A/N: Apologies for not updating yesterday. I had a rough weekend and spent most of Monday recuperating. This chapter's a little bit longer than the previous one, so hopefully that makes up for the delay. Thank you to everyone who assured me my trigger warnings have been more than sufficient this whole time. As I said last time, I would never want to trigger someone or try to use this subject matter for shock value or entertainment purposes. It's difficult and ugly and I hate what's happening to Liv, but it was the story I wanted and needed to tell, and I tried to keep that balance of showing what had to be shown because it's such a hard topic that shouldn't be sugarcoated—yet, still without crossing over into the gratuitous. Some might argue I went too far, but from my POV, everything I wrote was with the utmost respect for the characters, whom I love as if they were my own. Anyway, you guys are the best, and as always, thank you for reading! Also, as requested, here's what's been going on with Amanda and the gang. TRIGGER WARNING: Graphic and explicit depictions of gang rape and sexual violence.
[1] After these things God tested Abraham, and said to him, "Abraham!" And he said, "Here am I." [2] He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Mori'ah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you."
- Genesis 22: 1 - 2
Chapter 11.
Watcher
. . .
Amanda Rollins-Benson had seen a lot of fucked up shit in her day. By age eleven, she had witnessed her mother being beaten unconscious, choked, pushed down the stairs, and lying in a puddle of blood after miscarrying Amanda's little brother or sister. By age seventeen, she had attended the memorial of a childhood friend who got drunk at a party, wound up being gang raped by three college guys, and committed suicide shortly thereafter—that was actually what had scared Amanda straight; she'd been at the same party, but knew how to hold her liquor by then. She hadn't heard a peep from the upstairs bedroom where the rape occurred, though she remembered the guys involved. One of them had served her a couple beers.
In college, majoring in forensic science, she had studied some of the most horrific crime scenes imaginable, just for the hell of it. Blood-drenched walls and sacrificial killings weren't nearly as disturbing in pictorial form as they were in real life, when the energy—and the smell—of the murder still permeated the room. And since joining the police force, and eventually the Special Victims Unit, she had encountered the worst dregs of humanity and seen things that even the hardest, most callous cops couldn't stomach: women chained up like dogs and used as sex slaves, children being molested on camera, dead babies buried in shallow graves.
There was a lot of fucked up shit out there, and Amanda thought she knew how to handle it. But nothing—not one of those past experiences, no matter how graphic or harrowing; not the unflinching "been there, done that" attitude she liked to convey; not even her own assault in Atlanta—none of it could have prepared her to watch her wife being beaten, brutalized, and gang raped by more men than it took to subdue an NFL running back.
They had been savaging Olivia for almost forty minutes. Ever since Amanda clicked on the link in her email and a blurry livestream consumed the full screen, only a voice recognizable at first, breathless and terror-stricken, as the picture slowly came into focus. Olivia was on her knees in some hovel, a knife to her throat, the Sandman threatening to carve her out a new cunt if she put up too much of a fight . . .
Then reality took on the same blurry, surreal quality as the first few seconds of the buffering video. Amanda vaguely remembered charging into the squad room with her phone extended like a dirty bomb, shouting for someone (anyone, goddammit!) to get TARU, and get them now. Most of the officers only stared at her, mouths agape, until Fin jogged over, asking, "Whadda you got? Is it Liv?" He took one look at the cell phone, saw Olivia being lifted bodily by three men, and began barking orders to the room at large.
Cops scattered in every direction, the momentary chaos adding to Amanda's disembodied feeling as she stayed in place, unable to take her eyes from the screen. It was like the effect in movies when the rest of the world went into hyper speed around the protagonist while she remained unchanged and isolated from the action. The protagonist usually wasn't viewing a live feed of five men threatening to rape her wife, though. That plotline was too fucked up, even for the movies.
But this was happening in real life, where there were no rules, no continuity or dramatic structure, and no content rating system to ensure that, while the situation might look hopeless and dire, nothing truly awful would happen to Wife of Protagonist—at least nothing stronger than PG-13 violence and innuendos.
That soon changed, Olivia herself securing a solid R-rating by screaming for help and unleashing a profanity-laced rant on the men who were dragging her towards a shabby old desk that stood singularly in the room, like a sacrificial altar. Overhead lights shone down on its surface, heightening the effect and, Amanda realized with increasing dread, creating a crisper, more vivid image for the viewers. Rape in HD, what would they think of next?
Vaguely, Amanda heard herself answering Fin's questions—yes, the video had been sent directly to her; no, she didn't know where it was coming from; no, there weren't any ransom demands yet—but she was too focused on willing the clouds to part, for a celestial voice to boom down and stay the captors' hands as they slammed Olivia, her primal and blood-curdling screams for help turning to frantic pleas, facedown on the desk. It had happened for Abraham, when he was about to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac and prove his faith in God. Surely, surely, it could happen for Detective Amanda Rollins, who loved her wife with more passion and devotion than any Biblical figure had ever loved his god. She would give up whatever she must to make this stop.
The God of Abraham and Isaac wasn't in the sacrificial business these days, it seemed. No divine intervention came, just threats too vile for Amanda to associate them with Olivia (something about not using Vaseline, which she didn't allow herself to comprehend), the captain's desperate cries of please and don't repeating like the saddest refrain Amanda had ever heard.
It was a familiar song, though—during the worst of Olivia's night terrors, she had cried those same words in a voice so shrill and frightened it was unrecognizable as her own; and during the bad dreams that occasionally slipped by Gigi, the captain could sometimes be heard whimpering different combinations of the phrase Amanda now knew for certain was what Olivia had begged of her other rapists. Please don't. Don't, please.
(Please, Amanda silently joined in. God, please.)
The entreaty hadn't worked for Olivia those other times, and it didn't work for her now, either. Two of the men—Amanda recognized them as Liam Sandberg, the son of a bitch who had tased her, and his tattooed freak of a partner, still unidentified, who had drugged Olivia and whose erection currently wagged from his undone fly—were arguing over who got to rape her first. The driver of the van, the Satanist on steroids, slapped Olivia hard on the ass (she didn't even like that when Amanda did it) and declared himself victor.
Then it was happening. Amanda glanced around helplessly at the crowd of one-sixers, seeing no one in particular, no one who could do something, only a blur of concerned faces, all of them looking at her with pity. They could hear Olivia's struggle, even if they couldn't see her being flipped over, her pants yanked off by the burly guy with the goatee. It didn't take a vivid imagination to guess what was on the screen while the man made his sick comments, most of them regarding Olivia's body. Her beautiful, perfect body . . .
Someone gasped when the man forced Olivia's legs apart and inhaled the crotch of her underwear like he was doing a fat line of coke off her labia. Fin's hand came down heavily on Amanda's shoulder, and only then did she realize the horrified sound had been her own. The phone jittered in her hand, but she jerked it away when Fin tried to rescue it. "No, I hafta . . . " She let the rest trail off, no idea how she'd planned to finish, nor did she care, because her heart was shattering into a million fucking pieces.
