GENERAL WARNING FOR STORY: ADULTS ONLY. Violence, blood and gore, coarse language, adult themes, coercion, and sexual content. If you don't like it then don't read!

DISCLAIMERS: Same as chapter 1.

A/N: [I'm throwing in a quick reply to the 'Guest' reviewer here: You're right on the money there, just what I'm thinking/aiming at! It's like the 50 shades of grey ethics isn't it? Send me a PM if you can, would love to talk more about it. Thank you for another wonderful review! :) PS – I love that phrase, "Karma Houdini"!]

I know, I'm evil, how could I leave that chapter like that?!

So does he kill her? Hmm, lemme think ;-)

I'm actually a bit chuffed that I managed to catch some of you unawares, don't want to be too predictable! And nobody seems to have guessed how she gets out of this pickle. The clue's in the details, hidden a couple of chapters back... Though granted, it was buried in all the mush...

This was going to be a super long chapter but I forgot that I'm away half this weekend, but instead of delaying this for a week (I'm not that mean!) I've cropped it here at a more usual length and we'll carry on next time where we leave off.

Anyhow, on we go – the most terrifying feral mutant in the world is launching straight at Sofie... *gasp...*

~ Nyx ~

CHAPTER 21

Blind panic made Sofie flail instinctively for the only shelter available – Midas. She clutched at his jacket, swinging behind him, forcing the DCI to also duck aside to avoid the lethal claws slashing after her.

"Stop! Sabretooth!"

The chairs were sent clattering away and Victor skidded to a crouch at Midas' order on the other side to Sofie.

"Her, not me. Got it?"

Sofie could only manage one eloquent thought. Fuck.

Midas' jacket had been skewed up when she'd collided into him, leaving the handle of his freakishly large hunting knife practically in her face. With no real thought of what to do with it, she grabbed it as she propelled herself off his back and urged her shaky legs to run.

This wasn't the jittery, cautious escape like on the mountain. This was flat out bolting in terror, turning tail, running helter skelter for all her ass was worth.

She skidded out of the barren store, clutching at the doorframe for leverage. She pounded her legs down the walkway, all the while hearing the drumming of Victor's approach – thudthud thudthud – as he ran on all fours along the frigging wall like a blasted snow leopard down a vertical cliff face.

Double fuck.

Only the fact that he hadn't caught her yet told her that he was toying with her. As did her legs being knocked out from under her a second later...

She went crashing through the dust, smashing sideways into the wall. Coughing and with her eyes stinging, she blindly swung out with the knife, but unsurprisingly it simply whistled through thin air. The sardonic chuckling came from a little way off and totally not where she expected him to be. God help her, he was like a cat playing with a maimed mouse before delivering the final blow...

She scrambled to her feet and scarpered pell-mell away from that chuckling. There was suddenly a doorway next to her with the fire door miraculously still on its hinges, and she threw herself through it and slammed the door shut, yanking up the horizontal bar and sinking the bolts home. She was already legging it down the hallway when the door shuddered and rattled behind her as Victor collided on the other side. His fists made fast work of smashing through it, he might as well have set a bomb on it.

Victor was after her. Victor, in all honesty, was chasing her down to smash her head in. She had no chance.

Fuuuuuck.

After all that she'd survived, after all they'd gone through! To think this was where it all ended, Victor killing her under Midas' control, robbing them of the chance to conclude their dance where Victor taunted and seduced while she fought, when they both knew whom she was really fighting...

It was just too cruel. It leant fire to her terror, gave her voice.

"You told me you'd make me beg!" she yelled over her shoulder, knowing Victor would hear wherever he was.

It had worked once, when he'd almost ravished her when he was still caught between dreaming and wakefulness, trapped in his animalistic mind. She'd managed to get through to him then, stop him just in time before he raped her. But there was no recognition in those glinting eyes now, that frighteningly captivating face that appeared at the other end of the corridor.

"It's Midas," she implored as he continued to prowl towards her and she backed away. "This isn't your doing. Can't you feel how he's controlling you?"

