A/N: I was trying to get this update ready to post yesterday, as an early surprise, but it didn't work out that way. However. This chapter and the next were originally a single, 23-page chapter, and I might be persuaded to post the second half earlier than Monday... just sayin'. :-D Also, I received an anon message on "The Devil's Cut" that I'm going to reply to in the comments for *this* story for reasons. I usually delete the trolls who talk shit, but this one accused me of arrogance, and I'm not just letting that go. I don't think there's much need for a trigger warning this time, unless being drugged against one's will gets to you. Okay, here we go. Enjoy.

Chapter 20.

This Woman's Work

. . .

The nose would heal, Dana didn't much care about that. She had grown up a tomboy in rural Virginia, two older brothers, scrappy as all get out; she was used to broken noses. And you didn't build a career as a ball-busting FBI agent or serve time in prison, posing as a murderer of innocent pregnant ladies, without getting socked in the face a few times.

Honestly, she could have popped her crooked schnoz back into place herself and kept right on working, but somebody needed to be with Rollins when she woke up. The detective was going to be madder than an old wet hen once the drugs wore off, and Dana couldn't exactly blame her. It had been a rotten trick by that beady little shrink to sedate her like that, against her will. He had claimed it was for her own safety, and that of everyone in the squad room, but in Dana's opinion it was no different than the age-old practice of deeming women "hysterical" and drugging them into submission.

She was here for selfish reasons, though. She had needed to get away from the precinct and especially from the live feed of Olivia Benson being beaten and raped. The video had ended abruptly, right before the altercation, leaving everyone to stare at the black void on their screens in stunned silence, but it would likely be restored. Those men were not amateurs, nothing they did was by accident, and everything was designed to inflict the most suffering—for Olivia and their audience—as possible.

In the meantime, Dana's colleagues were poring over the previous footage, analyzing background noise, enlarging screen captures, replaying conversation in search of missed clues, all in hopes of pinpointing a location. It was too much. The longer she watched it play out, the deeper she receded into memories of her own assault. Following leads on Declan Murphy's whereabouts had been a good distraction for a while, but there were only so many dead ends you could go down before admitting you were on a wild goose chase.

Maybe Amanda had the right idea after all. Dana watched her sleeping heavily on the gurney, chin slumped to her chest, and wished she could be that oblivious to the passage of time. Every minute Olivia was held captive, the likelihood of getting her back diminished by that much more. How long until they ran out of minutes? Until Olivia did? Despite years of not being in contact with the captain, Dana had taken great comfort in knowing that somewhere in New York City, justice and empathy thrived, and it had a fantastic head of hair to go with it.

She couldn't imagine looking out at the Manhattan skyline if Olivia was no longer under it. She couldn't imagine how devastating it must be, as a wife, to watch the woman you loved, the mother of your children, being violently tortured, her beautiful body used and defiled. Vandalized like a highway underpass, blood and semen the tagging medium of choice.

All of Dana's spouses and children were unique to her UC personas, and she enjoyed making up lives for them. She'd liked being married to Amos the best, he never gave her any guff. Stephanie had been fun, though. She challenged Dana, drove her crazy, but they always found something to laugh about together. Jordy and Cash were into every school sport imaginable, Nellie got good grades but was shy like her father. Sometimes Dana missed them, those fictional families she used to believe were as good as the real thing.

Then again, look what the real thing got you, she thought, sighing as Amanda slept on. The shrink said the sedation would wear off in about an hour, and that had come and gone twenty minutes ago. If Dana sat there much longer, watching the steady rise and fall of Amanda's chest, the dripping of her IV, the blips from the pulse oximeter, she would probably go crazy and need to be sedated too. She got up to stretch her legs, stiff from the uncomfortable hospital chair, and bent down to touch her toes. That always got her blood going.

When she stood upright again, Amanda had begun to stir, her hand feeling the catheter in her arm, though she hadn't opened her eyes yet. The detective frowned, gliding the length of slender tubing between her fingers, and slowly parting her lids to peer at what she was holding. "S'this?" she mumbled, speaking more to herself than to Dana, who had yet to catch her eye.

