Chapter 191 Jargon.

Chapter 191: 191 Jargon.

"How’d you do that, anyway?"

"Do what, sweetie?" Lilith asked, her big yellow eyes wide and completely innocent as she adjusted the reading glasses perched on her nose.

"All that legal jargon. Omnitron v. Blackwing? How the hell did you pull that out of thin air?"

Lilith burst into a high, trilling giggle that echoed across the sterile foyer. A cluster of armed BSA security guards and a couple of lower-tier heroes loitering near the front desk visibly jumped, scuttling back like she was about to spit hellfire across the floor.

"Oh, Milesy, please!" she chirped, tossing her horns with a flick of her head. "I’m a succubus! My kind practically invented the art of wriggling out of contracts and hunting down fine print. Honestly, human lawyers are positively adorable compared to the devils in the lower rings. So quaint, sweetie! Like toddlers playing dress-up!"

I couldn’t help the small snort that escaped me. There was something absurdly grounding about her sheer cheerfulness.

The knot of adrenaline in my chest loosened a fraction, though I knew better than to think she’d picked up contract law just by lurking around Hell.

Working under House of Edna meant swimming in intellectual property disputes and licensing NDAs day in and day out—and Edna definitely didn’t tolerate an assistant who couldn’t navigate a copyright minefield.

"So what actually happened in there, Milesy?" Lilith asked, lowering her voice to a theatrical whisper as we approached the heavy front glass doors. "Did you really—"

"Not here," I cut in quietly, flicking my gaze over my shoulder.

A dozen paces back, Micheal was escorting us out, drifting like a drab gray ghost in his tailored suit. He had that mild, empty expression back in place, hands folded neatly in front of him. A model civil servant making sure the troublemakers left the premises.

"I’ll tell you once we’re in the car," I murmured.

"You’d better, sweetie!" Lilith pouted playfully, her spaded tail flicking against my thigh. "I am positively aquiver with curiosity! Secrets are terribly naughty things, Milesy. Naughty, naughty, naughty!"

I felt an involuntary heat creep up the back of my neck. I cleared my throat, staring straight ahead until the pressurized glass doors hissed open and the cool evening air hit us.

Waiting out on the plaza was the car Edna had left behind—a matte-black Maybach armored like a light tank and styled like a luxury stealth jet.

"Halt!" a sharp voice barked across the concrete.

Oh, fantastic. What now?

I turned to see Divina marching across the tarmac, radiant aura barely contained, her jaw set so hard I thought her teeth might crack.

For a second, I thought she was about to pull rank and throw hands right in front of the lobby cameras. Then the magnetic tug in my gut flared.

Clutched tightly in her gauntleted fist were my magnetic armbands and anklets.

Micheal’s doing. Having a righteous, grieving teammate hand my weapons back was just petty enough to be his signature psychological touch.

Divina stopped a yard away. Her knuckles were dead white, and the skin around her eyes twitched with barely restrained fury. She wanted to smash me into the concrete. Every muscle in her body practically vibrated with the urge.

Instead, with excruciating restraint, she shoved the gear into my chest.

"This is not over," she hissed under her breath. "You will answer for what happened to Mystic."

I glanced past her shoulder. Gathered along the perimeter of the facility were at least a dozen off-duty capes, their eyes fixed on me like vultures watching a stray dog.

If I needed a visual aid for how thoroughly my reputation had been torched today, there it was. Public Enemy Number One in the cape community, courtesy of a frame job I hadn’t even seen coming.

"Yeah. Noted," I said flatly, taking the heavy metal bands and latching them around my wrists and shins. The magnetic field snapped into place with a familiar, grounding thrum.

Flipping them off was tempting, but I wasn’t suicidal. I turned, popping open the Maybach’s passenger side.

"You drive, sweetie!" Lilith declared with an airy wave of her crimson hand. She gracefully folded her towering six-foot-three frame into the backseat, smoothing her pinstriped skirt over long, velvet-red legs. "I simply cannot stand driving myself. Dreadful! The road rage, the pedals—it’s so horribly common!"

"Right. Chauffeur duty. My favorite," I muttered.

I slid behind the wheel, tapped the push-button start, and the engine purred to life with a low, expensive growl. I punched the accelerator, tires chirping against the asphalt as we cleared the checkpoint gates and tore onto the highway, leaving the gleaming citadel of the BSA in the rearview mirror.

"Now then, Milesy," Lilith purred, leaning forward over the leather console, the heavy scent of vanilla and sulfur rolling over the front seats. "I believe you owe your savior a story, hmm?"

Did I ever.

As the cityscape receded into rolling hills and dark pines, I gave her the rundown. Micheal Carter. The telekinetic puppetry. The fact that Mister Invincible, Cloudfire, and God knew how many other heroes were glorified meat-drones. The Override Array, the Brain Trust, and his master plan to turn the entire cape community into an optimized, standardized monopoly by strapping Psyren into an amplifier.

Lilith listened in rare silence, her chin resting on her knuckles, yellow eyes wide behind her reading glasses.

When I finally finished, she blew out a long breath, puffing her cheeks out.

"Well!" she sighed, slumping back against the leather. "Seems you have quite the messy pickle on your hands, sweetie."

"Understatement of the year," I said, knuckles white on the steering wheel.

Just talking through it had spiked my adrenaline all over again, and I had to consciously keep my magnetic fields from warping the car’s electrical wiring.

"So what’s the big plan, Milesy?"

"Honestly? Packing the chalet and running like hell sounded pretty damn appealing twenty minutes ago."

Lilith lowered her sunglasses with a manicured claw, giving me a deeply unimpressed look over the rims. "Really, sweetie? Running away?"

"Hey," I shot back defensively. "I’m a pragmatic villain! Running away is standard operating procedure. The villains who stick around to trade monologues with a god-complex bureaucrat end up in a six-by-six concrete box or a cryogenic tube. Retreating to fight another day is how you get a sequel!"

"Oh, Milesy, but think for just a tiny second," she cooed, tilting her head. "If you thought of running away in five seconds flat, don’t you think a scary little control freak like Micheal calculated that before you even left the room?"

I frowned into the road ahead.

She had a point. In fact, she was almost certainly right.

Micheal didn’t leave loose ends. If his plan hinged on pinning the Brain Trust on me and grabbing Psyren, he already had eyes on the mountain roads, rail stations, and airports.

He was just waiting for me to panic and bolt so he could call it ’flight from custody’ and send a strike team to finish the job.

I still had a couple of cards to play, but none of them were pretty.

I could break protocol and reach out to The New Order—petition for emergency asylum under an established syndicate.

It was a miserable thought; turning freelance independence over to some megalomaniac crime lord would mean signing away my pride, my autonomy, and a fat cut of my earnings.

But the BSA wouldn’t risk an open war by raiding a New Order compound, which would buy Psyren time.

It would be a temporary truce with the devil to keep the girls breathing, at least until I could dig up hard proof of Micheal’s telekinesis and blow his neat little monopoly wide open.

I exhaled slowly, checking the mirrors as the mountain road began to wind upward toward the chalet.

"I’ll figure something out," I muttered, leaning back into the headrest. "First thing’s first: we get back, we lock down the perimeter, and we call a full emergency briefing with the Proxies."