The door opened behind her without a knock.

Kara didn't turn. The letter opener stayed where it was, pointed at the space between her and Vic, her arm still trembling from the effort of holding it up. She heard the footsteps—soft, hesitant, the shuffle of someone who'd learned to walk without being heard—and then a hand closed around the doorframe, knuckles white, nails bitten to the quick.

"Dad."

The voice was thin. Familiar.

Kara's arm dropped. The blade clattered against the armrest of the leather chair, and she turned her head, and there she was—the girl from the pit, the girl she'd been tracking through the crowd, the girl whose face she'd burned into her memory as the reason she'd walked into this trap in the first place. Zoe Marchetti stood in the doorway in a different hoodie—clean, gray, the drawstrings hanging loose—her dark hair pulled back, her hazel eyes fixed on Kara with something that wasn't fear.

Something worse.

"Zoe." Vic's voice was warm. Proud. He spread his hands on the desk, fingers splayed, the gold ring catching the lamp light. "Come in. Close the door."

She did. The latch clicked, and Kara felt the sound in her teeth.

"You're supposed to be in the pit," Kara said. Her voice came out rough—her throat still raw from the chokehold, from the corridor, from screaming that no one had answered. "The lanyards. They were moving you through the crowd. I saw—"

"I know what you saw." Zoe crossed the room. She didn't look at the letter opener on the armrest. She didn't look at Kara's bare legs, the band tee bunched at her waist, the bruises flowering along her collarbone. She looked at her father, and something passed between them—a flicker, a nod, the kind of silent exchange that came from years of practice. "I was bait."

The word landed like a slap.

Kara's fingers curled around the armrest. "What?"

"Bait," Zoe repeated. She stopped at the corner of the desk, close enough to touch her father's shoulder. She didn't. "The girl who ran. The one who looked scared. The one who kept checking the exits. That was the story we built. You were supposed to see me and follow."

"You were in the corridor." Kara's voice cracked. "I saw them take you. I saw—"

"You saw what we wanted you to see." Zoe's chin lifted. The nervous posture was gone, the flinch at sudden noises, the way she'd pulled her hoodie tight around her thin frame like armor. She stood straight now, shoulders back, and the haunted look in her eyes had a different quality—not prey, but witness. "The lanyard guys? They work for my dad. They've always worked for my dad. The girls in the corridor—" She stopped. Swallowed. "Some of them are real. Some of them are ours. You weren't supposed to know the difference."

Kara's stomach turned. The fluorescent hum of the corridor, the wet prints her bare feet had left on the concrete, the hands that had pinned her down—it all rearranged itself in her head, the pieces sliding into a shape she didn't want to see.

"You planned this." She said it to Vic, but her eyes stayed on Zoe. "All of it. The lights. The lanyards. The—" She couldn't finish. The word stuck in her throat like a bone.

"The rest was Lex's contribution." Vic leaned back in his chair, and the leather creaked. He was enjoying this—she could see it in the way his pale eyes moved between them, the way his smile had settled into something almost paternal. "I provided the venue. The talent. The girl." He gestured at Zoe with two fingers, casual, like he was indicating a piece of furniture. "Lex provided the science. The red lights. The little black boxes that turn a god into a girl."

"You used your own daughter."

"I used my best asset." Vic's smile didn't waver. "Zoe's been with me since she was twelve. She knows the operation better than anyone. She knows how to look like a victim because she was one—once. Before she understood that family doesn't leave."

Zoe flinched. Just slightly—a twitch at the corner of her mouth, a tightening around her eyes. It was the first crack Kara had seen in her, and it was gone as fast as it appeared.

"You told me you escaped," Kara said. "You told me you ran. You told me—"

"I told you what you needed to hear." Zoe's voice was flat. Recited. "That's what I do. I'm good at it. I've been doing it since I was twelve."

The words hit Kara somewhere below the ribs. She'd believed her. In the pit, in the chaos, with the red light bleeding her dry and the lanyards closing in—she'd looked at that scared girl with the haunted eyes and she'd thought: there. That's why I'm here. That's who I'm saving.

She'd walked into the trap with her eyes open, and she'd still walked into it.

"Why?" Kara asked. "Why go through all of this? You knew who I was. You could have just—"

"Killed you?" Vic raised an eyebrow. "I considered it. But dead Kryptonians are messy. They leave questions. Bodies. A trail that leads somewhere." He tapped the desk with his ring finger, a small, precise sound. "Alive, you're an asset. You owe me. You're compromised. You're—" He paused, savoring the word. "—grateful. Or you will be, once you understand the arrangement."

"There's no arrangement."

"There's always an arrangement." Vic stood. He was taller than she'd realized—or maybe she was just smaller now, diminished, sitting in his chair with her bare feet on his floor. "You're going to work for me. Not in the way you're thinking—I don't need you in the corridors. I need you in the light. Supergirl, the hero, the symbol. You're going to do what I say, when I say it, and in return—" He spread his hands. "—I don't send the footage to every news outlet on the planet. I don't tell the world what happened to you in that corridor. I don't make you the punchline of every late-night joke for the next decade."

Kara's hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against her thighs to stop it.

"You're bluffing."