"The sedation can make you dehydrated," Dana said, moving slowly toward the bed. Last time she rushed at Amanda, she ended up with blood gushing from her nostrils. For someone so slight, the little blonde packed one helluva punch. Dana was shorter, but rock solid and thicker around the middle, thanks to menopause. Even so, she had reeled back on her Steve Madden loafers with that hit. "You were lookin' a mite peaked when we got here, so they hooked you up to an IV."

"They did?" Amanda traced her eyes along the tubing, no thicker than a cooked spaghetti noodle and twice as curvy, as if she had never seen such a contraption before. The sedative could cause confusion too, Lindstrom had warned. "Don't remember. Just one minute I's talking to y'all and watching the livestream— oh, God, Liv. How long have I been out? Did they find her? Is she okay?"

"Hey, slow your roll there, Detective." Dana snapped her fingers for Amanda to stop trying to rip off the surgical tape from the crook of her arm. When that didn't work, she stepped forward and cupped a hand over the catheter. "You need to take it easy, otherwise you'll be on your ass. And I ain't waiting around while you recover from that."

The joke fell flat as Amanda glanced around the room like she was looking for an escape route. Her strength hadn't returned just yet, but it was filtering back slowly, like the drip from the saline bag, and soon she would be putting up a much heartier struggle. "You've been out for 'bout an hour and a half," Dana said quickly, hoping to allay some of the girl's concerns. Although probably not many. "Olivia is . . . we still haven't found her, I'm sorry. Since the feed went dead, there's been no new attempts at contact. Sergeant Tutuola's been keeping me apprised via text. Last was five minutes ago."

Amanda fought valiantly for several more seconds, prying at Dana's fingers and huffing in frustration each time they closed around her arm again. "Lemme go, you fuckin—" Flumping back against the pillow elevated behind her head by the upright bed, she let out a low, animalistic growl, like something feral and ferocious that had gotten its leg caught in a trap. "Bitch. I h-hafta go to her. Hafta— she . . . she needs me."

In that moment, Dana saw clearly what had so appealed to Olivia about the spunky little blonde that she'd gone and married her. Amanda was muscling her way through a haze of ketamine and fatigue just to watch over the captain in whatever capacity she could, her desperation so stark, so unabashed, it was almost embarrassing. That kind of loyalty was hard to come by; Dana certainly hadn't found it, although years of UC work would do that to you. Couldn't be loyal to someone whose persona changed every five minutes.

Detective Rollins loved Olivia in that fierce and consuming way that most people only dreamed about finding in a partner. Well, good for Olivia. She deserved it, and God knew she'd need it if she ever made it back home. "I know, darlin'," said Dana, easing off Amanda's arm with a few awkward pats. She wasn't great with the affection, probably another reason they weren't lining up for a chance at Dana Karen Lewis. "But until they initiate contact with us again—"

"Don't call me that." Amanda's head was tipped back to gaze at the ceiling, her irises a flat blue that matched her flat voice. She blinked and suddenly her eyes were awash with tears. "That's what I call her. I ain't your darlin'."

Cringing, Dana mentally kicked herself for the pet name. It was common in the South, versatile enough to use on men, women, and children, and no one took offense. Her big mouth always seemed to get her into trouble, though, even when she wasn't being rude or abrasive. She just had that knack. "Sorry, I didn't realize—"

"Did you say I was sedated? As in, drugged?" Amanda sat forward, looking directly at Dana. Her irises swam in the surrounding white pools of sclera, the pupils not quite back to normal yet. She looked a bit like David Bowie, with his strange asymmetric dilation. She had his intensity too, all of it focused on Dana. "Was it that bastard Lindstrom? Did he do this to me?"

