Chapter 3: Violent Reunion
The tea grew cold in the chipped mug. Amelia sat at her kitchen table, listening to the distant, endless rush of the shower. It had stopped twenty minutes ago. Now there was only silence from behind the closed bathroom door.
When the door finally clicked open, the figure that emerged was a stranger. Kara wore a pair of Amelia’s gray sweatpants and an oversized MIT sweatshirt. The clothes swallowed her frame. Her damp hair hung in lank strands. Her face was wiped clean of expression, a pale, blank mask. But her eyes were volcanic.
“I found him,” she said, her voice a low scrape of gravel.
Amelia started. “What? How?”
Kara’s gaze was fixed on a point a thousand miles away. “I tuned my hearing. I’ve been scanning since I got out of the shower. I filtered out the city, the normal chaos. I listened for the stone. It has a frequency. A hum. Like a rotten tooth in the universe. I can hear it.” She blinked, a slow, mechanical motion. “It’s at the docks. An old warehouse off the Seagate.”
“You can’t go. Kara, look at you.” Amelia stood, gesturing at the slumped shoulders, the tremor in the hands she was clenching into fists.
“I have to go,” Kara said, and for the first time, a spark of something alive flashed in her eyes. Not heroism. Pure, unadulterated fury. “He has to pay.”
“You said it makes you weak. You said you could feel everything. If he uses it again—”
“I know what it does,” Kara interrupted, her voice sharp. She flinched, as if her own tone surprised her. She took a breath. “I know. But I know it’s there now. I can prepare. I can be fast. He’s just a man.”
It was the last sentence that worried Amelia most. The naive, dangerous certainty in it.
“Call someone.Your cousin. The authorities.”
“And tell them what?” Kara asked, the mask cracking. Humiliation and rage swirled in her blue eyes. “That Supergirl got cornered and raped by a two-bit thief with a rock? That my… that my body came while he was doing it? That I’m not who they think I am?” She shook her head, a brutal, final motion. “This is mine to fix.”
Before Amelia could protest further, Kara was at the window. She didn’t fly. She opened it and leaped, a powerful, graceless jump that carried her across the street to the roof of the next building, and then she was gone, a blur of gray moving through the twilight with single-minded, terrifying purpose.
The warehouse was a decaying molar in the mouth of the bay. Rust wept down its steel siding. The air was thick with the stench of dead fish, diesel, and the metallic tang of old industry. Kara landed on the roof without a sound, her boots settling on corroded metal. She crouched, listening.
Thump-thump-thump. A human heartbeat, slightly elevated. And underneath it, the sound. The sickening, subsonic hum of the green stone. It vibrated in her molars, made her stomach clench. She pushed the sensation down, building a wall of white-hot anger around it. She focused on the heartbeat.
The skylight was grimy, but one pane was missing. She slipped through the opening, descending into the gloom like a shadow. The warehouse floor was a maze of crates and shipping containers coated in grime.
She saw him. He was at a makeshift table—a cable spool—under a single, swaying work light. The duffel bag was open. Her stomach turned as she saw the familiar lead-lined case. And beside it, resting on a dirty rag, was the main fragment of kryptonite. It pulsed with a gentle, malignant light, illuminating his hands.
He was big. Broad-shouldered, thick-waisted, with blunt fingers. He had a tired, open face, the face of a working man. He was holding a small geologist’s hammer, trying to chip a smaller piece off the main rock, muttering to himself.
“C’mon, you weird little bastard. Just a sliver. Pawn the big one, keep a little insurance...”
Kara landed behind him, ten feet away, her boots silent on the concrete. Her shadow, elongated by the single bulb, fell over him.
“Benny ‘The Brick’ Briklos.”
His body jolted. He spun, the hammer clutched like a weapon. His eyes widened, then narrowed in recognition. There was no fear. Only a calculating, ugly glee.
“Well, shit. The alien herself. Back for more?”
His voice. It was the voice from the museum. The voice that had whispered her name as he drove into her. The wall of anger she’d built shook. A cold sweat broke out on her back.
“You’re going to give me the rock,” she said, forcing her voice to be steady, commanding. “And then you’re going to come with me.”
He laughed, a short, barking sound. “Or what? You’ll use your laser eyes? I saw what that thing did to you. You could barely stand.” His eyes raked over her, taking in the borrowed sweats. “You look like shit. Heard you scream, though. Loud. Sounded like you was enjoyin’ it by the end.”
Every word was a nail hammered into her resolve. The hum of the kryptonite seemed to grow louder, a buzzing in her skull. She had to be fast. She blurred forward.
He was faster than she expected. Not in movement, but in thought. He didn’t try to run. He lunged for the table, not for the big rock, but for the small, jagged sliver he’d just chipped off. He snatched it up, whirling.
He didn’t throw it. He just held it out in his closed fist, like a talisman.
The effect was instantaneous.
It was like a switch flipped in the center of her being. The strength that had propelled her forward evaporated. A wave of nauseating, bone-deep weakness slammed into her. It wasn’t just fatigue; it was an unmaking. Her cells screamed. The light in the warehouse became a sickly, green-tinted halo around everything. Her knees buckled. She caught herself on a crate, her fingers digging into the splintered wood.
“See?” Benny said, his voice taking on a conversational, almost friendly tone as he walked toward her, his fist extended. “Just a little piece. Does the trick, don’t it? Turns a goddess into a dizzy bitch.”
She tried to summon heat vision. A flicker of red sparked in her eyes, then died with a sizzling pain behind her temples. She gasped.
