Chapter 2
CIPHER
I jerked awake, my body launching upright before my mind fully surfaced. The sensation of shadows tearing through my chest lingered along with the memory of my own blood spraying across Annie’s horrified face.
Death had tasted like copper and regret.
My heart hammered against my ribs. The same ribs that had been shattered, then knitted back together. It had been three months since Dread had killed me. Months filled with waking up like this, drenched in sweat, convinced I was dying all over again.
But this time something else had followed me from the dream. Annie’s voice screaming my name, the raw desperation in it. The certainty that she was in danger.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed, the cool air hitting my sweat-slicked skin. “Lights, twenty percent.”
The bedroom illuminated with a soft glow that revealed nothing out of place in my meticulously ordered sanctuary. No immediate threat. Just the same expensive furniture, the same pristine surfaces. The same emptiness.
“Security feed: Bishop residence.”
The wall opposite my bed transformed into a display showing Annie’s apartment. A quick scan confirmed no intruders, no emergency. Just Annie, alone in her bedroom, arms wrapped tightly around herself as she paced the length of her room, every light possible on.
She’d had a nightmare too.
I wasn’t surprised. She’d spent three hours at the Crucible today. I’d watched her through the facility’s security cameras, noting how she’d flinched whenever there was a loud noise.
I ran a hand through my hair, grimacing at the dampness. The nightmare was fading, but the feeling of wrongness persisted.
I couldn’t shake the thought that I was fucking failing Annie by allowing this separation to continue for too long. But what was I supposed to do?
How much time was enough for her anger to cool, for her loneliness to deepen. How much time for the scales to tip, and give me the opening I needed to reclaim her.
I watched her sink onto the bed, her fingers running through her hair in a gesture of frustration.
Even through the security feed, I could see the exhaustion etched into her face.
The shadows under her eyes had deepened over the past three months and I had documented every fucking hour of sleep she’d lost.
“Fuck,” I muttered, scrubbing a hand over my face.
The urge to go to her chafed at me. I could be at her window in minutes. I could slip past the security system Havoc had upgraded and just be near her. I tried my best to ignore the urge.
“Computer, pull up Bishop cuff diagnostics.”
The screen split, Annie’s image shrinking to make room for the technical readout of her cuff. The one she had no idea came from me. My creation was wrapped snugly around her wrist day and night. Even now, when she wouldn’t let me touch her, a part of me remained pressed against her pulse point.
Without that digital tether, the reality of her absence threatened to fracture my mind as my thoughts kept looping back to the devastation in her eyes when she realized exactly what I was.
The need to go to her just to force her to look at me clawed at the inside of my skull.
It was a raw panic that my usual logic failed to suppress.
I watched the rhythmic spike of her heart rate on the monitor.
She wore my metal. She carried my engineering against her skin every single day.
Knowing my creation was physically bound to her was the only thing stopping me from dragging her back to my bed.
If I did that she would eventually give me her body, but the rest of her, my Annie, would be fucking lost to me forever.
I forced myself to focus on the scrolling numbers instead of the maddening distance between us but frowned at what I saw in the diagnostics.
Power fluctuations in the third quadrant.
Minimal, but there. The dampening field was holding, but not consistently enough.
Not for something keeping Halcyon’s power locked away.
Another failure to add to my growing collection.
I’d been working on a better version for months, but each prototype fell short of what I needed. The problem was elegant in its simplicity and maddening in its complexity.
“Bring up prototype seven schematics.”
The holographic display materialized in front of me, the intricate design rotating slowly. Beautiful, complex, and completely fucking useless. Like most of my recent work.
Annie shifted on her bed, pulling her knees to her chest. The movement was so vulnerable it made something in my chest constrict.
“End surveillance.”
The feed cut out, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the rotating schematic. I leaned back on my bed, staring at the ceiling, surrounded by the invisible threads that kept her tethered to me.
Three months since I’d touched her. Three months of watching from a distance, tracing the electronic outline of her existence, collecting every scrap of data, telling myself it was better this way. That she was safer without me.
A noble-sounding lie to mask the simple truth: I was terrified of seeing the look in her eyes when she remembered exactly what I was. What I’d done.
