by Vivi Andrews
“He was acquitted.”
“Only because they couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Victorio Peccorino was The Volt. And guess who now makes his living on fucking reality television as The Volt, The Villain America Loves to Hate? Little Vic Peccorino.”
“I know.”
“Then you know he isn’t innocent.”
“I know a jury of his peers decided he was.”
“Goddamn it, you sound just like Captain Justice. It’s all black and white to you assholes, isn’t it? He kidnapped me. Everyone knows it’s him, but because twelve idiots in a jurors’ box decided he didn’t need to be punished, he just gets away scot free and it’s open season on Kim Carruthers for supervillain kidnappings. Do you know how many of those assholes have tried to make a name for themselves by abducting me? Twenty-four. Twenty-fucking-four.”
His grunt was unimpressed. “You can’t blame all of that on Little Vic. You made a pretty big target of yourself all on your own by being so public about your relationship with Captain Justice.”
“Jealous?” It was pathetic how badly she wanted him to be.
But his voice was emotionless and cool as ever when he spoke. “Anyone who dates a super is vulnerable—especially if they are public about the connection.”
“Oh, that’s right. That was your excuse for dumping me with a freaking note on my pillow. I forgot you were protecting me.” Lie. Luckily he wasn’t a human lie detector like Justice.
She hadn’t forgotten a damn thing about Frost, but she’d be throwing snowballs in hell before she admitted to him that she’d memorized every word of that note, taking it out to reread so many times the paper had started to wilt around the edges, staining it with pointless tears.
His arms tightened minutely about her and she fought another shiver of unwanted lust. “This isn’t about me.”
She wanted to scream that everything had been about him. Her stupid flirtation with Justice. Her obsession with superhero stories. It seemed like every move she’d made over the last five years had been about him—consciously or not. To feel closer to him. To piss him off. It didn’t matter. It was all him.
And now, here he was, his arms wrapped around her in a dingy alleyway piled with snow. It was oddly fitting, finally meeting Frost again on such a cold night. And arguing with him like this, with her back to his front, so he could see only part of her face and she could see none of his—it worked, somehow. She didn’t know what would have happened if she’d looked him in those piercing, glacial blue eyes. But like this, with his arms braced across her ribs, feeling the familiar strength of him without having to see his face, this made it bearable.
His mouth brushed her ear again. “Little Vic is a harmless little twerp with a few million fans. If you hurt him, you’ll be the villain, Kim.”
“I don’t want to hurt him.” Much. “I just want to ask him a few questions.” And scare the ever-loving shit out of him so he tells the entire goddamn world that I am not an easy target anymore.
“Justice is worried about you.”
“Fuck Justice. Or wait, that’s Mirage’s job now, isn’t it?”
She didn’t mean to sound bitter. Things had been over between her and Captain Perfect long before he’d taken up with the dark waif of a Mindbender—hell, Kim had dumped him, not the other way around. And she didn’t resent the couple their sickening happiness. She was almost grateful they’d gotten together. If they hadn’t, Mirage’s fucked up supervillain father never would have kidnapped Kim—twenty-five and counting—and injected her with the serum that had given her telekinesis. In a twisted way, she owed her power to her ex and his new sweetie—but part of her still writhed with jealousy when she thought of them. Not because she wanted Justice, but because she wanted what he and Mirage had.
Justice had literally walked through fire to make Mirage happy. Sure, he’d saved Kim—over and over and over again—but it had always seemed like it was just in a day’s work. She’d never had someone who loved her so much he would bring the world crashing down if anyone even dared think of touching her. Justice certainly hadn’t felt that way about her. And the villains had known it. So they’d come after her. Knowing that Captain Awesome would save her, but that there would be no unforgiving wrath when he did.
She wanted the unforgiving wrath. She wanted to be worth that to someone.
Not the girl Frost had walked away from without a backward glance. Not the girl who was a friendly obligation to Justice. She wanted to be the goddamn reason someone breathed.
