A Most Unkind Songbird Part 1 (v1.0)

Summary: A supervillain kidnaps his nemesis' new sidekick
Tags: Female Sidekick to a Superhero / Male Supervillain, rape, violence, blood, humiliation
This is dark shit.


A girl with a fabric mask over her eyes and a green jumpsuit stood on a roof. Gecko was proud of herself. She felt invincible, even when her hero left her alone for half an hour and her only responsibility was staying put. Pushing brown hair out of her face, she seemed alert, but really her head was so busy racing with thoughts that the world around her dimmed in intensity. She thought of things in the past. She planned for the future. She fantasized.

Men in black clothes overwhelmed her from nowhere, but it was mostly the element of surprise that allowed them to drug her with a needle and gag the girl before she could cry for help. They put a bag over her head while she went limp and dizzy, carried her down a poorly lit stairwell to an alley, and threw her in the back of an unmarked van.

The men in the van with Gecko listened to her hero calling her over a little radio at her hip. One of them turned it off without comment.

They gave her limp body to their boss. He was in charge of this scheme and many others. In the low light of the room he could have vanished into the shadows if he didn’t care so much about maintaining a commanding presence. Standing tall with perfect posture and a javelin in his hand, the man wore a suit of black ballistic nylon with black armor plates where he most needed protection from guns. A smooth steel mask with black eyes protected his identity much more completely than the cloth joke on the girl’s face.

He smiled behind his mask where no one could see and gestured for the men to chain her to the wall like anyone they planned to interrogate. There was concern that she might fight back when she woke up, but one girl punching and kicking could still be easily subdued and the key to the electronic collar around her neck would be stored far away from her. They had an arsenal of non-lethal ways to keep her in her place for as long as it took. As long as the man in the mask wanted.

They left her lying on the floor when the collar was secure. They presented their boss with the girl's radio and the rest of the tools she had been carrying. It pleased him immensely.

"I'll make good use of this," he said. "It will be good to have a hotline to Chimera, won't it? He hasn’t been taking my calls for the last few years for some reason."

It was a pretty good joke.

The henchmen waited around as quietly as they could, keeping towards the far corners of the room, trying to stay out of the way and out of sight. They were very good at being part of the background. They were proud of their accomplishment in kidnapping the girl and wanted to know what the next step was in their boss' scheme.

The tall man in black stood in front of the girl where she slumped against the wall and watched Gecko in silence for some time, then squatted down to touch her neck with two gloved fingers. He examined the fabric that made up her costume and pulled aside the collar of her green shirt for a moment before letting it fall back into place. It was always strange to meet someone in person after spying on them for a long time with cameras. She seemed smaller to him than she had in the videos.

He walked away from her body to a table far out of her reach where he left her radio and her tools. Her toys, he thought of them. His own tools that he arranged next to hers were far more refined. He chose a needle and filled it with a clear liquid, then returned to her and slipped it into her neck for a moment. Not seconds after he stepped away from her, the sidekick was on her feet, looking around the room in a confused panic. Her hands jumped to the metal collar around her neck to pull at it, but it was secure and she only rattled the chains. She made a frustrated sound and cursed loudly.

The man in the mask did not flinch, but he stepped out of her reach. He put away the needle and turned back to watch her with one hand on his hip and the other holding the javelin point up like a walking stick.

"Are you kidding me?" Gecko shouted. "You guys kidnapped me? I'm going to kick all of your asses!"

She was posturing. The man in the mask was not afraid. He wanted the girl needed to get all of the confidence out of her system, the sooner the better. His men snickered and looked at each other sideways.

"My hero is going to kill you when he gets here!" she threatened.

"Chimera never kills anyone," the masked man laughed, and the girl promptly shut her mouth and blushed furiously at him. "He's a coward."

"He is not," she immediately defended the honor of the man she had been fighting crime with. How could she not? It was often said that all sidekicks adored their heroes and that absolutely held true for the kidnapped girl. How could she not love the man who was like a big brother to her? Who had taken her in and brought her into this world so much bigger than herself? "He is not a coward! Give me my communicator!"

