Chapter 3: The Journalist's Rescue
The gunshot was a punctuation mark in the night, sharp and final. The minion’s grip on her right arm vanished in a spray of dark fluid and a grunt of surprise. The magical fog in her veins receded a millimeter, just enough.
Patriot twisted, a raw animal motion. Her left arm, still held, became a lever. She shoved backward, feeling the minion’s ribs crack under her elbow. His gasp was hot in her ear. His hold broke.
For a second, she was free, swaying on the precipice. Thirty stories of nothing yawned behind her. In front, the other rooftop, and Leo, the gun now aimed with shaky hands at the advancing Dr. Cross.
“Jump!” he screamed, his voice tearing.
She jumped. It wasn’t the graceful, powerful arc of Ms. Patriot. It was a desperate, stumbling lunge. She cleared the gap, but barely. Her body hit the lower roof’s ledge with a brutal thud, the impact driving the air from her lungs. She rolled, a tangle of torn costume and bruised flesh, crashing into Leo’s legs. They went down in a heap.
The gravel here was the same. The smell of ozone was the same. The taste of humiliation in her mouth was the same.
Leo scrambled up, pulling her. His hands were on her bare shoulders, her torn back. His eyes, wide with terror, scanned her face, then the ruin of her body. He saw everything. The bites of gravel, the slick, glistening trails on her inner thighs, the brutal, leaking redness between her cheeks. His expression cycled through horror, pity, and a furious, helpless rage.
“Can you fly? We have to—”
“She can’t.”
The voice came from behind them, not across the gap. It was right there.
Vivian Cross stood beside the rusted air-conditioning unit, as if she’d been part of the scenery all along. The night air around her didn’t stir. She held a dagger, but it wasn’t metal. It was solidified shadow, edged with a crawling violet light that hurt the eyes.
She moved. Not with speed, with inevitability.
Leo raised the gun. Cross flicked her free hand. The weapon glowed cherry-red in his grip. He cried out, dropping it with a sizzle of seared palm flesh. In the same motion, she closed the distance. Her hand, cold and strong as marble, clamped around his throat. She lifted him, his boots kicking a foot above the roof tiles. He choked, his hands clawing at her implacable wrist.
The shadow-dagger pressed against the pulsing vein in his neck. The violet light cast eerie shadows up his strained face.
Patriot pushed herself to her knees. Her body screamed. Her asshole was a burning knot of agony. Her pussy felt swollen and raw. The magical residue was a leaden blanket, smothering her strength. She tried to summon the fury, the power. It sparked, then guttered out, drowned in the aftermath of violation.
“Look at him, Patricia,” Cross said. She used the real name like a surgical instrument. “Look at your curious little librarian-lover. So brave. So stupid.”
Leo’s hazel eyes bulged, fixed on Patriot. They weren’t accusatory. They were just desperately, terminally afraid.
“The belt,” Cross said, her tone conversational, almost bored. “Unclasp it. Toss it to me. Do it, and I let him stumble back to his mediocre life, his mediocre articles. He lives. You come with me.”
Patriot’s breath hitched. The belt. The source. Without it, she was just Patricia Grant, naked and broken on a roof. With it, she was still Ms. Patriot, but she was beaten, magically neutered. And Leo would die.
“Don’t…” Leo gagged out, the word a wet rasp. “She’ll… kill… both…”
“I might,” Cross agreed pleasantly. “But I definitely will kill him right now if you don’t. The choice isn’t between victory and defeat. It’s between which flavor of loss you prefer. His blood on your hands, or your power in my hands. Choose.”
Patriot’s hands went to her waist. The familiar smooth metal of the belt, the cool stone at its center. It hummed with a potential she couldn’t tap. Her fingers found the clasp.
“Patricia, no,” Leo whispered.
She looked at him. She saw the man who had traced the curve of her spine with such tenderness an hour ago. Who had made her gasp into his mouth, not scream into the gravel. That man was about to have his throat opened because of her. Because of her secrets, her weakness.
Her fingers trembled on the clasp.
Cross’s smile was a victor’s smile. She adjusted her grip on Leo, her thumb stroking his throat almost tenderly beside the blade. “Good girl.”
