Chapter 18
CIPHER
The wind tore around us, but my suit’s localized field kept the worst of the drag off Annie. She was pressed flush against my chest, her face buried against my neck. God, she felt perfect.
This was a catastrophic miscalculation. Kidnapping her hadn’t been on my itinerary.
It was a dangerous, reckless indulgence that could bring the entire Aegis down on my head.
But when my system had alerted me to her schedule change and I had seen that beautiful, blank void where her mandated schedule used to be, my restraint had evaporated.
Twelve hours, thirty-seven minutes and twenty-six seconds.
That was the exact duration since I had left her in the penthouse.
The mental timer had been ticking in the back of my cortex ever since, a maddening metronome of obsession that bled into my focus and compromised my efficiency.
I despised it. But as long as she wasn’t at work, she could be with me.
And with her here, anchored in my arms, the timer had finally stopped.
The silence in my head was absolute euphoria.
The hull of the aircraft materialized from the cloud cover. Once we were on board, the second her bare feet touched the floor, she planted both hands flat against my chest and shoved.
“You fucking asshole!” she snapped, her blue eyes blazing.
Internally, a vicious thrill ripped through me. There it is. That spectacular, suicidal fire. It was the single most intoxicating thing about her. I had literally just abducted her, and her first instinct was to physically attack a man who could crush her skull with two fingers.
My gaze dragged over her. She had chosen this ridiculous ensemble, the oversized gray sweatshirt and the black leggings, specifically to spite me.
She wanted to look unremarkable and she had failed.
The thin material of the leggings clung to the curve of her thighs and the perfect, rounded shape of her ass.
And the fact that she looked so incredibly comfortable...
It pleased me. Every woman I had ever encountered in the League or the civilian world spent hours painting themselves, contorting into uncomfortable, performative armor just to impress me.
Annie just threw on a baggy sweatshirt and picked a fight.
She was just Annie. Unfiltered, defiant, and entirely mine.
I wanted to drag that oversized fabric off her shoulders, bury my face against her bare neck, and inhale the intoxicating scent of vanilla and adrenaline rolling off her skin. I wanted to map every nerve cluster in her body right there on the airlock floor.
But I had an empire to manage and actual work to do now that I had secured her. I caught her wrists before she could shove me again, pinning them together with one hand, and stared down at her.
“Come now, Bishop,” I murmured, my voice a flat, deadpan drawl. “I suggest you conserve that energy. You’re going to need it.”
“Take me back,” she demanded.
“No.” I released her wrists. I let my fingertips drag down the skin of her inner forearm as I pulled away just so I could feel her pulse hammering against my touch.
Number Seven rounded the corner, silent as a shadow, and extended Annie’s mask to me. I took it and held the mask out to her.
She stared at it for a second, scowling before she lifted her chin and locked her gaze on mine. “What happens if I refuse to put it on? What if I just stand right here?”
I looked down at her feet on the grooved steel of the airlock floor. “The metal grating is going to feel horrible against your feet long term. But if you’re determined to suffer, I won’t stop you.”
I tossed the mask and she caught it against her chest. I walked away without bothering to look back to see if she followed. I already knew she would. The alternative was standing alone in an airlock and Annie Bishop possessed too much curiosity to stay put.
Behind me, I heard a huff then, the soft pat-pat-pat of bare feet following me down the corridor.
I smiled. She really couldn’t help herself.
The bridge doors hissed open at my approach to reveal the panoramic sweep of the city skyline through the viewport. Off to the side, encased in a containment cell, sat my morning headache.
Velocity. He was a newly christened Hero who thought intercepting me was a brilliant career move. I had brought him aboard to teach him a lesson, though I hadn’t quite finalized the syllabus yet. He would undoubtedly serve as a cautionary tale by the time I dumped him back out the airlock.
I walked toward the glass, offering him a sharp, humorless smile.
“Comfortable?” I asked.
Velocity scrambled to his feet, his blue and silver armor dented from where I had fractured his ribs three hours ago. “You can’t keep me here, Cipher!” he shouted, slapping a gloved hand against the glass. “I was on Alliance business. They’ll—“
“They’ll file a report,” I interrupted. “You cost me twelve minutes of productivity this morning. I’m currently debating whether to extract that lost time from your hide or your bank account.”
His gaze shifted past me, his eyes widening.
I looked back just as Annie stepped cautiously onto the bridge, her arms crossed tight over her chest. The mask sat perfectly in place, framing those cutting eyes which had been rendered a warm, deceptive brown.
The sweatshirt hung off one bare shoulder, and she stood barefoot on the decking.
Combined with the way her hair looked a little wild from the flight, she looked exactly as though she had just rolled out of my bed.
She also looked absolutely furious.
Velocity stared at her, then snapped his attention back to me.