Midas' knife was still clutched tightly in one sweaty hand, the other feeling blindly along the wall. She hit a cold metal bar – the handle to a stairwell leading down. She took it, no hesitation, plunging two, sometimes three steps at a time, her feet a blur and hardly knowing how she managed to not go tumbling head over heels. She tripped through the door at the bottom, scratching hands and knees before scrabbling back to her feet. She leaped back and slammed the door closed, wrenching the bar up again, possibly enough to buy herself an extra second.

Lungs and heart bursting, she pushed on. Her shoes hit broken tiles, the sound of her steps different now, the floor and walls echoing differently from before. What was this place? She shot through another doorway, this one missing its door.

Then the floor disappeared.

As her feet flailed in thin air her left arm caught on something. She hugged the arm into herself as hard as she could, hand clenched close to her face, and her body swung on the one limb. Her shoulder wrenched, the same one still tender from Victor throwing her whole body by it when she'd tried to get one up on him two days ago. She cried out in agony, her back and head slamming back against hard horizontal bars, but she held on.

Jagged moonlight fell through the broken windows high above, casting everything in eerie greyscale. It was a swimming pool, now empty and dry, the tiles cracked, and she was hanging by the ladder in a corner of the deep end. She felt blindly with her feet to find the bottom rung of the short ladder, managing to stand on it backwards clinging on with her left arm.

It was more instinct, a crawling feeling at the back of her neck than anything she saw or heard, that made her look over her shoulder.

Victor loomed in the doorway. An unnatural light shone from his eyes, a werecat if she had to put a name to it, on the hunt and upon his prey.

There was nowhere left to go. He pounced.

She'd almost been in a car accident once. It had been a close call, break lights and smashed up cars filling the windscreen. She'd swerved on instinct, nothing more than a snatch of the steering wheel that had manoeuvred her car precisely into the tight gap between the pile-up and the central reservation. It was the work of a moment and impossible to have done had she acted on conscious thought.

It was the same instinct that moved her now as Victor hurtled like a wraith through the air. The knife was tossed into her left hand and raised, her right hand slid into the wristband to grab the second – and last – injector from Mickey.

Victor caught the arching handle of the ladder and swung down, his boots finding purchase on the narrow ladder with smooth precision. The snarl was all animal, fangs bared...

Silent, precise, coordinated. The black-armoured and armed troops streamed out of the eight blacked-out vans that had just pulled up outside of the abandoned shopping and leisure complex.

Orders had been given en route. Maintaining radio and operational silence, the commander signalled the twelve teams into the decrepit building.

The fangs retreated with a jarring jolt. There were no extending claws, no hypersensitivity at his fingertips, nothing but the cold, blunt handle of the tarnished pool ladder.

An injector was stabbed right up to the frail's fist in his abdomen, straight through the black T in the opening of his dark trenchcoat. The sharp sting against his neck registered next, the knife making a shallow cut but suspended there, not twisting home to the jugular. It stung, not healing like it always did, the steady trickle of blood warm and ticklish on his neck...

What in all the fucking hells had the frail given him?

The demand was on the tip of his tongue – only the tongue felt heavy and lacking in all the things he could usually taste. He couldn't smell either, either her fear or her natural scent or the stale dust. He couldn't hear her thumping heartbeat or Midas closing in on their location, the rats and bugs scuttling around. He began to growl – only the growl never came.

Human. He was fucking human! Some kind of serum seared through his flesh, blistering as his mutated genes waged war. Fury, molten and incendiary, consumed him and he turned the magnitude of it all to the frail trapped trembling between his arms...

Only, the sight brought his wrath to a screeching halt.

Sofie couldn't do it.

Midas, when it came down to that split moment of her life or his, she'd pulled the trigger on without a second thought. She would have shot him, too, had she known to cock the stupid gun.

But this was Victor. In that moment, completely in self defence, death a whisker away, instinct had both armed her and made her falter. In truth she'd gone one step further – she'd actually drawn back the knife, as far as she could with the arm still hooked around the ladder and just short of her own face. Victor's momentum had swung him along the knife's razor-sharp edge, streaking his neck in blood, as well as impaling himself onto the injector.

As her thoughts caught up and took stock of their impasse, she was astounded to a standstill, lock, stock and barrel.

Victor, super-human-and-invincible-and-impossible-to-kill Victor, was human.

