A/N: Now, some of y'all may be thinking "hey Leah, it kinda seems like Olivia's mark is inspired by Kushiel's Dart." And to those people I would say: you are correct, let's be best friends. This fic is obviously not a 1:1 AU, but a lot of this is an homage to Phèdre's story, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention that, and take the opportunity to plug some of my favorite books. Also, fun fact, the plural of phoenix is phoenix. There is no plural, because there's only one. Thank you to my college mascot for teaching me that.


August 1, 2014

"A phoenix?" Elliot repeatedly, feeling foolish. A phoenix. How the fuck was he supposed to know that, anyway? Phoenixes - phoenixi? Whatever - weren't real. As far as he was aware there wasn't a single agreed upon image of a phoenix, a set standard of facial features or morphology. The tattoo just looked like a bird, but evidently it was a very special type of bird, and evidently just talking about it upset Olivia.

"It's sort of like…the symbol of the house," she explained.

"Like a mascot?"

She shot him a look that plainly said no.

"It's stupid," she said. "But Oak House was revived - reborn - so. Phoenix."

That part made sense. He could understand the significance of the symbol, but he still couldn't understand why the fuck she had a massive tattoo of it on her back.

"And you got the tat because you're the madam now?" he asked slowly, trying to work his way through it. Maybe the tattoo was her way of saying she was Oak House. That they were inseparable, that they had both been born anew, Oak House brought to life after a century of neglect, and Olivia restored from…what, exactly? The aftermath of Lewis, maybe, that seemed to him a likely explanation, but she proved him wrong in a moment.

Olivia snorted once, derisively, and began to pace, putting distance between them, wrapping her arms around herself as if she were cold, despite the fact that it was a balmy night in the height of summer and Elliot was beginning to sweat.

"It wasn't a choice," she told him grimly. "Things worked differently, in the old days."

Sister Peg had told him as much, but he still didn't know what that meant, and he was hanging on Olivia's every word, desperate for some explanation.

"You worked sex crimes-"

"How did you know that?" he demanded sharply, caught off guard by the realization that while he'd been running recognizance on her, she'd been doing the same thing to him.

"I know," she said coolly. "And so I know that you know how the traffickers work. They take a girl in, then they tell her she owes them for food, clothes, housing. They make her work off her debt. All the money she makes goes straight to them, and she never sees a penny."

And in most cases, the "debt" was never paid, was instead a constantly increasing balance, a fiction that served to keep the girls in indentured servitude until they died or bolted or got sold to someone else. Yeah, Elliot knew how that story went.

"It was the same way here," Olivia said. "The madam would take a girl on, but that girl would start off in debt to the madam. Every girl started at Oak House with a ledger in the red."

It was a depressing fucking concept and Elliot would've expected her to sound sad as she explained how she'd started her tenure in this place, but there was no sorrow in her. Instead her voice was level, detached, somehow, as if she were telling him a story, a story that had happened to someone else.

"The mark was how the madam kept track of how much of the debt had been paid. For every ten grand a girl earned, another section of the tat would be filled in. Most marks only came in five or six parts."

Why do it piecemeal, he wondered; why bother with the tattoos at all, when a book and a pen would work just as well?

"And if a girl tried to leave before her mark was finished…everyone would know. Everyone would know what she was, and everyone would know she still owed a debt to Oak House. And everyone was terrified of the madam. No one would touch a girl with an unfinished mark. If a drug dealer or another pimp found her, he'd take her back to the madam. She usually paid a finder's fee to anybody who brought a girl back."

Jesus Christ.

"It's not a tattoo, Elliot. It's a brand."

It was something he'd seen before, many times, while he was SVU. Pimps tattooing special marks on their girls, so everyone would know which girl belonged to which operation. Most of the marks were small - hell, he'd even seen barcodes, a time or two - designed not to damage the girl's beauty or appeal in anyway, but this…the tattoo on Olivia's back was huge. It would be hard for her, for anyone, to hide a mark like that all the time. Even now he could see a piece of it, curling over her shoulder when she turned her back to him in her pacing. With a mark that big, a girl would never really be free of this place; even if she left the life, it would follow her wherever she went, for all the rest of her life.

"How many?" Elliot started to ask, but he choked on the question, had to clear his throat and try again. "How many sections did it take to finish yours?"

There was no doubt in his mind that Olivia's mark was complete. The house and its legacy had been entrusted to her, and if the old madam was as hard as everyone said, he doubt the woman would've gifted her house to a girl who had not paid her debts in full.

"Ten," she said softly.

Ten. Ten sections, ten grand apiece. Olivia had earned a hundred thousand dollars on her back, and never seen a penny of it. Elliot's hands curled into fists, his nails digging into his palms as he fought back the urge to hit something, to throw something, to find some outlet for the rage that simmered low in his belly. Sure, Olivia could command half that price for a single night now, but the girls under her purview only cost a fraction as much, and some of that money went to the house. How much of what she'd earned had gone towards her debt, and how much had simply vanished into the madam's coffers? How many men had it taken, to pay so great a sum?

