The bass hit her sternum like a second heartbeat. You Could Be Mine thundered through the floor, up through the soles of her boots, rattling her teeth. Kara let herself sway with it, arms loose, a smile she didn't have to fake curving her mouth as the strobes cut the smoke into silver sheets. Sweat and cheap beer and something electric—ozone from the amps, or maybe just the sheer animal press of three thousand bodies packed into the dark.
She was here for a reason. She kept the thought loose in the back of her skull, let it sit there behind the music, behind the thrum. Cat Grant had handed her the tip with that particular smile—the one that meant either a story or a trap, and sometimes both. A trafficking pattern. Concert venues. Girls who went in through the crowd and never came out through the doors. Kara had spent three nights cross-referencing missing persons reports against tour dates, and the overlap had made her stomach go cold.
So here she was. Blond hair loose, jeans tight, a faded GNR tee she'd bought at a gas station in Nevada three years ago. No cape. No skirt. No crest. Just Kara Danvers, concertgoer, bobbing her head, letting the crowd push her one way and then the other.
She felt the hand before she understood it. A palm on her hip—just a brush at first, the kind of incidental contact that happened a hundred times a night in a pit this dense. She shifted, gave ground, kept her eyes on the stage where Axl Rose was strutting in a bandana and little else, his voice a ragged howl that cut through the wall of guitars.
Then the hand slid lower.
Fingers curled over the curve of her ass, squeezed once, deliberate. Not an accident. A claim.
Kara's own hand moved before her brain caught up—snapped down, caught the wrist, squeezed. She felt the bones shift under her grip, felt the man's pulse jump against her fingers. She turned, ready to deliver the kind of smile that usually made men rethink their entire evening.
The wrist in her hand was attached to a different man entirely—young, drunk, his eyes wide with confusion and the first flicker of pain as she held him. She released him instantly, muttered an apology he couldn't hear over the guitars, and watched him melt backward into the press of bodies.
A woman near the barrier. She was young, maybe twenty, pressed against the rail with her hands up, lost in the music. She didn't notice the hand that found her hip. Didn't notice the fingers that walked up her side, that brushed the underside of her breast through her tank top.
Kara's jaw tightened. She started to move—and stopped.
Because the groper's head turned, just for a second, and she saw his face clearly in a strobe flash. Bland. Forgettable. The kind of face that disappeared in a crowd. And he was looking at someone else—a third woman, five yards to his left, also being touched by a man with a black lanyard.
Her eyes went wide. She scanned the pit, suddenly seeing the pattern the way she'd seen the missing persons reports—the shape behind the noise.
Four men. Four black lanyards. Moving through the crowd like a net, each one touching, testing, finding the ones who didn't pull away fast enough, who froze instead of fought, who looked around confused instead of angry. And each one was steering—subtle, patient, a hand on an elbow here, a shoulder there—toward the same gap in the crowd. A service corridor, dark and unmarked, tucked between the merch stand and the soundboard riser.
A corridor that no one was walking out of.
Kara's hands curled into fists at her sides. Every instinct she had—the ones she'd been born with on a planet that exploded, the ones she'd learned in a foster home in Midvale, the ones she'd sharpened in a cape that the world had come to know—screamed at her to move. To cross the twenty feet of bodies and start pulling lanyards off necks.
She took a step, but was stopped in her teacks by another exploring hand.
The hand that stopped her wasn't a lanyard man. It was just a hand—some kid's, barely old enough to drink, with a patchy attempt at a mustache and eyes gone glassy with beer. He'd grabbed her ass through her jeans, and when she turned, he grinned like he'd won something.
"Hey, blondie—"
She caught his wrist. Squeezed. Felt the bones shift, felt his grin falter as the pressure built. A normal woman couldn't do this. A normal woman would slap him, scream, shove him away. Kara squeezed harder, and the kid's face went white.
"Walk away," she said, low enough that only he could hear it over the guitars. She released him and watched him disappear into the crowd, rubbing his wrist. Good. That was one. But her eyes went back to the lanyard men, and her stomach dropped.
They'd moved. In the seconds she'd spent handling the drunk kid, the net had shifted. The woman at the barrier was gone. The third woman was gone. The gap in the crowd near the service corridor had swallowed them both, and the men with the lanyards were already fanning out again, looking for more.