She was seeing him as she'd never seen him, the part of him usually eclipsed by his mutation. As flawed and imperfect and vulnerable as the next man, even if just for these brief few seconds, even if he was still stronger than most. Not just a monster as the world saw him, but so much more, for the human concealed deep within.

Victor didn't need his superhuman senses to read the stunned awe splashed all over the frail's face, it was right there naked and exposed for him to see. Everything about this fucking business burned – being reduced to a pathetic human, the fact that the frail had done this, the fact that she had a monster knife to his neck and could do the impossible and take his life with a flick of that puny wrist. So what if she wasn't moving the knife and she was staring at him like he fucking mattered, no fucking way was he about to let this go. He was still perfectly capable of squeezing that feeble neck and wringing the life out of her...

Only he hadn't fucked her yet. He wasn't letting her off that easily, especially after the prank she'd just pulled. Payment would be in full, in every sense of the word – literal, lateral, horizontal, vertical, diagonal, every which fucking way –

"Aren't you done yet, Sabretooth?" intruded Midas' conversational voice into their frozen bubble, surprising them both. "We need to finish you off too and I need to get back before the humans arrive for the morning shift. That's your fault, you know, Sofie, with your suggestions. I could have easily contained Whisper but big boss Dalton overheard and it was all out of my hands."

Victor hadn't moved a muscle. But still staring so deep into Sofie's eyes that she felt as if their minds merged somewhere in the middle, she saw it, the realisation of all that had transpired, the cause of it all. And with it, that terrible wrath rekindled.

But his voice was soft and unhurried, almost lazy or perhaps pensive, deep with the bass rumbling in his chest. "Have you ever looked into someone's eyes as they died, Midas?"

Her heart had long ceased beating, or so it felt. There wasn't scope for any more shock. She simply stared wide-eyed, nothing left in her but to surrender. She was lost.

Victor's voice became even softer, if that was possible. "At that moment when they realise that it's all over, and all the fame and success and fortune that they ever wanted means precisely fuck all?"

Midas stopped closer to the edge of the dry pool, as enthralled as Sofie was.

Something in Victor changed. The spark of the feral, as though there was an actual fire smouldering within. With their gazes locked together she bore witness to his mutation before her very eyes, his genes fighting the anti-mutagenic serum.

His voice continued to hypnotise, still a soft caress, all the more ominous for it. "When life becomes their single need, when they fight tooth and nail to hang onto life. But it's too late. They're gonna die and there ain't a single fucking thing they can say or do to change that. Their whole fucking life, after all the blood and sweat and tears and hours wasted with pointless fucking bull, it's all come down to this, to this one goddamned shitty moment when it all ends. Have you ever seen it, Midas?"

It was almost tangible, this presence that was Sabretooth, his animalistic power electrifying the air as his mutation overcame the suppressant. Sofie would have shrank back further if Victor wasn't already caging her against the sharp bars of the ladder.

"I –" the DCI began to reply but had to clear his throat when all that came out was a dry croak. "No, I can't say I have. I've seen plenty of dead bodies but –"

"Not the same, Midas, not the same at all. Do you wanna see it? Do you wanna see the moment... when the lights... go... out?"

Midas quietly cleared his throat again. "Go on then."

Victor smirked. It was a look straight out of hell, that of the devil himself, save for the fangs which hadn't returned yet. Midas couldn't see it from his place by the poolside, only Sofie saw the darkness spill forth, the terrible fury unleashed from its confines that Victor had imposed until he was ready to let the hurricane loose.

Victor started bellowing when he was still all up in her face. It reverberated off the tiled walls as he launched himself off the steps and sailed through the air – to land directly in front of Midas.

All Sofie heard was a small cough, something nondescript that could have been a muffled sound in a hushed library. Midas wore a look of total surprise. He blinked, looking down. Sabretooth's fingers, all ten of them, claws and all, were buried in his chest. Midas stared in morbid fascination at the blood trickling down the backs of those large hands, the deep red liquid dripping onto the floor with a soft, innocent pitter-patter. He coughed again, this time the unmistakable wet sound of blood in the lungs, the same sound Sofie had heard once before when Logan sat cleaved open against a tree. But unlike Logan, Midas' wounds weren't going to close.