The detective was getting riled up again, and Dana felt for her. Born in the mid sixties, she had narrowly missed the era of men making women's mental health decisions for them, but her mama and a few aunts had suffered through the psychiatric treatment for difficult, high strung women. Apparently Lindstrom hadn't gotten the memo that the fifties were over. Women could be as loud, and maybe even a little violent, as they saw fit.

"Yeah, he, uh, got kinda freewheeling with that syringe. Thought you were gonna hurt someone, supposedly. Your sergeant was not a happy camper." Might as well keep Fin in her good graces, Dana decided. And he had been visibly upset with the shrink as he hefted Amanda's limp body onto the desk chair. "He asked Lindstrom to leave, which I think was Fin-speak for 'get the hell out of my squad room.'"

Amanda gave a derisive sniff. "Shouldn't have called him in the first place, if that's how he felt about it. What happened to you?" She tapped the side of her nose when Dana tilted her head, questioning.

"Oh. This?" Dana touched the splint, a small piece of plastic shaped like a Bioré pore-cleansing strip and held in place by medical tape. She had tried to refuse the damn thing, insisting she'd broken her nose enough times to perform her own rhinoplasty, but the doctor insisted. She held no illusions about the appearance of her nose—it had been her least favorite feature long before the breaks, its snubbed tip and asymmetrical nostrils the bane of her existence—but at least the guy cared that it healed properly. "This is nothing. I've gotten worse fractures sneezing. You should see the other guy."

"Sorry," Amanda said with a deep, weary sigh. She flexed her knuckles, as if they still held the residual pain of smashing into Dana's approaching face. It had been one hell of a right hook. "Did I headbutt someone too?" She rubbed the back of her head, grimacing. Dana had used the defense move on a few sleazebag perps herself, including a nearly seven-foot-tall white supremacist who outweighed her by two hundred pounds, and she well remembered the brain-thudding throb that followed.

Wincing, she gave an apologetic nod. "Let's just say Sergeant Tutuola will be a little fuller around the lips for the next week or so. I think the goatee absorbed some of the blow." On the outside, at least. She had heard the unmistakable clack of teeth, a sound you didn't forget once you'd heard them gnashing together during enhanced interrogation techniques, seconds before the equally unmistakable sound of her nasal bone and cartilage crunching like Styrofoam.

"Good," said Amanda, her icy features hardening to frosted steel. All at once, she halted the careful probing of her injuries as if the pain had magically disappeared. More than likely, she had simply resolved herself to it, as Dana would have. As Olivia seemed to have done in that sadistic horror movie she was trapped in. "Serves him right for siccing goddamn Lindstrom on me like I'm some kind of . . . "

Some kind of what, she didn't finish, but Dana got the gist. She doubted it would do much good to point out that Fin hadn't personally sicced the therapist on Amanda—the odd little man had taken that liberty all by himself—not when the detective was determined she knew where to place the blame. Besides, Dana had a feeling that reasoning with an angry Amanda Rollins was like reasoning with a hornet. A nest of them, freshly kicked.

"I'm gonna kill that sonuvabitch." Amanda's jaw tightened with resolve, and she glanced sidelong at Dana, daring her to say differently.

Normally, Dana wouldn't have; she made off-the-cuff remarks like that all the time, everyone did. But something about the way the word kill sprang from Amanda's tongue, as singular as a launched grenade, was troubling. Dana might never have watched her wife going through the worst kind of hell imaginable, but she had survived her own sexual assault and, in a blind fury of grief and trauma, very nearly murdered the assailant. Amanda had the same vengeful look in her eye that Dana had glimpsed in the mirror after completing her own rape kit.

"It isn't Fin you should be—"

"I'm not talking about my damn sergeant," Amanda snapped. "I'm talking about the turtle-looking motherfucker who stuck me. He had no right. I mighta found Liv by now if I wasn't lying in some goddamn hospital bed. Christ. Who the fuck's he think he is? I never should've let Liv go to him. I'm making her switch therapists soon as I get home."

