Page 159 of Villainous Rise

“I am,” I admitted, because of course I fucking was. The air pressure. The temperature. The wind speed. The exact amount of force needed to propel us upward without jarring her. The precise angle of ascent to minimize resistance.

Annie laughed, the sound bright in the muffled silence. “Of course you are.”

We continued upward, the fog growing thinner with each passing second. We broke through the top of it, the air suddenly clear, the stars visible overhead.

Annie gasped, her grip on me loosening slightly as she took in the view. Below us, the fog blanketed the city like a silver sea, glowing faintly with the reflected lights of Chroma Bay. Above, the night sky stretched endlessly, stars scattered across the darkness like diamonds.

“Beautiful,” she whispered.

“Yes,” I agreed. But I wasn’t looking at the view. I was looking at her face, illuminated by starlight, her eyes wide with wonder.

“Ready?” I asked.

Annie’s eyes sparkled with a mix of fear and anticipation.

“Yes,” she breathed.

That was all I needed to hear.

I tilted us forward and we plummeted back into the fog. Annie’s body tensed against mine, her breath catching as gravity reclaimed us. I felt her heart hammering against my chest, matching the wild rhythm of my own.

For anyone else, this would have been fucking terrifying—hurtling through opaque nothingness with no sense of direction or distance. For me, it was a complex equation of air pressure, sound waves, and temperature gradients that mapped the invisible world around us.

I banked hard left, feeling Annie’s grip tighten as we changed direction. Her squeal of surprise transformed into laughter as we emerged from the thickest part of the fog into the neon-drenched heart of Chroma Bay.

The city unfolded beneath us, a glittering labyrinth of light and shadow. Skyscrapers rose like luminous monoliths, their edges softened by the wisps of fog. Massive digital billboards painted the fog in ever-changing colors—electric blue, bright pink, molten gold.

I weaved between buildings, close enough that Annie could reach out and touch the glass if she wanted. The reflections of neon signs blurred as we passed, creating streaks of color that followed in our wake.

I hadn’t flown like this, without the constraints of my suit, in years. I’d forgotten how it felt. The pure fucking freedom of it. The rush that came from pushing the limits of what my body could do.

No calculated public persona. No technology to moderate my abilities. No pretending to be less than I was.

Just me. Just this power that was mine by birth, not by science or serum.

And Annie knew. She fucking knew, and she was still here, clinging to me as we danced through the urban canyons of Chroma Bay.

I pushed faster, testing the limits of what I could do with Annie in my arms. Her weight was nothing to me, a minor calculation in the physics of our flight, but her presence was everything. The warmth of her body against mine. The trust implicit in the way she held on to me. The knowledge that she saw me, really fucking saw me, and wasn’t afraid.

It felt like flying in a different way. Like something inside me that had been caged and confined was finally stretching its wings.

I pushed us higher, ignoring the biting chill of the altitude. I drove us straight up through the dense gray until we shattered the ceiling of the fog bank. The neon lights bled upward, washing across Annie’s skin. Acid green and blood red painted her cheeks, her throat, the curve of her jaw.

I stared at her face, tracking those shifting colors. I needed to scrub every trace of that fucking gala from her memory. I needed to erase Valor’s hands on her waist, the flash of the cameras, the hollow, broken look in her eyes. I wanted my face, my power, this exact moment, to consume her until she forgot everything else.

I tipped us forward.

Gravity seized us, dragging us into a dead freefall. Annie gasped, her fingers digging deeply into my shoulders. The wind roared in my ears, tearing at our clothes as we plummeted back toward the earth. We were falling at terminal velocity, seconds away from a catastrophic impact.

Her eyes were wide, locked onto mine. I held her gaze, letting the rush of the drop overtake us both. The last wall between us was gone. The Trueborn secret, the one truth I guarded with lethal paranoia, belonged to her. She held the power to destroy me, yet she’d protected me instead.

A vicious, possessive joy clawed its way up my throat and settled deep in my chest. I didn’t have to hide the mechanics of my mind or the raw, unnatural power of my body. I could just be the monster she willingly let into her bed. She was my entire fucking world. Every calculation, every breath I took revolved around the woman clinging to me in the sky.

The joy was fucking intoxicating and I wanted to keep flying forever, keep her laughing, keep feeling her heart race against mine.

But eventually, I angled us toward the shoreline, finding a secluded stretch of beach where the fog had settled thick and heavy. I touched down gently, the sand shifting beneath my feet as I kept Annie cradled against me.

When I set her down, her legs buckled and I tightened my grip on her waist, steadying her as she found her balance.