"Am I?" Vic reached into his jacket and pulled out a phone. He tapped the screen, turned it toward her. The video was grainy, shot from above—a security angle, the corridor, the fluorescent lights. She could see herself. Naked. On her knees. The men around her, their faces blurred but their bodies unmistakable. She could hear the sound, tinny through the phone's speaker—her own voice, raw and broken, saying please.

She looked away. Too late. The image was already behind her eyes.

"That's one of six angles," Vic said. He pocketed the phone. "I have everything. Every second. Every sound. You're going to do exactly what I tell you, or the world is going to see Supergirl for what she really is: a girl who breaks."

The room was very quiet. The work lamp hummed. Somewhere above them, muffled through concrete and earth, Kara could hear the distant thump of the concert—Guns N' Roses, still playing, still oblivious. She wondered if Axl Rose knew what was happening under his stage. She wondered if anyone did.

She wondered if her powers were coming back.

It was a small thing—a flicker at the edge of her awareness, like a limb waking up after falling asleep. The red light was gone from this room. The black boxes were outside, in the stadium, rigged to the rigging. Down here, in the damp earth and hot machinery, there was nothing to drain her. She could feel it: the slow return of something vast and bright, pushing against the walls of her body like a tide coming in.

She kept her face still. She kept her hands flat on her thighs. She didn't look at the letter opener on the armrest, though she could feel its weight, its presence, the cool silver of it waiting.

"You're not going to say anything?" Vic was watching her. His smile had faded, replaced by something more careful. "No threats? No promises? No I'll never work for you?"

"You want me to say it." Kara's voice was steady now. Steadier than it had been since the pit. "You want me to fight. It makes the win sweeter."

Vic's eyes narrowed. Just slightly. Just enough.

"You're smarter than you look," he said. "That's good. I can work with smart."

Kara let the silence stretch.

Vic was waiting for her to flinch, to bargain, to do something. She'd learned that much about him in the last twenty minutes—he read people like a menu, and he hated a page with nothing on it. So she gave him nothing. She sat in his leather chair with her bare feet flat on his concrete floor and her hands loose on her thighs, and she listened to her own body instead.

The tide was still coming in.

It moved under her skin like warm water finding a crack in a dam. Not the full roar of it—not the strength that could lift a jet out of a nosedive or hear a heartbeat three blocks away—but a current. Her hearing had come back first. She could pick out the low thrum of the generator through the wall, the tick of the banker's lamp, the wet click of Zoe swallowing in the corner. Then her skin, waking up, registering the cold of the chair and the grit under her heels. Then something deeper, older, the thing that made her *her*, stirring in her chest like a sleeper turning over.

She kept her face bored.

"You're not going to offer me anything to eat?" she said. Her voice cracked on the last word, and she coughed, and when she spoke again it came out cleaner—less like gravel, more like herself. "That's bad hosting. Even for a kidnapper."

Vic's eyebrow lifted a fraction.

"You're making jokes."

"I make jokes when I'm nervous." Kara shrugged one shoulder, deliberately loose. "Also when I'm bored. Also when I'm about to get my ass kicked. It's a whole thing. You'd know if you'd done your homework on me instead of just my—" she flicked two fingers at the phone in his pocket, "—greatest hits."

Zoe shifted her weight by the desk. Her hazel eyes tracked between them the way they'd tracked the exits in the pit, quick and constant, and Kara noticed for the first time that the girl's hands were folded into the sleeves of her hoodie, the way you'd hide a weapon or a tremor. She'd stopped playing the victim the moment she'd walked through the door, but the nervousness underneath it was real. Kara had spent enough time around liars to know the difference between a performance and a tell.

"He doesn't do homework," Zoe said. "He does leverage."

"Zoe." Vic's voice was mild. A warning wrapped in a compliment.

"She's right, though." Kara turned her head slowly, like it cost her something, and looked at the girl full-on. "You did your homework on *me*. The red lights. The corridor. The lanyards. You knew exactly how I'd walk into it. But you didn't do the one thing—" She let the sentence hang.

Vic waited. She watched him wait.

"You didn't think about what happens after," Kara said.

"After." He said it flat, like he was tasting a word he didn't recognize.

"After you win. After I say yes." She leaned back in the chair, and the leather creaked, and she let her eyes go soft and unbothered. "Because I'll say yes. You're right about that. You've got six angles of me on my knees and a phone that reaches every newsroom on the planet. I'm not stupid. I'll say yes."

Vic's smile came back, slow and satisfied. "Good."

"But here's the thing about saying yes to a man like you." Kara's voice had dropped—not the rasp, something lower, steadier, the voice she used on the roof of the Daily Planet when she wanted a source to keep talking. "You'll never actually believe it. Every time I smile for a camera, you'll wonder if I'm smiling because you told me to. Every time I save someone, you'll wonder if I'm doing it for you or for me. Every time I'm in a room with you, you'll be looking at my hands." She held them up, palms out, fingers spread. "Waiting for me to do something. And one day—" she let the smile reach her eyes, "—you'll be right."

The room went very still.

Zoe's breath caught. Vic's hand moved, almost without his permission, to the ring on his pinky. He twisted it once. Kara watched the gold catch the lamplight and she filed the tell away like a gift.

