Dashing Devil Omnibus 1: Books 1-3, page 12
The audio cut off as the synthetic voice returned. “Incoming Vid Call from Royce, priority override.”
A slovenly middle-aged man with a receding hairline and a little extra weight in his face and the rest of him appeared on the kitchen’s screen. He was wearing a gray suit, his shirt was untucked, and his tie had been loosened. He was likely at home watching the news, himself.
“What the fuck was that, Boyd?!” Royce demanded sharply. Royce was Boyd’s primary handler with The Authority.
“What was what?” Boyd feigned ignorance. He wasn’t as good of an actor as Silvie was and probably looked less than innocent, but for her sake he had to try.
“Don’t screw with me right now, this is fucked up enough already. I know you have a program set up to alert you every time Silver's name is mentioned in a broadcast. So, try again… what the fuck was that, Boyd?”
“I don’t know. It looked like an honest mistake to me,” Boyd responded. He was lying, of course, already certain this was part of whatever Silvie had planned.
“Don’t give me that shit.” The man glared at Boyd for a moment before he sighed, his shoulders slumping. “Christ, kid...” He pressed both palms to his eyes.
When Royce looked up, his plain brown eyes look exhausted. “Look, I get it. It’s fucked up that they have you locked up like this. We both know that you could do great things in the field.” He paused. “You know I’m doing everything I can to get you out there, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I know Royce,” Boyd rumbled. “I appreciate it, I really do, but…”
“But nothing, kid. Shit like this is going to make it harder for me to go to bat for you. The one thing we had going for us is that you’ve always followed orders,” Royce grumbled.
Boyd heard the sliding glass door that led out onto the balcony open behind him and a second later Silvie’s slender arms settled around his neck, her chin propped on his right shoulder. He had to unfurl his wings a little to flatten them enough for her to move in closer, but that had become instinct at this point. As always, her presence soothed him immediately.
She kissed his cheek and said, “He had nothing to do with it, Royce. That was all me. It annoyed me that they kept giving reason after reason to keep my man hidden. I just gave them a reason not to.” She settled in and added in her chipper voice, “Besides, it was just an honest mistake. Just slipped out. Tee-hee.”
Royce laughed. “Sticking with the airhead act, huh? Does Carrie buy that shit?”
Carrie was Silver’s primary handler. Each Hero had their own handler, but normally one would be assigned as primary for a team. So far, that hadn’t happened for him and Silvie.
“Of course not, but what’s she going to do?” Silvie laughed, snuggling into Boyd more firmly.
“Well, shit. I guess as long as Boyd didn’t have anything to do with it, I’ve got nothing to complain about.” He smiled. “Well, I hope this goes the way you want it to. You kids have a good night.” Royce winked and the screen went dark.
“Hello, Darling. I guess that opportunity presented itself quicker than I was expecting.” She nuzzled into his neck, pressing her soft lips to the tender skin there. “I know you don’t approve of breaking orders.” Her lips moved up to the side of his jaw. “I hope you aren’t too mad.” Another gentle kiss, higher on his jaw.
“While it was reckless,” he rumbled, “how can I be mad? You just earned yourself a chewing out to try to help me.”
Boyd wasn’t mad. True, he would have preferred that she’d followed orders. They’d been given those orders for a reason, after all. He acknowledged she’d done it for him, though, and it wasn’t like she’d endangered herself or civilians.
What did he have to be mad about?
“Good.” Her lips move up a little further, gently brushing along the edge of his ear.
His change affected his ears, too. They were a bit longer than standard and slightly pointed, but at least they matched his near-white skin tone. His Change had also made them more sensitive, and she knew it.
“Because I’m set to emergency communication only for the next eight hours and I need you for every second of it,” she cooed softly in his ear, making him shudder.
It was a good thing neither of them needed a lot of sleep. That night, they didn’t get any.
Chapter 11 (Omnibus Exclusive)
Silvie floated in the bedroom she shared with her Darling, her electronic diary that she still used to maintain private communication with Mind Witch held before her. She normally didn’t call her friend from anywhere in the suite to avoid detection, but her usual location on a rooftop garden that didn’t have any cameras nearby was hosting a wedding tonight.
She had to settle for calling Mind Witch from their bedroom. Fortunately, Boyd was busy out in the kitchen making muffins for tomorrow’s breakfast. That should keep him busy in the kitchen for long enough for a quick call to check in.
“Hey Silv,” Mind Witch immediately answered the request for private communication. “You’re a few minutes late, I was starting to worry.”
“Sorry,” Silvie replied with a sigh. “The garden was occupied tonight, but I didn’t know that until I got there. I had to move to a… secondary location,” she hedged.
She knew Mind Witch would not approve of the secondary location being so close to Boyd, but Silvie didn’t want to waste any more time looking for another place without any cameras. Their suite had surveillance, but it was only accessible locally and didn’t include the bedroom.
“Ah… okay.” Mind Witch seemed mollified by this answer. “I saw you put the first part of the plan into motion. That slip to the media looked completely natural to me—even though I knew it was intentional. Good job.”