But Patriot didn’t undo it. Her hands fell away. “You’ll kill him anyway. The moment you have it.”
Cross sighed, a sound of genuine disappointment. “You lack imagination. And faith. I don’t want him dead. He’s a witness. He’s a variable. He’s… interesting. But.” She pressed the blade. A thin line of red welled on Leo’s neck. He went perfectly still. “My patience is a finite resource. Last chance.”
The standoff stretched, measured in the pounding of Patriot’s heart.
Then Cross’s eyes flickered with a new idea. A crueler one. The smile returned, wider. “Perhaps the choice is too abstract. Let’s make it more tangible.”
She lowered Leo, just enough so his feet touched the ground, but her grip on his throat didn’t loosen. The dagger moved from his neck. With her other hand, she made a subtle, twisting gesture.
Leo’s body stiffened. His eyes, locked on Patriot, glazed over. A faint violet sheen filmed his hazel irises.
“What did you do?” Patriot snarled, trying to surge forward. A wave of dizziness forced her back to her knees.
“A simple compulsion. A nudge.” Cross released Leo’s throat. He didn’t run. He stood, swaying slightly, his breathing ragged but even. He turned to face Patriot, his expression slack, vacant. “He’s quite suggestible right now. The trauma, the fear… it leaves such lovely holes in the psyche to fill.”
Cross walked around him, a curator presenting an exhibit. “You wouldn’t give up your power to save his life. A principled stand. Admirable. So let’s change the terms.” She stopped behind Leo, her hands on his shoulders. “Give up your power… to save him from what he’s about to do to you. And what you’re going to do to him.”
Patriot stared, uncomprehending.
Leo’s hands came up. They began, with a mechanical clumsiness, to unbutton his jeans.
“No,” Patriot breathed.
“He’s still in there,” Cross murmured, her lips near Leo’s ear. “He can see, he can feel. He just can’t stop. My magic is in his nervous system, like puppet strings. And my instruction is very clear.”
Leo’s jeans and boxers slid down his hips. His cock, half-hard from adrenaline and terror, bobbed free. The sight of it, which had been an object of shared pleasure so recently, was now a monstrous threat.
“The compulsion is simple,” Cross explained. She guided Leo a step forward. “He fucks you. Right here. He takes back what was given so sweetly in that apartment. He reclaims you, but as mine. And you… you will respond. You will take him. You will show me how the heroine fucks the man who knows her secret. Do this, willingly, and I won’t make him slit his own throat afterwards. Refuse…” She shrugged. “The puppet has other uses.”
Leo took another step. The vacant look in his eyes was breaking, replaced by a dawning, utter horror. He was fighting it. She could see the muscles in his jaw standing out, the tremble in his thighs. But his body moved forward, obedient to the violet will threaded through it.
“Fight it, Leo,” Patriot begged, scooting back. Her torn costume offered no cover. “Please.”
“He can’t,” Cross said. “But you can stop it. The belt. Now.”
Leo was upon her. His hands, trembling violently, reached for her. They didn’t caress. They grasped her hips, his fingers digging into the bruises left by the minions. He was crying, silent tears cutting through the grime on his cheeks, even as his body maneuvered hers.
He pushed her back onto the gravel. The cold bite was familiar. He knelt between her splayed legs. The head of his cock nudged against her entrance, still wet and sore from the earlier ravages.
“Don’t… don’t…” he choked, every word a Herculean effort against the compulsion. “Patricia… run…”
But his hips pushed forward.
He entered her in one slow, dreadful inch. It was a grotesque parody of their first time. There was no desire, only a violation amplified a thousandfold by the love and recognition in his terrified eyes. She felt him inside her, a familiar shape now made instrument of torture.
“See how he fills you,” Cross crooned, kneeling beside them, an avid spectator. “He remembers how you felt. His body knows. Even through the horror.”
Leo’s body began to move, shallow, jerking thrusts. He was sobbing openly now, his face a mask of agony. Each time he slid into her raw flesh, a pained gasp escaped his lips. Each withdrawal was a shudder of revulsion.
Patriot lay still, staring up at the indifferent stars. The sensation was unbearable. The physical violation was one layer. The emotional evisceration was another. But the worst was the guilt. This was being done to him as much as to her. He was a prisoner in his own body, forced to rape the woman he cared for.