"You think you're clever," he said.

"I think I'm patient."

"Patient." He stood, and the chair rolled back, and he came around the desk with his hands loose at his sides. He was trying to loom, and it was working—he had six inches on her and the suit made him look bigger—but Kara didn't move. She kept her hands on her thighs and her feet flat on the floor and she let him tower. "You're not patient. You're *waiting*. For what? For your powers to come back? For someone to find you?" He crouched down in front of her, eye level, and his breath smelled like scotch and mint. "Nobody's coming, Supergirl. This is a hole in the ground under a rock concert. The only people who know you're here are the people in this room."

"And the two guys outside the door," Kara said.

Vic blinked.

"I can hear them," she said. "Boots. Two sets. One's got a bad knee—he shifts his weight every forty seconds. The other one's chewing gum. Spearmint. He's been chewing it since I got here, and he hasn't spit it out, which means he's the one who's nervous." She tilted her head. "You brought nervous and limpy to guard a Kryptonian. That's the part of the homework you skipped."

Vic's eyes had gone flat and pale, the smile gone. Behind him, Zoe had gone very still, her hands still buried in her sleeves.

"You're bluffing," he said. "The lights—"

"The lights are out there." Kara gestured at the ceiling with her chin. "In the stadium. In the rigging. Not in here." She let that land. "You built a room with no leash in it, Vic. That's the part of the homework you skipped. You spent so much time figuring out how to catch me that you never figured out what to do once you had me."

He was up and moving before she finished the sentence—two steps to the door, and he yanked it open and barked something down the corridor. Kara didn't catch the words. She was too busy listening to her own body, to the tide, to the way her fingertips had started to tingle against her thighs like they did right before she lifted something heavy.

The two men came in.

They were exactly what she'd heard—one with a bad knee, one with the gum—and they filled the doorway shoulder to shoulder, black lanyards swinging against their chests. The nervous one had a taser on his belt. The limpy one had a baton. Neither of them had a gun, which told her something about the kind of men Vic liked to keep close: men who wanted to feel the work.

"She says her powers are back," Vic said. "Check."

The limpy one came at her first.

Kara waited until he was close—close enough that his shadow fell across her knees—and then she moved.

It wasn't the move she wanted. The move she wanted was a single open-handed slap that would have put him through the wall. What she had was a body that had been choked, dragged, stripped, and used for the better part of an hour, and a tide of power that was still two feet below the flood line. So she gave him what she had: she came up out of the chair, drove her forehead into his nose, and felt the wet crunch of it against her skull.

He staggered back. Blood everywhere. She got one hand around his lanyard and yanked, and he came with it, off-balance, and she brought her knee up into his thigh—the bad knee, the one he favored—and he screamed and went down on it.

"Kara—" Zoe's voice, high and sharp.

Kara didn't look. She was already turning toward the gum-chewer, who had his taser out and his stance wide and his face set in the careful blankness of a man who'd done this before. He didn't rush her. That was the problem. He circled, and she circled, and the limpy one was still on the floor with his hands over his face, blood running between his fingers, and the room was small and the desk was between them and there was nowhere to go.

He feinted left. She bit on it. He came in right, and the taser cracked against her ribs—not a full hit, just the edge of it, a bright hot snap that made her whole side go numb and her vision white out for half a second.

She got a hand on his wrist anyway. She squeezed.

His face changed. She felt the bones in his forearm flex under her grip, the way a plastic bottle flexes before it cracks, and she could have—she *could* have—

He headbutted her.

It was dirty and it was fast and it landed on the bridge of her nose, and the pain was a red flash that broke her grip and dropped her back a step. The limpy one was up again, behind her, and she heard the baton before she felt it—a whistle through the air, then a line of fire across her shoulders that drove her to one knee.

The band tee ripped. She heard the cotton give, felt the collar tear away from her throat, and then the whole shirt was gone, peeled off her back by the baton's swing and the grip of the man behind her, and she was on the floor of Vic Marchetti's office in nothing but her skin.

She got up anyway.

She got up with her hands empty and her nose bleeding and her shoulders screaming, and she looked at the two of them, and she smiled with red on her teeth.

"That all you got?"

It was not, in fact, all they had.

The gum-chewer came in low and drove his shoulder into her sternum, and the limpy one caught her from behind with an arm around her throat—not a choke this time, a *hold*, the kind you put on someone you intend to move. She drove her heel down into a boot and got a grunt for it. She got an elbow into something soft and heard a wheeze. She twisted, and bit, and clawed, and for four or five seconds it was just bodies in a small room, all of them breathing hard, none of them winning.

Then the taser came up against her ribs again, and this time he held it there.

The current went through her like a fist closing around her heart. Her back arched. Her heels drummed on the concrete. Every muscle in her body locked at once and then let go, and she went down in a heap, twitching, her own spit on her chin, the room swimming in and out.

She was still conscious. That was the thing. The tide was still there, somewhere under all of it, still coming in, and if she could just—

He hit her again.

The second one was worse. The world went white and then gray and then nothing at all, and the last thing she heard before the floor came up to meet her was Zoe's voice, small and far away, saying something Kara couldn't make out.

