Chapter 31
CIPHER
I couldn’t stop staring at my hands. Dried blood crusted in the creases of my knuckles, flaking off like rust onto the lab floor. I didn’t even remember flying back to the Labyrinth, didn’t remember walking through the corridors. All I knew was that people had scattered when they saw me coming.
But before that, before the blood and the silence and the empty flight home, there had been Annie.
Annie, who hadn’t run when I told her exactly what I was, who hadn’t flinched when I confessed to enjoying Ash’s death. Annie, whose eyes had widened behind her mask not with horror but with something dangerously close to understanding.
She’d kissed me with Baron Ash’s blood still on my hands.
My fist slammed into the nearest workbench, the impact sending tools scattering across the surface. The pain barely registered, just another set of numbers cataloging nerve endings and pressure thresholds.
“FUCK!” The word tore from my throat, echoing off the sterile walls.
My thoughts were everywhere and overwhelming in a way they hadn’t been since I was a child. The exact force needed to shatter the reinforced glass of my fabrication station—the precise words Annie had whispered against my mouth— the statistical probability that I was completely fucking losing it—
And on and on and on.
I’d sent her away. After fucking her against that wall, after showing her the darkest, most twisted parts of myself, I’d dismissed her like she was nothing.
No one was supposed to see that side of me.
No one. That particular part of me wasn’t for public consumption, it was the ugly truth behind the carefully crafted Villain persona.
The part I kept locked away so it would hopefully never see the light of day.
Annie had seen it and she hadn’t run. She’d pressed herself against me and pulled me closer.
My arm swept across the workbench, sending equipment crashing to the floor. The sound of breaking glass and twisting metal was oddly satisfying. It was destruction I could control, chaos I could create.
I grabbed the edge of the table and flipped it, the heavy graphene composite crashing down with a thunderous boom. My mind calculated the trajectory, the point of impact. All meaningless numbers that didn’t drown out Annie’s voice in my head.
“I’m glad he’s dead,” she’d whispered, and something in me had broken open.
I stalked to the fabrication station, my reflection warped in the curved glass. I drove my fist through the transparent barrier. It shattered exactly as predicted, the material giving way with a satisfying crack that sent shards exploding outward.
Blood dripped from my knuckles. The cuts would heal in seconds. The memory of Annie’s face wouldn’t.
I tore through the lab, destroying everything within reach. Monitors shattered under my fists. Prototypes I’d spent weeks perfecting crumpled in my hands.
“You fucking idiot,” I snarled at myself, kicking over a storage unit. Components worth millions scattered across the floor. “You absolute fucking idiot.”
I wasn’t supposed to care. She wasn’t supposed to matter. This was just sex, just a convenient arrangement. Just bodies, fucking, and a way to get at her secrets.
I had wanted to own her, every part of her, but she wasn’t supposed to fucking matter.
My breath came in harsh gasps as I stood in the center of the wreckage, surrounded by the broken remnants of my carefully ordered world. The silence that followed the crash was heavy, but it was nothing compared to the void that had opened up inside me the moment I’d found Annie in the tunnels.
I had always prided myself on my control. On the ability to detach, to view the world as a series of problems to be solved. People were variables. Emotions were chemical reactions.
But when I turned that corner and saw Ash’s bulk pinning her to the concrete, saw his hand on her skin, the detachment evaporated. There was no logic in the way my heart had slammed against my ribs. There was no strategy in the blinding terror that had seized me.
For a split second, before the rage took over, I had felt… Small.
I gripped the edge of the ruined workbench, the metal biting into my palms. I needed to call it obsession. I needed to file it under “fixation” or “territorial instinct.” Those were manageable. Those were things I could starve out or indulge until I was bored.
But obsession didn’t make you feel like you were bleeding out just because she was in pain. Obsession didn’t make a man who valued his intellect above all else suddenly willing to burn his entire life to the ground just to keep one person breathing.
If she had died in that tunnel, the rest of it, the League, the years of planning, would have meant nothing. I would have been king of a graveyard.
She wasn’t just a part of the game anymore. She was the only thing that made the game worth playing. She was the quiet in the noise of my head, the only reality in a life built on lies.
Annie’s face floated before me, the hurt in her eyes when I’d dismissed her, the acceptance when I’d confessed to enjoying the kill.
She had accepted something she shouldn’t have.
When I backed her against that wall, my hands still slick with blood, she hadn’t recoiled.
I had fucked her while still riding the euphoric high of a brutal execution.
I used her body to process my rage and my bloodlust. I poured every ounce of my violence into her, and she took it.
She swallowed the worst parts of me and offered me her own ruin in return.
I had spent my entire life starving the worst parts of my nature.
That isolation was what kept everyone safe.
But Annie had looked at the blood on my hands and pulled me in.
After decades of hiding everything about myself, she’d listened to the obsessive way my mind worked at the Colosseum and shrugged it off like it was the easiest thing in the world to digest.
If I let her accept me, my control would shatter.
The tight grip I kept on my own darkness only existed because I knew how poorly it would end for me if the world saw me for what I truly am.
If she took away that barrier and proved I am allowed to exist exactly as I am, I would stop holding back.
I would let the monster off the chain. I would wrap all that possessive need around her and consume her. And she would let me do it.
Her acceptance was a death sentence for my sanity.