The Villain. The Betrayer.
I closed my eyes, but all I saw was Annie’s face when she’d realized the truth. The moment she understood that my love for her hadn’t been enough to overcome what I was.
“Computer, resume surveillance.”
I stared at the screen, the hollow feeling in my chest expanding like a black hole. This separation, this fucking misery, was entirely my doing. My masterpiece of self-sabotage.
“Computer, display calendar.”
The holographic display materialized, and I immediately spotted it—the date of the Nemesis match.
“Fuck me.”
It was customary for the Hero to send a message to the Villain just before the match through their Keeper.
So I’d see Annie. In person. I’d have to. After three months of pathetic long-distance stalking through security feeds, of designing upgrades for her cuff that I’d never give her because it wasn’t fucking good enough. Three months of drafting messages I’d never send.
The prospect sent a cold spike of something uncomfortably like fear through me because of all the things Annie should feel toward me, hatred, betrayal, she wouldn’t act on any of those things when we saw each other.
She’d be worse. She’d be professional. Polite.
She’d look at me like I was just another League member in the rotation.
Like I hadn’t had my tongue inside her perfect cunt not so long ago.
She’d look at me like I hadn’t died in her arms.
“Computer, what’s the protocol for faking your own death? Asking for a friend.”
The system ignored my sarcasm and helpfully displayed several contingency plans I’d created for exactly that scenario, which might say something deeply concerning about my life choices.
I dismissed them with a wave.
I glanced at the prototype cuff schematics still rotating in the air. Maybe I could—
No. Bringing her a gift would be pathetic. “Here’s an upgraded power dampener to contain the mind-control abilities you absorbed from the Super who murdered your family. Sorry I betrayed you. We good?”
I flopped back onto my bed, throwing an arm over my eyes. The correct response would be to swagger in, act like nothing had happened, and treat her with the same indifference she’d show me.
The thought made me want to punch something. Preferably myself.
I glanced back at the surveillance screen but Annie wasn’t in her room anymore.
It took only seconds to find that she had moved to her kitchen, mechanically preparing tea.
Her movements were precise but lifeless.
The Annie I knew burned bright with passion, whether it was fury or desire. This hollow version was my creation.
I’d done that to her. And I would undo it.
“Two weeks,” I muttered to the empty room.
Two weeks to prepare for seeing her again. To determine exactly which buttons to press, which vulnerabilities to exploit. To begin the delicate process of pulling her back into my orbit where she belonged.
And people thought being a Super Villain was all death rays and monologuing. If they could see me now, reduced to monitoring my ex’s tea-making routine and having an existential crisis at three in the fucking morning.
I rolled over and slammed my fist into the mattress. My brain, ever the helpful fucking companion, chose that moment to remind me she wasn’t my ex. We hadn’t dated because I didn’t date. “It’s just fucking,” I’d told her repeatedly, like the emotionally stunted asshole I was.
My rules. My terms. My brilliant fucking strategy to keep her at arm’s length while still getting to taste her.
But it had never been just fucking, had it?
The truth was lodged in my chest like shrapnel.
I was addicted to her. I needed her reluctant laugh like oxygen.
I pushed her buttons because demanding her absolute attention was the only thing that settled the static in my brain.
I wanted to possess her fury and her joy just as completely as I possessed her in my bed.
“Fuck,” I whispered to the ceiling. Because that was the extent of my emotional vocabulary when it came to Annie Bishop. A single expletive that couldn’t begin to encompass the clusterfuck of feelings she inspired.
Five hours later, I was hunched over my workbench, making microscopic adjustments to the power relay in Annie’s cuff prototype. Every circuit I tweaked, every line of code I wrote, was another way to bind her to me.
The delicate work required complete concentration, which made Dawn’s laughter from the kitchen all the more intrusive. Each bright peal of it was like a fucking ice pick to my eardrums.
Not because it was Dawn. Dawn was fine. Great, even. Smart, funny.
No, the problem was what that laughter represented: the fact that Menace had somehow stumbled ass-backward into a functional relationship while I was reduced to pathetically monitoring security feeds.