"Help. Please help me," Olivia implored, her voice a charred husk of its usual rich, velvety tone. It was directed to the dopey kid standing on the outskirts of the scene, but she had tilted her head back the way she sometimes did during moments of extreme pleasure, her neck exposed and her lips bee-stung with Amanda's kisses, and appeared to be looking straight into the camera lens as she spoke.
"Oh Jesus, Liv." Amanda fisted her hair near the scalp, tugging it desperately. She had known a girl in college who pulled out strands of her own hair till she had bald spots, even going so far as to pluck her eyelashes, one by one. Amanda had never understood the compulsion, until now. She wanted to rend something valuable and irreplaceable with her bare hands. She wanted to tear down the city, brick by brick, until Olivia was back in her arms.
Just as the thought formed in Amanda's racing mind, the goateed man grasped Olivia's panties at the hip and tore them from her body, ripping along the side seam like he was opening a potato chip bag. They were a simple but cute pair of briefs that Amanda loved for their softness and the little white stars that were a charming contrast with the captain's tough persona. (Twinkle, twinkle, little star, Amanda teased in a singsong voice, whenever her wife slipped the underwear on.) They crumpled like so much tissue paper in the man's huge hands.
"Oh my God. Oh my God." For a moment, they were the only words Amanda could think of, and they mingled with the miserable cries coming from her phone, like the ululation of mourners at a funeral. She almost couldn't hear the men critiquing Olivia's pubic hair over the forlorn sound. "Jesus Christ, Fin, we have to help her, he's gonna—"
The air left the room as if it had been sucked out and vacuum sealed; left Amanda's lungs in the same manner, time itself seeming to freeze. All except the live feed in her hands, where Olivia's eyes, bulging with terror, suddenly went dead and sightless, the pained and frightened pleas expiring on her lips. Amanda could see the fight leave her wife's body entirely, like a soul departing its corporeal form, a light winking out in the darkness, the moment she was penetrated.
"Oh yeah," said the man raping Olivia. He exhaled deeply, a carnal, throaty rumbling more suited to a bad porno than a gangbang.
It didn't seem fair that men could still make sounds of pleasure while inflicting so much pain. Charles Patton had pawed and snorted like a racehorse at the gate when he was on top of Amanda, but he was just a wiry old booze-hound who barely kept it up long enough to finish. Not like this guy, who was clearly putting on a show and making the most of his time in the spotlight.
His muscles rippled while he drove at Olivia, forceful and punishing, though she offered no resistance. In fact, she was practically catatonic, jogged only by his movements in a profane imitation of the kids on one of their bouncy toys. She didn't blink once.
Amanda's knees buckled underneath her, and she would have gone down hard, if not for the hands that caught her by the elbows on either side. They guided her to the nearest desk chair, where she sat down heavily, her gaze traveling up the arms attached to the hands and settling on a pair of familiar faces: Fin and Kat. But no, not familiar—their features were twisted into expressions Amanda had never seen before. For once, Fin didn't appear to know what to do, his brow furrowed in deep concern as he looked not at Amanda, but at the horrors playing out on her phone. Kat was openly weeping, a hand over her mouth, as if awaiting a gasp that never came.
"He's raping her," Amanda said dully, to no one in particular. No one was listening to her, anyway; not while the rapist complained about how tight Olivia was and got razzed by his buddies for having a fat dick. She almost threw up then, her stomach rebelling at the vulgar remarks—and because she had seen it, before he put it into her wife. His penis was as they described, and he was using it to hurt Olivia.
And Amanda couldn't do a damn thing about it but watch.
It was the story of her life. Child or not, she had sat back and watched her daddy beat, berate, and belittle her mama too many times to count, doing nothing to stop it. She hadn't witnessed any of the rapes, beyond what her childish imagination conjured to explain the sounds from the next room, but she'd lain in bed, hands over her ears, willing her mama to shut up and take it. To get it over with, so Amanda didn't have to hear any more of the begging, the crying, the moaning . . .
She'd done the same thing with Olivia and Lewis, then again with Olivia and Calvin—watched. Only, those times she had been old enough and strong enough to stop the bad guy, if she would have just tried. The warning bells about Lewis had gone off instantly that first moment she saw him with Frannie in the park, but when his interest in Amanda waned in favor of Olivia, she'd actually been annoyed that he had some big supposed connection with Detective Benson. He was Amanda's collar, not Olivia's. Why should Benson get the credit for taking down the psychopath that Amanda brought in?
Then he had snatched Olivia from her own apartment, tortured her for four days straight, and left her so scarred and broken she couldn't even return to work for two full months—and what did Amanda do? She thanked her lucky stars that it hadn't been her. Oh, she played the supportive colleague who suggested welcome-back cupcakes (then forgot them), but she felt relieved every time she noticed Olivia absently fiddling with her healed wrist or her short hair, or pretended not to see the once-unflinching detective shrink from loud noises. Relieved that she hadn't let Lewis get the jump on her; that she wasn't the one they looked at with doubt anymore. And so goddamned convinced that if she had been in Olivia's position, she would have gotten away sooner, been unaffected by the experience, and wouldn't have needed to beat Lewis to subdue him—or at least would have finished the job she started.
She'd had the audacity to believe every bit of that, while also plunging headfirst into a gambling relapse and her own personal rock bottom; the audacity to take it out on Olivia—if the woman had just looked out for herself better, Amanda wouldn't feel so damn guilty for not protecting her, just like Mama—who had needed Amanda's support, not her shitty attitude.
All because Amanda sat back and watched.
And when Calvin came along, dangling his girlfriend and baby in front of Olivia as bait, Amanda had encouraged the lieutenant to follow up on the young mother. Once again, she'd sent Olivia off to face a monster alone, and instead of learning from her mistakes—how long had she sat at her desk in the precinct, thumb up her ass, knowing damn well something wasn't right, just as she had when Olivia didn't ignore Cragen's order to take two days off after Lewis walked?—she had wandered around Calvin's lair, giving him plenty of time to sexually assault Olivia in the very next room.
Just like Mama, just like Daddy. Just like Amanda, eyes squeezed shut and ears plugged, pretending she didn't know what was happening behind the closed door.
Now the door was flung wide open, forcing Amanda to look inside, to see.
And watch.
She swallowed hard several times, refusing to give up the contents of her stomach (if there even were any; she didn't remember or care). Throwing up would take her attention away from the screen, and the only thing worse than looking at it was not. This was her punishment for years of turning a blind eye, she couldn't look away. If Olivia had to experience it, so did Amanda. Every hellacious, soul-eating moment.
Still. Amanda choked back a sob when the men pulled Olivia's legs up at the knee, her limp arms pinned needlessly at her sides, and positioned her for the goateed man to have deeper access. He slapped Olivia smartly on the cheek for looking at his swinging necklace instead of his face. "You fuck," Amanda whispered, hot tears rimming her lower lids, but no higher. She wouldn't allow her vision to blur and separate her from Olivia while that piece of shit was hurting her. "You sick goddamn fuck."
