Page 78 of Villainous Intent

And then, I pulled my hand away.

Cipher’s eyes snapped opened and the shock on his face was absolute.

A dark, triumphant satisfaction took root in me. I had reduced the most dangerous man in Chroma Bay to a shuddering, gasping mess. I had brought him right to the edge, and I was leaving him exactly as he had left me on the floor of his lab.

But the smugness evaporated the second he lifted his head. Cipher looked feral instead of defeated.

My triumph bled out as the throb between my thighs became urgent, demanding attention. I wanted him. And looking at the hunger burning in his gaze, for once, I could believe that he actually wanted me too.

I gasped as his hand wrapped around my throat and he pulled me closer. He brushed his mouth against mine, the contact so agonizingly soft it made my knees weak.

“Are you going to say yes to me?” he whispered against my lips. “Please say yes, Annie. Fucking say yes.”

Every instinct screamed at me to run. To get back to the safety of the party. To the light.

But I didn’t want to fight myself anymore. The exhaustion of pretending to be pristine, of forcing myself into the neat little box of Keeper Bishop, had hollowed me out. In his lab, Cipher had laid out the exact terms: a transactional, no-strings-attached physical arrangement. Pure, unapologetic sex.

I wanted the monster. I wanted him to be rough with me. I craved the sharp sting of his teeth and the dark bruises his fingers would leave on my thighs. I needed his violence to drown out the constant, deafening noise of my own rules.

“Yes,” I whispered.

His fingers immediately tightened around my throat. The squeeze was enough to restrict the airflow, sending a spike of panic through me. Before I could fight, his other hand buried itself in the hair at the back of my head. He fisted the carefully styled waves and yanked my head back.

I hissed as the sting radiated across my scalp.

Cipher held me there, suspended in the sharp, sudden pain, before his grip gentled just enough to let me drag in a desperate breath. He leaned in and brushed his lips over mine.

“This is how it works from now on, Annie,” he murmured against my mouth. “I am done hiding. And I know you are, too. I am so fucking tired of holding myself back.”

He dragged his lips along my jawline. “I’ve seen your browser history. I know exactly what you read. I’ve watched you get off to it when you think you’re alone. You don’t want romance. You want fear and pain. Real pain.” He gave my hair another deliberate tug, sending a fresh jolt of heat rolling through my body until it settled between my legs. “Not just a little spanking to make your ass pink. You crave the kind of intensity that makes your brain shut down because it’s the only way your body can process the sensation. And I am going to fucking give it to you.”

His hand slid from my throat, tracing a burning path down my chest before his arm wrapped around my waist and hoisted me off the ground.

The world tilted as he stepped forward and set me onto the stone ledge of the roof.

I instinctively wrapped both of my legs tight around his waist because behind me was nothing but the fog and a deadly drop into the neon-lit abyss of Chroma Bay. Cipher was the only solid thing tethering me to the earth. If he let go and stepped back, I would plummet to my death.

“I am going to use your body however I want and you are going to let me. Because it is exactly what you’ve been fantasizing about while you pretend to be such a good, little Keeper.”

He was going to give me the fantasy. I got the dark, twisted thrill of submitting to a monster, surrendering the crushing weight of my own control and the endless rules I clung to. And in exchange, he got to stop pretending to be human for a while. It was a perfect intersection of our dysfunctions. No strings attached. No messy, complicated feelings involved.

He shifted me closer, pressing his cock flush against me.

“You’ll be mine,” he murmured. “Whenever you are with me privately, you belong to me. No rules. Nothing for you to hide behind. Do you understand me, Annie?”

I nodded.

His fingers flexed in my hair, pulling my head back further. “Use your fucking words.”

“Yes,” I gasped. The single syllable felt like a surrender of my entire identity.

The woman inside me, the terrified, rule-obsessed girl who needed a safety net to survive the chaos, frantically clawed for one last boundary. I swallowed hard, forcing my voice to steady. “Is the safeword still in use?”

The muscles in his jaw locked, forming a hard, rigid line beneath his skin. His silver eyes darkened with immediate, visceral distaste. I could tell he hated the question.

“Truce,” he finally rasped, spitting the word out like a curse. “You can have your safeword. But hear me now, Annie. That word is an absolute kill switch. If you misuse it, if you say it just to hide from me, or to play games because you’re scared of how good it feels to let go, the word becomes meaningless.” His thumb pressed into the frantic pulse at my throat. “And I promise you will not like the consequences.”

I shivered and it wasn’t entirely from fear.