Kara moved. She didn't think about it—her body just went, cutting through the press of bodies with the kind of force that made people stumble out of her way without knowing why. She kept her eyes on the corridor's dark mouth, on the last lanyard man's back as he ducked inside.
Then the lights changed.
The strobes cut out. The reds that had been washing the stage all night—she'd barely noticed them, had written them off as part of the show—suddenly seemed to intensify. The air went thick with them, a crimson wash that turned the whole pit the color of a warning light. Kara felt it hit her skin like a fine mist. Warm. Almost pleasant.
And then she took another step, and her legs didn't quite do what she told them to.
She stumbled. Caught herself on a stranger's shoulder, muttered an apology, kept moving. But the feeling lingered—a wrongness in her limbs, like her body was running on a frequency that didn't quite match her brain's signal. She shook her head, tried to clear it.
Another step. Her knees buckled.
She went down hard, one knee hitting the sticky concrete floor of the pit. The crowd surged around her, bodies pressing in from all sides, and for a moment she was looking at a forest of legs and belt buckles, the bass vibrating through her bones.
Get up. She told herself. Get up, get up, get—
She pushed herself upright. Made it to her feet. The red light pulsed overhead, and she felt something drain out of her—not blood, not breath. Something deeper. The warmth that lived behind her sternum, the hum she'd felt her whole life, the thing that let her hear a heartbeat across a crowded room and punch through steel like wet paper.
It was quieter now.
No. No, no, no. She reached for it, the way she'd reach for a muscle, and found only a faint echo. Like a radio signal fading into static.
The red lights. She looked up at the rigging, squinting through the haze. The lights weren't standard—she could see that now, even without her powers. They were too focused, too deliberate, banks of LEDs angled down at the pit like surgical instruments. And at the center of each one, barely visible against the glare, a small black box.
Lex Luthor's signature. She'd seen enough of his tech to recognize the design language—the clean lines, the absence of branding, the way everything he built looked like it had been designed to kill someone politely.
But Lex was in prison. Lex was supposed to be in—
A hand closed on her elbow.
She spun, ready to break something. But it wasn't a lanyard man. It was a kid—a girl, maybe eighteen, with wide brown eyes and a nose ring, wearing a tank top that showed off the bruises on her shoulders.
"You okay?" the girl shouted over the music. "You looked like you were gonna go down."
"I'm fine." Kara's voice came out rougher than she intended. "Thanks."
"No problem." The girl smiled, relieved, and started to turn away.
That's when the lanyard man appeared behind her.
He was tall, broad-shouldered, with a face so forgettable Kara had already lost it twice in the crowd. His hand came up and landed on the girl's shoulder with a practiced casualness that made Kara's blood run cold.
"Hey, you're coming with me." His voice was pitched to carry over the music, friendly, like he was an old friend. "Your friend's looking for you."
The girl turned, confused. "I don't—"
"Yeah, you do. Come on." His hand tightened on her shoulder, steering her toward the corridor.
Kara stepped forward. "She's not going anywhere with you."
The man's eyes flicked to her. Bland. Unimpressed. "Mind your business."
"She is my business." Kara reached for the girl's other arm, and the man's gaze sharpened.
"I said—"
Kara moved. Or tried to. Her body responded a half-second too slow, her fist swinging through the space where his jaw should have been. He stepped back, easy, almost bored, and her momentum carried her forward into the crowd.
She caught herself on a stranger's back. Shoved off. Turned.
The man was gone. And so was the girl.
Kara's heart hammered. She pushed after them, into the press of bodies, and the crowd seemed to close around her like a fist. Hands caught at her—not incidental touches, not accidents. Fingers on her hips. A palm sliding up her ribs. Something brushing the backs of her thighs through her jeans.
"Hey—" She shoved at the nearest body, and the man didn't move. He was bigger than her, broader, and when she pushed, it was like pushing against a wall. Her arms trembled with the effort.
Her arms trembled.
Kara stared at her own hands. She'd lifted a tractor-trailer with these hands. She'd caught a falling plane. She'd punched through concrete like it was tissue paper. And now she couldn't push one man out of her way.
The red lights pulsed overhead. She felt another layer of warmth peel away, like skin sloughing off a sunburn.