As if she could possibly persuade him. The masked man picked up the little radio and switched it on, watching the girl chained to the wall almost strangling herself trying to pull free and reach him while she hurled obscenities. He cradled the communication device for a thoughtful moment and then hit the button. "Chimera?" he sang in a taunting tone.

"Give it to me!" the girl demanded. "It isn't yours!"

No one was paying attention to her for the moment, all eyes waited, watching the little device in his hand. Moments later a light came on and everyone in the room heard the familiar voice of the hero, angry and accusatory. "Where is she, Shrike?"

The henchmen cackled like hyenas and their boss made sure their laughter carried through the communicator to the hero. Gecko had a moment of silent panic realizing who it was that had her. She’d heard stories.

"I've got her! Don't worry," Shrike laughed.

The hero's reaction was much like the girl's: he led with empty threats. "If you hurt her--"

"I'm going to," the man in the mask delivered a quick promise and shut off the device before there could be any retaliation. When he set it back down and looked back across the room at Gecko, he saw that she had finally gone quiet. She stood still like an animal hoping it could blend in with its surroundings now that she was aware that threats would have no effect.

"So, what are you ransoming me for?" she asked.

Shrike coughed a laugh back at her. "I'm not ransoming you. I'm going to keep you!"

Her wide eyes told him that this was unexpected and something she had not considered or been prepared for. Who could blame her? She was a sidekick to a hero after all. They were always sheltered and never trained to deal with the dark possibilities that their optimistic masters liked to pretend weren't real. And this girl was relatively new anyway--how long had she worn her mask and costume out at night? A month? And she couldn’t have been training for long before that. Chimera had rushed this and Gecko would pay the price.

"You can't do that," she told him.

"I can," Shrike replied, taking confident steps towards her and watching her body language as she grappled with the situation. The sidekick looked unsteady on her feet with her arms hanging limply at her sides in shock. "I know we haven't gotten to know each other yet, but I know your hero very well."

"He told me about you," she said, taking a step as the villain drew close.

"What did he say?" pressed Shrike.

“He just mentioned the birds,” she started, but was cut off.

When he got a chance to explain his namesake, he took it. Shrike tapped the end of his javelin on the ground to draw attention to it. “They really are interesting creatures, aren’t they? They love sharp things. Thorns. Barbed wire. Any needle or spike they know. Because they’re hunters. They eat little mice or little birds or little lizards.”

He pointed the javelin at Gecko briefly to make his point. “But before they eat their prey, they impale them somewhere. Even if they’re still alive.”

She looked at him with disgust while her stomach twisted into knots and her eyes kept drifting to the tip of the javelin. She needed to move the conversation. "Chimera said that you knew each other from school," she said.

"True enough," he replied, taking another step forward. "But a rather boring piece of information on its own."

The moment he was in her range, the girl lunged for him with all of the ferocity of a caged beast. She forgot any subtlety she had in her attack and left her guards down so he had all the time he needed to pull up his weapon and turn it to strike her over the eye with the blunt end so hard that she fell back against the wall.

"He did a shitty job teaching you to fight," Shrike said. That wasn't quite true. He'd seen enough videos of the girl fighting petty criminals and henchmen to know that she was more than competent if she had a fair fight. What she didn't know how to do was stay calm and remember everything she had learned when she was in a situation like this. And now that he had landed a hit to her head, he was sure she would only get sloppier and sloppier.

"He's a great teacher!" she shouted in pain, covering her eye where she had taken the hit and then cursing softly.

"You aren't doing him any favors by trying to defend him from every little thing I say," Shrike man said.

"We'll you're a..." Gecko paused and struggled with her words. "You're not doing any favors yourself if you..."

Shrike stepped in and struck her again, this time to her abdomen. She flinched to jump out of the way too late and ended up doubling over his javelin’s shaft and groaning. Poor girl. "If you had been watching instead of trying to say something clever, you wouldn't be in this much pain," he chided, stepping back before she could try to grab him or strike back.