Was that really so much to ask?
“Look, I know neither of us is your favorite person right now, but I owe Justice, and I’m not going to let you—” Frost’s arms tightened fractionally as his words froze.
The door to the bar in front of her creaked, beginning to open.
Little Vic. Shit. This was it. The moment. Her moment.
Kim renewed her struggles against Frost’s hold—with just as little success. The infuriating man was even stronger than she remembered and every time she called up a telekinetic shove, it fizzled out in the air, smothered by that same unseen force. How the hell was he doing that?
“Let me go,” she hissed, keeping her voice low to avoid alerting the weasel exiting the bar to their presence. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go down. This was supposed to be her moment of triumph. Payback time, goddamn it. She’d been training for this. Preparing for weeks. Honing her new power into a fine blade, perfect for terrifying weasely little villain wanna-bes like The Volt. Tonight was supposed to be the night. She’d set out after Vic high on the power of her power. She wasn’t supposed to be the helpless victim again.
She thrashed wildly, managing to land an elbow hard enough to make Frost grunt, though it did nothing to relax his hold.
“I’m sorry, Kim.” His voice showed no emotion as he dashed her hopes—no change there.
Then the world flickered, her head spun, and she was standing in the middle of her own living room, fighting back a lingering sensation of vertigo.
Chapter Three: The Couple that Teleports Together
“Did you just teleport me?”
Kim’s outraged yelp was accompanied by another enthusiastic jab from her elbow to his internal organs.
“Yes.” Frost maintained his usual façade of icy, unwavering calm, even though the feel of her in his arms again was hot enough to liquefy the polar ice cap. “Stop fighting me.”
“I’ll be sure to get right on that,” she snapped, stomping on his foot. “Since when can you teleport?”
“I can’t.” He averted another foot-stomping by lifting her so her feet dangled off the ground. She thanked him with a heel to his shins—or she would have if he hadn’t been ready for her and dodged. “Stop fighting and I’ll let you go.”
She muttered something that sounded suspiciously like that’s your specialty, but she went still in his arms. “Take me back.”
“That I won’t do.” He eased her feet back to the floor, ready to take defensive action if necessary, but she seemed to have worked out her temper. Kim had always been quick to anger and quick to forgive, her rages passing with the speed and passion of a summer storm. Frost was more the slow moving blizzard type.
“If you can’t teleport, how did you teleport me? Did your sister build you some kind of teleportation device? And how the hell are you dampening my TK?”
He loosened his arms, immediately regretting the loss of her heat. Impervious as he was to cold, he’d never longed for any warmth except hers. But he’d given that up a long time ago. For the best. He just needed to keep reminding himself of that.
He stepped back, watching her warily as she turned to face him, arms held loosely at her sides in the defensive stance he’d once taught her.
“Tandy didn’t build me anything. Technically, I made you teleport us here.”
Shit. Why had he told her that? A smart super—especially one who might be called in to hunt down his former friends at any moment—nev
er revealed the secrets of his powers unless absolutely necessary.
But she wasn’t thinking about what he’d revealed about his own powers. Her jaw fell. “I can teleport?”
“No, you can’t. But you have the potential.” Which he’d tapped into to drag them back here. The teleport had been clumsy as hell and he’d nearly fallen on his ass when they arrived, but he’d managed it. Now Frost dropped his hands to his sides, though he kept a tight mental grip on her TK. “You’re a strong telekinetic. You could learn to teleport. If you live that long.”
She laughed, bright and sharp and utterly lacking in humor. “Am I dying?”
“Do you have a death wish?”
“Oh please. I can handle Little Vic.”
“I wasn’t talking about Little Vic, Trouble.” The nickname came easily to his lips, seeming to fall off them when he was least expecting it.
Her breath shortened, crystal blue eyes flaring wide. “Are you threatening me?”
“I can’t let you go vigilante. No matter whose girlfriend you used to be.”
“He kidnapped me!” she shrieked, another summer storm kicking up just as quickly as the last one had dissipated.
