Chapter 37 #2
I needed to push her away. I needed to open my mouth and deliver the verbal strike that would sever this dangerous tether between us. But my jaw remained locked. I was frozen, trapped by the terrifying reality that I didn’t actually want to sever anything. I wanted her.
Then Annie sealed her own coffin.
“You wouldn’t tell me even if my safety, my life, might depend on it?” she demanded.
The paralysis shattered and cold fury flooded my veins, washing away the hesitation.
Manipulation. It was such a base, predictable tactic.
My parents had used it. The doctors who cut into my skull had used it.
We’re doing this for your own good. Your life depends on it.
And now Annie. I had elevated her above the rest of the pathetic, self-serving world.
I had thought so much more of her. To see her stoop to the exact same emotional extortion everyone else used disgusted me.
The anger was a welcome relief. It set me free.
Now, I could be cruel.
“Your life?” I echoed. “You think highly of yourself, Bishop.” I didn’t sugarcoat the words.
I stripped away every ounce of the vulnerability I had foolishly shown her.
“You want the truth?” I kept my voice flat, completely devoid of warmth.
“Back in my bedroom, you were putting your clothes on. You were about to walk out the door. I ran the variables and calculated the precise sequence of words required to keep you in my bed.”
I watched the hurt bloom in her blue eyes, but I didn’t stop. She had tried to manipulate a monster and now she would pay for it.
“You were a pleasant distraction. You are a tight, wet body that takes a fucking exactly the way I demand it. That is the entirety of your value to me. I told you what you needed to hear so I could keep playing with my favorite toy. Did you really think I was harboring a bleeding heart for you?”
I leaned down, my mouth inches from her ear, ensuring she heard every fucking word.
“Our arrangement is about access. I want to use your body. If you require pretty, pathetic lies to keep your legs open for me, I will supply them. But do not ever try to manipulate me again. You’re a good fuck, Bishop. Nothing more.”
I watched the exact moment my words registered. The color drained from her face, leaving her skin as pale as bone under the harsh blue-gold beacon of the Tower. She looked completely, utterly shell-shocked.
A knot twisted in my gut. I was furious with her for backing me into a corner, but the velocity of my own self-hatred was staggering.
I was lying. Every vicious, degrading syllable I’d just spat at her was a complete fabrication.
She wasn’t just a tight, wet body to use and discard.
She was becoming my entire fucking universe.
My mind, which usually processed a thousand strategic variables a second, had narrowed down to a single, consuming obsession. She was all I could think about.
Even now, my physiology betrayed me. I wanted her to step forward.
I wanted her to grab my jaw and press her mouth to mine.
I craved the softness of her lips, the exact softness I despised in myself.
I didn’t do soft. But I could easily rationalize it if she initiated.
If she kissed me, I wasn’t the one being weak.
I wasn’t the one surrendering control. I was just taking what was offered.
But she didn’t step forward.
“Then we’re done,” she whispered. Her voice shook, but the finality in it was absolute. “The arrangement is over.”
She stared at me and I watched the hatred taking root in her blue eyes. I locked down every muscle in my face, burying my internal panic under impenetrable layers of ice.
Let her hate me. Hate was a clean, predictable metric.
Hate I could manage, calculate, and counter.
Hate was infinitely easier to deal with than the terrifying possibility that she might have been about to offer me something resembling love.
Love was a catastrophic weakness I couldn’t afford, a leash I refused to wear.
A single tear spilled over her lower lash line, cutting a shining path down her cheek. Then another followed. But her expression remained hollow. She didn’t wipe them away. She didn’t look like she even felt the moisture on her skin. She just looked numb.
She looked broken.
I turned and left her there, each step precise and measured despite the chaos raging inside me. The edge of the roof approached, my exit point, my escape from this conversation that had shattered everything.
Without another word, I stepped off the edge. I didn’t look back to see if she was watching. I let gravity claim me for five full seconds, the rushing air a violent roar in my ears, before I took flight.
As I moved away from the Tower, I deleted Annie’s contact from my personal communications system and revoked her access to the Labyrinth and penthouse.
Just like that, her digital footprint in my life vanished.
It was a required exorcism. Annie had violated the core rule of our arrangement.
She had demanded a confession, a piece of me, when my only obligation was to spread her thighs and fuck her.
She wasn’t allowed to make demands. Her role was submission.
The night air tore at me as I accelerated.
The wind howled through the microscopic seams of my armor, a physical manifestation of the ache spreading through the center of my chest. Below me, the sprawling grid of Chroma Bay blurred into meaningless streaks of neon and sodium vapor.
Countless pinpricks of brightness openly mocked the suffocating darkness rapidly expanding inside me.
I pushed harder. I needed speed. I needed the G-force to crush the air from my lungs so I wouldn’t have to process the sharp, jagged edges of what I’d just done. I flew as if velocity alone could create enough distance to outrun the memory of her tears.
I had known this would happen. I had calculated the trajectory of our arrangement from the very first night I’d fucked her. A dynamic built on dominance, pain, and fucking always had an expiration date. It was a volatile chemical reaction; eventual burnout was a certainty.
I just hadn’t expected the fallout to hurt like this.
But it was better this way. I had to sever the infected tissue before the rot spread. End it now, before I compromised myself any further. Before I did something genuinely pathetic, like fly back and beg her for forgiveness.
This was for the best. Now, I could refocus. Get back to the objectives that actually mattered. The Tinkerer’s Hammer. Ripping Dread’s head from his shoulders. My ascension through the ranks.
I repeated those goals like a mantra as I tore through the sky.
The Hammer. Dread. Ascension. I chanted it to drown out the relentless, echoing voice in the back of my skull, the terrifying, logical voice of my own genius, whispering that I had just made the single most catastrophic mistake of my life.