She fell on one knee and held her stomach.

"I think he winded her," a henchman muttered to another. "She finally shut up."

"No," their boss said. "She's just embarrassed by how badly she's doing."

The girl looked up at him but didn't say anything. He was right, she was embarrassed. Her lip was twisted in anger but her eyes spelled fear. The one he had struck was already starting to swell and close.

"She's ashamed because you lot caught her, I'm sure," Shrike kept speaking to his men. It made his stomach wrench in happy thrills to say these cruel words to the young girl and watch her expression fall. "I’m certain she thought she was too good to be ambushed and kidnapped. But what an absolutely useless sidekick she is. Dead weight, really."

Oh god, she thought. He’s right.

Clenching her jaw she tried to suppress thoughts labeling herself as worthless, as a burden, as someone who didn’t deserve what little she had in life.

He heard her sniff. The first sign of tears. It sent a tingle up his spine to watch fear enter her. He walked away from her and leaned his javelin against the wall, then folded his hands behind his back. She was easy! So easy!

When Shrike looked back at Gecko, she had pulled herself to her feet again. She adjusted the fabric mask over her eyes.

“So why am I here?” she asked across the room. The Henchmen were quiet--they wanted answers too. “What is your problem?”

“My problem is mouthy brats who think they are in a position to do anything other than beg,” he snapped. She annoyed him, so he withheld the entirety of his plan.  “You’re here for fun.”

“Fun?” she sputtered. Her voice cracked.

“My fun,” the villain clarified, putting a hand on his chest. “Not yours. Making you squirm. Making your master squirm by proxy. I’ve been waiting for him to get a sidekick for a long time just so I can play this game with him. And god, it’s like he picked you knowing I would be dragging your ass back here.”

This plan made sense to the henchmen, who nodded along like students in a class listening to a lecture. It made Gecko feel like she had eaten a meal of lead nuts and bolts for dinner and they were churning in her gut, partly from fear and partly from getting hit in the stomach.

“This is just to get back at Chimera?” she asked. Her voice was much less steady than she wished it was. “W-well, congratulations, I’m sure he feels like an idiot. You can let me go and always talk about how you won this time.”

The men broke into laughter at her pathetic attempts to get out of the situation and she felt the sting in her eyes again as fear pushed tears out of her.

“No, no,” said Shrike. He picked up the radio again from the table and walked back towards the girl. When he spoke next he was upbeat and energetic. Enthusiastic. “I’m going to torture you.”

“What?” she breathed. Any tiny bead of confidence that had remained left her body in an instant.

“I’m going to torture you,” he said again, as if this was something very normal. “But nothing too fancy. I’m just going to beat you bloody and violate you. We’ll take lots of video of course. I don’t think that just sending our favorite hero little sound bytes is going to really get the message across, you know?”

Gecko looked like she might pass out again. The thing that screamed most heavily in her head was the word ‘violate’, repeated over and over again as she tried to guess what that meant. There wasn’t much to guess. She knew. Her eyes fixed on the radio in Shrike’s hand. It was cute to him that she could be so easily distracted. Chimera was an idiot for letting her on the streets at this stage. He jumped forward and grabbed the back of her mask where the cloth was tied in a knot and pulled it off of her head. The chain connecting Gecko to the wall rattled as she tried to duck away.

She didn’t have much of an identity to protect. She was no genius, no billionaire, no one in the public eye. He knew all of that ahead of time, he did his research! He knew enough that he could have written her biography. Still, she acted like a fully-fledged hero and stupidly covered her face. Shrike laughed at her stupidity and kicked her in the stomach. Gecko went tumbling on her ass with a grunt. She didn’t get back up this time, but she did look at him with her bare face. He saw the tears he had been looking for and inhaled deeply with pride. Her bruised eye was more swollen than before.

Shrike crouched to be at eye level with her. “If you had anything to say to Chimera right now, what would it be?”

“Are you going to let me talk to him?” she asked.

“I haven’t decided.”

She blinked. “I don’t know what I would say.”

“Why?”