No. No. She gritted her teeth and shoved again, harder, throwing her whole body into it. The man grunted, shifted—and then a hand closed on her wrist from behind, yanking her backward.
She stumbled, caught herself, spun. Another lanyard man. This one was shorter, stockier, with a shaved head and a smile that showed too many teeth.
"Easy there." His grip on her wrist was iron. "Don't want you getting hurt."
"Let go of me." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Now."
"Or what?" He leaned in, close enough that she could smell the beer on his breath. "You gonna fly away, sweetheart?"
Kara's blood went cold. He knew. He knew who she was, what she was supposed to be. And he wasn't afraid.
She tried to pull her wrist free. His grip didn't budge. She tried again, and felt something hot and shameful crawl up her throat—the beginning of real fear.
She yanked again, hard enough that her shoulder screamed, and the stocky man laughed—a wet, phlegmy sound that turned her stomach. He said something to his partner, something she couldn't hear over the guitars, and then a second set of hands found her other arm. She was being lifted, her boots leaving the sticky floor for one horrible suspended second before they set her down again, herded toward the corridor.
The crowd parted around them like water around a stone. Nobody looked. Nobody saw. That was the thing about a pit this dense—everyone was too busy protecting their own space to notice someone else's being invaded. Kara opened her mouth to scream, and a hand clamped over it, rough palm grinding her lips against her teeth.
"Shh." The stocky man's voice was almost gentle. "Don't make this harder than it has to be."
She bit him.
He yelped, jerked his hand back, and she got one breath of air—one lungful—before his partner's elbow caught her in the ribs. The impact drove the breath right back out. Her vision went white at the edges. She felt herself sag, felt their hands catch her before she hit the ground, felt the press of bodies close around her like a wave closing over a drowning swimmer.
The red light pulsed. Her legs were made of water.
But she wasn't done. Not yet. Not while there was still a flicker of the hum left inside her, that warmth she'd spent her whole life taking for granted, like breathing, like her own heartbeat. She reached for it with everything she had, the way she'd reached for it a thousand times before—when a plane was falling, when a building was collapsing, when a child was trapped under rubble and only she could hear the crying.
Come on. Come on, please—
And for one glorious, impossible second, it answered.
The warmth surged up through her chest, spread out along her limbs like water finding channels. Her feet left the ground. Six inches. A foot. Two. She was rising, her boots clearing the heads of the crowd, the red light washing over her like a wave trying to drag her back down to the depths.
She was flying.
Weakened, barely a whisper of what she should have been, but flying. The pit fell away beneath her, a sea of upturned faces and raised hands, and she could see the service corridor, the dark mouth of it, the place where the girls had been taken. She could see the lanyard men looking up at her, their faces shifting from smug confidence to something like alarm.
Good. Let them be afraid. Let them see that they'd made a mistake, that they'd picked the wrong woman to drag into their nightmare. She was Kara Zor-El. She was Supergirl. And she was going to—
The hum died.
It didn't fade. It didn't flicker. It just stopped, like someone had thrown a switch, like the warmth had never existed at all. One moment she was rising, her heart singing with the old familiar power; the next she was a dead weight, a body with no wings, plummeting back toward the crowd.
She hit the surface of the pit like a stone skipping across water. Bodies broke her fall, but they didn't catch her—they just deflected her, sent her tumbling sideways, her shoulder cracking against a stranger's ribs, her hip slamming into a belt buckle, her head snapping back as she caromed off one body and then another. The world became a blur of leather and denim and sweat, the bass a physical force pounding through her skull.
She came to rest on the sticky floor, one cheek pressed against the concrete, the taste of blood and beer on her tongue. Her ears rang. Her vision swam. She tried to push herself up, and her arms buckled beneath her like they were made of wet newspaper.
Hands caught her before she could move.
Not kind hands. Not helping hands. Hands that clamped onto her upper arms and hauled her upright, hands that dug into her biceps hard enough to leave bruises, hands that belonged to the men with the black lanyards.
"Got her," someone said. The stocky one with the shaved head. His voice was close to her ear, almost gleeful. "Knew the light would do it. Knew she couldn't hold on forever."