“You can end this,” Cross whispered, her hand stroking Patriot’s sweat-damp hair. “All you have to do is give. Why do you hold on so tightly to this brittle idea of yourself?”
Leo’s thrusts became harder, more rhythmic. The compulsion was overriding his conscious resistance, finding a biological cadence. His cock stiffened fully inside her, a betrayal of his mind by his flesh. He fucked her with a growing, mindless intensity, the wet sounds of it obscene in the quiet night.
Patriot turned her head away. She saw the belt’s buckle glinting in the peripheral light.
She could end it. She could save him from this.
But giving Cross the belt meant giving her everything. It meant every city, every person she’d ever protected, became prey. It was the ultimate betrayal.
Yet, as Leo groaned, a sound of utter despair, and picked up his pace, slamming into her with a force that jarred her body against the gravel, the calculus broke. This wasn’t abstract. This was the man she’d let see her, the man whose warmth was still a ghost on her skin, being shredded from the inside out.
Her hand crept to her waist.
Cross saw it. Her breath hitched with anticipation.
Patriot’s fingers found the clasp. She felt the intricate mechanism, the enchantment woven into the very metal.
Leo was nearing his climax. His movements became frantic, erratic. His tears dripped onto her chest. “I’m… sorry… I’m so sorry…” he babbled.
She undid the first latch.
A surge of weakness immediately washed through her. The distant hum of the city faded. The gritty detail of the rooftop blurred. She felt smaller, softer, more fragile.
Cross leaned forward, her eyes blazing.
With a final, broken cry that was equal parts ecstasy and torment, Leo came. His body arched, shuddering violently as he emptied himself into her, a hot, bitter flood that felt like a seal of damnation. He collapsed on top of her, his weight suddenly heavy, his sobs muffled against her neck.
The compulsion snapped. He was just Leo again, destroyed.
Cross reached out. “Now. The rest.”
Patricia Grant—for the transformation was already receding, the costume becoming insubstantial as mist—looked up at the triumphant sorceress. Then she looked at Leo’s ravaged face beside her own.
With the last of Ms. Patriot’s fading strength, she did not hand over the belt.
She slammed her palm, and the belt with it, against the central star-stone on her waist.
There was no triumphant energy surge. Instead, a blinding, concussive pulse of white-gold light erupted from the stone, a final defensive discharge fueled by the severing of its own connection.
Cross was thrown backward with a shriek, shielding her eyes. The violet magical fields around them flickered and died.
The light faded as quickly as it came. The belt was now just a strip of cool, inert metal in Patricia’s hand. Her costume was gone. She was naked, shivering, utterly human, lying in a pool of her own and Leo’s fluids.
Leo stirred, groaning.
Across the roof, Dr. Cross climbed to her feet, a burn across her cheek smoking faintly. Her elegant suit was scorched. Her expression was no longer amused. It was pure, cold fury.
“A final trick,” she spat. “You burned it out. A single-use failsafe. How… pedestrian.”
Patricia couldn’t speak. She could only clutch the dead belt and stare.
“It doesn’t matter,” Cross said, regaining her composure. She brushed soot from her sleeve. “The power is not destroyed. It’s just… inaccessible. To you.” Her fury cooled into something more calculating. “And now you have nothing. And he has seen everything. And I have all the data I need.”
She took a step toward them, then stopped, as if reconsidering. “Killing you now would be a waste. A story needs its fallen hero. And a puppet,” she glanced at Leo, who was staring blankly at the sky, “needs his strings.”
She turned and walked to the edge of the roof. “We’ll meet again, Patricia Grant. When you’ve had time to appreciate the true depth of your nothingness.”
She stepped off the ledge. Instead of falling, she dissolved into a swirl of violet smoke that scattered on the wind.
Silence descended, broken only by the distant sirens, now drawing nearer, and Leo’s ragged, broken breathing. The cold wind bit into Patricia’s naked skin. She looked at the dead belt in her hand, then at the man beside her.
He turned his head. His eyes, empty and shattered, met hers. There were no words. There was only the vast, screaming quiet of what had been done, and the terrifying vacancy of what came next.