Then hands. Two sets. One at her ankles, one under her arms, hauling her up off the concrete like a sack of feed. Her head lolled. Her hair dragged across the floor. She was aware of the desk coming up under her—the cold edge of it against her back, the papers sliding, the banker's lamp knocked askew so the light swung across the ceiling in slow arcs.

They laid her across it. Face up. One hand pinned her wrist above her head, the other pressed down on her hip, and a third—Vic's, she'd know that ring anywhere—settled flat on her sternum, just below her collarbone, and pressed until her breath came short.

She blinked up at the swinging light.

The lamplight cut across the ceiling in long, slow arcs, and she watched it the way you watch a clock in a hospital — because it was the one thing in the room that kept its own time. Her wrists were pinned somewhere above her head. Her hips were pinned. Vic's palm sat flat on her sternum, and she could feel the hard ridge of his ring through the skin, a small cold coin against her sternum bone.

"She's still awake," the gum-chewer said.

"I can see that." Vic's voice had lost its polish. It was flat now, the way a man sounds when a plan has cost him more than he budgeted. He pressed down on her chest until her next breath came in short. "The taser. Again. Make sure."

"She's already—"

"I said again."

The gum-chewer moved. Kara heard him unhook the taser from his belt, heard the small plastic click of the safety, and she had time to turn her head and see him before he did it — the careful blankness on his face, the way he aimed like a man sighting down a rifle. She tried to pull her wrist free. The hand holding it didn't budge. Her strength was still a tide two feet below the flood line, and the man holding her was a man, and she was a girl on a desk with her arms above her head.

He put the taser against the soft inside of her thigh.

The current went through her hip and up into her pelvis and her whole body came off the desk, arching, heels drumming the wood, a sound tearing out of her throat that didn't have a word in it. The light swung wild across the ceiling. Vic's hand rode her sternum, holding her down through it, and she could feel every muscle in her core clamp and release, clamp and release, like a fist closing on nothing.

He held it for two seconds. Three. Four.

When he let off, she couldn't feel her legs. Her thighs were twitching on the polished desk, wet with sweat, and the air in the room smelled like ozone and blood and her own fear. She tried to say something. Her tongue wouldn't shape it.

"Again," Vic said.

"Vic—"

It was Zoe. Kara heard her from a long way off, a small sharp sound from the corner where she stood, but Vic didn't turn his head.

"She's Kryptonian," he said. "She can take it. That's the point of her."

The taser moved. The gum-chewer put it against her ribs this time, low on the side, and Kara saw it coming and couldn't stop it and the current hit her like a car. Her back bowed off the desk. The lamp swung. Her teeth clicked together and her vision went white at the edges and she heard herself make a noise she hadn't known she could make, a thin high whimper that wasn't a word.

He held it longer this time.

She lost the room. She lost the light on the ceiling and the shape of Vic's shoulders and the feel of the desk under her back. There was only the current and the clench and the sound of her own blood in her ears. Somewhere in the middle of it she felt her bladder tighten and let go, a small hot shame against the desk, and the part of her that could still think thought, not that, not that, anything but that, and then the current took even that.

When it stopped, she was on her side. She didn't remember turning. Her cheek was against the desk and her mouth was open and a string of spit hung from her lower lip to the wood, and she watched it stretch and break with a kind of distant interest, because the rest of her body had gone away. Her hands were somewhere. Her feet were somewhere. She could hear her own breathing, wet, shallow, and a ringing in her ears that wouldn't stop.

"There," Vic said. "That's better."

She wanted to say something clever. She wanted to say the thing that would make him twist his ring and step back. Her mouth wouldn't cooperate. What came out was a wet sound and then nothing.

Hands moved her. Two sets. They turned her onto her back again, and her head lolled, and the lamplight found her eyes and she flinched from it. Her thighs were wet. She could feel it — the shame of it, the cooling slick on the desk under her, and she couldn't do anything about it, couldn't close her legs, couldn't cover herself. The band tee was gone. She was naked on a stranger's desk in a room with three men and a girl, and she couldn't lift her own arm.

"Check her hands," Vic said. "Both of them."

The limpy one grabbed her wrist and bent her arm up over her head again, and she felt her shoulder joint grind and a small bright pain cut through the fog. He held it there and looked at her fingers, one by one, like a man checking a horse's teeth. Her knuckles were split from the fight. There was blood under her nails that wasn't hers. He turned her hand over and looked at the palm and grunted.

"Nothing," he said.

"Nothing yet." Vic came around the desk. He stood over her and looked down, and his pale eyes moved over her the way they'd moved over the crowd in the VIP section, unhurried, categorizing. Her breasts. The bruise flowering along her collarbone. The wetness on her thighs. He didn't touch her. He didn't need to. The looking was the thing. "You said your powers were back."

Kara got her mouth working. It took everything. "I said—" Her voice was a ruin. She swallowed and tried again. "I said the lights were out here. I didn't say—" She coughed. "I didn't say I was full."

"No." He crouched down so his face was level with hers. Up close, he smelled like scotch and mint and expensive cologne, and under that, faintly, like sweat. "No, you didn't. That was the trick, wasn't it. You made me think you were a threat so I'd waste my men on you. You wanted me to spend them."