If Amanda had been in that room—God, there weren't even any windows, nothing to give any indication of where they were, other than a dreary, boxlike setting that made everything appear artificial, the way plays looked on film—she would have shot the bald bastard right then, no questions asked. She could shoot all five of the men in that room, even the kid who was obviously simple (but also void of compassion; he observed the rape as if he were watching a sporting event with low stakes), and not lose any sleep over it.
"Rollins, maybe you shouldn't be—"
Amanda blocked out Fin's voice saying she shouldn't be watching the stream. It was far too late for that, and if Fin thought for one second that there was any chance of keeping her off the case or dragging her away from the phone screen after this, he was an idiot. Thankfully he abandoned that tack almost at once, instead muttering, "Aw, shit," when the fucker onscreen made orgasm noises.
The guy was dripping when he pulled out of Olivia. She exhaled loudly through her nose and winced, the way she did if Amanda removed the dildo too fast. Amanda always took extra care with such things—or tried to—knowing that sex, while increasingly free and open to experiment the more they'd had it, was still a potential minefield for Olivia, and probably always would be. No matter how much the captain enjoyed the act itself, her long history with sexual abuse and assault had made her vulnerable in ways of which she was sometimes unaware. There were a few sex acts she just couldn't handle, no matter how gentle Amanda's touch.
Seeing this man, this animal, disregard it all completely, and likely destroy for good all the progress Amanda had made with her victimized wife, filled her with a rage so immense it tunneled her vision, the overheads grayed out, the faces around her, too. Even the voices sounded foreign and muted, as though she were hearing them through a heavy dark hood.
Then Fin was shaking her shoulder, telling her the TARU officer had located the darknet site Olivia's rape was broadcasting from. Untraceable, of course—that was the whole point of the dark web, to commit the most devious, depraved offenses in the shadows, while never leaving the comfort of your own home. Or your run-down shithole of a rape pad.
It was even more of a cesspool than the rest of the Internet, and it featured everything from kiddie porn to snuff films to hitmen for hire. The anonymity it provided was a dream come true for criminals of all shapes and sizes, and a nightmare for law enforcement, even the officers with hacking skills and the most high-tech equipment. Oftentimes the video transmitted through darknet servers couldn't be traced at all; in those instances, it was almost always some random detail that broke the case and led the cops to where the victim was being held. Amanda had seen it a hundred times over.
Many of those times, help arrived too late.
Officer Boyd, who had announced that the IP address embedded in the live feed was bouncing from one location to another—Sri Lanka, Okinawa, Sydney, Texas—patched the video through onto his laptop, the tablet on Fin's desk, and the flat-screen monitor in the media section of the squad room. It afforded Amanda a supersized, crystal clear view of the scene just in time to watch Olivia topple sideways off the desk as she tried to elbow the man with all the tattoos. The ink made him look dirty, like a mechanic whose fingernails were caked in grime no matter how frequently he washed.
"No!" Amanda shouted at the laptop screen, springing to her feet when the cruddy, tattooed bastard started kicking Olivia repeatedly. The onscreen desk obscured Amanda's view, but not the thump of each brutal blow connecting with her wife's
(head, chest, abdomen . . . ?)
body, not the grunt from Olivia or the sound like air gushing from a punctured tire. Amanda slammed both palms down on the desk in front of her so hard the laptop screen juddered and a cup of ink pens overturned, scattering. "God damn you! Leave her be, you sick freak!"
"Amanda," Fin said measuredly, and rolled the chair she'd shoved backwards into place behind her. "You gotta sit down and quit yelling. Go on, sit."
"He's hurtin' her, Fin," Amanda cried, pointing indignantly at the screen. Kicking the living shit out of her, more like, but Amanda couldn't form the words. She had picked her mama up off the floor countless times, after her daddy had finished whaling on Beth Anne that way. She'd be damned if she would sit there and watch someone do that to Olivia.
But in the end, that was exactly what she did. There was no other option.
"He's hurting her so bad," she said, fisting the hair on either side of her head and sinking down onto the chair. Her elbows banged against the desktop, but she didn't feel it. She felt nothing: not the pins and needles from hitting her funny bones; not Fin's hand on her shoulder, squeezing ("I know," he said solemnly, "and I'll beat his ass when I get my hands on him, but right now she needs us to keep it together"); not the daggers in her heart as Olivia was yanked upright, wheezing and clearly in tremendous pain, by the man whose strength was frightening to behold, let alone be on the receiving end of. He was strong enough to jerk the captain around like a rag doll.
"You wouldn't last five minutes where I been, kitty cat," he told Olivia, the microphone of whatever recording device was being used just barely picking up his low, gravely voice. But it was enough to confirm what Amanda already knew from his teardrop tattoo and hardened features—he'd done serious time.
Fin had heard it, too. "Tamin, get this mofo into facial recognition. He's gotta have a record. I wanna put a name to his ugly ass so we know what we're dealing with."
"Copy that, Sarge." Kat hesitated, turned toward Amanda and the computer screen, then hurried off with the tablet in hand.
Wouldn't want to miss the show, would you, Officer, Amanda thought after the younger woman, when Olivia swore at the tattooed fucker and paid for it by having her shirt and bra torn off, exposing her fully to the camera. A disgruntled murmur went up from the packed squad room, a couple of the women punctuating it with sharp gasps (imagining themselves in Olivia's place, probably—but they weren't, they didn't know . . .) Amanda had forgotten the crowd around her, too focused on the indignities her wife was suffering to think about anyone else watching them unfold.
"Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus," she choked out, head clamped between her hands like a block of wood in a vice. The man was bending Olivia over the desk again, in the Eiffel Tower position, between himself and Liam Sandberg. "Fin, you gotta get these people outta here. Now. She wouldn't want anyone to see this. Make 'em clear out. All of 'em."
"Amanda, we need some of them—" Fin stopped short, looking slightly taken aback by the agonized expression Amanda turned on him. Or maybe he was just shocked she'd actually taken her eyes off the screen, off Olivia, even for a split-second. How could she do such a thing? How could she, while her wife needed her so desperately?
She returned to the screen in time to hear the platinum-haired scumbag tell Olivia that she was being sold for one million dollars. A staggering amount, considering humans were relatively cheap in the modern slave trade, but it supported the theory that Olivia's abduction was connected to a trafficking ring. And that undoubtedly meant the man who stood outside the plateau of light, skulking in the shadows just beyond the camera lens, was The Sandman.
So, please turn on your magic beam . . .
The thought made Amanda shudder—if these guys were just the lackeys, what must the man so notorious he had his own alias be like?—but it was listening to Olivia tearfully deny being worth that much money, or any amount at all, that left her trembling from head to foot. First, with a sadness so disheartening she felt physically ill (Olivia still didn't believe herself worth anything, no matter what Amanda said to the contrary), then with a rage that consumed her like fire when Olivia cried out and pleaded with young Liam Sandberg, of the serial killer eyes and Leave It to Beaver hair, not to fuck her in the ass.
Might as well call it what it was. Not much point in niceties when you were about to witness your wife being sodomized. Amanda rubbed unconsciously at her mouth, a habit that mostly manifested when she was drinking or trying very hard not to. "Oh, Jesus," she said, her voice a muffled whimper behind her fingers. Liam had retrieved a Vaseline container from inside the desk and slapped it down on top. "Oh, Fin. Get them out. Please get them out."