“You...” Velocity choked out, his voice cracking as he looked between the two of us. “You went to get your fucking girlfriend while you left me locked in here?”
“I have my priorities,” I drawled, glancing back at Annie. Her eyes narrowed behind the mask, promising absolute murder.
I cut the external speaker to the containment cell with a subtle flick of my wrist, silencing the Hero’s sputtering protests. I turned fully toward Annie and waited. When she didn’t speak, I said, “No lecture? No impassioned speech about the sanctity of Hero life and proper prisoner protocols?”
She didn’t even look at Velocity. She kept her gaze locked on mine, her arms still crossed tightly. “League members are permitted to hold Alliance prisoners for up to twenty-four hours before it’s considered an infraction.”
I blinked. That was not the reaction I had anticipated. “You’re not clutching your pearls? I’m almost disappointed.”
“Fuck your disappointment,” she snapped, finally ungluing her feet from the doorway and taking a few steps onto the bridge. “Havoc raised me. You think I don’t know what happens behind closed doors, away from the public? I know the rules exist to manage the chaos, not erase it.”
I moved toward her, tilting my head to consider her as I approached. “What do you know about the asshole in the tank?”
She just stared me down, those brown-tinted eyes flat. “I’m not giving you privileged intel on an Alliance Hero.”
“I gave you access to League files,” I reminded her.
“Yeah, you can do that because you’re a criminal. You break the law. I’m not. I don’t.”
I pointed a thumb over my shoulder at the silently shouting Velocity. “You’re standing on my bridge. You’re seeing my prisoner. That makes you complicit.”
She actually laughed. “You fucking kidnapped me. That doesn’t make me complicit, that makes me a victim. There’s a form for that, by the way. League abduction report, subsection B. You’ll need to file it within twelve hours of my abduction.”
Before I could formulate a retort to that staggering display of administrative defiance, she stomped past me.
She marched straight to my command chair, the central seat, the one with the optimal sight-lines to every diagnostic console and tactical screen.
She plopped right down, curled one bare foot beneath her thigh, and glared at me from the dead center of my power.
Fuck.
She was in a rage, sitting in my chair, surrounded by my systems, wearing my technology on her face. Her posture radiated defiant ownership. She could command this entire aircraft from that position through sheer force of will.
I loved it. I loved the breathtaking audacity of it. Her absolute refusal against my absolute control made my cock instantly hard.
I walked over until I stood beside the chair, looking down at her soft, furious form. “Comfortable?”
“It’s a nice chair,” she said, refusing to look up at me.
I leaned down, bracing my hands on the armrests, caging her in. “You really aren’t going to help me with him?”
“Not a chance.”
“Even though you know I’ll get the information anyway?”
“Then get it,” she challenged, giving me a glare. “Do your Villain thing. But don’t ask me to grease the wheels for you. I have lines, Cipher. You drag me across most of them, but that one is still there.”
I stared at this principled, infuriating woman sitting in my chair, telling me no. She was fucking perfect.
“Fine,” I murmured. “Keep your lines. For now.”
I pushed off the chair and turned back to the containment cell, flicking the comms back on.
Velocity’s voice filled the bridge, tinny and grating through the overhead speakers.
“—think you’re some kind of prize? You think he’ll keep you?
He’s probably bored already. You’re just a warm hole to him.
Bet you have daddy issues, huh? That why you’re on your knees for a Villain? Sucking Cipher’s cock for attention?”
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.”
“Cipher—”
“No.” I leaned closer. “You want to save him? You want to play Keeper? Then here’s the deal,” I whispered. “You walk out those doors with Number Fifteen. You go to my office. You sit in my chair and you wait for me. If you do that, I will make his end quick.”
She shuddered and opened her mouth to argue but I squeezed her throat just enough to silence her.
“If you stay,” I continued, sliding my hand up to cup her jaw, “if you force me to have this conversation one second longer, I will peel him apart. I will take my time. And I will make you watch every second of it.”
Her breath hitched and her eyes went wide. She’d finally realized she wasn’t talking to Cipher the public persona anymore and I was certain she hadn’t forgotten how I’d forced her to watch Solstice’s death at the hands of Dread at the Opener.
“Choose, Annie.”
She stared at me for a heartbeat. Two. Then her gaze flickered to the containment cell, where Velocity was still shouting mute obscenities, oblivious to the fact that his style of execution hung on the whim of the woman he’d just abused.
“It will be quick?” She looked paler now but she still hadn’t shied away.
“Instant.”
She jerked her chin out of my grip. She didn’t look at Velocity again as she walked toward Fifteen.
“Number Fifteen,” she said, her voice regaining its professional clip. “Escort me to the office.”
The doors hissed shut behind them and the silence that remained on the bridge was absolute.
I turned back to the containment cell and looked at Velocity.
The cold inside me finally snapped into focus.
“Now,” I said to the room. “Where were we?”