Chapter 5
ANNIE
I collapsed back against the elevator wall and slid down until my ass hit the floor. I jabbed at the button but missed. The elevator didn’t move.
“Fuck.”
My date had been Cipher.
The Cipher.
The same man whose fan accounts I trawled through late at night on ShadowSnap. The same Villain whose casual cruelty on screen made my pussy ache.
And he’d been flirting with me. Or was he toying with his food? I squeezed my eyes shut. Please let it be flirting. I don’t think my pride would survive being the punchline to his joke.
“His face,” I whispered to the elevator doors. “I saw his face.”
If he ever did a face reveal, ShadowSnap would crash and burn hard. The people on the MaskedTemptations subforum, the ones who wrote detailed manifestos begging to be his collateral damage, would lose their minds. They worshiped the mask, but the man beneath it?
He would ruin them.
Why did he even wear it? To protect himself, or to protect us? Cipher was devastating, a weaponized kind of beauty that made you willing to bleed just to keep his attention.
I finally managed to hit the button and the elevator lurched upward. I needed to get my act together and fast. The Aegis was waiting. The faceless gods who controlled the Alliance viewed emotion as a defect.
I stood and tried my best to look like the Keeper I was and not a woman who had just realized she wanted to kneel for a monster.
My phone chimed with another alert as I stepped off the elevator.
URGENT: Meeting with Aegis agents in Havoc’s office. Attendance mandatory. 10 minutes.
“Perfect. Just perfect.” I smoothed my dress down.
“Talking to yourself again, Miss Bishop?”
“Shit!” I clasped my chest as Simmons popped into existence at my elbow. The man needed to wear a fucking bell sometimes. “Simmons, hi. I’m fine.”
Simmons raised a brow. “I didn’t inquire about your state of being, but I appreciate the unsolicited update.”
“Right. Yes. Sorry.” I cleared my throat. “The Aegis is here?”
“One of their messengers is prepping Havoc about the upcoming conference call now. He’ll be ready for you once the messenger leaves.” He looked me over. “May I suggest you visit the powder room before the meeting? You appear somewhat flushed.”
I made my way to the bathroom, my inner voice screaming the entire way. I splashed cold water on my face, trying to shock my brain back to reality. As I stared at my reflection, another bomb detonated in my memory.
Holy shit, Dawn’s dating Menace.
My best friend was dating a League member and she didn’t even know.
I’d recognized Menace the moment I saw him. He wasn’t exactly a household name, but he was on the Alliance watch list. And I’d said nothing. I just sat there sipping my wine while my best friend gave doe-eyes to a League member.
She was going to murder me when she found out I knew and even if she didn’t, she would be friendship-ending levels of pissed. I was in an impossible situation because there are strict rules governing that sort of thing. My entire career would be in jeopardy if I ratted Menace out to Dawn.
But the more I thought about it, maybe it wasn’t so bad.
Menace wasn’t exactly Super Villain levels of Villain.
He was barely hanging onto his Archfiend status, and rumor had it he’d failed his last two advancement evaluations.
His powers were limited at best, something about sensing fear and some minor shadow manipulation. Nothing particularly threatening.
Every notable score on his record came from team-ups with Cipher. Solo, he was practically a non-entity in the Villain world.
Maybe it wasn’t that serious. Dawn never stayed with a guy more than a few weeks.
The last guy had been too clingy. The one before that had talked too much about his mother.
And the one before that had an annoying laugh.
Dawn’s dating history was a revolving door of brief encounters and quick exits.
She’d dump Menace before it became an issue and if not, well, I’d cross that bridge when we got there.
Then you better bleed enough to make it worth my time. My words had been repeating on a loop ever since I’d left the restaurant. What had gotten into me?
Most men would have recoiled, laughed it off, or looked at me with concern if I’d held a knife to them. Cipher had looked at the knife like it was an invitation.
When his eyes had darkened, pupils expanding until the silver was swallowed by an endless, hungry black, I had wanted to kneel for him. I’d wanted to beg him to ruin me.
I gripped the edge of the sink until my knuckles turned white.
Fuck. Had he seen it? The rot beneath my mask?
The part of me that was exhausted from holding myself together?
He must have. He saw me holding the knife, and looked at me like he knew exactly how desperate I was to let someone else take the handle.
To let someone else decide where the cut would go.
My phone buzzed and I almost dropped it trying to read the screen. Another message from Havoc:
Meeting starting soon. Where are you?
“Shit!” I ran for Havoc’s office and cringed as I took in my outfit. My boobs were on display with the neckline of my dress, but I hadn’t expected to be called back in to work tonight. It wasn’t the most professional attire, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
I stepped into Havoc’s office as the Aegis messenger was leaving. He was a tall, lean man in a gray suit with no distinguishing features beyond the silver pin on his lapel denoting him as an Aegis messenger.
I nodded as we passed each other, but his eyes slid over me as if I weren’t there. Typical. Most people treated Keepers like glorified secretaries, necessary but beneath notice.
“Charming as always,” I muttered under my breath as the door closed behind him.
Havoc was standing at the windows behind his desk.
“Annie, I’m sorry for interrupting your evening,” he said, gesturing for me to join him at the window. “I hope I didn’t pull you away from anything important.”
“It’s fine,” I blurted. “Is everything okay?”
His gaze was guarded as he looked out at the city. “Today’s fight between Dread and Obsidian served as cover. During the chaos after the match, the Archives under the League’s headquarters were breached. An artifact, the Tinkerer’s Hammer, was stolen.”
I didn’t know much about the former Villain known as the Tinkerer. He’d retired when I was in middle school and passed away a few years after that. He was best known for his wild inventions and his Hammer had been his signature piece.