“Nah, none of that,” he said, and he was right in front of her now. The hum from the sliver in his fist was a physical pressure against her skin. He smelled of stale sweat and cheap cigarettes. “You came all the way down here. Just for me. That’s kinda sweet.”
With his free hand, he grabbed the front of her sweatshirt and shoved. The force, pathetic by her normal standards, was overwhelming. She stumbled back, her back connecting with the cold, ridged metal of a shipping container.
“Get away from me,” she snarled, but it came out a reedy whisper.
“Or what?” he repeated, grinning. He pressed the fist holding the kryptonite against her sternum. Agony, white and pure, blossomed in her chest. She cried out, her body arching, trying to escape the contact. It pinned her there, a toxic branding iron.
He leaned in, his mouth close to her ear. “Last time was business. Had to shut you up, get the job done. This time… this is just for fun.”
With a brutal yank, he tore the sweatpants down from her waist. The fabric ripped. The cold air of the warehouse hit her exposed skin. She thrashed, but the stone sapped all coordination, all power. Her movements were weak, uncoordinated slaps against his shoulders. He laughed again.
“Hold still, you fucking space cunt.”
He fumbled with his own belt, his jeans dropping to his thighs. His cock, already hard and thick, sprang free. He spat into his hand, slicking himself roughly. The sound was obscene in the silent warehouse.
“Look at that,” he muttered, using his body to keep her pinned, his kryptonite-fist still pressed to her chest, burning. He reached between her legs with his wet fingers. “Still swollen from last night. Goddamn. You’re a mess.”
He probed her, his touch clinical and cruel. She squeezed her eyes shut, tears leaking out. Her body, betrayed by the stone’s influence, was already wet. Not from desire, but from a traitorous, panicked physiological response. He found her entrance.
“Fuck, you’re tight,” he grunted. “Even after I wrecked you.”
He positioned the blunt head of his cock against her. He didn’t ask. He didn’t tease. He drove forward in one brutal, shearing thrust.
Kara screamed. The sound echoed off the high steel ceiling. It was a sound of pure, shattered agony. He was bigger than she remembered, and the dry, violent entry tore at tender, damaged flesh. The pain was electric, merging with the sickening throb of the kryptonite. It wasn’t human. It wasn’t anything she could comprehend.
He started to move, a harsh, punishing rhythm, slamming her body against the unyielding container with each thrust. The metal rattled. Each impact drove a grunt from him.
“Take it, superhero,” he panted, his breath hot and foul on her neck. “Take my fucking cock. This what you came for?”
She tried to disconnect, to flee into her mind. But the stone held her prisoner in her own flesh.She felt everything. The brutal stretch. The raw friction. The deep, internal pounding that resonated in her hollowed-out bones. She felt him, every vein, every pulse, as he used her. Her hips stung where his fingers dug in, reopening the bruises from the night before.
Then, a new sensation began to coil, insidious and horrifying, beneath the pain. A sick, shameful heat. It started low in her gut, a tingling fire that spread despite her screaming mind. Her body, so sensitive, so starved of any sensation other than pain and weakness, began to respond. A flutter. A clench.
“No,” she whimpered, shaking her head. “No, no, no.”
But her traitorous nerves were alight. The friction transformed. The deep, grinding pressure became a trigger. Her breath hitched. A low, guttural moan escaped her, mingling with her sobs.
He heard it. He froze for a second, then laughed, a sound of pure triumph. “You feel that? Your pussy’s squeezin’ me. You like this, you freak.”
She didn’t. She hated it. She hated him. She hated herself. But the build-up was relentless, a tidal wave her crippled will couldn’t hold back. The coil tightened, fed by the very violation itself. Her hips gave a tiny, involuntary jerk against his.
“Yeah, that’s it,” he growled, pounding into her harder, faster. “C’mon, Kara. Come on my dick. Make yourself come for me.”
His command, her name on his lips, was the final key. The coil snapped.
Her orgasm ripped through her with the force of a detonation. It was not pleasure. It was a seismic event of shame, a violent, convulsive release that wracked her broken body. She screamed again, a raw, broken sound, as her cunt clenched and spasmed around his invading cock in wave after wave of brutal, involuntary contraction.
He grunted, his rhythm faltering. “Fuck! Yeah, milk me, you bitch!”
Her climax triggered his. With three more jarring thrusts, he buried himself to the hilt and let out a choked roar. She felt the hot, wet pulse of his release deep inside her, filling her, another violation layered atop the first. He stayed there, shuddering, his weight crushing her against the cold metal.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing and the ever-present hum of the kryptonite.
Slowly, he pulled out. The sensation of him slipping free, followed by the immediate, shameful trickle of his semen down her inner thigh, made her stomach heave.
He stepped back, buckling his belt. He looked down at her, slumped against the container, pants around her ankles, tears cutting tracks through the dirt on her face, her body trembling violently.
He picked up his geologist’s hammer from the spool table. He looked at her, then at the kryptonite sliver in his hand, then back at her.
“You know,” he said casually, as if discussing the weather, “I think I’ll keep this little piece. Just in case you get any more ideas about bein’ a hero.”
He turned, stuffed the main rock into the duffel bag, zipped it up, and walked towards a side door. He didn’t look back.
Kara slid down the container to the filthy floor, the cold concrete biting into her bare skin. She pulled up the torn sweats, but the wet, sticky feeling remained. The hum of the stone faded as Benny left the warehouse, but the echo of it was inside her now, wired into her nervous system.
She lay there, curled on her side, shaking. The smell of him, of sex and violence and rust, was everywhere.
In the distance, a ship’s horn blared. It sounded like a derisive laugh.