Surprise morphed into horror and fear and rage and desperation all at once as Midas met Sabretooth's eyes again.

"I take orders from no one," Victor snarled, nose to nose, shaking with the ferocity of his rage. "Not from you, not from God, not a single fucking soul." His lip curled, his fuse totally blown. "The frail is mine and I'll do whatever the fuck I want to her, whenever the fuck I feel like doing it. This is what you get for messing with me. It all ends here. Shame I don't have a mirror to show you the look in your eyes, Golden Boy."

"Guk goo." Not the most coherent with blood spewing from Midas' mouth but the message was clear.

They might have been his only parting words but Midas still had one present left for them. With the last of his control his thumb flicked a safety cover on his police radio and depressed a switch. The radio fell from his limp hand and rolled to the edge of the pool with a clatter, teetered, then plunged the two metre drop. It came to a stop, inert save for the single innocent-looking green light under the released safety.

Midas slumped lifeless, still suspended on the claws stabbing into his lungs. Victor wasn't fussed. With a sneer of disgust he simply shook the body off to land with a dull wet thud and crouched to wipe off the blood.

Sofie wasn't aware that she was still frozen on the pool ladder.

Thirty seconds ago she was dead. She'd been so sure of it, that it was all over, all the running and chasing and demand and denial. Death had come for her in the smoking hot form that she called Victor Creed.

To go from that, to this. The DCI lay crumpled on the dusty, broken tiles, his ocean blue eyes glassy and unseeing, the cobalt flecks now faded. Blood so dark it was almost black spread across his shirt, glistening like an underwater fountain from the ten holes, five on either side of the buttons. Meanwhile, Sofie was clinging to the ladder with hands long white from clenching so hard, face equally ashen, still breathing – just about. At least for now...

A shadow fell over her, blocking the pale moonlight. She looked up, so tense that her neck creaked.

Victor stared down at her.

Sofie had no idea what was going through his head but it didn't matter. She was done running. She was just an ordinary girl way out of her depth, this was all too much. The entire week had been too much. She couldn't take anymore. If Victor was her Death then so be it. Let him come. A part of her was glad that it was Victor, it was a thought she could come to peace with.

All the while his face was unreadable, a faint crease pinching his brow. He remained motionless, simply watching and thinking, shrouded in his dark trench coat.

She didn't flinch when he reached for her, but she couldn't help the gasped cry when he hauled her up by the back of her jacket, forcing her seized up arm to straighten painfully fast and release the ladder. The throbbing ache in her other arm registered now too, radiating from her fist from the bone-jarring impact with Victor's abs.

In a flash she was disarmed – the knife, the empty wrist band, the empty injector. A tight grasp closed around her jaw, jerking her face up. She could only quake in his hold as claws were raised to her eye, but all that came was a soft scratch over the twin lines on her cheek. A reinforcement, on so many levels. Her trembling quietened down as she, however insanely, calmed at the gesture.

It all changed in an instant. Movement and gunfire, she didn't know which came first.

Bullets and crackling blue energy rent the air, punctured the tiled wall with a cloud of dry plaster where they'd just been standing, her body almost snapping in two as Victor grabbed her and leaped clear across the empty pool.

In that moment of suspension, she clearly recalled Victor at the airport, strapped to a metal chair, contained by that same strange energy but still looking like he ruled the world –

The bullets and sizzling electricity didn't stop and neither did Victor. They practically flew out the doorway and ploughed through a line of armed men, their pained cries and curses falling away behind them amidst a flash of claws and red. She clung on with sudden desperation, her earlier resignation all but vanished, spurred on by maddening thoughts of damn anti-mutant bozos and Victor's urgency infecting her as he ran along the floor and walls and ceiling and any which way to avoid the hail of bullets and blue fire following them, all while locking her to his side with one arm. She couldn't tell whether it was the dusty air flowing by or the trail of bullets that she felt rushing by her face, clogging her lungs and making her heart race a mile a minute.