"The ones who aren't essential, okay? No looky-loos," the sergeant grimly agreed, his hand heavy on Amanda's shoulder a moment longer. Then he was gone, leaving her to nod dazedly while he rounded up bystanders and shouted to be heard over the sound of Liam and Fauxhawk bickering about who got to visit Olivia's backdoor.
Check it out, backdoor shuffle, nine o'clock, Amanda had overheard one of her Atlanta SVU coworkers snickering as a prostitute who had been beaten and sodomized by a john took small, wincing steps across their squad room. Amanda requested a transfer to Manhattan soon after. Running into Deputy Chief Patton at every turn had a little something to do with it as well.
That all seemed like child's play now. What was getting knocked around a little, having your shirt ripped open, and letting your boss have his way—as you'd already agreed to—compared with this? This felt a thousand times worse than anything Ol' Early Arrival Patton had done to her. This was the pure and utter terror Olivia had spoken of the first time she'd let down her walls and given Amanda a glimpse of her experience with William Lewis. Now Amanda knew.
The squad room was only partially cleared out by the time Liam Sandberg summoned over the dopey-looking kid he called bro ("Find out if Sandberg Senior's got a younger kid," Amanda barked out to whomever was listening, when The Sandman called the younger boy son, and sent him into the fray, "Check special ed schools") and began instructing him on how to rape Olivia. "But really, you can stick it anywhere that feels good to you. Give 'er a good smack if she does anything you don't like. Like when we hit Shadow with a rolled up newspaper, remember?"
And by the time Liam's oration was through and he commenced the physical demonstration, perhaps a third of the officers remained. It was still too many, though at least there were no gasps or murmurs as Olivia was penetrated—not even by the captain herself. Amanda couldn't tell for sure where he had put it, but judging by Olivia's reaction, she didn't think the young man was sodomizing her wife.
Yet.
Anal sex was something Amanda and Olivia hadn't even tried together. Amanda had occasionally indulged with old boyfriends, mostly out of curiosity, and while she didn't get much out of it, she wouldn't have been opposed to trying again, had Olivia expressed interest. But the captain expressed the exact opposite, tensing the few times Amanda hinted at the act with wandering fingers, and once guiding the strap-on away from the cleft of her backside, requesting over her shoulder, "Not there, okay?"
(Please don't, not there.)
It had bothered Amanda, the way Olivia asked the question, as if she might not have a choice in the matter. But Amanda had let it go, not wanting to seem like she was pressuring her wife into anal. Knowing Olivia, she would give in, if she thought it was something Amanda truly desired—or if it would get her out of talking about why she disliked being penetrated in that particular area.
Amanda wouldn't need to ask anymore, after watching this. Assuming she ever got the chance.
Liam made some comment about switching to granny pussy, which Amanda only half heard (Thank God, she thought, then wanted to scream in his divine, passive face; he got to sit up there on a throne while she was down here thanking him that her wife wasn't being sodomized). She was too distracted by what the bald man and his tattooed friend were doing.
Tattoos had ordered Goatee to hold Olivia's head still by pulling tight on her braid—the braid Amanda had fashioned just a few hours earlier, the soft, silky strands tangible between her fingers even now—while he rounded the desk and took something from one of the drawers. He knelt down, disappearing from view for only a second, but it was much too long for Amanda's liking. When he re-emerged, it was with a nondescript tube she couldn't identify, though it filled her with a cold, familiar dread. It almost looked like a bicycle pump, without the skinny hose to conduct air.
Whatever it was, he crammed it into Olivia's mouth so roughly and so far, Amanda feared it might pierce through to the other side like a skewer through a beef cube. She got to her feet again, unaware she was moving, just finding it impossible to stay seated. Her wife was being horrifically tortured right before her eyes, Fin could go to hell if he thought she shouldn't react. She pressed her fists into the desktop until her arms trembled, until it felt like she could bore through the wood, and she seethed as Tattoos threatened Olivia—first, with the tube, then with a pair of pliers.
"I'll fucking kill you," she said under her breath, when he forced Olivia to choose oral sodomy over being penetrated anally with a foreign object or having her teeth pulled out. Amanda didn't care if the TARU guy picked up on what she was muttering. She didn't care about anything but the woman on the laptop screen who was suffering and struggling to breathe. And to the man holding the tube: "You goddamn animal. I will put you in the ground."
His response?
"'I can't wait to suck your big, yummy cock, Angel.'" He was making Olivia repeat it, calling her filthy names, threatening her with the pliers or the tube-thing again, each degradation slicing at Amanda's heart like a pair of shears. But he had slipped up, and that was how Amanda knew she would find him. If she had to hunt him down till her dying day, she would do it, and she'd stick more than just a tube in his mouth when their paths finally crossed . . .
(Lord Jesus, Sandberg Jr. was rough. He reamed Olivia viciously from behind, but even though it jarred her entire body, she hardly reacted. She was too frightened of what the man in front of her had planned.)
"Somebody run the name Angel," Amanda called out, aware she was giving orders as if she were in charge of the investigation. If anyone didn't like it, tough. They could try to send her home, but they would have one hell of a fight on their hands. Right then she felt the urge to hit something—or someone—almost as strongly as she felt the urge to smoke while she gambled. "Check for guys with records. Shouldn't be too hard to ID the sonuvabitch with all that ink and metal."
"Already on it," said a voice Amanda didn't even recognize. She didn't turn to look because her eyes were fixed on the screen, where Olivia's features were also flat and unrecognizable.
The closest expression Amanda could recall seeing on her wife's face was the one Olivia had worn under Lewis' blood after he forced her to play Russian Roulette and killed himself in front of her. It was a ghastly image then, haunting Amanda every time she closed her eyes, for days after; now, it was less ghoulish without the blood (although one of the bastards had hit the captain and left a fleck of red on her cheek), but it would haunt Amanda for the rest of her life. Olivia was playing Russian Roulette again, only this time it wouldn't be a gun that got shoved in her face.
"No," Amanda said, shaking her head adamantly as Angel tried handing the tube off to Sandberg Jr., to use on Olivia when she wouldn't—couldn't—recite his disgusting words back to him. "No, no, no, no, no."
Something of that length and width would unquestionably cause devastating internal injuries, especially in the overzealous hands of the man who was raping Olivia. (Even watching it unfold, moment by horrific moment, Amanda still couldn't comprehend that it was actually happening. They just went out for bagels, for Christ sakes, and now her wife was being gang raped.)
Amanda breathed a shaky sigh of relief when Olivia spoke up, agreeing to the prick's terms, though every twitch of muscle, every facial tic, screamed that she absolutely did not want to. She looked like she would rather die. "Just say it, baby. Tell him what he wants to hear." Amanda nodded encouragement, as if her captain could see it. She hated herself for willing Olivia to give in. It made her feel like an accomplice. All this time she'd been giving Olivia hell for not fighting for herself, and now Amanda wanted her docile and compliant, just like the men did.