"She almost made it." That was the tall one, the forgettable one. He sounded almost admiring. "Gotta give her credit. That was close."
Kara tried to pull away. Her body wouldn't obey. It was like her muscles had forgotten how to work, like the signal from her brain was arriving a second too late, muffled and weak. She managed to lift her hands, to push against the stocky man's chest, and he didn't even grunt.
"Easy, sweetheart." He caught her wrists, pinned them behind her back with one hand. His grip was iron. "You've had a long night. Time to rest."
"Let—let go of me." Her voice came out slurred, barely recognizable as her own. "You don't know who I am. You don't know what I can—"
"I know exactly who you are." He leaned in, his breath hot against her ear. "And I know what you can do. That's why we have the lights, see? Specially tuned. Lex's finest work." He laughed, a wet, phlegmy sound. "The mighty Supergirl, brought low by a few red LEDs. It's almost poetic."
Kara's stomach turned. Lex. The name hit her like a physical blow, and with it came a cascade of understanding—the lights, the black boxes, the deliberate targeting of the pit. This wasn't just a trafficking ring. This was a trap. And she'd walked right into it.
The stocky man released her wrists, and before she could react, hands were on her from every direction. A palm flat against her stomach, sliding up. Fingers hooking into the collar of her shirt. A hand closing over her hip, squeezing through her jeans. She was being passed between them like a doll, her body moving where they pushed it, her feet barely touching the ground.
"Stop—stop it—" She tried to twist away, tried to bring her knee up, tried to do anything, but her limbs were useless, heavy as lead. The men didn't even seem to notice her struggles. They just kept touching her, their hands moving with a practiced, casual intimacy that made her skin crawl.
"She's got a nice ass on her, doesn't she?" The stocky man's voice was conversational, like he was commenting on the weather. "For a reporter, I mean. You'd think she'd let herself go, all that time sitting at a desk."
"Yeah, but she's not really a reporter, is she?" The tall man's hand found the hem of her shirt, slid underneath, fingers brushing the bare skin of her stomach. "She's something else entirely."
Kara gritted her teeth. Focus. She had to focus. If she could just get her body to respond, just for a second, she could—
A hand closed over her breast through her shirt, squeezed. Her breath caught in her throat. She felt a hot rush of shame flood through her, and with it a surge of rage so pure it almost broke through the fog in her limbs.
"Get your hands off me." Her voice came out harder now, sharper. "I'm warning you—"
"Warning us?" The stocky man laughed. "What are you gonna do, sweetheart? Hit us with your purse?"
She lunged for him. It wasn't a coordinated attack, wasn't anything she'd have done with her powers intact—just a desperate, clumsy swing of her fist, aimed at his throat. He caught her wrist easily, twisted it behind her back, and she gasped as pain shot up her arm.
"Now, now." His voice was almost gentle. "Let's not make this harder than it has to be. You're coming with us one way or another. The only question is how much damage you want to take on the way."
She spat at him.
It wasn't the most dignified moment of her life. The spittle landed on his cheek, and he wiped it away with a slow, deliberate motion, his eyes never leaving hers. When he smiled, it didn't reach his eyes.
"Fine." He nodded to the others. "She wants to play rough."
And then the hands were everywhere.
They stripped her of her balance first, pushing her back against a wall of bodies that parted just enough to let her through, then closed around her again. A hand on her shoulder, shoving her down. A hand on her hip, spinning her around. A hand flat against her chest, pressing her back against a stranger's sweaty shirt. She tried to push them off, tried to fight, but every time she got one hand loose, two more took its place.
"Help—" Her voice was swallowed by the wall of sound. "Someone help—"
Nobody looked. Nobody turned. The crowd surged around her like she wasn't there, like she was just another body in the press, another pair of shoulders to bounce off. The music thundered on. Axl Rose was screaming something about paradise city, and the crowd was screaming back, and Kara was screaming too, but nobody could hear her over the noise.
A hand found its way under her shirt again, this time sliding up her ribs toward her bra. She twisted, tried to bring her elbow back, caught someone in the gut—she didn't know who, didn't care—and was rewarded with a fist in her kidney that drove the breath out of her.
"Stop fighting." The stocky man's voice was right in her ear, almost kind. "It's easier if you don't fight."
She fought anyway.