"Worked."

The word came out cracked and small, and it hung there, and she watched his jaw tighten.

"You broke his nose," Vic said. "You put him on the floor. You had your hand around the other one's wrist and you squeezed. That's not a bluff. That's a plan." He stood up. "So we're going to make sure you can't finish it."

He nodded at the gum-chewer.

Kara tried to move. She got her heels against the desk and pushed, and she got maybe an inch, and then the limpy one had her shoulder again and the gum-chewer had her ankle and they had her spread out between them, one arm up, one leg down, and she was too weak to do anything but twist. She heard herself say no. She heard herself say it more than once. She heard it come out of her mouth in a voice she didn't recognize, and none of the men in the room flinched.

The taser came down between her legs.

He didn't put it against her thigh this time. He put it flat against her cunt — the plastic housing cold and hard against the swollen flesh — and Kara had one half-second to understand what was going to happen, and then he pulled the trigger.

The current went through her sex and up into her belly and down into her legs and her whole body snapped like a bowstring. She screamed. She screamed with her whole throat, the raw ruined throat, and the sound broke in the middle and came out as a sob. Her hips bucked against the desk, grinding down onto the taser, and her cunt clenched around nothing, spasming, and the current kept going and going and the light swung and Vic's face above her was calm and interested and she hated him, she hated him, and then she stopped hating him because she stopped being able to think at all.

He held it for six seconds. She counted them, somehow, some animal part of her counting, waiting for the click, and when it came she went limp all at once and slid off the edge of the desk and would have hit the floor if the limpy one hadn't caught her by the arm.

She hung there. Her feet touched concrete. Her knees didn't hold. She was aware of her own wetness running down the inside of one thigh, of her nipples hard from the cold and the current both, of the way her belly muscles were still twitching in small waves she couldn't stop. Her mouth was open. She was making a sound — a low, thin keening — and she couldn't stop that either.

"There she is," Vic said. "That's the real Supergirl. Under all the cape and the jokes. Just a girl on the floor."

Kara got one hand around the limpy one's forearm. She didn't have a plan. She just held on, because holding on was the only thing left.

Then the gum-chewer hauled her upright by the arm and the moment broke, and Kara's head snapped back and the room tilted, and she was standing — barely standing, held up between the two men, her toes scraping the concrete — and Vic was walking toward her with his hands in his pockets like a man strolling through a park.

Vic's hand closed around her jaw.

He turned her head left, then right, the way a man inspects fruit at a market. Her neck gave a small hot complaint and she let it. Her feet were barely under her. The limpy one had her right arm twisted up behind her back, wrist to shoulder blade, and the gum-chewer had her left, and between them she was a scarecrow held upright by its own stakes.

"Put her on the desk," Vic said.

They did it without ceremony. The limpy one kicked her feet out from under her and the gum-chewer took her weight, and she went down onto the desktop face-first with her cheek against the polished wood, papers sliding out from under her, a pen rolling off the edge and clicking on the concrete. Her arms were wrenched up behind her, both wrists caught in one of the limpy one's hands, and that hand pressed her knuckles flat against her spine.

She could smell the desk. Lemon polish and old ink and, faint under it, herself — the ozone of the taser, the salt of sweat, something else, lower, that she didn't want to name.

"Look at me," Vic said.

She didn't. She was looking at the banker's lamp, still knocked askew, still throwing its slow arcs across the ceiling. She was counting the arcs. She was doing the arithmetic of how many seconds she had left before the tide came all the way in, if it came at all, if the taser hadn't burned something out that wouldn't grow back.

His fingers found her hair and twisted, and her head came up off the wood, and she was looking at him whether she wanted to or not. His face was very close. The pale eyes had gone flat and bright, and the smile was gone, and what was underneath it was worse — a patient, workmanlike attention, the look of a man who had stopped performing and started doing.

"You broke my man's nose," he said. "You cost me time. You cost me money. You made me come down here." He said it quietly, each word placed. "I was going to be reasonable with you."

"You were going to—" Her voice gave out. She swallowed and got it back. "You were going to film me and blackmail me. That's reasonable?"

"That was the offer." He released her hair and straightened, and she watched him loosen his tie with two fingers, unhurried, the way he did everything. "You declined it. So now we do it the other way."

He shrugged out of the jacket and folded it once, precisely, and laid it over the back of the leather chair. The suit vest under it was black, fitted, with a gold chain across the pocket. He undid his cuffs and rolled them, one turn, two, and set his hands on the desk on either side of her head.

"Hold her," he said.

The gum-chewer took her left wrist and pulled it out wide, flat to the desk, and planted his own hand over it, palm to palm, fingers laced through hers so she couldn't close her fist. The limpy one did the same on the right. They leaned their weight into her shoulders, and she felt her arms stretch to the edge of their sockets and stop there, pinned, palms down, spread out like she was being measured.

She tried anyway. She got her hips up an inch, twisted, drove her heel at the limpy one's shin. It landed. He grunted and shifted his weight and pressed her shoulder harder and she stopped being able to feel two of her fingers.

"That's it," Vic said. "Keep doing that. It's better when they do that."