“You weren’t able to identify him.”
“Because he was wearing that stupid Volt mask the entire time!” She stalked toward the door, but he used a pulse of her borrowed TK to block her way with a heavy recliner, the chair scraping noisily across the floor. Again, clumsy but effective.
He’d never really gotten to the point of finesse with TK, no matter how often he’d usurped his brother Chance’s power over the years. Some powers were easier to manipulate than others, he’d learned. He could freeze any ability—mindbending, superstrength, superspeed, it didn’t matter—but when it came to drawing the power into himself and using it, that was trickier. He couldn’t even sense some powers—like his little sister Tandy’s newly revealed power-nullification talent—and others he knew to steer damn well clear of—like Eisenmann’s pryokinesis. But he was just good enough with Kim’s talent to use it against her.
She stumbled over the chair with a little shriek of frustration and whipped toward him. “Little Vic is making a living—a disgustingly good living, I’ll have you know, raking in more in a month than I made all last year—by being The Volt on national television. A gig he only got because he used the trial for my kidnapping to make himself famous, but no, of course no one can prove he’s actually The Volt who kidnapped me. How ridiculous of me to think he might be profiting off my abduction rather than going to Area Nine to rot with all the other supervillains!” Seeming to realize she wasn’t going to get back to the alley, she took out her aggression on her jacket, wrestling out of it and flinging it over the roadblock recliner. She attacked her black zippered hoodie next.
He couldn’t argue with anything she’d said. Little Vic, the oily little weasel, was profiting from the crime he’d been acquitted of—and had almost assuredly committed. But there was no proof. And even if there had been, double jeopardy protected the bastard from a second prosecution.
Frost swallowed back the icy anger that threatened to rise.
Not for the first time, he thanked God it had been Justice and not him who’d swooped in to save the day the first time Kim was abducted.
Frost had been in the middle of a super-hunt in Europe. He’d been so careful to make sure no one knew Kim was special to him, make sure no one would think of them in the same sentence let alone try to use her against him. So damn careful that he hadn’t heard a word about the kidnapping until she was already home safe. Even then, knowing she was all right, his rage had been a blinding, animal thing. He’d have used Vic Peccorino as a cryogenics experiment, flash freezing him in a heartbeat and shattering the frozen statue. He would have crossed the line without flinching.
So it was good he’d been half a world away. Good that it had been Justice who rode to the rescue. Good that the papers immediately speculated on a relationship between the pair and he was forced to stay away, to move on.
It would have been far too easy for him to turn villain protecting her. He had that darkness in him, never closer to the surface than when he thought about anyone harming her. So he’d watched from afar instead, taking more and more out-of-town contracts, hunting supers all over the world, and piling up debt after debt to Captain Justice. The man who repeatedly saved the only woman Frost had ever wanted—keeping him from going rogue avenging her.
Some lines should never be crossed.
Kim had finished stripping off her excess layers—down to a t-shirt, jeans, and those sky-high black boots, her eyes still flashing angrily as she kept up a steady stream of bitching.
Frost couldn’t help drinking in the sight of her, his hands itching to touch, but his voice was even when he spoke over her tirade. “When he does something illegal, you can bring him to justice. Until then, acting against him is a personal vendetta and that isn’t what superheroes do.”
“Is letting criminals go free what superheroes do?” she asked with exaggerated sweetness.
“Prove he’s a criminal.”
“Give me five minutes alone with him and I’ll get you a full confession.” There was a dark glee in her eyes, something he’d never seen there before. Ambition? Absolutely. A certain ruthlessness? Sure. But not this bitter rage.
“What happened to you?”
He didn’t mean to ask the question aloud, but the words hung between them and he couldn’t take them back. She was so much the same, but something had hardened in her and it chipped at his own frozen heart to see it.
