Chapter 12
ANNIE
I paced my bedroom, glaring at my tablet. The screen displayed the League’s public website, a slick, professionally designed PR front that told me absolutely nothing useful about their actual operations or members.
“Useless,” I muttered, tossing the tablet onto my bed.
Earlier, I’d spent twenty minutes of futile hacking and the Alliance database locked me out. Havoc’s text flashed on my phone, unapologetic:
Dad
Nice try. Day OFF means OFF, Annie.
He’d followed up with the threat of losing access to the Tower for a full week.
All of this was because of one itty-bitty Villain murder at the party I’d attended last night. That didn’t mean I had to take the day off. I wasn’t dead.
Havoc had to know I wasn’t just browsing. I was hunting. Somewhere in that list of smiling sociopaths was a rogue Trueborn.
At the Tower, I could access complete dossiers on every League Villain, their powers, weaknesses, known associates. At my apartment, I was limited to whatever garbage the League wanted the public to see.
Even Villain Watch didn’t have the information compiled in a nice, neat way, and I was too upset to go there, anyway. Cipher was probably watching what I was doing on my laptop and I couldn’t handle him right now.
I flopped onto my bed, and my mind circled right back to Cipher against my will.
One minute he had been a shield, his body a wall of heat at my back, his hand around my throat. The next, he was cold and distant. All because I dared to touch him when Baron Ash challenged him.
“Oh no, Annie touched my hand. Better act like she committed high treason against the sacred League of Villain Egos,” I muttered to myself.
I grabbed a pillow and hugged it to my chest.
Before Ash arrived, things with Cipher had been good. Better than good. I closed my eyes and the memory washed over me, uninvited and sharp. The way he’d effortlessly drawn an orgasm out of me, the scrape of his teeth against my neck.
I squeezed the pillow, trying to smother the ache in my chest. I shouldn’t be thinking about him. I had actual problems to solve. A rogue Trueborn to identify. But I couldn’t help replaying the feeling of his weight against me and wondering what I had done to make him stop.
“Congratulations, Cipher,” I whispered to my bedroom, “you’ve successfully confused and annoyed a woman who organizes Superhuman paperwork for a living. What an accomplishment. Put that on your evil résumé.”
I grabbed the tablet again, needing to purge him from my thoughts.
I scrolled through a random Villain’s profile.
Energy manipulation. Enhanced durability.
Vague terms for terrifying realities. Nothing that would help me learn for the next time I had to go out with Cipher.
I didn’t want to go into the next outing knowing almost nothing except what the Alliance and the League wanted me to know.
I laid back and closed my eyes. The morning breeze from my open balcony door washed over me. I’d changed into sweatpants and a tank top once I’d been kicked out of the Tower, and the air raised goosebumps along my bare arms.
The silence of the apartment pressed in against my eardrums. It had been so long since I just stopped. Since I let my guard down and felt anything other than responsibility.
My body felt heavy as it sank into the mattress. For a second, I let myself imagine it wasn’t the breeze touching my skin. I let myself imagine heat. Weight. A pair of silver eyes watching me.
The thought made my pulse jump.
My body was a traitor. It didn’t care that he had humiliated me. It didn’t care that he had used me as a prop to assert dominance over the League and then discarded me the moment he got bored. My brain knew he was a monster.
My body just missed the weight of him.
I could still feel the pressure of his hand sliding between my legs, his fingers brushing against the lace of my panties moments before he’d pulled them aside.
“Fuck,” I whispered to the empty room.
I pressed my thighs together, trying to grind the sensation away. It didn’t work. The friction only made the ache sharper. I was lying in my safe, quiet bedroom, dripping wet for a man who had looked at me with cold indifference.
“Comfortable?”
I screamed, bolting upright. My heart hammered against my ribs as I stared at the black-clad figure perched on the edge of my desk. He was perfectly, terrifyingly still and for a second, my brain refused to accept he was real.
He was holding the framed photo of Dawn and me from last summer, his thumb tracing the glass. He didn’t look up immediately when I screamed. Instead, he took his time setting the photo back down and aligning the frame perfectly with the edge of the desk, adjusting it until it met his standards.
Only then did he look at me.
“You’re loud when you think about me, Annie.”
“How long have you been there?” I hissed. The mortification burned through me as I wondered if he’d watched me writhe.
“Long enough to know you weren’t thinking about work,” he said.
“Annie?” Dawn called from down the hall, followed by the sound of hurried footsteps. “Are you okay?”
Crap.