She fought because that was who she was—because she'd been fighting her whole life, against bullies and bastards and people who thought they could take what they wanted from the weak. She fought even though every movement cost her, even though her vision was swimming and her limbs were screaming and the red light overhead seemed to be draining the very will from her bones.
She fought until a hand closed around her throat.
The hand around her throat squeezed.
Not hard enough to choke—not yet. Just enough to remind her that it was there, that the owner of that hand could take her air whenever he wanted. Kara's vision swam at the edges, the red light bleeding into everything, her lungs burning with the effort of drawing breath through a windpipe that was slowly being compressed.
"Look at me."
The stocky man's face swam into focus. He wasn't even breathing hard. She'd been fighting him for what felt like hours, and he looked like he'd just finished a warm-up set.
"You're going to stop struggling now." His grip tightened a fraction. "Because every time you struggle, I'm going to squeeze a little harder. And I don't think you want to find out what happens when I squeeze all the way."
Kara tried to speak. A thin, reedy sound came out of her throat, barely audible over the guitars. She tried to lift her hands, to pry his fingers away, and found she couldn't—her arms hung at her sides like they belonged to someone else, the signal from her brain arriving muffled and weak.
He squeezed harder.
The pressure built in her head, a dull roar that drowned out the music. Her vision narrowed, the edges of the world going grey, the stocky man's face the only thing still in focus. She felt her knees buckle, felt him catch her with one arm around her waist, hauling her upright like she weighed nothing.
"That's it." His voice came from very far away. "That's it. Just let go."
Kara's hands scrabbled at his wrist—weak, pathetic, barely there. She could feel her pulse hammering against his grip, could feel the blood pounding in her temples, could feel the darkness creeping in at the edges of her consciousness.
And then he let go.
Air rushed into her lungs in a ragged, tearing gasp. She doubled over, hands on her knees, sucking in breath after breath while the world slowly swam back into focus. Her throat felt raw, bruised, like she'd swallowed broken glass.
"See?" The stocky man's voice was almost kind. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"
She didn't answer. Couldn't answer. Her voice was gone, her throat too damaged to form words.
And then the hands were on her again.
Not the stocky man's hands this time. Different hands, reaching out of the crowd, closing on her arms, her shoulders, her hips. She was being lifted again, passed like a package from one body to the next, her feet leaving the ground as hands caught her under the armpits, under the thighs, cradling her like she was something precious and disposable at the same time.
"What are you—" The words came out as a croak. "Put me down—"
Nobody listened. The hands just kept moving her, passing her deeper into the press of bodies, away from the stocky man, away from the corridor, into the heart of the pit where the crowd was thickest and the darkness was deepest.
A hand closed over her breast.
She felt it through her shirt, through her bra, a rough palm that squeezed and kneaded like she was a piece of fruit being tested for ripeness. She tried to twist away, but there was nowhere to go—bodies pressed in from every side, and the hands holding her only tightened their grip.
"Stop—" Her voice cracked. "Please—"
Another hand found her other breast. Then a third, sliding up her thigh, fingers digging into the muscle through her jeans. A fourth, flat against her stomach, slipping under the hem of her shirt. She was being touched everywhere at once, a dozen hands moving over her body with a casual, practiced intimacy that made her skin crawl.
This wasn't the lanyard men. She could see that now, through the haze of the red light and her own fear. These were just men. Concertgoers. Ordinary guys who'd seen a woman being passed through the crowd and decided she was fair game.
Or maybe not ordinary. Maybe they were part of it too, part of the net, part of the trap that Lex had built and Vic Marchetti had sprung. She couldn't tell anymore. Couldn't tell who was a predator and who was just a man taking advantage of an opportunity.
A hand found the button of her jeans.
Kara's body went cold. She kicked out, caught someone in the chin, heard a grunt of pain. The hands holding her shifted, tightened, and then she was being lowered—not to the ground, but onto a lap. Someone's lap. Someone who immediately wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her back against his chest.
"Easy, easy." A voice in her ear, rough and low. "Just relax. It'll be easier if you relax."
She tried to elbow him. Her arm moved like it was underwater, and he caught her elbow easily, pinned it against her side. His other hand found her hip, squeezed, slid around to the small of her back.
"I said relax."