigh pressing between my legs, pinning me to the spot. His hand settled on my throat, his thumb resting over my racing pulse and I had no choice but to let him, to keep up our charade.
“Open,” he commanded.
I blinked. “What?”
Cipher picked up the glass and took a mouthful of the amber liquid. He didn’t swallow.
His fingers tightened just enough to tilt my head back, then he leaned down and crushed his mouth to mine.
He kissed me, forcing my lips wider, and the warm, smoky fire of the whiskey flooded my mouth. The liquid burned a path over my tongue and I swallowed.
He pulled back slowly. A single drop of the whiskey escaped the corner of my mouth, tracking down my chin. Cipher caught it with his thumb, then dragged the wet pad over my lower lip, pressing the moisture into my skin.
“Good girl.”
The praise dropped straight to my stomach. My knees felt weak, the joints threatening to buckle if not for the solid pressure of his thigh holding me up. I hated that my body responded to him like it was starving for his attention.
And still I wanted more.
“Why did you do that?” I whispered.
I didn’t actually care about his reasoning. I wanted him to force another drink past my lips. I wanted the pressure of his mouth crushing mine. I kept that pathetic reality locked behind my teeth, terrified of the power I would hand him if I admitted it.
“You looked thirsty,” Cipher replied.
“I can drink on my own.”
His mouth curved into a wicked, knowing smirk. “But you swallow so much better when I make you.”