Had she really suggested, only a few weeks earlier, that she and Olivia should record themselves having sex, because it would be fun and hot? Had she really continued dropping hints that she'd like to try it—everything from playfully recording her wife before bedtime, ensuring the camera was handy, just in case, to leaving the lingerie drawer open, with her favorite selections on the top—right up until as recently as two days ago? God, she was an idiot. A damned insensitive, selfish idiot.
"Oh, come on," Amanda snarled at the creep who was making Olivia start again because she hadn't repeated him verbatim. The captain could barely raise her voice enough to be heard over Liam Sandberg's brutal and vocal assault, the words hiccupping in her chest as if she were hitting every pothole in a deeply pitted road.
But she said it like the good kitty she was (Amanda would cut out Angel's tongue for using that revolting nickname on her wife, for putting that filth on Olivia's lips), and for her troubles, she received a mouthful of cock before the sentence was even finished.
"Jesus fuck!" Amanda grabbed the edge of the desk, her fingernails digging into the wooden underside so hard they threatened to split down to the quick. She wanted to overturn the goddamned thing, hurtle it across the room, maybe—she had the strength right then to do it. But if she tossed the desk and the laptop resting on it, she risked losing her connection to Olivia. That was something she would not do, no matter how devastating the scenes playing out on the screen.
They couldn't be half as devastating to watch as they were for Olivia to feel. And by God, Amanda wouldn't leave her to feel them alone.
She tipped the desk forward, lifting the rear legs off the floor far enough to slam them back down and rattle the whole structure. Just because she didn't throw it, didn't mean she couldn't make some noise. Even the door to Olivia's office quaked from the impact, and that snapped Amanda out of her desire to rage more than anything else—more than Officer Boyd's exclamation of surprise when his MacBook hopped against the desktop; more than Fin's brusque, "Rollins!" from across the room—because she realized she expected the captain to throw open the door, storm out, and reprimand her for disorderly conduct.
The office remained silent and bare, and Olivia went on gagging and retching in the livestream, the sound amplified by the deathly quiet squad room. Amanda glanced around in misery and despair, barely able to catch anything but glimpses of Olivia's red, strained features, with Angel overshadowing most of her face.
There were at least fifteen people standing around watching Captain Benson of SVU take it from the front and the back. They had the decency to look sickened by what they saw, a couple of them gazing down at untouched coffee cups instead of the flat screen, but it took everything in Amanda's power not to scream at them to get out. They had no right to see Olivia like this. No one did, not even Amanda herself.
From what little Olivia had mentioned here and there about her feelings towards fellatio, Amanda had gleaned that her wife considered it a shameful, degrading act, which she'd only performed on a select few. Amanda had thought it a rather extreme view (blowjobs were just a means to an end, in her opinion), probably influenced by Olivia's traumatic childhood experiences and the oral sodomy she'd suffered while undercover in prison. Now, Amanda understood the shame and the degradation; it was almost more difficult to watch than the vaginal rapes. Almost.
"Jesus Christ, let her breathe," she bawled at the screen, where Olivia's face had taken on a purplish hue. She knew from experience how easily oxygen could be cut off during oral, particularly if the guy was big and didn't let up. It didn't matter how tempered your gag reflex—if your airway was blocked, you couldn't breathe through the mouth or the nostrils.
It was an alarming feeling at the best of times, and for Olivia, who had been deprived of oxygen before, it had to be downright terrifying. Indeed, she was trying to squirm away from Angel, only to meet up with Liam Sandberg in back. The burly guy with the goatee held her fast, her braid wrapped around one fist, his other palm splayed low on her back. Close enough to slide down and grab or slap her ass, both of which he did liberally.
Olivia was getting nowhere, and the longer she fought for air, the harder it became for Amanda to catch her own breath. Not until Fin guided her into the abandoned desk chair did she realize she was gasping out loud, chest heaving as if she'd run the entire thirty-five blocks from her apartment to the precinct. From their apartment.
"Hey," said the sergeant, bent forward to address Amanda. He sounded as if he were on an awkward phone call. There was no right way to talk to someone whose wife was being double-teamed in front of her, she supposed. "Amanda. Hey. The, uh, the EMT is here to check you out. Why don't you go on to the crib and let him make sure you're good? I'll . . . take over here." He gestured half-heartedly at the laptop, just a vague flicker in Amanda's peripheral vision.
"Huh? She turned her head slightly, giving the pretense of looking at Fin, though her eyes stayed glued to the livestream. "Check me for what?"
"You got tased and fell, remember? And I think you need your blood pressure checked. You're beet red. Look like you're about to have a stroke or something."
Amanda had completely forgotten that she'd agreed to see a medic, mostly to assuage her sergeant. She barely even recalled being tased, for that matter. It was something that had happened a million years ago, to some other Amanda. To the Amanda who had sworn to herself, her wife, her mother-in-law's grave, her best friend—and at some point, probably her sergeant too—that she would protect Olivia with everything she had; would make sure no one ever hurt her again the way she'd been hurt so many times before.
And now this Amanda (this failure, this liar) who had let Olivia be stolen right out of her grasp, and brutalized worse than even Lewis or the Mangler had managed to do—she was supposed to be examined for injuries? She was supposed to care about her own health while her wife was suffering so profoundly?
"No." She sat forward, elbows on the desktop, and hunkered around the MacBook screen, shutting out as much of her surroundings as she could. The animals were bragging about making Olivia come. Amanda shuddered, crying tearlessly. She'd finally gotten Olivia to a place where she could let go and reach orgasm almost every time they made love. It had seemed like such an accomplishment. A goddamn badge of honor.
"Amanda—"
"Leave me the hell alone, Fin," she growled. "I don't need no damn EMT righ' now. Can't you see what they're doing to her? Or don't you give a fuck?"
"You know I do. But I also see what it's doing to you. So you either let this guy look at you, or I'm sending you to the hospital, then home. That's an order, Detective."
It required every ounce of Amanda's self-control not to whirl around and demand to know who the fuck Fin thought he was? Half the time, Olivia practically had to strong arm him into doing his job, let alone staying awake at his desk. He wouldn't even be sergeant if not for Olivia's goading, and Amanda was carrying most of his weight these days, anyway. She had all the responsibility, without the increase in pay or rank.
But when she glanced at her longtime friend and partner, her anger dwindled from flash fire to the guttering of a candle flame. His face was full of such sadness and deep concern, his eyes flicking to the computer—he visibly struggled not to cringe—and back to Amanda, it made her want to fold her arms on the desktop, rest her head there, and weep.
Mandy, what's wrong, honey? Does your tummy hurt? Do you need to visit the nurse? Third grade, Miss Hart; she'd caught Amanda crying at her school desk, head down, and whispered those words in her ear. Miss Hart was a good teacher, but how to tell a grownup that you saw Daddy hurting Mama last night and your sick was in your heart, not your belly? How to tell your sergeant you couldn't abandon your wife while she was being raped, because you were afraid it might be your fault? Because you had let this happen?
"Fine," she said dully, glancing past Fin, at the EMT who had hung back near the reception desk. He was feigning interest in his stethoscope and medical bag to avoid looking at the flat screen and the horrors it broadcast to the room. "But he can check me out right here. I'm not leaving her. You make me do that, I'll never forgive you."
