Chapter 38
ANNIE
Havoc hadn’t wanted me to leave the Tower. I’d seen it in his eyes, that protective, parental concern. But I couldn’t bear those familiar walls, couldn’t handle one more sympathetic glance.
My apartment was dark, Dawn most likely spending the night with Hunter again. I didn’t turn on a single lamp when I walked through the door. I just went to my bedroom and sank onto the edge of my mattress, staring out the window.
I was wrong about Cipher. So fucking wrong.
It hurt to breathe. He had looked me in the eye and severed everything about us. He reduced what we did, everything we shared, to a physical transaction. A game he had finally grown bored of playing.
He was exactly the monster he always claimed to be.
I dragged my hands down my face, digging the heels of my palms into my eyes until sparks danced in the blackness. I was furious with him. I wanted to scream, to find him and shove his cruel indifference right down his fucking throat.
But the fury I felt toward him was nothing compared to the rage I felt toward myself.
I ignored every instinct of self-preservation when I invited him in. I let him strip away my sanity and I begged him for more. My body still ached for him. Even now, sitting in the dark, humiliated and discarded, my heart beat faster at the memory of his hands on my skin.
And beneath the humiliation was the ultimate, pathetic truth. I loved him. I loved a man who viewed human connection as a strategic vulnerability to exploit.
I shook my head as if I could dislodge that thought. No. I loved a lie. All that time we spent together, the late nights in his lab, the man who held me in the aftermath of violence—that man didn’t exist.
He had manufactured that vulnerability. He traded me carefully selected pieces of his trauma to disarm me, to ensure I would submit to his control.
I squeezed my eyes shut, fighting the burn of tears. The fury when Baron Ash had taken me. The exhausted, blood-soaked collapse in his lab after he’d killed Ash’s network.
I wondered if parts he shared were real, even if he weaponized them to keep me compliant. The trauma, the possessive rage, they were too visceral to be fabricated. He might have used those truths to manipulate me and bind me to him, but they were still truths.
And if that was the case, if the blood and the scars and the ruthless protection were genuine, then maybe I didn’t just love a lie.
I had to believe that or I was going to lose my mind.
I uncurled myself and lay back on my bed, staring at the ceiling.
You wouldn’t tell me even if my safety, my life, might depend on it?
God, it sounded pathetic now, echoing in my head. Of course he thought I was trying to trap him or trick him. That’s what he would expect, games and manipulation. But I’d just needed to know where I stood. If what we had was real or if I was just convenient.
And now I knew. His feelings didn’t matter because all he saw me as was a warm body. That was it.
I swiped angrily at my eyes.
I was still staring at the ceiling when the soft hum of my apartment went silent. The darkness deepened around me as the faint glow from my digital clock faded to nothing. Outside my window, the ambient light from neighboring buildings disappeared, plunging my street into darkness.
A power outage. Perfect. Just what this night needed.
I didn’t bother moving. What was the point? I’d been lying here in the dark anyway, torturing myself with thoughts of him. At least now the total darkness beyond my window matched my mood.
A bitter smile crossed my lips. At least I didn’t have to worry about Cipher watching me through security cameras. Not that he would. I was less than nothing to him now.
The soft breeze pushed through my open balcony door, making the curtains billow inward like ghostly hands reaching for me. For a moment, the full moon appeared, casting a silver glow across my bedroom floor before the curtains swallowed it again.
I watched the play of shadow and moonlight, remembering how Cipher’s eyes would catch the light sometimes, turning luminous. How they’d darkened when he wanted me.
God, I was pathetic. I was thinking about his eyes while he had probably compartmentalized me into the past already. A data point with no relevance now.
I froze mid-thought as a familiar sensation crawled up my spine, that unmistakable awareness that prickled across my skin whenever a Trueborn super was nearby. It wasn’t anyone I knew.
The curtains billowed again, and I stifled a scream as they revealed the silhouette of a stranger against the moonlight, tall, broad-shouldered, and utterly still. I scrambled backward across my bed until my back hit the headboard.
Something was wrong with the shadows. They stretched across my floor, elongating toward my bed like grasping fingers. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe as the darkness itself reached for me.
The figure stepped into my room. I couldn’t see anything except for his eyes, glowing red like embers in the darkness, casting a sinister crimson light across what little I could see of his face.
