Page 24 of All Superheroes Need PR
I don’t know what it is, but when I first saw her, every instinct in my body told me to do one thing: protect her. I feel that again now.
I can feel fire in my mouth and smoke wafting from my nostrils as I take a step, but Margerie, damn the woman, deftly veers away from where she’d been headed. She hooks my elbow and gives it a menacing squeeze as she passes in front of me to take the space Vanessa just vacated. She makes a face that’s frankly terrifying, lips peeling back from her teeth like she’s going to lurch forward and take a bite out of my cheek.
“What are you doing?” she hisses, spinning around with a smile on her face. She lets go of my arm after giving it a final bruising pinch. A threat.
“This is fucked,” I say, keeping my teeth clenched.
She smiles brightly and speaks to me in a closed-mouth grimace. “We’ve barely started. You can’t ruin this yet.”
“She’s scared. Pull her.”
“She’s tough. Don’t cut the legs out from under her.”
Heat burns through me, hot and impulsive, but her words have their intended effect and keep me grounded. I scan the skies onemore time before returning my attention to Vanessa as she reaches the podium, using a small step stool to put her in the right place at the mics that Margerie hadn’t needed to use with her heels and her height.
I don’tthinkthe Marduk would be up for an attack two days in a row, not in the shape I left him. I managed to burn him badly from ankle to groin. I wanted to take his cock for being such a pain in my ass, but the bastard managed to throw me off before he took off. He’ll heal fast—all of us Forty-Eight heal faster than humans—but we don’t healinstantly. I don’t doubt he’ll be thinking of me over the next week every time he goes to take a piss.
The unofficial head of the VNA, the Marduk is a big blond bastard with a thick beard and gruesome tattoos inked from his neck to his wrists—his kills. He’s got over twenty of ’em. Never bothered me before, but now, if I see him again within a hundred yards of Vanessa, I’m gonna rip those tatted arms off and beat him to death with ’em.
I hadn’t expected him to seek revenge after I rejected their bid—at least, not so quickly. Granted, I’d all but signed on the dotted line agreeing to join them and had alsomaybeeven agreed to entertain the COE proposal only as a means of gathering intel on the COE headquarters—more specifically, how to break in. When I contacted the Marduk to let him know I was out and that I wouldn’t give him jack shit about what I’d learned, he was alittleput out.
Yeah, I guess I should have expected the hit.
And that my response to it would be violent. I don’t like things touching her. Only me. And only with consent. I didn’t like the way it felt when she recoiled from me. I liked the way it felt when she swooned toward me after the Marduk attack, seated on Mr. Singkham’s desk. Whether she was aware she’d done it or not, I wanted her to do it again.
I rake my hand over my face roughly and then drag it back through my hair. For fuck’s sake, what’s happening to me?
The gong in my chest is gonging, Margerie is glaring, I’m glowering right back, COE security is circling, drones are buzzing overhead, thereporters are champing at the fucking bit to ask their questions, and Vanessa, goddammit, is making me see red.
She has a tiny little Band-Aid on her forehead—clear so reporters won’t be able to pick it up easily in photographs—as well as two on her neck and six on her arms and hands. Her fingers are fumbling the cards in front of her, and I tense as she drops one and it’s immediately swept away in a turbulent breeze.
“Fuck,” I hiss.
“Fuck,” Margerie repeats through clenched teeth. Margerie yanks at my wrist, and I can feel the bite of her hold briefly before she moves ahead of me and picks up the two—now four—cards Vanessa let fall.
“You got this,” I hear her whisper to Vanessa, too low for human ears to hear. What Idon’thear is Vanessa’s response. She just stares at Margerie like she’s about to beg the taller woman to grab her around the waist and whisk her out of there.
Margerie can’t do that, but I can—already would have, if Margerie hadn’t returned to me with a look on her face and hissed, “Give her a chance.”
Give her a chance. I rub my chest where it aches, not soothed at all when Vanessa speaks into the microphone in a voice that’s way too loud at first. “Hello. I’m ... sorry. Sorry. I, um ... I am Vanessa Theriot. I know many of you may have seen me in the video ... oh no. That’s not the right one.”
She flips through her cards, searching for whatever she’s searching for, all that neat little handwriting utterly worthless in the face of her fumbling. I’ve seen this woman’s proposals. Heard how she talks to her team. Her competence makes me wanna perform hara-kiri because I know I’m not worthy and then shove my organs back into the slit of my stomach just to perform the ritual all over again knowing that I’m the reason she’s in this position. I forced her to be here.
She said no to the proposal. But then she changed her mind. I still don’t know what happened to make her agree. It wasn’t the Marduk attack; she said she’d take on the Lois Lane contract before that, when Iwas busy being an asshole. Why’d she agree? I’ve been a dick. And she’s been a clumsy, perfect little thing.
Fire shimmers across the backs of my hands. I roll out my wrists and force calm.
“Come on,” Margerie hisses beside me.
“I’m ending this,” I say, louder this time.
“Wait—” Margerie grabs the back of my hoodie as I take a step.
Vanessa must hear the commotion because she turns and takes a sideways shuffle that has the edge of her foot tipping off the step stool—a small, easily corrected mistake that she resolves by flinging the cards out of her hands like they’re covered in snakes. They hit the glass barrier, some hit the ground, and one gets picked up by the wind and tossed into the sea of reporters, who all reach out to try to grab it.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. The microphone makes that terrible squeaking sound, and I grimace. “I’m a little nervous.” Her words get her a responding chuckle from the crowd, but she doesn’t laugh, and it no longer feels so much like they’re laughing with her but at her. Her hands clutch the top of the podium, her forearms bracketing the mic. The wind pushes her hair in front of her face, and she doesn’t bother to brush it back.
“I, um ... I was a little nervous on Friday, too, in case it wasn’t clear in the photos.” She gives an awkward little chuckle, but this time no one laughs with her. A journalist in the front shoots her hand into the air, taking advantage of Vanessa’s pause.Give her a fucking minute. These reporters are goddamn cannibals.