In no time at all they were back in the shopping centre side of the decaying complex. The corridor abruptly deposited them in an atrium open to all the floors, moonlight shining through the broken glass ceiling high overhead. Victor didn't slow their pace; he barged straight on and without any hesitation he shot them over the balcony, dark shadows shifting on various floors as they sailed past. He locked both arms around her and spun in mid-air, and the knock-on thumping of bullets pounding into his back thudded against her. He growled, exposing fangs that had finally returned. No sooner had they landed than Sofie almost suffered whiplash, powerful legs immediately driving them away from bolts of electric fire, only to take him into the path of bullets. She'd thought it was an accident the first time, but when it happened a second, then a third time, she realised it was strategic. He was favouring the bullets no matter how much they made him hiss and snarl, going to great lengths to avoid the blue fire lapping at their heels. With one arm keeping her secure against him, he still somehow found purchase with his remaining hand and his legs, running along every available surface as though the laws of gravity didn't apply to him.

They crashed through a narrow door into an equally narrow, dark corridor. She couldn't see a thing but it was blessedly silent, though her ears still rang from all the gunfire. Victor's heavy paw dropped on the back of her neck and he marched her along, occasionally directing her sideways but urging steadily onwards. It was a familiar weight and warmth tipped with the light scrape of claws in a way that could only be Victor, and her runaway heart finally began to calm down. She didn't see his probing gaze in the dark.

"Victor?" she dared to ask. "Do you know who they are?"

"Armed police," he muttered as he pushed them on.

"Police?" she squeaked. "Why are they shooting at us?" Why are they shooting at me, she really wanted to ask. People shooting at Victor was nothing new.

"Midas had them in position to deal with me. They were only meant to step in if I couldn't kill myself, which is so fucking stupid it's not even funny. He gave them the signal when he knew he was gonna die."

"There're so many of them. And they managed to get the drop on us."

Claws dug in around her neck, a slight pressure, a warning, though he didn't slow their pace. "And who's fucking fault was it that I couldn't hear or smell them or pick up a single fucking thing until it was almost too late?"

"Ah – Mickey gave me that to use on the Pied Piper, you know it was never meant to be for you! Are you... yourself again?"

His reply never came. Not verbally, at least. He grabbed her, wrapping his own body around her as he leaped into a diving roll, moments before the wall beside them exploded in a cloud of dry plaster. They were suddenly back out in the open atrium and her stunned ears were filled with his roaring and gunfire and that dreaded sizzling electricity and the occasional scream or grunt of pain as the world spun and she was flung around like a rag doll with no clue if up and down even existed anymore. But when all that touched her were Victor's rough hands despite being surrounded by a sea of cops firing at them, she knew the answer. Sabretooth was back.

Victor swung them over another balcony, hooking onto the edge this time to swerve them under to the level directly beneath, a jump that was nothing for him to balk at but too long a drop for humans, and the world finally righted itself again. Boots clattered overhead as the men rushed to close in on their floor and Victor took a moment to scope the empty shadows for the best route.

That was when she saw it, the lone figure on the balcony opposite, the large rifle with the thick, pulsing blue barrel –

"Victor!"

Afterwards she would swear that she was only reaching out to tap his shoulder. Hell, even she didn't know what she was trying to achieve. Whatever the case, it took her into the path of the energy bolt –

Fuck if that didn't hurt! Her nerves were on fire, her skin blazing, the breath stolen clean from her, she couldn't cry out or move. Hazy shapes filled her vision, blobs of black pointing black pointy things at her –

"Move!"

Victor barrelled into her, shielding her from the bullets that whooshed past her face, knocking her off her feet. If she wasn't so out of it she would have felt the G-force compressing her down several dress sizes as Victor rolled them both with the momentum, spinning in an arc and practically pitching her behind him as he shielded her against the wall on one side and with his own body on the other. Crouched low, fangs bared, claws fully extended, he bellowed like a demon. His fury bounced off the empty space up and down the atrium, leaving their ears ringing.

As the echoes faded, the briefest silence fell upon them, the calm before the mother of all storms –

It was filled with the unexpected crackle of a radio. "Hold fire! All SFOs, hold fire and stand down."

The volatile silence tripped into an extension, a few seconds longer. The man that Victor had already identified as the lead commander activated his radio to reply. "Our orders come from DCI Sterner himself –"

"And this is the Commander of Specialist Operations, Chief Superintendant Ralph Dalton," barked the authoritative voice on the other end. "This operation is unsanctioned. All Specialist Firearms Officers will stand down at once. That includes you, Chief Inspector Cole."