Pain flickered across her lips at some imagined scene. She chose to be honest. “Because I don’t want it to be the last he ever hears from me.”

Shrike chuckled. “Well. That’s not a stupid answer, but I don’t plan on killing you. Not like that carjacker who shot your mother.”

“Stop!” Gecko screamed before he could say anymore. Shrike knew he had found a raw nerve. She was surprised that he knew her history as much as horrified that he would bring it up. He had torn open every wound she had tonight and given her plenty of new ones. Everything was still too fresh. Memories of injustices were always red hot on a hero’s mind, easy wounds to agitate. “Stop talking! How do you… how did you find out…?”

“I did my research. I don’t just go around kidnaping strange girls. I know your life story. I have your social security number and a copy of your birth certificates. I even have your school records until you dropped out,” he stood back up. “Leverage.”

Tears streamed out of her eyes. She couldn’t imagine why he needed those things if he just wanted to torture her. But being reminded was torture in its own way. Losing her parent was a wound that Gecko believed could never heal.

He showed her the radio in his gloved hand again. “I really, really want to make an old friend of mine miserable.”

“So why me if he’s what you want?” she shuddered as a sob finally welled up and burst out of her body.

“Well, I already killed his wife,” came the deep reply. “But I did that too quickly. Just a run-of-the-mill impaling. Hurting you is going to be a great way to twist the knife. It’s really true what they say, that the best way to hurt a hero is through the people close to him. Because he will always blame himself for it.”

Gecko shut her eyes and shook her head while her body trembled with sobs. She had never even known Chimera had been married. He never talked about a wife. But then, she never talked about her mom. “No,” she moaned.

With a little smile to himself, Shrike quietly turned on the communicator while the girl was groaning to herself and not paying attention. He wanted to give his old friend some nice reassurance that his sidekick was still kicking. He let a few moments of the girl crying play for the transmission, then he stepped in and grabbed her by her hair on the side of her head and pulled her to her feet. She wailed.

“I’m glad we’re past the part where you thought it was a good idea to try to act confident,” he said, then shoved her against the metal wall and leaned on her to keep her in place with his body weight. His right foot was planted heavily between her two, his thigh grinding against her crotch. When he added pressure, the girl’s loud sobbing was interrupted by a high-pitched gasp. He purred a question in her ear just loud enough for her hero to hear on the other end. “You like that?”

“No!” she shouted.

“That’s okay. I’ll make you like it,” he said calmly. His hand still wrapped up in her hair pulled her head away from the wall and then smashed it back with a crack and a click of her teeth. He stepped back and let her cradle her head and make whimpers of pain. He ended the communication and stood still for a moment, waiting for a reaction from Chimera.

Her called to Gecko through the radio. “I’m coming,” he told the crying sidekick until the masked man turned it off again. Couldn’t let the girl have too much reassurance. He just wanted her to hear the man’s desperate voice.

“He’s not coming,” Shrike assured the girl, leaving her to sit down again so he could return to his henchmen in the corner. “He has no idea where you are.”

The men were attentive and curious. Some unhappy about it. Most of them had seen their boss being violent before, especially to prisoners they had to interrogate. But not to a young girl.

“You can go now,” he dismissed them. After a moment, sensing hesitation and curiosity he reminded them: “You can watch on the cameras. Make sure they’re all recording properly. I need good footage to send to our dear friend when I get around to it.”

“You think he’ll even watch?” asked one man on the way out.

“Of course,” said Shrike. “And he’ll hate himself for it every second of the way.”

The henchman shrugged and left the room.

Empty space pressed down on Gecko when she was left alone with Shrike. Her head pounded. Her stomach hurt. She knew it was only going to get worse. “Are you going to rape me?” she asked.

He sneered and crossed his arms. “It wouldn’t be rape if you were to let me in.”

The girl felt sick hearing him say that and clenched her thighs together and curled them up against her chest. “You’re disgusting.”

He snorted, a sound still fully audible through the mask. He wouldn’t call her wrong. “How far have you gone with your hero?” he asked.