"I was sixteen when I came here," she explained. "I was broke, I was starving, I was out of options. I'd…I'd run away from home to be with a man who promised to marry me. He didn't, though. He got bored with me. He got mean. But I couldn't go home. My mother told me if I left she'd never let me come back. I needed a warm place to sleep and I needed someone to protect me. Liz offered me that. At a price."

The price of her freedom, her future. Only sixteen, when she should have been thinking about college and careers and shopping with her friends Olivia had been alone, had traded her body and everything she could have been for the means to survive. How different might her life have been, if she'd never left home, if someone else had found her before the madam did? Where could she have gone, what could she have accomplished? A surge of grief filled him, then, for the girl she had been, the woman she was now, and the woman she'd never had a chance to be.

"By the time the mark was finished Liz was thinking about stepping down. I had a GED, but I'd never had a straight job. I couldn't fill out a resume, and the jobs that would hire me wouldn't pay a tenth of what I'd make if I took over for Liz. So, yeah, I stayed."

She stilled in her pacing, looking at him across the courtyard, small and lost and defiant somehow, still, despite everything.

"This is all I've ever been, Elliot. This is all I'm ever gonna be. You want the truth? That's it, right there. I'm a whore."

"No," Elliot said harshly, his self control snapping in an instant. It was breaking his heart, listening to her recounting the horrors of her life, and he couldn't bear to hear her reduce herself to a whore. Yeah, she'd traded sex for money all her life and yeah, that's where she made her living now, and yeah, maybe that fit the textbook definition of the word, but he would not hear it. He couldn't accept it, the ugliness of it, the thought that Olivia, who was good and strong and beautiful and brave, thought so little of her own worth. Maybe it was naive, his dogged instance that she just not fucking call herself a whore, maybe he was being fucking stupid, but he couldn't stop.

In three long strides he crossed the space between them, and did something he had not ever done, something he had thought before now he would not ever be able to do. He slipped his hand beneath the fall of her dark hair, let his palm settle against the nape of her neck, holding her to him while he looked into her eyes, tumbled into them, huge and dark and so fucking sad it shattered his heart to see it.

"You're not a whore, Olivia," he told her fiercely. "I know what you are and what you've done. I'm not fucking stupid. But Jesus, you're…you're more than that. You're everything."

A friend, a mother, a woman. A savvy business owner, a fierce protector of the unfortunate souls who found themselves in need of her care. A person, whole and complete, defined by so much more than the act of sex and how she went about it.

"You can't say shit like that to me," she breathed in an unsteady voice. "It isn't fair."

"What's not fair?" he asked, increasing the pressure of his hand against her neck just a little, just enough to urge her to look up at him, and not down at her shoes like she was trying to do. "It's not fair to tell you that you're more than this?"

"It's not fair to make me hope."

The desolation in her voice was nearly enough to bring him to his knees.

"Girls like me…we don't get the things we hope for, Elliot."

"What if you did, huh?"

What if she left? Hadn't she already begun to break away from the curse of Oak House? He knew without asking she didn't mark her girls the way she'd been marked; he'd seen some of their backs, but it was more than that. In his gut, in his soul, he knew that the mark had wounded her, imprisoned her, and he knew that she would not inflict the same hurt on anyone else. He knew it, when he had no reason to know it; looking into her eyes, he felt as if he knew her, as if he always had, as if despite the fact that they'd only met a bare few months before, only spent so brief a time in one another's company, he knew her. The way she thought, the way she moved, the way she believed. What she believed in, and why, and what her heart longed for.

"What if just once you got what you wanted, Olivia? What would that look like?"

The humid heat of summer lay heavy as a blanket on their shoulders, the fence and the shrubs and the house behind them muffling any noise from the street, cocooning them in warmth and solitude. Her skin burned his fingers like fire, and her eyes cut him to the bone. There was an electricity crackling in the air between them, adrenaline coursing through his veins, as if he held not a woman, beautiful and sad, but a fucking grenade, unpredictable and deadly. He did not release his grip, however, did not even dare draw a breath, as he waited for her to answer, as he prayed with all his might that she would just tell him what she wanted, that it would be something he could give to her.

"I want to be free," she whispered.

Free of the house, free of this life, free of the brand on her back and the memories it carried with it; Olivia wanted to be free, and if he could have Elliot would have lifted her clean off her feet, then, and carried her away. She wouldn't have gone, though, and he knew it. Her son was in that house, and all the money she'd ever earned, and every person she knew, and every piece of her past. That kind of freedom he couldn't give to her.

But she was looking up at him with longing in her eyes, her soft lips parted, soft breasts rising and falling in time to her unsteady breaths. There was another kind of freedom. The freedom to choose. To choose where she went and who she saw and whose hands she let touch her body. At the party she'd let Perkins touch her, and she was letting Elliot touch her now, but he wasn't stupid. It was different, and he knew it. Everything about this was different. The way she was looking at him, the fierce desire he felt in his own heart, the way she seemed to sway towards him, seeking, hoping, even after she'd told him she couldn't allow herself the luxury of hope…he could give her a choice. He could give her a piece of freedom.

Slowly, giving her every opportunity to push him away, with eyes wide open and no breath in his lungs he bowed his head, and she raised herself up on her toes, just a little, just enough to close the space between them, and let his lips brush against hers.