Chapter 27 #2
The crowd roared as another combatant went down, but all I could focus on was the fury radiating from the woman on my lap.
“You’re such an asshole,” she hissed.
“What did you expect when you climbed into my bed? That I’d suddenly develop manners?”
“I expected basic respect.”
“That’s adorably naive.” I slid my hand up her throat.
It was both a warning and a caress because nothing between us could be one without the other.
“You’re in the viper’s nest, Annie. Asking for respect here isn’t in the nature of the beast. I don’t operate on feelings.
I operate on utility. Leverage. Cause and effect.
You’re here because you serve a purpose.
Because your presence changes the math in my favor. That’s the only language that matters.”
I felt her swallow against my thumb. I wanted to press harder just to see what she’d do.
“Everything is a calculation,” I said, even as the words felt wrong. “Even this. Even us.”
“Is that all you see when you look at me?” Annie asked. “Just numbers in an equation?” She placed her hands flat against my chest. I tracked the exact moment her pulse spiked with adrenaline, the look of genuine betrayal on her face.
“If I’m just math to you, then calculate my exit,” she whispered viciously. She tried to pry herself off my lap. “I am done letting you use me for your fucking equations. Let me go.”
I tightened my grip on her waist even as the force of her disgust made my chest hollow out. I looked away, focusing on the arena floor where Hellhound was currently breaking his opponent’s knee. The snap of bone echoed through the stadium’s sound system.
“You’re not just numbers. That’s the fucking problem.” My brain started screaming as soon as I gave her the truth.
“What do you mean?”
“I can calculate the trajectory of every piece of debris in this arena. I can predict the structural failure of that spire within two seconds. But you?” I turned back to her. “You are the outlier. The variable that ruins the model.”
I gestured to the chaos below. To anyone else, it was just violence. To me, it was a cascading waterfall of data that I couldn’t turn off.
“I don’t see the world. I see the numbers underneath it. I see the stress fractures in the concrete before they happen. I hear the heartbeat of the man in the third row and know he’s going to have a cardiac event in twelve minutes.”
My voice cracked. It was the first time I’d let anyone see a hint of the frantic, terrifying machinery that whirred beneath the mask. I waited for her to recoil. I waited for the look I’d seen on the doctors’ faces, my parents’ faces, the fear of the broken boy who knew too much.
“I’ve spent years trying to keep the noise out, to pretend I’m just a man in a suit and not a machine that can’t stop running. But you? You’re the only thing that’s never fit the algorithm. You’re the silence.”
Annie stared at me. I expected her to look afraid, but she looked fascinated. “You’re always literally calculating everything?”
“Yes. It never stops. The noise. The numbers.”
She turned and looked out at the arena. She was quiet for a long time, long enough I wanted to shake her, to demand to know what she was thinking. But I waited. I let her digest what I’d told her.
She finally looked back up at me. “Do you do it during sex too?”
“I do it all the fucking time.”
“So...” She swallowed, her throat working against the tight leather collar. “What sort of numbers do you think about? During sex, that is.”
I stared at the pulse jumping against the leather at her throat.
I had already cracked the vault door wider for her than I ever had for another living soul.
My parents and the endless parade of childhood specialists never understood the staggering volume of data tearing through my skull every second of the day.
Giving her as much as I already had was a reckless miscalculation.
Giving her the rest of it felt like handing over a loaded weapon and pressing the barrel directly to my temple.
I weighed the high probability of her fear against my sudden need to strip away the final layer of my armor.
If she recoiled from the truth of how I mapped her out in my bed, it would poison the only quiet space I had in this world.
I hesitated, letting the noise of the arena wash over us while I analyzed exactly how catastrophic this confession could be.
But maybe it was worth the risk.
“You want to know? Fine. Last night, when I had you on your back, I wasn’t just fucking you. I was tracking your pulse, 122 beats per minute when I entered you. It spiked to 167 exactly three seconds before you came.”
“Oh,” Annie said softly.
“I measured the angle of my penetration,” I continued, relentless.
“Forty-seven degrees. That’s the precise tilt of your hips required to make you gasp.
Not moan—gasp. The sound of your brain short-circuiting.
I counted sixteen distinct muscle contractions during your climax with a total duration of 37.
2 seconds. I know exactly how much pressure to apply to your throat to trigger panic versus pleasure.
I know the dilation of your pupils to the millimeter when you take my cock in your throat. ”
I pulled back just enough to look into her eyes. They were wide and dark.
“I don’t just experience you, Annie. I map you. I turn every moan, every shiver, every reaction into data. And then I use it to break you apart more efficiently the next time.”
“Is that...” Her voice shook. “Is that why you’re so good at it?”
“That’s just the mechanics,” I whispered. “The rest is just hunger.”
She looked flushed and made a non-committal “hmm” sound.
I waited for more, a reaction, a question, anything, but she just turned her attention back to the arena where Hellhound was taking his victory lap.
Fucking perfect. I’d just told her about the inner workings of my freakish brain, and her response was the verbal equivalent of a shoulder shrug.
“That’s it? ‘Hmm’?” I kept my voice low despite my irritation.
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. ‘That’s fascinating, Cipher.’ ‘You’re a neurological marvel, Cipher.’ ‘Please use your Superhuman calculation abilities to make me come again, Cipher.’” I tightened my grip on her thigh. “Literally anything besides ‘hmm.’”
“Hmm,” Annie hummed again, this time with a fucking little shrug.
That was it. I was going to lose my fucking mind. “I swear to god, Sparks” I growled. “If you make that sound one more time, I’m going to throw something off this balcony. Possibly myself.”
She turned to face me. “What? It’s interesting.”
“Interesting,” I repeated flatly. “That’s your response to learning your fuck buddy’s brain functions like a Supercomputer?”
“Should I be more impressed?” A hint of amusement crept into her voice. “Or horrified?”
“Either would be better than ‘hmm,’” I muttered.
“Fine. I’m impressed by your freakish brain,” Annie said, pressing a kiss to my jaw. “Happy now?”
I wasn’t. Not remotely. But I couldn’t articulate why her casual acceptance and dismissal of something I’d tried to keep hidden my entire life made me want to burn the whole arena down.
“Sir,” came the voice of Number Eleven over comms. “The League media team is requesting your presence for the scheduled interview immediately.”
I frowned. “I thought that was after the third match.”
“Schedule change, sir. Apparently, Sledge sustained injuries in the first match and can’t do his segment. They’ve moved everything up.”
I suppressed a sigh. “Fine. I’ll be there in two minutes.”