His belt made a sound she'd heard before, in a corridor, under fluorescent lights, from men she couldn't see. The buckle clicked. The leather slid through the loops. She heard him set it on the desk beside her head, and she turned her face away from it and looked at the lamp again, at the arcs, and her breath was coming fast and shallow and she couldn't slow it down.

His hand came down flat on the small of her back.

It was warm. That was the worst part. It was a warm human hand on her skin, and it rested there for a moment, and then it slid down over the curve of her ass, slow, the way a man drags his palm across a surface he's thinking about buying. Down over the back of her thigh. Up the inside of it, and she clamped her legs together on reflex and he let her, and then his knee came down between them and forced them apart again, an inch at a time, until she was open on the desk with her cheek on the wood and her arms pinned wide and nothing between her and the room.

She heard the gum-chewer swallow.

"Eyes on her hands," Vic said without looking up. "Not on her."

His fingers found her.

Two of them, flat, dragging up through the wet of her. She jerked against the hands on her wrists and got nowhere. He did it again, slower, parting her, and the sound of it was obscene in the quiet room — a slick, sticky drag, and she felt her own body answer it, a clench deep in her belly that she couldn't stop and couldn't forgive.

"You're wet," he said. It wasn't a question. He said it the way he'd said she's still awake. A fact on a ledger.

"You tased me," she said. Her voice was a ruin and she didn't care. "That's not—"

"It's all the same to me."

He pushed one finger into her.

She made a sound and hated it. He worked it in to the knuckle, unhurried, and crooked it, and the pressure was wrong and specific and her whole body flinched around it and he felt that, she knew he felt it, because he made a small approving noise and added a second finger and spread them.

"Tight," he said. "That's good. That's worth something."

Then he pulled his fingers out and she heard him unzip.

She didn't look. She kept her eyes on the lamp and the ceiling and the slow swinging light, and she listened instead — the rasp of the zipper, the shift of fabric, a small wet sound that was his hand on himself. She heard him spit. She heard him stroke it in.

"Hold her shoulders," he said. "She's going to buck."

The hands on her wrists moved up, one to each shoulder, and pressed her flat to the desk. Her cheek ground into the wood. She could feel her own heartbeat in her face.

He set the head of his cock against her.

Not inside. Against. The blunt, hot pressure of it, low, at the wrong angle, and he held it there and let her feel the size of it, and she did feel it, she couldn't not feel it, a thick blunt weight against a part of her that had already been used and was raw and was opening anyway.

"This is the part where you learn something," Vic said. "Everything before this was the pitch. This is the contract."

He pushed in.

It didn't go. She was tight and dry at the entrance and he was too much, and for a half-second there was only pressure, a spreading white burn of pressure, and then he put his weight behind it and the head of him forced through and she came up off the desk against the hands on her shoulders and screamed into the wood.

He didn't stop. He didn't slow. He fed himself into her an inch at a time, and every inch was its own event — the stretch that wouldn't end, the drag of him against walls that had already been torn and hadn't healed, and she could feel the shape of him, the length of him, going deeper than the men in the corridor had gone, deeper than she had room for. Her body made its own decisions around him: clenching, gripping, trying to push him out and pulling him in, and none of it mattered, because he kept going.

He kept going.

"Jesus," the gum-chewer said, and got a look from Vic and shut up.

Vic's hips met the backs of her thighs and stopped, and she understood, with a cold drop in her stomach, that he wasn't all the way in. There was more. He pulled back until just the head of him sat in her, and the drag of it was a bright line of pain, and then he drove back in and got further, and the sound she made wasn't a word, wasn't a scream, was something between the two that scraped her ruined throat raw.

He set a rhythm. Not fast. Deliberate. Each stroke longer than the last, each one reaching somewhere new, and by the sixth or seventh he was seated to the root in her, his hips flat against her ass, and she could feel him all the way up under her ribs, a fullness so total it was a kind of nausea, a pressure behind her navel and in her throat at once.

"There," he said, breathless for the first time. "There it is."

He held himself there, deep, and ground his hips in a slow circle, and she felt the head of him move against something inside her that made her vision white at the edges and her thighs shake against the desk.

"You feel that," he said. "That's the last thing you're going to feel for a long time that isn't mine."

He started to fuck her in earnest.

Long strokes, all the way out and all the way back, and the wet sound of it filled the room, and the desk creaked under her with every one. She was pinned at both shoulders and she couldn't move and she couldn't brace and all she could do was take it and be taken, and her body did what bodies do — it warmed, it slickened, it opened around him until the drag eased and the strokes got smoother and the shame of that was worse than the pain.

"That's better," Vic said. He had one hand on her hip now, thumb dug into the muscle, and the other flat on the desk beside her head, and he was watching himself go into her, she could see it in the angle of his neck. "See how it works. You fight, you get hurt. You stop fighting, you get used. That's the whole arrangement. That's what you agreed to when you walked in that door."

"I didn't—" she got out, and he drove in hard and cut the sentence in half.

"You did. You came here. You followed the girl. You put yourself on my floor." Another stroke, harder. "This is your plan working."

He was right. That was the thing that undid her, more than the stretch, more than the size of him. He was right. She'd walked in with her eyes open. She'd looked at the scared girl with the haunted eyes and she'd thought there, that's who I'm saving, and the scared girl had been a hook and she'd swallowed it whole.