“Annie Bishop,” he said, his voice so soft, so safe sounding. “The last Warden.”
“Who are you?” I managed to ask, hating how my voice trembled.
The red eyes narrowed slightly, and the shadows pulse around him, as if they were extensions of his body, living, breathing darkness.
“Someone who’s been looking for you.”
My eyes strained in the darkness, gradually adjusting until the shadowy figure became clearer. The red glow from his eyes cast enough light that I could finally make out his features. The sharp angles of his face, the cruel set of his mouth.
Dread.
Everything about him felt wrong. The way the shadows clung to him, moved with him. The unnatural stillness when he breathed.
And something else, that unmistakable signature of a Trueborn that I could sense. Yet he wasn’t registered as one. The League database listed him as serum-enhanced.
“You’re the one who stole the Tinkerer’s Hammer,” I whispered.
His eyes widened slightly, the red glow intensifying for a moment before settling back to its eerie, steady burn.
“Does that matter right now?” he asked, his voice still unnervingly gentle.
I pressed my back harder against the headboard, wishing I could melt through it. “What do you want?” I demanded, trying to sound brave while my heart beat wildly.
He took another step forward, and the shadows around his feet rippled across my bedroom floor. “For you to join Reeves,” he said simply. “Eventually.”
I fought to keep my breathing steady as Dread moved closer, each step bringing the living shadows with him.
“I didn’t get the luxury of testing Reeves. The old man needed to die quickly. But now...” His red eyes gleamed brighter and a cruel smile spread across his face. “Now that I have you in my possession, I have all the time in the world.”
My mind raced through options, none of them good. I couldn’t overpower him. Couldn’t outrun him. But I’d be damned if I’d just sit there and let him take me.
I launched myself off the bed and hit the floor running. The door was only a few steps away, if I could just reach it—
I crashed to the floor as something cold wrapped around my ankle, yanking me backward. The shadows themselves had grabbed me, cold as ice.
They shouldn’t have been able to touch me, not really. Maybe they technically weren’t, but they hovered over my skin, close enough that the difference between touching me and not it didn’t matter.
I kicked and thrashed as Dread dragged me across the floor, the darkness coiling around my legs, my waist, my arms. The shadows slithered over my mouth, hovering and muffling any sound I tried to make.
“Such spirit,” Dread murmured, hauling me to my feet. “Reeves trembled and begged. This will be much more entertaining.”
He dragged me toward the balcony and I fought against his grip, but the shadows only tightened, constricting around me until I could barely breathe.
At the balcony’s edge, Dread pulled me against his chest, one arm locked around my waist. The shadows retreated from my face, allowing me to gasp for air.
“Let’s see what you’re made of, Warden,” he whispered against my ear. Then we were flying, the lights of Chroma Bay spreading out below us as Dread carried me away into the darkness.
“Let me go!” I gasped.
His red eyes glowed brighter as he laughed, the sound cold and hollow. “Poor choice of words, Warden.”
I looked down at the dizzying drop below. The streets of Chroma Bay looked impossibly far away.
“I know your secret,” Dread crooned. “You’re a little broken, aren’t you?
Not a full Warden. Enough power to be hunted, but not enough to save yourself.
Not enough to stop me from using my powers around you.
” He tightened his grip, keeping my arms locked firmly at my sides.
“As long as you don’t touch my skin, you can’t do anything to me. ”
I noticed then what I’d missed before. He wore thin, tight-fitting gloves. His face was the only exposed skin.
He’d come prepared. He knew exactly what I was and how I was broken.
If I could just touch his skin. Just once. But my arms were pinned.
I’d never been more bitter about being broken.
“It would be so easy,” he mused, loosening his grip enough to make me scream. “Just open my hands and let gravity do the rest.”
I forced myself to breathe, to think past the terror clouding my mind. Screaming wouldn’t help. Panicking wouldn’t help. I needed to keep him talking, buy time for someone, anyone, to notice I was gone. But other than Havoc, I couldn’t think of anyone who would even note my absence.
“Why?” I managed to ask. “Why kill us? What threat could we possibly be to you?”
“It’s the fact that you could out me,” he hissed, bringing his face closer to mine. “The fact that you can resist my power. Right now your mind should be fucking fractured with fear, but there’s only this paltry amount.”