The humans in their assorted ranks jumped to obey, immediately raising firearms. But half as many in the group were mutants affected by Midas, including Cole.

"Good try but we're not falling for that. All teams, hold course. The operation is still a go."

The humans were complying with their big boss but the mutants were quick to respond, retraining their rifles on their targets. Victor braced himself, hypertuned to every hint of body language and twitch of muscle to anticipate and protect his own. Fingers squeezed on triggers –

They froze. To the last man every cop halted, rifles still on target but trigger fingers suspended mid-motion, as though someone had waved a magic wand and literally hit pause.

Sofie was only just recovering from the energy bolt. "Of all the bloody painful, stinging..." She blinked, her eyes widening as she finally registered the frozen picture around them.

Victor was scanning the motionless formations of armed police, still ready at any moment to engage. Sofie remained huddled behind him, not in the least bit ashamed to be hiding.

"Uh, Victor?" she whispered. He didn't reply but at least he was still moving his head so she knew that he hadn't been turned into a statue along with the hoard of armed cops. "What are they doing?"

Victor had turned to a corridor leading off to the side long before Sofie heard it. A constant sound of something whirring, or brushing like cloth.

A wheelchair was the last thing she expected to see, the wheels rustling in the dust. Its electric motors carried a smartly dressed man, his face kindly, his head bald and smooth, calmly looking upon the standoff as though it was a daily sight. Alongside him strode a uniformed officer with a fancy rank insignia, a red crown and a gold diamond thingy that she couldn't make out at this distance, his demeanour sharp and authoritative.

Victor's defensiveness shifted into a whole new gear of aggression. His muscles bunching further, Sofie could practically imagine his hairs bristling as he backed all the way up to her and drew her tight against his side, his entire attention zeroed in on the man in the wheelchair as though he posed the King Kong of all threats in this complex full of dangerous men armed to the nines. This wasn't the You dumb fuckers quit messing with me or I'll rip you a new one warpath that he'd been on until now. This was, plain and simple, backed in a corner and going all out.

"You!" Victor snarled.

It only made Sofie press against him in turn, gripping his arm tight enough to cling on if he chose to bolt. There was no way she was reading her moral compass from appearances, no matter how kindly the smile from that wheelchair. After all, Midas, aside from one creepy moment when she thought he was trying to hoodwink secrets out of her, had generally been perfectly amiable and easy on the eye to boot. Look how grand that had turned out.

"Sabretooth, Ms. Cruso, please be at ease," spoke the bald man. There was a depth, a roundness to his voice that was calming and reassuring by itself, even without the words framing it. "I'm not here to interfere with either of you."

The decorated officer gave Baldy the stinkeye at that but it didn't seem to perturb him.

Who the hell is he? Sofie was wondering. Baldy's in a chair, why's Victor being like this? C'mon, Victor, you can take him, can't you?

"Allow me to introduce myself," Baldy continued. "I am Professor Charles Xavier and I run a School for Gifted Youngsters, for mutants, just outside of New York."

"He's a fucking telepath," Victor rumbled.

"Telepath? As in –?" Shit, does he know what I'm thinking?

Bright eyes met hers and twinkled his answer.

Ah crap.

It was a right shitstorm in the making.

It had been hard enough just convincing Creed to let Sofie be checked over by the paramedics, his hand forced in the end by Xavier's none-too-subtle threat to step in to ensure she received medical care. Both paramedics? Male, of course, sod's law, just to piss Victor off further as they pawed over her. Dalton had then tried to transfer them to the local police station to give their statements and Victor had damn near taken his head. The icing on the cake was forensics calling in the body count, rising to eleven as they began canvassing the old complex, and Dalton attempting to arrest not just the big feral but Sofie as well. Midas' bloody body being discovered by the old swimming pool and spurring the cops in their febrile hostility was just the cherry on top.

So here they were, under harsh artificial floodlights in a makeshift incident room that had been set up in a disused sports hall, with a single rookie restraining Sofie with ease – and it honestly was a piece of cake because by now she felt about as dynamic as a dollop of porridge – while Victor faced down the full contingency of Dalton's armed backup trying to slap cuffs on him.