She was crying. She hadn't noticed starting. The tears ran sideways across her cheek into the wood and the limpy one's knuckles were white where he held her shoulder and the gum-chewer was looking at the wall.

Then Vic's hand left her hip, and came up, and closed around the back of her neck.

"Lift her head," he said.

The gum-chewer got a fist in her hair and pulled her head up off the desk, and her neck arched, and Vic's hand slid around to her throat.

He didn't squeeze yet. He just held it. His palm across her windpipe, his fingers spread along the side of her neck, his thumb resting in the hollow under her jaw where he could feel her pulse going like a rabbit. He fucked her like that, one hand on her throat, and every stroke jostled his grip, and she could feel her own heartbeat against his thumb, fast and thin.

"You're going to look at me while it happens," he said. "You're going to know who did it."

And then he squeezed.

Her throat closed under his palm and the room went thin and far away — the lamp a smeared coin, the desk a hard line under her cheek, the gum-chewer's face a pale nothing at the edge of it. She heard herself try to breathe and get nothing, a thin whistling nothing, and her body arched against the hands on her shoulders because it had to, because there was no air and there had to be air, and Vic kept fucking her through it, long and slow and deep, riding the arch of her like a man breaking a horse.

Then he let go.

Air came back in a rush and she sucked it in with a sound like a drain, and the blood roared in her ears, and she was sobbing now, really sobbing, the kind that came out of the chest and not the throat. He didn't stop for that either. He planted both hands on her hips and hauled her back onto him, and the angle changed, and the head of him started hitting something that made her whole lower body spasm around him — a bright, wrong, involuntary clench that he felt and she knew he felt because he laughed, low, through his nose.

"There she is," he said. "Took long enough."

He went rougher. He pulled her back to meet every stroke now, using her hips like handles, and the desk started moving — a half-inch skid across the floor with every thrust, the legs groaning, the lamp wobbling its light across the wall in time with him. The limpy one had to brace a boot against the desk to hold it steady and the gum-chewer had both fists in her hair now, holding her head down, and she couldn't see anything but the grain of the wood and her own tears making it dark.

She stopped fighting. She wasn't sure when. It wasn't a decision, it was a subtraction — one more thing her body did without asking her, the way it warmed, the way it opened, the way it shook. She lay there and took it and the taking was the only thing left in the world, and somewhere behind the desk someone's watch ticked, and the fluorescent hum went on and on, and Vic Marchetti fucked her through the wreck of the plan she'd walked in with and she felt every inch of what that cost.

"This is what you are now," he said. His voice had gone rough at the edges, the first crack in the smooth. "You understand? Not the girl with the cape. Not the reporter. This."

He drove in hard on the word and held himself there, grinding, and her thighs shook against the desk and a sound came out of her that wasn't a word and wasn't a scream and wasn't hers.

"Say it."

She didn't.

He pulled out and slammed back in and the desk jumped and she cried out.

"Say it."

"No," she got out. Ruined. Barely there.

He stopped. Just — stopped, buried to the root, and held still, and let her feel the fullness and the waiting and the four hands holding her down, and the waiting was worse than the fucking, and he knew it, he was watching her know it. The lamp ticked. Somewhere down the corridor a door opened and closed. Her heart went on beating against the desk and against him and against nothing.

"Say it," he said again, soft. Almost kind. "Or we do this all night and I start taking pieces. You've got a lot of pieces. I've got all night."

She thought about Kara Danvers. She thought about the girl with the haunted eyes, the hook she'd swallowed, the girl who was somewhere in this building right now with a man's name and a man's face and a story that had been a door. She thought about the two women from the corridor, the ones she hadn't saved.

She said it.

"This is what I am."

The words came out flat and dead and he made a satisfied sound low in his chest and started moving again, and this time he was close — she could feel it, the rhythm going short and hard, his breath coming fast and mean, his fingers digging bruises into her hips. He fucked her through the last of it with no finesse at all, just weight and speed, and the desk hammered the wall and the lamp swung and the limpy one's boot slipped and scraped and nobody cared, and then he buried himself to the hilt and held and came.

She felt it. The pulse of it, deep, and the heat of it, and the way he ground himself in while it happened like he wanted every drop of it in her, and the sound he made was small and private and almost polite, and then he stayed there a moment longer, breathing, before he pulled out.

The withdrawal was its own event. A long, dragging pull and then the sudden empty ache of it, and she felt something wet follow him out and run down the inside of her thigh, and she pressed her forehead into the desk and didn't move.

Vic zipped up. She heard it. She heard him take a breath and let it out and pick up his glass and drink, and when he spoke again his voice was smooth as it had ever been, the crack sealed over like it had never happened.

"Get her cleaned up," he said.

The hands let go of her shoulders and her hair and she slid down the side of the desk onto the floor because her legs weren't there. The concrete was cold against her hip and her bare thigh and the side of her face, and she lay there with her shirt bunched around her neck and her knees drawn up and watched Vic Marchetti straighten his tie in the green lamplight like a man who'd just finished a phone call.