“Soooo,” I drew out the word, thinking through what I might be missing. “Are they mobilizing you to recover it or…” I trailed off. If that had been the case, he would have said it outright.
“No, not exactly. According to the Aegis, it’s impossible for someone who is a Super by serum to break into the archives. Their powers would be nullified by the power dampeners in place.”
“So a Trueborn Super did it. Okay. What does that have to do with you?”
Havoc looked exhausted. “All current Trueborns are accounted for at the time of the crime. They’re looking for a rogue.”
A chill passed over me. “What?”
I turned and started pacing the length of the office, needing to move, to do something.
Trueborn Supers were rare enough, and their power signatures were unmistakable.
The only rogues the League and Alliance had problems with were the ones that received the serum illegally. Even then, they were caught quickly.
“How could they—” hide what they were is what I was going to say, but cut myself off. We both knew one answer to that particular question.
There had only been one rogue Trueborn hiding what they were in recent history.
The former Alliance member Halcyon had managed it because he’d been gifted with the ability to influence those around him.
Subtly bend them to his will. He would make everyone who figured out what he was forget.
And if he couldn’t make them forget, well, a lot of people had gone missing during his active years.
God, I didn’t want to think about that bastard. I realized my hand had gone to my cuff instinctively. “Okay, well, we know one way they could hide themselves.”
Havoc nodded, but said nothing, tracking me as I paced. “The Aegis has asked me to double check Alliance members.” He paused, like he was trying to figure out how to break bad news.
“But?” I asked, when Havoc’s pause stretched on.
“But given that the Hammer was stolen from the League archives, they believe it was done by a League member. The Aegis wants you to work with the Syndicate.”
I stopped dead in my tracks. “The Syndicate? They want me to work with the League?”
“I can’t exactly go to League events anymore and mingle,” he said dryly.
“And they think I can? How the hell am I supposed to examine League members without raising suspicions? I’m your Keeper. The moment I start poking around, they’ll know something’s wrong.”
“They don’t want you poking around.” Havoc still hadn’t turned from the window. “They want you to look.”
I stopped pacing.
There was looking, and then there was looking.
I didn’t like looking. Every hour of every day, through every clash and every bout, every time I had to stand shoulder to shoulder with a crowd of supers, I kept it locked down. Keeping it off cost me nothing. It was as automatic as breathing.
Turning it on was the expensive part. The last time I’d done it in a real crowd I’d spent the following day in a blacked-out room with a wet cloth over my face and a bowl beside the bed, and all I’d learned for my trouble was that a lot of Supers in one building generated a pressure I couldn’t turn down once I’d let it in.
“How do they expect me to look, exactly?” I asked. “There are over three hundred names on the League register. Half of them wouldn’t let me within twenty feet of them, and the other half would only let me close so they could see if I flinched.”
“I don’t know yet. The messenger gave me the theft, the Trueborn, and your name. That’s it.” He finally turned from the glass. “They’re presenting the rest on the call. To both of us. At the same time.”
“Why would they—”
“I imagine it’s because they know if they told me what they wanted you to actually do first, I’d have thrown the messenger off the roof and they’d have had to send another one.”
“It’s probably nothing dramatic,” I said. “Observation work. They’ll want me near enough to sweep a room, they’ll build in some cover story, I’ll file a report. That’s most of my job already.”
“They wouldn’t have sent a messenger ahead of a conference call for something simple,” he said.
No. They wouldn’t have.
I looked down at my hands. My thumb had found the cuff again without asking permission, worrying at the seam where the metal met my skin, and I made myself stop.
“You could still do it,” I said. “You’d just have to shake a lot of hands.”
“Three hundred of them. While every one of them wonders why the Alliance’s top Hero suddenly wants to touch them.” His mouth flattened. “They already ran the numbers, Annie. That’s why the messenger came with your name on his tongue instead of mine.”
“It would work, though.”
“It would work eventually. On one League member at a time, at arm’s length, if he let me close enough and held still while I did it.” He looked at his own hand for a second, then let it drop. “It used to be a room. Now it’s a handshake.”
There it was.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t.”
“I broke it. You had something whole and now you’ve got a party trick, and that’s on me.”
“You were ten years old.”
“That doesn’t make it not true.”
I’d been ten. I’d grabbed his hand because it was the only thing in that house that wasn’t trying to kill me, and I hadn’t known how to let go, and by the time somebody pried my fingers loose I’d taken something I had no right to and left the rest of it in pieces.
He crossed the office and put his hands on my shoulders.
“You don’t apologize for that,” he said. “You don’t apologize for surviving. Not to me. Not to them.”
I nodded, because nodding was faster than arguing.
He’d been telling me the same thing since I was eleven. I had never once believed him.
“You can say no,” he said. “Whatever they ask you to do, you can say no.”
“I know.”
“You won’t.”
“I know.”
The pen on his desk gave a faint rattle against the wood. He let out a breath and dragged a hand down his face. “One of these days I’d like you to surprise me.”
“You’d hate it. You don’t like surprises.”
The corner of his mouth moved. Barely. It was still something.
A chime echoed through the office. My stomach pulled into a knot and stayed there.
Havoc pushed my hair back off my forehead and pressed a quick kiss there, the same as he had before every hearing, every evaluation, every meeting where somebody in an expensive suit talked about me in the third person while I sat in the room.
“It will be okay, Annie.”
I nodded even though I didn’t believe him.
I straightened my shoulders and tried to look like a woman who wasn’t already saying yes to a question she hadn’t heard yet.
“Are you ready?” Havoc asked.
“No,” I admitted softly. “But I never am when it comes to them.”
He pressed the button. The screen on the wall came to life as the call connected.