She turned and looked at him, shocked. “With Chimera?”

“Yes, Chimera.” He rolled his eyes at her, but all she could see was the annoyed tilt of his head.

Gecko shook her head incredulously. “Never, no!”

He was inclined to believe her because of her surprise and apparent confusion, though it wasn’t what he had anticipated. “Why not? You’ve lived and trained alone with him for months now. Are you telling me you never once had that man’s cock inside of you?”

She shook her head. Sleep with her hero? How could she? He was like family, he’d taken her in. Aside from an awkward dream or two it wasn’t something that she dwelled on. “Why would I?”

Retrospectively he wasn’t sure why he had assumed this girl would be having sex with his nemesis and took his time in answering. “Because you were both so desperately lonely.”

She wiped her nose on her green sleeve. “He’s my best friend,” she said, and saying so triggered a new wave of tears.

Shrike lifted his head and briefly looked into one of the cameras. When he sent this footage to his nemesis, he wanted him to hear from her mouth how much he mattered to her. It was important that he hear her words in his mind when he thought about how he was unable to save her.

“How... pure of you,” the masked man said. “Unless you’re gay?”

She shook her head slowly, not sure why it would matter. He was glad--he didn’t see any appeal in molesting a gay girl.

“That’s good,” he said, mostly to himself. “Take off your clothes.”

“No way,” she said. She wanted to cry about what she knew was coming, but that wasn’t pragmatic. He was filming this and she didn’t want there to be a shred of doubt in the mind of any potential viewer--but especially Chimera--that she wanted nothing to do with this man. She got to her feet slowly. “No way.”

Shrike sighed. “At least I will enjoy making you regret that.” He grabbed the chain connected to her collar rather than try to grab the girl when she was waiting for him and yanked her off-balance, grabbed her lapels, and deftly slammed her back against the wall and started to peel off her suit.

Rather than look away from him, she glared up at his mask with her teeth grit. “You’re sick in the head.”

“Oh, do you think?” he was unabashedly sarcastic, pausing, the grab her chin and squeeze. “Of course I’m sick! I make my living being sick. And I’m going to make you sick in the head, little girl. I’m going to fuck you and you’re never going to forget about it because I am going to be here for the rest of your life.”

He let go of her face and went back to undressing her. “Rest of my life?” she asked in a cracking voice. Underneath her green jumpsuit was a white tank top and a smooth body.

“You think I’m ever going to let you leave?” he pulled the suit down to her hips. “I told you, you’re not here for a ransom. I gain nothing if I let you go. But as long as you’re here? As long as you’re alive? I have Chimera in my palm.”

Gecko inhaled with a shudder as Shrike tore the straps of her tank top so he could pull it down her body. If he pulled it up, it would get stuck on the chain. She kept staring at him with her hands as fists at her sides and every second that went on made her want to lash out more, but she held back. What good would it do? Even if she hit him somewhere he didn’t have armor, he’d hit back twice as hard.

Even as she tried to keep herself under control to preserve her health, her hands went rogue and tried to grab his hands to stop him as he reached around her back to unclasp her sports bra. He ignored her pathetic protests and pulled her bra from her. She whimpered.

“Very nice,” Shrike complimented her pale breasts, stepping back as she folded her arms defensively on her chest and tried to simultaneously pull her tank top back to a covering position. He unfastened his gloves from his costume and pulled them away. After all, what was sex without touch? He tossed the gloves over his shoulder after her bra and flexed his bare hands. From the look in her eyes he may as well have been holding javelins. When he grabbed her wrist and felt her soft, warm skin under his rough palm and pried it away from her body, he felt intimate, felt a surge of arousal. This was the time. She stopped resisting when he twisted her wrist and made her whimper.

He groped her chest to make her squirm, to make him rock hard in his pants at the soft and forgiving feeling of her breast, a body he was going to destroy. and then pulled the rest of her clothes down all in one pass--shirt, jumpsuit, shorts, underwear. The room wasn’t cold, but it was colder than she wanted and goosebumps popped out on her skin.