Fin sighed, nodded. He knew when to pick his battles, and this was not one. Not while a trio of men were arguing about who got to shove his dick in which of Olivia's holes. Fin must have waved the medic in, because a moment later, Amanda felt a blood pressure cuff tightening around her bicep. The chest-piece of a stethoscope slid from one point to another on her front and back, deep breath in . . . and out . . . Her eyes followed a blue latex finger just long enough to get the fucking thing out of her line of sight, reserved solely for Olivia.
Amanda answered the man's questions robotically and without truly hearing any of them. There was new activity on the screen: Liam Sandberg and the piece of shit who called himself Angel were performing a Chinese fire drill on Olivia, swapping orifices instead of car seats. For one fleeting second, none of the bastards were touching Olivia's body, and she almost looked like herself. Mussed, terrified, exhausted, traumatized beyond belief—but it was Liv.
Then she was gone. An empty shell of a woman, nude and misused, her eyes black slate and unseeing, stared back at Amanda from the digital feed. A million miles of gigabytes, code, and firewalls stood between them, invisible barriers Amanda couldn't break down with her fists or any amount of brute force. It made her feel pitifully small and helpless. Her sweet, fierce, beautiful wife looked pitifully small and helpless.
Meanwhile, the pigs who stood around Olivia, touching her now—batting her tousled braid, smacking her ass, jeering, pinching, pulling, grinding—seemed impossibly large, monstrous. God, how they must look to Olivia, looming over her like that. It was better that she had so clearly dissociated, escaping to the place Amanda suspected she'd been disappearing to since childhood. That place Amanda always tried to bring her back from, lest she be lost there forever.
Stay there, darlin', Amanda silently encouraged. Whatever protection Olivia's unconscious had created for her all those years ago was her safest bet now. No one could remain mentally cognizant through what Amanda was witnessing and keep their sanity. Not even her fearless Liv. Stay as long as you need, until I find you.
No sooner had the thought formed than two things occurred at once: the EMT offered Amanda something to calm her nerves ("Ma'am, your blood pressure is dangerously—") and Olivia cried out in pain, fully lucid as she pleaded for a reprieve. For just one minute of not being raped.
(God, please!)
Perhaps Amanda should have accepted the sedative ("Get the fuck out of my face," she'd snapped, and heard nothing further from the paramedic), because a moment later, heat surged through her chest, neck, cheeks, and out the top of her skull as Angel jerked Olivia's head back, then slammed it onto the desktop. He flattened his hand on the side of Olivia's face, like he was palming a basketball for dribbling.
"You don't get to say stop, you stupid cunt."
His other hand slithered around Olivia's thigh, disappearing below the edge of the desk, but obviously fondling between her legs. No, fondling was too gentle a description for what he was doing. He was scouring her, as if she were the washboard and he held the bar of lye soap. Olivia gasped and writhed under the abrasive touch, going nowhere.
"I'm gonna put a bullet in yours," Amanda whispered to Angel, when he knocked roughly on Olivia's temple and asked when she'd get it through her thick skull that she didn't get to tell him to stop.
"What'd you say?" Fin asked.
He never got an answer. Seconds after the question was posed, the sound of a red fox screaming sent a hush over the squad room and a chill through Amanda. She remembered that shriek from the few hunting trips she'd taken with her daddy; listening to the animals keen and whimper and die had quickly put her off the sport, but not before hearing a vixen's final enraged screams as she tried to protect her cubs from Dean Rollins' shotgun.
The sound of that mother fox haunted Amanda for weeks afterward, maybe months, especially at night when the nocturnal creatures called to each other in the woods outside her bedroom window. She wondered how long this sound would haunt her and what mournful, accusatory voices would cry out to her in the dark. Because it hadn't been a red fox screaming just now, she realized—it had been Olivia.
Even without a close-up view, it was obvious Angel had sodomized her. His grimace and Olivia's agonized expression, her teeth gritted in a macabre grin of pain, told the entire story. No need for graphic, gory shots when the actors could convey everything with their faces, wasn't that what they said about television and movies? Same went for livestreams of your wife being raped. It was all in the face.
"Why," Amanda asked in a watery, broken voice, finally unable to look on her wife's tortured countenance any longer. She held the sides of her head, fingers knotted into her hair, and gazed at the ceiling swimming above her. Tears spilled hotly into her ears, but didn't block out the terrible grunts and whimpers coming from the laptop speakers. More sounds she would never forget. "Why is this happening? How can you let this happen to her?"
Whether she was asking God or herself, she didn't know. Maybe no one. A small part of her had held onto the faith she'd been raised with, mostly out of love and respect for her grandmama, whose existence seemed proof enough that some benevolent force out there was watching over Amanda. She had thought so again, when she hit rock bottom and somehow came back from it; again, when her daughters were born; and the day she married Olivia, she had been absolutely certain of it as she walked down the aisle to join her bride.
But it wasn't true. There was no one out there listening, guiding, or caring. His eye wasn't on the sparrow any more than it was on the woman being sodomized in some dirty room while who knew how many people watched.
The last of Amanda's faith slipped away quietly, leaving an empty feeling in her chest. She would have thought the hollowness was in her soul, if she still believed in such a thing. People didn't have souls—not when they could do things like that man was doing to Olivia.
"Come on," Fin said gently, a hand under Amanda's elbow.
Following along, as if in a dream, Amanda let the sergeant stand her up and walk her from the squad room towards the interview room. She balked outside the door, trying to turn back for the laptop—for Olivia—but Fin kept a tight hold on her shoulders and steered her forward.
"I had Boyd set it up in here. I still don't think you should be watching it, but . . . she's your girl, and it ain't for me to say." Fin led her to the office chair where she'd sat earlier, poring over the tourist's cell phone footage with Kat, trying to find even the smallest clue that might result in Olivia's safe return. Before anything truly awful happened.
On the current laptop screen, Olivia was cringing and biting her lower lip hard enough to break the skin. Amanda had caught the captain biting herself like that a few times during sex, especially when it got intense—perhaps too intense, in hindsight—but she'd chalked it up to inhibition. Like a hand covering a laughing mouth, holding back the full blast. But maybe that wasn't it at all; maybe Amanda had just been hurting and triggering her wife all along.
The beast known as Angel was bent over Olivia, speaking too softly into her ear for the microphone to pick up on his naturally low, guttural voice. Whatever horrors he whispered to Olivia made her open her mouth in a silent scream, revealing a dark gash in her bottom lip, split down the middle. A high, thin whine, like a distant siren, escaped her lips and caused the hair at the back of Amanda's neck to stand on end. She had heard Olivia whimper and cry in her sleep, and on the worst nights, Amanda had even heard her wife scream. But she'd never heard the sound Olivia made now; there was no name for it, just endless despair. It was how the fire and brimstone preachers back home would say the damned sounded, suffering eternal torments in the pits of Hell.
