Page 172 of Villainous Intent

“Because you refuse to fulfill them,” I argued, not even trying to hide the frustration and hurt bleeding into my voice. “ I care about⁠—”

“What you feel is just as irrelevant as what I feel,” he interrupted. “It changes nothing because neither of us can change who we are. I am Cipher. You are Annie. You need order and structure and rules. I am the antithesis of that. Those are immutable facts. Just because you let go for a few hours when you’re with me, let yourself succumb to the chaos of what I represent while we’re in bed, doesn’t change who you are.”

I forced myself to look away from his face, fixing my eyes on the spinning blue holograms above my trapped wrist. I had asked for the monster. I had agreed to the terms. I had no right to be upset when the monster refused to become a man.

The diagnostic beeped softly, signaling its completion. The display above my cuff shifted from scanning patterns to incomprehensible strings of code and measurements.

“You can relax your arm now.”

I withdrew my arm slowly, rubbing at the slight indentation the edge of the workbench had left on my skin. My wrist felt strangely naked despite the cuff still being firmly in place, as if his scanning had somehow exposed me further.

Cipher didn’t look at the data floating above us. He didn’t reach for his keyboard or make notes or do any of the things I’d expect from him after completing the diagnostic.

“What would you have me say, Annie? That I have feelings for you?” He shook his head. “I can’t feel anything for you. It’s inconvenient at best, dangerous at worst.”

I opened my mouth but struggled to formulate a response that made any sense against the complicated tangle of emotions I was feeling.

“Don’t,” he said quietly. “You don’t need to say anything. Feelings change nothing in the grand scheme of things,” he continued. “I don’t date. I don’t do relationships. All feelings would do is complicate things horrendously.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that.

Cipher turned his attention back to the display.

“Interesting,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. His eyes flicked to my face.

“Would you like my professional opinion on your cuff?” he asked.

“Sure. What the hell.”

“Clunky,” Cipher snapped. “Inefficient. Outdated. Whoever designed this was working with limited resources and even more limited imagination.”

I pursed my lips. “Of course you’d say that. Is there anything you don’t think you could improve upon?”

“Your orgasms, perhaps.” He swiped through the data with a flick of his wrist. “Also, you shouldn’t use the stunner function again.”

“What? Why not?” I asked, despite my irritation that he’d bring his sexual prowess into the conversation.

His expression turned serious. “There’s a fault in the circuitry. You’re lucky it didn’t break when you electrocuted me off that rooftop.”

My stomach dropped. “What do you mean, break?”

“I mean the next time you use it, the shock might overload the dampening systems.” He leaned back in his chair. “The cuff might not survive, and neither would its control over whatever power it’s suppressing.”

Horror crawled up my spine like ice-cold fingers. My hand instinctively covered the cuff, as if I could somehow protect it, protect everyone, through sheer force of will.

“But it’s working now, right?”

“As well as it could be, given what it is.” Cipher shrugged. “I wouldn’t recommend testing its limits.”

“That’s not exactly comforting.”

“It wasn’t meant to be. It was meant to be accurate.”

I watched Cipher’s face as he studied the readouts, his expression absorbed.

Just like that, we were back to normal. Whatever normal was for us.

Something hollow opened up inside my chest, a cavern expanding with each breath. In all the stories, those ridiculous fanfictions I’d devoured about Cipher falling for the heroine, this wasn’t how it went. In those fantasies, the moment the Villain realized they were in love, everything changed. They’d abandon their evil ways, throw aside their plans for world domination, all for the woman who’d somehow captured their heart.