Would this nightmare never end? Mutely, Sofie watched with a detached sort of numbness as they teetered on the brink of another bloodbath. The claws weren't out yet and the stance was deceptively loose but there was no doubt that Victor was primed and ready. Hemming him in at a cautious distance were almost twenty men armed with conventional Tasers as well as more of those damned mutant zappers, understandably wary since they were attempting to apprehend him for the slaughter following precisely such an altercation.

Victor was claiming self defence and warning the nervous rookie to let her go – she thought 'cranium' and 'foot' might have been mentioned. Despite Xavier's reminder of their informant's tip-off, Dalton was in full denial that DCI Sterner was anything but straight up and was demanding the 'real' reason he might've set the SFOs on them. The air was volatile enough to ignite an incendiary bomb, all that was needed was the smallest spark...

It struck her with as much subtlety as Victor in a field of wild flowers: they were going down in flames and it was all on her.

She, who knew exactly what Victor was, who'd held the extraordinary chance to stop the invincible mutant in the palm of her hands, had done diddly-squat.

How many more would die because of it? Every person she could have saved from falling victim to his bloodlust, the carnage about to kick off any moment now and all the others to come that she could have prevented...

She felt sick, swamped by an avalanche of guilt and self-recrimination and confusion...

They were interrupted by the ear-thumping whumpwhumpwhumpwhump of helicopter blades, the metal sheet roof rattling as the chopper landed nearby. Anders strode in seconds later.

Ebony eyes sought Sofie out on the sidelines and swept over her, a fleeting glance that resulted in him almost sagging with relief to find she was still in one piece. He then spun towards the centre of the standoff, stirring up the dust as he headed straight for Dalton.

"Whisper," Dalton frowned. "We appreciated your tip-off. As you can see we're in the middle of making arrests, I'll be with you shortly."

"You appear to have misunderstood the reason I directed you here with Professor Xavier, Chief Superintendant Dalton. You recall that I mentioned my associate, Gabriel, during our conversation earlier." In full formal power-attorney mode, Anders stepped directly in front of Dalton and dropped an inch-thick case file into the man's hands and flipped a memory stick on top. "These are some of his preliminary findings: both the recording and transcript of DCI Sterner confessing in full to being the serial killer commonly referenced as the Pied Piper; GPS tracking data proving DCI Sterner's contact with every mutant in the lead up to their suicides; CCTV recordings of DCI Sterner utilising his abilities to influence his investigative team to provide him with false alibis for the same timeframes; DCI Sterner's instructions issued to the SFOs to ambush and execute two targets, Sabretooth and Sofie Castro, now known as Sofie Cruso, under falsified charges; and," – his tone became so tightly controlled that it could have shattered like glass – "the surveillance footage of DCI Sterner abducting Sofie Cruso from Dartford police station at gunpoint."

Anders let the stunned hall stew on that for a few seconds. "You'll have a full report in short order but that should be sufficient for the time being to equip you to make more informed decisions. Such as realising that Sofie Cruso is the victim, not the perpetrator, and rescinding your order for her arrest. An apology wouldn't go amiss either."

WhaPSHHH! Trounced! Even through the hazy shock Sofie could hear the crack of the whip in her head.

Dalton recovered his wits. "How did you record... this supposed confession?"

"Not me. Gabriel. He accessed DCI Sterner's mobile phone and activated the microphone. It was easy, apparently."

"We can't use evidence from an illegal phone tap!"

There was barely any change of expression but it was enough to betray Anders' exasperation. "Attorneys may largely be perceived as idiots, Chief Superintendant, but we can dot the i's and cross the t's when we want to. The warrant is also in your hands."

"You got a warrant? At this time of night? In the twenty minutes between here and Dartford?" Dalton didn't look in the files, half too amazed to check, half knowing it would be there.

"What can I say," Anders deadpanned. "I must be a bloody good attorney."

Having diverted a blow-up and the preposterous intention to arrest Sofie, Anders left them to sort themselves out in a more civilised manner. He had a much more pressing concern right now and made a beeline for his friend, the intensity of his midnight eyes clearing the path without any resistance.