"I gotta get back out—" Fin began, his hand on Amanda's shoulder making her flinch. He stopped short and swore under his breath when the man on camera went at Olivia twice as hard, clamping a hand over her mouth and biting down on the fleshy slope of her clavicle like a dog aggressively defending its meal. "Christ," Fin muttered, and drew back as Amanda recoiled from his touch and the laptop.
"Get out." Amanda stared stonily ahead, refusing to look away from the barbarism again, no matter how much distance she put between herself and the screen. She needed to see every violation, every cruelty, however it sickened her and broke her heart, to ensure that the monsters responsible for each atrocity got what was coming to them. And so that she might know how best to comfort her wife once this was all over.
But it would never be over, would it?
"Amanda, I—"
"Just go, Fin. Please." She gritted her teeth, fighting the urge to scream at him. Not for any particular reason, other than to scream. She usually went to the shooting range and unloaded a few rounds into a paper target when she felt like that. Every bullet was a release of the pent-up pressure she could feel consuming her by degrees. Used to be, gambling gave her that release. Gambling and meaningless sex. Now, sex always had meaning because it was with Olivia. Everything had more meaning when it was with Olivia.
Amanda didn't know how to function without her anymore. Angel and Liam Sandberg might as well have ripped Amanda's heart out and taken it with them when they tossed her wife into that van. They might as well have backed over her and left her for dead; it would have hurt less than what they were actually doing, and she probably would have recovered better. (How was Olivia ever going to recover from this?)
"I called Garland and let him know it's definitely a trafficking situation," said Fin, his voice retreating towards the door. "He's bringing the Feds onboard. It'll be better that way. More eyes, fancier tech, and we'll need 'em if those punk-asses took her across state lines . . . Amanda? You hearing me?"
She was straining too hard to make out what Angel and Olivia were whispering—she couldn't, even after stabbing at the volume button several times—to hear anything Fin said, but she nodded anyway. He added something about the EMT clearing her medically, but recommending the pills. She hadn't even noticed the blister pack of diazepam beside her on the table, until he mentioned it. There were four capsules total, and it would stay that way. Popping sedatives while her wife was stone sober and being tortured was not an option.
"Wait," she suddenly called, expecting Fin to already be gone.
"Yeah?"
"Put a security detail on my kids." Amanda tossed a quick glance over her shoulder, too brief for eye contact. She wasn't entirely sure where the request had come from, other than the fear of not knowing why Olivia had been taken and whether the rest of her family was a target or not.
Had she been thinking clearly, she would have asked for the protection sooner. Lucy knew the drill and wouldn't leave the apartment or let in anyone without a badge while her boss was under threat—that was a rule Olivia had established with the nanny long ago, after the drive-by at the park when Noah was just a baby. But men like the ones hurting Olivia wouldn't be deterred by petite, innocent-looking Lucy Huston, no matter how protective she was of her charges.
Besides that, Amanda had a bad feeling. It might just be a result of watching her wife being beaten, raped, and sodomized, but she didn't think so. Something told her she needed to prepare for other attempts on her family, and though it was probably instinct, she heard the warning in a voice that sounded a lot like Olivia's.
"The best we got, okay?" she requested, rubbing absently at her head, where it had hit pavement. That attack had come out of nowhere and ended in the blink of an eye. The Sandman and his accomplices were skilled and frighteningly bold.
"Already done. I sent 'em to your apartment right after— right after you called and told me what happened. Your kids are safe, Rollins. Focus on Liv now."
As if she could focus on anything else. But she nodded and said a vague thank you over her shoulder, unsure if Fin had heard it before stepping out or not. She didn't really care either way, because at that very moment, Angel grabbed Olivia's face and turned it directly to the camera lens. Blinded by the lights and the pain, Olivia blinked rapidly, then squinted ahead, almost as if she knew the camera was there, almost as if she were gazing straight at Amanda.
"Oh, Liv," Amanda whispered, tracing the outline of her wife's tear-stained face with her thumb. "I'm here, baby. I'm right—"
"Your bitch wife didn't do shit to protect you. We walked right up and took you from her, and she did nothing. Where is she now, pussycat? I don't see her coming to your rescue."
Amanda snatched her hand back from the screen like she'd touched a hot burner on the stove. It was one thing to think it of herself, but to hear her failure confirmed out loud like that, by the man currently raping her wife, nearly put her over the edge. She couldn't even yell at him that he was wrong. He wasn't. She'd downplayed Olivia's unease about Liam Sandberg at the bagel shop, and she'd watched as this man, a devil who called himself Angel, snuck up behind the captain and stuck a needle in her neck. And Amanda hadn't done a damn thing to stop him.
She'd failed as a wife, a cop, a mother—her kids expected her to protect their mommy; "Mama, are you Mommy's bodyguard?" Jesse had asked once, out of the blue, "Do you shoot the bad men for her?"—and Olivia was the one paying for it. Why hadn't they just taken Amanda instead? That would have been less tortuous than watching this. She could live with being repeatedly and brutally assaulted, but not with listening to her wife defend her ("You ambushed us," Olivia stuttered, grasping at each breath, each word) while crying out in unimaginable pain.
"She— she— God. Oh God, Manda . . . "
Amanda felt as though she were being ripped in half, her skin tearing like paper, her insides snapping apart like a gristly cut of meat, guts unspooling on the floor. This was worse than dying. This was Hell, and Amanda's eternal torment was to hear Olivia sobbing for her, but having no way to help. The rest of the words were broken and incoherent, except for those heartrending cries: Manda. Please.
"I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry." For a while it was all Amanda could say, shaking her head in denial (of what, she had let this happen) and gripping the upper corners of the laptop until they felt embedded in her palms, fingers numb and stiff against the outer shell. If she didn't hold it, she would throw it. And right then, it was the closest thing she had to holding her wife.
I'm so sorry I'm so sorry so sorry so sorry . . .
Over and over again, becoming a single, stream-of-consciousness apology that could go on forever and still not be enough. She gave it up—all of it—and covered her mouth with both hands, sobbing into them as Liam Sandberg forced Olivia's jaw open and put himself in her mouth. Acid tears coursed down Amanda's cheeks, trickling between her fingers, and for a moment she was glad she couldn't see clearly: not while the two men raped Olivia together; not when Angel switched to vaginal penetration, giving the younger Sandberg a tutorial on anal play; and not as the goateed guy took turns stroking Olivia's body and his erection.
By the time Liam Sandberg ejaculated in Olivia's mouth, Amanda's tears had turned to dust, refusing to fall any longer. She cried without them, great, racking sobs that had no sound but sent violent shudders rippling throughout her body. She hadn't cried so forcefully since childhood, when everything felt like the end of the world and she'd been powerless to stop it. Except, this really was the end of her world, and she had no more control of it now than she did at six years old.
Angel climaxed a moment later, clawing at Olivia's ass with enough pressure to leave visible scratches in her already florid skin, and hunching over to ram her a few last times before pulling out. Amanda tasted bile at the sight of his slimy, pierced dick slipping, eel-like, out of her wife. He shook it off as if he'd just taken a piss on some bushes.
Motherfucker.