“Thanks!” Silvie smiled at the woman who couldn’t see her. “I was just putting all that training they gave us to good use.”
“Well, you still did great. Before we talk about the next stage, though, is there anything new you want to tell me about, or should it be just more of the same this week?” Mind Witch asked.
“Darling is miserable… and he’s only getting more and more miserable,” Silvie said before letting out a breath in a long sigh.
She stared out the window, taking in the view of Glorith City’s skyline. Dozens of brightly lit windows in the nearest buildings—still hundreds of feet lower than their suite—beat back the darkness of the night. She knew that more than anything, her Darling wished he could be out in it, if only to stretch his wings under the cover of darkness.
“It’s better than it was back in the PAC in most ways,” she admitted, “but worse in others. Like, he smiles, looks at me, and engages in conversation and… ehem… bedroom activities now…” Silvie pouted, though there was no one to see it. “But he needs something to do! They instilled so much drive and duty into him, and then made him a glorified housekeeper. Darling is bored! At least he could keep himself busy with training in the PAC, even if he was socially isolating himself. It’s not like things have gotten much better on that front, either. He really only talks to me and to Royce.”
“I would argue that is much better than when he would only talk to Victory Seeker and to Royce,” Mind Witch replied dryly. She then continued with more enthusiasm, “You have been doing great, from all reports. Getting him to engage the parts of himself he was taught to repress without realizing that’s what he is doing is no easy feat.”
“All I’ve done is to do what you tell me I should to draw that part of him to the surface.” Silvie shrugged off the praise, not feeling like she was doing nearly enough. Surely there was something more she could do.
“If that were the case, he wouldn’t be nearly as far along as he is.” Mind Witch sighed. “I don’t know what exactly it is you are doing, but the progress he has made is impressive. The fact that he tells you he is bored is actually a good sign. That you are at all aware he isn’t perfectly content to follow the orders he was given is fantastic.”
The voice on the other end of their secure communication line paused. “Think back, Silv. Between what happened between me and him and recently, how many times did he admit to or even give any sign of being unhappy with his orders?”
“Um…” Silvie thought back and counted the number of times she had seen her Darling display any emotion outside of training scenarios in which he was supposed to.
She knew he could be a very emotive man when he tried, but the vast majority of the time he was a stoic blank slate.
“Like… three, maybe four times?” Silvie said. “But honestly, I might have been projecting… seeing only what I wanted to see.”
“And how many times have you seen—not heard over our calls—but actually seen me display any emotion?” her co-conspirator asked.
“Um… just the one time you cried before you were moved away,” Silvie replied.
Mind Witch had proven to Silvie in recent years to be far from the emotionless woman she showed the world. She just constantly hid those emotions—partly because she was a spy and partly because she never felt truly comfortable in the PAC.
“Oh...” Silvie said, understanding the point Mind Witch was making.
“You are helping Boyd become more comfortable with who he is,” Mind Witch added. “He was heavily conditioned to repress certain aspects of himself. The things I’ve suggested you try have all been designed to show him that the parts of him they taught him are evil are just another part of him. We’ve started slow, getting him comfortable with being himself around just you—we didn’t want to overwhelm him and trigger a negative personality shift. But we are past that now, which is why we are moving forward with getting him out in public. He’s ready.”
“I still think we could have acted faster, but just to confirm…” Silvie was about to make sure she had the timeframe down when she was interrupted.
“Silvie?” her Darling rumbled from the doorway.
Silvie spun around to face him as she deactivated the hidden private communication app on her electronic diary. The blank mask he always used to wear in the PAC after Mind Witch left had made a reappearance. He stared at her with dead eyes and no emotion.
Fortunately, Silvie managed to hide the wince this triggered in her. She hadn’t seen her Darling so stone-featured since the first weeks after the testing ended—back when he was in denial about her being bound to him for life. After those first few weeks, she’d started to see a glimmer of the person he once was before his Change.
His emotions began shining through. Seeing him start to open back up reflected a fire in his heart. It was so bright, that it persisted through all the ups and downs of these past two years, sometimes dimming for a time, but consistently growing—until now. His well-trained mask managed to hide this inner fire, even from her.
Silvie had slipped up, and she felt a rush of fear that all the good she had done to get him this far had been undone in one careless moment. Her own training kicked in, reminding her that all she could do now was damage control. In a single blink, she switched from shocked to see him to happy to see him.
“Hi, Darling!”
Silvie bubbled with all the brightness she could muster, confident that she had hidden the fear and allowed, at most, a slight surprise to show through. That could be explained away, right? She’d just admit—honestly—that he had snuck up on her.
“Who were you talking to?” Boyd asked, his tone flat and neutral.
His voice contained none of the warmth she had come to expect. Silvie restrained another wince; she had really slipped up. She quickly ran through her options.
The best way to avoid him feeling betrayed would be to fess up—but as much as she would like to, that wasn’t really an option. Unfortunately, in her rush to respond, eliminating the non-option also wiped any thoughts of telling a half-truth from her mind. Which left her with only one course of action—to lie.