“Now why do you shave if he isn’t fucking you?” asked Shrike.  She was too busy crying to give a good answer. He sighed and snatched up her wrists in one of his hands. “Not that I’m going to complain. Kick off your boots so I don’t have to throw you on the ground.”

“No,” Gecko said. Another refusal. She knew that she was asking for more pain, asking for more injuries. But she’d take a concussion now over regret later.

He made good on his promise and kicked her legs out from under her so she fell. She landed with a grunt in a pile of tangled limbs and he was quick to grab her boots and pull them off, then grab her clothes and pull them from her legs. “You are a chore,” he told her.

She waited until one of her legs was free from the clothes and he was still disentangling her foot from the rest. The girl pulled her leg back and kicked, landing her heel squarely in the center of his mask and knocking his torso back as he reeled in surprise and whiplash. For a moment she was smugly proud of herself for fighting back, and then he retaliated. Anger had splashed his blood now, and he was already worked up for sex. It wasn’t a good combination. He burned from the inside out.

Shrike’s left hand grabbed Gecko’s right wrist like he meant to crush all of the bones into dust, and his right arm wailed like a jackhammer against her body. He cut his bare knuckles on her teeth when he struck her mouth and bruised them pulverizing her nose. His cold rage made her bleed, and every time his fist struck her body in a new place--her stomach, breasts, jaw, shoulders, thighs--his cock throbbed and grew harder until he couldn’t hit her anymore, he had to stop and open his pants while she gasped for air and coughed. Coughing was a mistake, it made her aware of not just the surface pain of the injuries, but the deeper pains all through her torso. The other damage under the bruises. She didn’t move now. Her world was spinning.

“I hope you remember this as a lesson,” he grunted, finally unzipping his fly to free his erection. His quaking right hand stroked his thick shaft. “Not to fight me.”

Shrike spread her legs for himself. “If you weren’t trying to be a little hero fighting a villain, we could have spent more time getting you ready for me and this wouldn’t hurt as much,” he sighed, leaning over her body and letting the tip of his cock brush up against her labia and clitoris while the girl made a whimper.

The masked man got tingles up his spine as he throbbed so hard it pained him. No more waiting. He pulled Gecko by her hips towards his cock and buried himself inside of her. It must have hurt because she wailed, he thought--he didn’t realize she’d never done any of this before and she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing unless he found blood on his cock later. She was wet enough from panic and from when he had pressed his leg to her crotch that it wasn't agonizing on its own, but she wasn’t slippery enough to make his work easy and that meant unenjoyable friction for her body as he stretched her out. Her fingernails clawed at the floor.

He groaned through clenched teeth and leaned his torso over her frail body and listened to her whine and breathe.

“If you were my sidekick,” Shrike said, pressing slowly into her all the way, watching her sweat and shudder. “I would have been able to keep you safe, unlike that disgrace you’re running around with.”

"I'm not your sidekick," Gecko said. She couldn’t get air out her nose. It was definitely broken.

"You could be," he told her, waiting a moment inside of her to take a deep breath before he started to thrust. He planted a hand next to her head and the other stayed on her hip. "Right now it seems like I'm the one doing all the work but don't you think we'd work nicely as a team?"

"No," she replied, lifting a thigh slightly to try to accomodate him, to mitigate his size and her unreadiness. No matter how she squirmed her hips she couldn’t make him fit her comfortably. Gecko couldn’t keep him from rubbing sensitive places and had never felt so out of control of her own body before.

"You don't think?" His breathing was slightly heavier as he pounded her. Her comfort didn’t matter. He liked that he could make her wiggle her hips for him, and he wasn’t the only one noticing that she was getting wetter as he kept going.

"I'm going to be a hero," she told him, accidentally letting out a high-pitched moan.

"Not at this rate," he laughed at her helplessness to resist her body’s urges. "Besides. You were meant to be crime, not fight it."

She sensed his apprehension, the way he was like a herd of angry bulls and needed to hold himself back to keep from going berserk. She turned her head to the side and shut her eye not swollen shut yet. He was better not listened to.