I grabbed the first excuse my brain could dredge up. “It’s fine! Just a spider. Sorry!” I called back, my voice pitching too high.
I looked at Cipher. He hadn’t moved from his perch. He sat on my desk, perfectly at ease, watching my panic like it was a performance I was putting on just for him.
“You want me to get it?” Dawn paused outside my door.
“No!” I yelped, then cleared my throat trying to force it to sound normal. “No, I got it. It’s dead. Sorry for screaming.”
It felt like forever before her footsteps finally retreated back down the hall.
I waited until she was halfway across the apartment before I turned on Cipher.
“Get out,” I hissed. My face burned.
“You left your balcony open,” Cipher said, not even bothering to lower his voice, daring me to shush him. “If you leave your perimeter breached, you invite things in, Annie.”
“We’re twelve stories up.”
“And I can fly,” he said, his voice flat. “Do the math.”
“Hey, Annie!” Dawn’s voice got louder again as she came back toward my bedroom.
“Oh shit!” I scrambled off my bed. “Hide!”
Cipher didn’t move. He looked at the door, then back at me, like he was weighing whether my fear was amusing enough to indulge.
“Please.” I absolutely wasn’t above begging.
His mouth quirked into a cold, sharp smile as gravity released him and he drifted upward in silence. He hovered against my ceiling, looking less like a man and exactly like the spider I’d lied about.
Even working with Supers for a living, it looked so wrong. It triggered a panic in my lizard brain seeing a human shape clinging to the ceiling like that. But I composed my face and cracked the door open.
“Hey,” I said, blocking the view of the room with my body.
“Hey Annie, I was thinking we could—” Dawn stopped abruptly, her expression shifting from cheerful to concerned. “Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. How big was that spider?”
“I’m fine,” I lied. I could feel Cipher’s gaze boring into the back of my skull. “Just startled.”
Dawn crossed her arms, studying my face. “You’re not fine. You’re pale and you’re doing that thing with your hands.” She nodded toward my fingers, which I realized were nervously twisting together.
“This is just work stress,” I said, desperate to get her away from the door. Which, technically, Cipher was work stress.
“Work stress? On your day off?” Dawn’s eyes narrowed. “That’s it. I’m calling Havoc and giving him a piece of my mind. He works you too hard.”
“No!” I said too quickly. “Please don’t bother him.”
“Annie, you look like you’re about to snap from tension. What kind of man works his daughter to the breaking point, even on her days off?”
I flinched. My relationship to Havoc wasn’t exactly public knowledge. Dawn only knew because she was the one person I trusted with my life.
But she wasn’t the only person listening anymore.
“Dawn, I’m fine,” I said. “Havoc has nothing to do with this. I just didn’t sleep well.”
Dawn’s expression softened, but the concern remained. “If you say so.”
I watched her retreat down the hallway, trying to ignore the weight of the secret she had just exposed.
I closed the door and leaned my forehead against the wood. I needed a second, just one second to compose my face before I turned around to face the intruder.
“Daddy’s girl,” he whispered right beside my ear.
I clamped my hand over my mouth to stifle my scream and spun around.
Cipher had flipped upside down, his face inches from mine. His black hair hung down like a dark curtain.
“Dad is your boss?” he asked. “How cozy, Keeper.”
I bared my teeth and shoved at his chest. He didn’t move an inch.
“Back off.”
He didn’t move so I had to skirt around him to put space between us.
“Get down,” I tried again.
He let gravity reclaim him, dropping to the ground and landing soundlessly on his feet.
“So the great Havoc is your daddy,” he continued.
He began to circle me slowly. “I knew you were his pet Keeper. I didn’t know you were his heart.
Same eye color, too.” He stopped in front of me and his hand shot out, gripping my chin before I could step away.
“I’d assumed that was power bleed. But it’s not, is it? ”
My eyes. Havoc’s eyes.
I couldn’t remember what color they’d been before. For as long as I could remember, it was his blue staring back at me from the mirror. Whatever I’d had before that was just gone.
“We’re not biologically related,” I said, my voice tight. “And it’s none of your business.”
“Oh, but it is.” His thumb stroked my jawline. “The Alliance and League want us to look cozy for the cameras. Shouldn’t I know about your family connections?’”
“There’s nothing to know.”
“Your roommate seems to think otherwise. If he’s not your father, what did she mean by calling you his daughter?”
I clenched my jaw. “I was his ward.”
“And before that?”
“Before that is none of your business,” I said firmly. “Get out of my apartment.”