“What happened?” she asked incredulously. “I was kidnapped twenty-five times, you ass. And you know what? The first time wasn’t that bad. Little Vic is about as intimidating as a wet sponge. I was never actually afraid of him—which is something I never should have admitted in court. I think that did more to hurt my case than any of the legal wrangling about confirming his identity. That and the fact that the defense claimed I benefited from the kidnapping. Like I asked for it. And damned if my career didn’t take off like a shot. I was suddenly the It Girl at the Sentinel. Not only could I tell my own story, but I suddenly had sources in the superhero community. And everyone who was rescued by a super wanted to tell their story to Kim Carruthers because she understood, she’d been there. I was flying high, baby. So long as all I ever wanted to report on was supers. And provided I kept my superhero boyfriend and smiled pretty when he trotted me out on the red carpet. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Justice, but after a while I started to wonder what we had in common besides the fact that we’re both extremely photogenic.”
Frost tried not to take a vicious satisfaction in the fact that she hadn’t said she loved Justice.
“But you know what happens next when you’re the top superhero correspondent in the city, dating a high profile goody-goody? You get kidnapped again. And again. The goddamn super villains keep coming after you. Most of them just wanted the freaking publicity that Little Vic got, but some of them were real prize sociopaths.”
She fell silent, her gaze going distant, and his hands fisted, itching to pound into whoever had put that haunted echo in her eyes. He took a step toward her, instinct urging him to pull her into his arms, but he didn’t have that right.
“Justice always came for me. DynaGirl helped a few times—you remember Darla Powers? Someone always saved the day, rescued helpless little Kim from the Big Bad. I bought a super strength Taser and a gun—became a damn good shot. But, you know what? I never fired either one outside of a target range. Never got the chance. It’s amazing what a disadvantage we mere mortals are at when there are superpowers on the playing field.”
Which was exactly why he’d never believed relationships between supers and non-supers had a prayer. Why he’d left her in the first place.
She sighed, still not really seeing him. “And then there was Demon Wroth. I don’t remember much of that abduction, actually. He kept me unconscious for most of it. And when I woke up? Loo
k at me. Kim Carruthers, Super Girl.” She focused on him then, her eyes back on the here and now.
He wanted to slay every demon that had ever left a shadow in those baby blues, but he wasn’t that kind of hero. He was the one who could only protect people by staying as far away from them as possible. So he’d stayed away from Kim. Five years.
Five years thinking he was doing the right thing by staying away. Five years of certainty that she was better off without him. Five years of nightmares stalking her while he was bouncing around the world stalking nightmares of his own.
For the first time, he wondered if he’d made the right choice. If he could have protected her better than Justice had. Sure, he would have gone rogue the first time someone dared touch her. His family would have cut him off and he would have been hunted down by someone like him. But would it have been worth it to make sure Kim never had that haunted look in her eyes?
Would he have regretted that choice as much as he now regretted leaving her?
Chapter Four: Looking For Clues at the Scene of the Crime
Kim studied Frost as her story sank in, though his dark face showed little.
Her own throat felt strangely raw, though her eyes had stayed bone dry. Nothing like a little jaunt down memory lane.
It was surreal having him here again. This was the same apartment she’d gotten when she first moved to the city after college. The apartment he’d left that morning when he walked out of her life, leaving only a note to remind her that he’d ever been part of it.
Pathetic as it was, she’d probably stayed here in part because she was waiting for him to come back. Then, when she’d finally decided to take control of her life again, stop waiting and leave town, Demon Wroth had happened.
“You know the irony of it?” she asked, flopping onto the recliner he’d repositioned. “I was getting out of the super business. Moving to the Capital to take over a political correspondent position. I’d already had to go independent contractor with the paper because my history with supers made me uninsurable—a liability to the company. But I had this shot, this one shot, to get out. I broke it off for good with Justice and was packing up my apartment, ready to leave all this bullshit behind and what happens next? Justice gets tangled up with Mirage, I run one last super story, and Demon Wroth comes back from Argentina or wherever the hell he’s been hiding and snatches me out of this very living room.”