Vic straightened his cuffs, one and then the other, and picked his jacket off the back of the chair. He shrugged into it with the unhurried economy of a man who had never once been late for anything in his life, and he checked the line of his lapels in the dark window glass before he turned back to the room.

The door opened. Fluorescent light from the corridor washed in flat and white across the office floor, and for one second Kara could see the long hall beyond it, the wet prints she'd left on the concrete still there, two lines of them, small and bare, leading away into the building like something out of a story about a girl who didn't make it out of the woods.

Then the door shut, and Vic Marchetti was gone, and Zoe with him, and Kara was alone in the room with two men and a desk that still smelled like what had happened on it.

For a little while nothing happened at all.

She lay on the concrete and listened to the building. Somewhere up high a bass line thudded through the structure, faint as a heartbeat through a wall, the concert still going, thousands of people still screaming for a band that had no idea what was happening under their feet. Somewhere closer, water moved in a pipe. The green lamp ticked and hummed and threw its coin of light on the ceiling, and the limpy one picked up Vic's glass off the desk and drank what was left in it and set it down again without looking at her, and the gum-chewer chewed.

Kara tested her hands. They moved. She tested her legs, drew one knee up, and the whole leg shook with the effort and she stopped, and let it lie flat again, and breathed. The red light was still in her — she could feel it, that wrong flatness behind her sternum where the sun used to live, like a radio tuned to static. She reached for it anyway, the way you press a bruise, and got nothing, and kept pressing.

"Don't," the limpy one said, without heat. "You do that thing with your eyes, it makes Dave nervous."

The gum-chewer — Dave, apparently — spat his gum into his hand and looked at it and then at her, and he didn't say anything, but he came around the desk and stood over her, and that was its own kind of sentence.

"Boss said clean her up," the limpy one said.

"Boss said a lot of things." Dave crouched down next to her, and up close his face was young, younger than she'd thought, twenty-four maybe, with a soft chin and a bad shave and eyes that had gone somewhere flat and stayed there. He looked at her the way you looked at a car you were thinking about buying. "He said clean her up, he didn't say how clean."

"Dave."

"What. He's upstairs with the kid. He's gonna be upstairs with the kid for a while." Kara got her arms under her. She got one elbow planted and her shoulder up off the concrete and she made it that far before the limpy one's boot came down on her wrist — not hard, just there, just weight, just a fact — and she stopped, breathing through her teeth, staring at the black rubber sole of his shoe on her arm.

"Don't," he said again, same tone as before, like he was reminding her about a parking meter.

"You don't have to do this," she said. Her voice came out in pieces. The chokehold had left it in gravel and Vic's hand had ground the gravel finer, and what was left was a raw scrape of sound that didn't sound like her at all. "Whatever he's paying you. Whatever he's got on you. There's a way out of this that doesn't—"

"There isn't," Dave said, and he said it without malice, which was worse. He was unbuckling his belt. "There really isn't. You want to know the thing about Vic? He doesn't pay you and he doesn't threaten you. He just makes sure you've got nothing else. You ever try to leave a job when the guy who gave it to you knows where your mom sleeps?" The belt came free and he doubled it in his hand. "So. You know. Sorry."

He didn't sound sorry. He sounded like a man clocking in.

The limpy one took his boot off her wrist and stepped back and sat down in Vic's chair — sat in the boss's chair, which told Kara something about how the hierarchy worked when the boss was upstairs — and he propped his bad leg on the corner of the desk and folded his arms and settled in to watch, and Dave knelt down over her and got a hand in her hair and turned her face to the side.

"Keep it quiet," the limpy one said from the chair. "The kid's upstairs."

"She's three floors up."

"She's got ears like a bat, that one. Keep it quiet anyway."

Dave didn't answer. He was already working his jeans down one-handed, and Kara watched the ceiling, the green coin of the lamp, the tick and hum, and she thought about the two women from the corridor, the ones she hadn't saved, and she thought about Zoe with her father's hand between her shoulder blades, and she thought, absurdly, about her apartment, the good chair by the window, the coffee she'd left half-drunk on the counter that morning like a person who thought she was coming home.

Then Dave's knee pushed her thighs apart and she stopped thinking about the coffee.

She fought. She got one hand free and raked it down his face and he swore and hit her — a short, hard, open-handed blow across the ear that rang her head like a struck bell — and then the limpy one was out of the chair and had her other arm, and between the two of them they had her turned and pinned with her cheek on the concrete and her hips up, and it was happening again, it was the corridor all over again, the same weight and the same four hands and the same fluorescent honesty, and she was so tired, she was so deep-down tired, and the red light sat behind her sternum like a stone in a well.

She heard him spit. Felt the wet heat of it land and slide, and then the blunt press of him, and then the push.

Her body gave. That was the worst of it — not the pain, which was there, but the give, the way her body had learned in the last two hours that pushing back only bought more, that going soft bought less, and had made the trade without consulting her. Dave groaned like a man settling into a hot bath and said, "Oh, that's — yeah," and started to move.

The limpy one held her wrists crossed behind her back with one hand and watched the door with the other half of his attention, and Dave fucked her on the floor of Vic Marchetti's office at a bored, steady pace, and Kara lay with her cheek on the cold concrete and her eyes open and counted the ticks of the lamp.