Page 59 of Villainous Intent

CHAPTER 12

ANNIE

I paced my bedroom, glaring at my tablet. The screen displayed the League’s public website, a slick, professionally designed PR front that told me absolutely nothing useful about their actual operations or members.

“Useless,” I muttered, tossing the tablet onto my bed.

Earlier, I’d spent twenty minutes of futile hacking and the Alliance database locked me out. Havoc’s text flashed on my phone, unapologetic:

Dad

Nice try. Day OFF means OFF, Annie.

He’d followed up with the threat of losing access to the Tower for a full week.

All of this was because of one itty-bitty Villain murder at the party I’d attended last night. That didn’t mean I had to take the day off. I wasn’t dead.

Havoc had to know I wasn’t just browsing. I was hunting. Somewhere in that list of smiling sociopaths was a rogue Trueborn.

At the Tower, I could access complete dossiers on every League Villain, their powers, weaknesses, known associates. At my apartment, I was limited to whatever garbage the League wanted the public to see.

Even Villain Watch didn’t have the information compiled in a nice, neat way, and I was too upset to go there, anyway. Cipher was probably watching what I was doing on my laptop and I couldn’t handle him right now.

I flopped onto my bed, and my mind circled right back to Cipher against my will.

One minute he had been a shield, his body a wall of heat at my back, his hand around my throat. The next, he was cold and distant. All because I dared to touch him when Baron Ash challenged him.

“Oh no, Annie touched my hand. Better act like she committed high treason against the sacred League of Villain Egos,” I muttered to myself.

I grabbed a pillow and hugged it to my chest.

Before Ash arrived, things with Cipher had been good. Better than good. I closed my eyes and the memory washed over me, uninvited and sharp. The way he’d effortlessly drawn an orgasm out of me, the scrape of his teeth against my neck.

I squeezed the pillow, trying to smother the ache in my chest. I shouldn’t be thinking about him. I had actual problems to solve. A rogue Trueborn to identify. But I couldn’t help replaying the feeling of his weight against me and wondering what I had done to make him stop.

“Congratulations, Cipher,” I whispered to my bedroom, “you’ve successfully confused and annoyed a woman who organizes Superhuman paperwork for a living. What an accomplishment. Put that on your evil résumé.”

I grabbed the tablet again, needing to purge him from my thoughts. I scrolled through a random Villain’s profile. Energy manipulation. Enhanced durability. Vague terms for terrifying realities. Nothing that would help me learn for the next time I had to go out with Cipher. I didn’t want to go into the next outing knowing almost nothing except what the Alliance and the League wanted me to know.

I laid back and closed my eyes. The morning breeze from my open balcony door washed over me. I’d changed into sweatpants and a tank top once I’d been kicked out of the Tower, and the air raised goosebumps along my bare arms.

The silence of the apartment pressed in against my eardrums. It had been so long since I just stopped. Since I let my guard down and felt anything other than responsibility.

My body felt heavy as it sank into the mattress. For a second, I let myself imagine it wasn’t the breeze touching my skin. I let myself imagine heat. Weight. A pair of silver eyes watching me.

The thought made my pulse jump.

My body was a traitor. It didn’t care that he had humiliated me. It didn’t care that he had used me as a prop to assert dominance over the League and then discarded me the moment he got bored. My brain knew he was a monster.

My body just missed the weight of him.

I could still feel the pressure of his hand sliding between my legs, his fingers brushing against the lace of my panties moments before he’d pulled them aside.

“Fuck,” I whispered to the empty room.

I pressed my thighs together, trying to grind the sensation away. It didn’t work. The friction only made the ache sharper. I was lying in my safe, quiet bedroom, dripping wet for a man who had looked at me with cold indifference.

“Comfortable?”