“No one,” she replied sweetly, “I was journaling, like I said I was going to.”
“Hmm,” Boyd made a non-comital humming sound.
His expression—or rather total lack of an expression—as well as his body language revealed nothing of his thoughts on her reply. The only features that moved, at all, were his amber eyes. They normally filled with warmth when they looked at her these days. But there was no warmth; they remained detached and clinical as he studied her. Silvie was certain that there’d been no tell to reveal the lie in her simple statement, but he’d detected it anyway.
“Okay, I’ll leave you to it,” Boyd stated woodenly, then turned and walked back down the hall towards the stairs.
“Wait!” Silvie called after him, but the stupid automatic door slid closed and cut her off. “Darn it…”
She groaned softly then blurred after him. Silvie caught up to Boyd just before he reached the stairs that led down to their living room. She zipped around the big demon to float in front of him, high enough to put her eyes at his chin level as she rested her hands on his habitually bare chest.
Silvie searched his face for any sign of what he was thinking, but found none. "Darling, is everything alright?" she asked. Her voice was soft and filled with genuine concern.
Boyd didn't respond immediately. At first, he didn’t even look down to meet her silver-flecked gaze. He just stood there, silent, blank, devoid of emotion. The silence stretched between them like an unspoken chasm.
For a moment, Silvie feared that she had irreparably damaged their fragile connection. Even worse, she sensed absolutely nothing over their Bond.
Finally, he spoke. “We’re adding training on coming up with lies on the spot to room clearing drills for your focus list. You sold it well, but the lie you chose was feeble. You not only lacked situational awareness and didn’t realize I was behind you, but you didn’t put two and two together—knowing that even if I’d just stopped in the doorway, I would see your lips moving in the reflection of the window before speaking.”
He studied her, expression unchanging. “You could have added that you recently switched to a spoken journal—even got a unit with the privacy filter that blocked others from hearing what you recorded. But even that would be a stretch… those are pricy, and you would have mentioned it before now. More importantly, while I couldn’t read your lips all that well in the reflection, it was clearly a conversation.”
Silvie did wince this time, internally cursing Boyd’s training and how serious he was about it. Adding more items to her focus list would be a pain. The room clearing drills alone were bad enough. She hadn’t properly checked her corners when clearing a bank during a hostage situation the other day and Boyd had caught this slip up when clips of the security tapes had played in the news.
While she loved her Darling, one of the reasons she was looking forward to getting him out into the field was so he would focus less on her training. It was one of his current responsibilities, ensuring she continued to train. And he took it very seriously—probably because it was the closest to real Hero work that he got.
He’d turned into a real training terrorist—that is, even the threat of more training being added to her focus list scared the daylights out of her.
“But to answer your question… yes, everything is fine. I’m just going to get an evening workout in,” Boyd rumbled, his tone still painfully neutral.
She wished he would just get mad at her. Instead, he was obviously boxing up his anger with his Power like he’d done before she’d irrevocably become his. Now, it seemed he was doing out of habit. Silvie’s understanding—albeit mostly gained from various forms of media—was that normal women had problems getting normal men to display their honest emotions.
She had it even worse. Her Darling could literally use his Power to box up his emotions. And unless he was going to unleash those emotions on an opponent or foe, they disappeared into the box his Mental Domination power stuffed them in. Given that Boyd absolutely refused to use his Mental Domination to release any of what he bottled up on her—even in training—meant that this anger would never see the light of day again
“It obviously isn’t fine!”
Silvie frowned up at him. She should probably just take the out and let him go cool down with some exercise. But she didn’t want him to stew on it, and couldn’t endure seeing him like this—especially knowing that she was the cause.
Boyd took a step back, breaking the contact between her hands and his chest. When that contact was broken, his eyebrow twitched. It was the only slip in his mask she’d seen since she’d spun around to find him standing in the doorway.
“It is fine,” Boyd insisted, a light growl breaking through his neutral tone. “Or it will be fine… shortly. I get it. You are required to file reports without my knowledge. You are just following orders. I’m guessing that when you told me that you weren’t required to file secret reports, and promised me you would tell me if you were ever ordered to do so was another lie to gain my trust. I understand completely. We got the same training on building rapport, after all.”
“That wasn’t it!” Silvie blurted out. “I didn’t break a promise… not really.”
Boyd arched an eyebrow at her, obviously waiting for more of an explanation. Silvie scowled, looking down. They didn’t break promises to one another, not ever. Being accused of doing so hurt, but she knew she had more than earned it. She didn’t want to lie. She hated keeping secrets like this… but it had to be done.
When she’d made the promise to Boyd, Silvie had rationalized that what she was doing with Mind Witch wasn’t filing a report but having a conversation. It was dangerously close to the line—heck, she might be tap-dancing right on top of the line. But even treading right next to it had led to a loss of her Darling’s trust. Even thinking that might be the case squeezed her heart.