"Because you like conflict," he growled. "I brought you here and you picked a fight with me after I chained you to a wall. I can teach you to backup your tough girl threats."

"I'm learning fine with Chimera," Gecko said.

"You were not. You're not going to continue with that hack because I am never going to let you off this spike where I have pinned you." He thrust into her viciously with every word even though it wasn't the most comfortable thing for him. Making his point was the most important thing. "If you ever want to see the sky again, you're going to do it with me, under my wing."

Better not to see the sky, she thought. Most of her energy was now being put into trying to move her hips in such a way as to avoid the most stimulation possible, but Shrike had none of that. He moved with her and listened to the moans and groans she made when her body flared with pleasure that she didn’t want to associate with. It was shameful, alien. She still thought she had a chance to avoid an orgasm up until his final thrust before her body tensed suddenly and she felt like she had fallen into a bathtub of ice as her wet tunnel clamped down on his cock.

"And I have another very compelling reason," Shrike cooed. He wasn’t done with her. "When I dug up information about you, I found more. I know things that police and heroes don't. You're not the only one whose name I know."

He grabbed the chain to Gecko’s collar and tugged her torso upright to make her sit in his lap so he could let gravity pull her down his cock and save himself that trouble. He let go of the chain and wrapped his arm around the small of her back. She was sensitive and raw inside from his thrusting, she just wanted him to cum.

"I know who killed your mother. I know his address. I've seen him and stalked him."

Her crying stopped for a moment in shock and she opened her eye to look at his soulless mask. She inhaled and pushed out one more, ragged sob.

"I'll let you kill him. I'll help you if you want." His voice was breathy as he neared his orgasm. "Is there anything you want more than to kill him?"

"N-no," she said, stammering her words.

In her admission was the deep, emotional weakness that Shrike wanted to see. The acknowledgement that she wanted something selfish and cruel more than being a hero. His arms tightened around her, holding her torso against his and pressing her face to his shoulder so he could come deep inside of her.

“That’s what I like to hear,” Shrike growled.

“No,” she repeated. “I mean… I mean no, I don’t want that.”

Disgusted and disappointed, he pulled her off his dick and threw her aside and hopped to his feet. “Imagine telling your mother that,” he said. He zipped up his pants, took his javelin and her communicator, and left her in the room.



Most henchmen had elected to observe from the control room. A few chose not to watch, and the ones that stayed were mainly interested in their boss' methods of persuasion and less interested in just the rape itself.

"Did I hear him break one of her ribs?" One asked, cringing.

"That sound wasn't it, but he could have broken one," said another. He was the only person with medical knowledge there. "Her nose is broken for sure though."



Shrike pulled off his helmet on the way out of the interrogation room. His blonde hair was plastered to his head with sweat. He walked immediately to the observation room, smiling like he hadn't just beaten and raped a girl, hiding his disappointment that she hadn’t cracked under the pressure on day one.

He pointed at the medic with the blunt end of his javelin. "Get her cleaned up. She's a mess. You can give her painkillers. And a bucket. But don't give her any clothes back."

He pointed at the man at the controls while the medic left. "Put together a tape. Or, disc. Or file. Whatever. Cut the video like a threat, not a porno."

"Sure."

His javelin end moved to the last two men and jumped between them. "See what Chimera's been doing out in the world. I'm sure he's positively frantic." Shrike sighed with delight as he leaned on the doorframe.



The medic found the girl only slightly responsive until he ran a cold, wet rag over her face to mop up blood. "I'm a doctor," he lied in a complaining tone when she tried to turn from him.

Gecko let him look her over. Let him inject something into her face on either cheek. Whatever it was, it wouldn't be worse. Let him wipe down her legs with the rag. She couldn't bear to do it herself but wanted it done and was secretly grateful for it. Oh. Her face was numb. He made her lie down so he could do something to her face that made her nose make a crunch sound. Setting it straight. He gave her a pill and he took it.

"Sleep," was his instruction. He left her with a bucket.