I had to push her away. I had to order her out of that room with cold indifference because if she had stayed for one more second, the mask would have shattered. If she had stayed, I would have taken her and never let her leave. I would have dragged her down into the darkness with me forever.
I sank to my knees among the debris, glass crunching beneath me.
In the silence of the destroyed lab, another sound filtered through the chaos of my mind. Baron Ash’s voice. The memory of it so vivid it might have been playing through hidden speakers.
“You’re dressed like a little slut, so why not treat you that way?”
I slammed my fist into the floor and the surface cracked under the impact.
“I’m going to take your pussy right there, so he has to watch a real man pound into his bitch and take her.”
I made a sound I’d never heard from my own throat before, something between a sob and a roar. My hand shot out and grabbed a jagged piece of glass from the floor. I squeezed until it shattered further, blood running between my fingers.
If I’d been even thirty seconds later, he would have raped Annie while she was drugged and terrified.
I’d watched the security footage. After Havoc had taken her. After I’d made sure she was safe. I’d hacked into the Colosseum’s underground security system and found the footage of what had happened before I arrived.
“I want to watch the light go out in your eyes properly—”
“FUCK!” I hurled a twisted piece of metal across the lab where it embedded itself in the wall.
I wanted to kill him all over again. I wanted to break more than just his limbs this time. I wanted to crush his fucking skull between my hands, feel the bone give way, and watch the light die in his eyes.
I’d been too merciful in the arena. Too quick. He deserved so much worse for what he’d done to Annie.
The memory of her bruised throat flashed through my mind, those massive fingerprints marking her delicate skin. The way she’d trembled in my arms as I carried her through those tunnels. The tiny, broken sound she’d made when she tried to speak my name.
I hadn’t spoken to her. Not a single word of comfort or reassurance. I’d carried her to safety and then walked away because I knew—I fucking knew—that if I opened my mouth, all that would come out was rage. And she’d been through enough without having to witness that.
So I’d stayed silent. I’d let Havoc take her. I’d sat in my chair, staring at nothing, while the only person I’d ever cared about was carried out of my life.
“Cipher?”
Her voice. That raspy, drugged voice calling my name as Havoc carried her away. I’d heard it. I’d wanted to turn around. I’d wanted to go to her.
I pushed myself to my feet, glass and metal crunching beneath me.
Ash had tried to turn her terror into a public spectacle.
He had leaked the footage from the security cameras to the morning programs and underground forums. The media outlets had sanitized the broadcast just enough to slip past the censors.
They cut the feed before his hands shoved her dress up.
They hid the true, sickening extent of his assault on her.
But they still showed his hands wrapping around her throat. They showed her struggling.
I eradicated the footage from the public domain with absolute prejudice. I made sure anyone searching for the video found nothing.
The only copy left in existence belonged to me now.
“Computer,” I said, my voice raw, “access security footage from Colosseum sub-level B, tunnel 7, timestamp 14:37 to 14:52.”
The holographic display flickered among the wreckage, showing Baron Ash looming over Annie. I watched again as his hand shoved her skirt up, as she fought with drugged, uncoordinated movements, as he reached for her mask.
I watched myself arrive, watched the fight that wasn’t really a fight at all.
“Pause.”
The image froze on Baron Ash’s masked face as I’d scooped Annie up to get her to safety before the service tunnel collapsed.
I stared at that masked face for a long time, remembering the exact sensation of my hands on his neck in the arena, the precise resistance his spine had offered before giving way.
“Delete the footage,” I said finally.
Some things didn’t need to be preserved. Some nightmares didn’t need to be revisited.
I stared at the wreckage of my lab, the dried blood on my knuckles, and felt a cold clarity descend over me.
Baron Ash was dead. But that wasn’t enough. He hadn’t acted alone. He couldn’t have accessed those tunnels without inside help. Couldn’t have obtained Somnolax without connections. Couldn’t have orchestrated a kidnapping from the Colosseum without proper backing.
Someone had helped him. Multiple someones.
“Number Three.”
“Sir.” The response over comms was immediate.
“I want everything on Baron Ash. Every fucking associate. Every contact. Every piece of shit who ever breathed the same air as him. I want names and locations.”
“Understood, sir.”
I cut the connection and moved to the display that had somehow survived my rampage. With a gesture, I brought up a map of Chroma Bay, my mind already plotting routes, calculating timing, factoring in Alliance response patterns.
Tonight, I was going hunting.
The numbers running through my head were a familiar refuge from the storm of emotions I couldn’t process.
I didn’t know what to do about Annie. Didn’t know how to handle the way my chest constricted when I thought about her or how to process the fact that she’d seen the monster and still embraced me.
But I knew how to kill. I was exceptionally good at it.
My communicator chimed. Number Three had already sent the first batch of data. I scrolled through it, memorizing faces, names, locations. Baron Ash’s network spread through Chroma Bay like a cancer. Corrupt security personnel, black market dealers, underground fight promoters.
Baron Ash had been the visible cancer. Tonight, I would excise every last metastasized cell.
I caught my reflection in a fragment of shattered glass. Eyes cold, jaw set.
My communicator chimed again. More data. More targets.
I smiled.
The lab’s destruction around me was nothing. Just a tantrum, a child breaking toys.
What I would bring to Chroma Bay tonight? That would be a masterpiece of devastation.