As soon as Liam Sandberg was out of her mouth, Olivia belly crawled to the edge of the desk and vomited over the side, fingers jammed down her own throat. Amanda tried not to think about what the viscous substance was that drizzled from the captain's lips as she hacked and sputtered, or why she was able to bring it up so easily. Almost as if she'd done it before.
If you asked Amanda, her wife had a sensitive stomach. Olivia would deny it, of course, always quick to dismiss anything that might be perceived as weakness, but she was the one who couldn't keep anything down when she was ill, who spent as much time as Amanda with her head in the toilet during Sammie's first trimester, and whose appetite depended entirely on her emotional state. God, how would Amanda ever get her to eat again, after this? How would Amanda ever eat again, for that matter?
"Liv," she breathed, pressing her palm to Olivia's naked, trembling body on the screen. She ached to wrap her wife in a warm and protective embrace, shielding her from the monstrous assholes who were laughing at her for throwing up.
If there was any part of Amanda's heart still left intact, it shattered completely when Olivia, too weak—or too injured—to push herself upright, tried to cover her breasts with her badly quaking hands. She had been so self-conscious about her chest these past few years, after Lewis and his cigarettes, after Calvin and his sick Oedipal fantasies. Amanda had noticed her unconsciously tugging her blazers closed at work many times, especially in front of the male suspects, and whenever she did wear a revealing top in public, often at Amanda's behest, she constantly checked that her scars weren't visible.
Only since she'd started breastfeeding Samantha had Olivia begun to recapture some of that body confidence Amanda remembered from their early years together at SVU. Man, she used to come in wearing some wild shit, Fin had said once, during a rare nostalgic moment with Amanda and Kat. Not to be trifling with your woman, Rollins, but she looked damn good. Amanda didn't know if she could ever completely restore that freedom and ease in her own skin that Olivia once had—age played a role too, unfortunately—but she had wanted to try. That was part of the reason she'd suggested filming themselves having sex. Maybe if Olivia saw herself through Amanda's eyes, she would realize how beautiful and sexy she truly was.
Now it would never happen. Even if the captain did survive this
(If? She will survive it, she has to, I can't do this without—)
showing off her body, reclaiming that pride she so rightfully deserved, would be the last thing on her or Amanda's mind.
"Oh, Liv. Hold on, baby. Hold on for me, okay?" Amanda kept her hand on the laptop screen, trying with all her might to convey the message. She knew the ability Olivia seemed to have to read her mind was just a confluence of empathy, intuition, experience, and years of working alongside each other, but if there was any chance—any chance at all—that her wife could sense her in the hellhole where she was being tortured . . . . Foolish or not, Amanda had to try.
She gasped and jerked her hand away when Liam Sandberg grabbed Olivia's arms, requesting assistance, and with the other men's help, flipped the captain onto her back. They expended no more effort than men turning a slab of ribeye over the fire. Then Liam called for his younger brother to hop on, promising to hold Olivia down for him.
"Stop," Amanda gritted, through clenched teeth. She got to her feet and leaned on the table, palms flattened at either side of the laptop. They couldn't honestly mean to let this kid rape Olivia, could they? They were heartless pigs, but even people like that didn't encourage mentally disabled boys who barely looked old enough to shave to commit rape. It was unconscionable. It would destroy Olivia, who had spent her life helping the innocents, the ones who couldn't stand up for themselves.
Amanda pointed at the screen, where the boy was creeping forward, an idiotic grin on his smooth baby face. His boner poked prominently at the zipper of his jeans. "Don't. Don't you fucking dare, you little ratfuck." She slapped both of her hands down hard against the table, palms stinging almost as badly as the rest of her body had when she got tased.
Before Amanda could unleash a torrent of obscenities on the boy, whose affliction she would not consider when assigning blame if he proceeded with the rape, Olivia uttered a feeble protest that sounded hauntingly childlike. As if she had regressed to some small, neglected part of herself that hadn't been let out of its cage in years. Weak and famished, it dragged its skeletal form into the open, a withered hand outstretched in supplication.
"No more. Please, no more. I wanna go home. T-tell me why you're d-doing this. I'll . . . I'll tell Amanda anything you want. I'll tell her ev-everything you did to me, and she'll— she'll fix whatever it is that started this."
The room began to shrink around Amanda as Olivia's meaning sank in. Her breath came in small, quick gasps, hardly enough to expand her lungs. At the last second, she felt her legs giving out and managed to drop heavily onto the chair behind her. It let out a huff, the lift mechanism giving by an inch or two. She gripped both sides of her mouth in one hand and coughed out a tearful, "Oh, dear Lord."
Her worst fear—which she had been shoving down and refusing to acknowledge since the door slammed shut on the van that took Olivia away from her—was coming true. This was her fault, and not just because she failed to act. The men had told Olivia that Amanda was somehow responsible for her capture; why else would she be offering to relay a message to Amanda, in exchange for release?
It made a strange kind of sense now. Nothing about the abduction or the livestream had felt like the work of Rob Miller, who would rather do the raping himself, or any of the idle threats made by BX9 members, coyotes, drug cartel, Henry Mesner, or the countless other men Olivia helped put behind bars. Those men wanted to end Olivia for interrupting their fun, these men were using her as a pawn. And the game was Amanda's to lose. No wonder it felt so personal, like some sort of twisted payback.
That's exactly what it was.
But who? Who had Amanda so grievously wronged that they would go to such lengths to destroy her, by first destroying the woman she loved? She had paid off her debts—slowly and with a determination that bordered on obsessive—and even if not, this went beyond the scope of a bookie's attempt to collect payment. It was the type of revenge someone sought when you had taken everything from them. She couldn't think of anyone she'd done that to, not even the worst criminals she'd encountered.
"Oh God, Liv, I'm so sorry, baby," she whispered into her hand. She repeated the apology again and again as Liam Sandberg informed Olivia that only the parts he cut off of her would be leaving, signifying his intended starting point by twisting cruelly at her breast.
"It's cute, the way you think that blond bitch of yours will still rescue you," he said. "News flash, honey: she can't fix this. And she already knows exactly what we're doing—"
"No, no, no." Amanda shook her head, scrubbing absently at her mouth, cheeks, bangs. As much as she wanted Olivia to sense her presence—to not feel so desperately alone—Amanda did not want her wife to know she was viewing the rapes like free porn on the Internet. Not only would it add to the already catastrophic humiliation of a violent and sustained gang rape, but Olivia was smart enough to figure out that if Amanda was watching, so were a lot of other people.
Luckily, the Sandman cut his son off mid-sentence, and Olivia didn't appear to catch on to the younger man's meaning. She was too busy shrinking from the youngest of the Sandberg men as he crawled on top of her, with the jolly assistance of his older brother. Liam leaned down to murmur something inaudible to Olivia, and whatever it was brought to an abrupt halt what little resistance she offered.
After nearly forty solid minutes of struggling against her torturers, being called the most vile and despicable names imaginable, suffering the most dehumanizing torments, Olivia finally heard the words that broke her spirit.
"Oh Jesus, no," Amanda said. She recognized the expression that softened across her wife's terror-glazed face.
Olivia had just resigned herself to her fate.
. . .