Dana could pinpoint the exact moment Amanda noticed the incongruity of her words—the detective froze in her fussing with the hospital blanket, went a little dead behind the eyes, and then her tired, pretty face crumpled in on itself. She began to weep with bitter, racking sobs that almost sounded like laughter, until you saw the anguish in her red face, in the clawed hands scratching at the blanket. A Bible verse Dana hadn't heard since she was a teenager, her mama's good little Pentecostal girl, came back to her unbidden:

They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Matthew something or other, if memory served. Dana had always liked the verse, the idea of Jesus and his angels tossing folks out of Heaven, onto their keisters, appealing to her not-quite-so Christian affinity for seeing the bad guys get theirs. I don't know about you, Daney, her daddy used to say. You're either gonna be a fearsome protector or a fearsome troublemaker someday. Cain't rightly say which just yet.

Luckily it had been the former option, but that didn't make her job any easier. She hated seeing women cry, particularly the tough ones like Amanda Rollins. She knew the shame and embarrassment that went with it. The feeling of failure that you were proving all the men right, women were too emotional for the job. She cleared her throat and patted Amanda awkwardly on the back. Why hadn't she just returned to the precinct instead of staying behind to play nursemaid?

Lord Almighty, she hated this case.

"Hey, now. Let's, uh . . . let's keep it together here, dar— honey." Dana winced at her incompetence. There was a reason she didn't have children. Or a spouse. Or even a dog. She tried to imagine what Olivia would say in her place—Olivia who wore her heart on her sleeve and had shown compassion and tenderness to Dana, despite believing she was a cold-blooded killer of pregnant kindergarten teachers—but all she came up with was a sentiment too lame for a greeting card: "Don't give up hope yet. She's a fighter."

It's always darkest before the dawn. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. May the force be with you.

It was all so senseless and there were no good words, certainly not any Dana could summon up on short notice. She pressed her lips together, blocking any more meaningless platitudes from spilling out, but the damage was already done.

"Not like this, she ain't," Amanda cried, the words harsh and jagged in her convulsing throat. "You weren't h-here, you didn't see. All the other times, what it did to her. Harris and Lewis. Calvin. The stuff fr-from when she was a kid. It took her so long to recover. Even if I g-get her back, she ain't gonna be my Liv anymore. Don't you understand, I already lost her for good. She might as well be—"

She swallowed the rest with an audible gulp, though Dana heard it just as plainly as if it were spoken. The Olivia they both knew and loved might as well be dead. Not a wish, but a deduction based on years of experience. People often didn't recover from a trauma of this magnitude, and those who did were fundamentally and irrevocably changed—it's why gang rape was such an effective weapon in war zones. Racking up kills without the body count.

Detective Rollins was in mourning. A widow whose spouse wasn't yet in the ground.

"You listen to me, little girl," said Dana, leaning both hands on the hospital bed and fixing Amanda with a severe look. She might not know how to comfort a devastated wife, but she knew damn well how to talk to a soldier giving up in the heat of battle. "That woman is not dead, and don't you ever come to me with that fatalistic bullshit again. She's only lost to you if you let her go. I seen plenty of ladies survive something this bad or worse, and yes, it's an unthinkable tragedy and some don't recover, but the brave ones do. And there ain't nobody braver than your wife. So, you don't throw in the towel till she does, ya hear?"

Gradually Amanda's expression changed from total despondence to mild surprise, probably at being spoken to like a kid getting scolded by a strict teacher, and finally settled on something resembling resolve. She nodded, pawing the tears from her face and pinching a drip of snot from her nostrils. "Yeah. Yeah, you're right," she said, sniffing loudly and rubbing the heel of her palm under her nose. "My head's just . . . " She spread her hands near either side of her head and shook them, suggesting a frenetic, static-filled brain.

"Yeah. Ketamine'll do that to you." Dana patted Amanda's arm, and this time it wasn't forced. She had suffered terrible sleep paralysis for months after her assault, waking up convinced she'd been drugged again and was incapable of moving. As an added bonus, he was always on top of her, murmuring about her velvet throat. For a long time, it was a raw, gravelly throat from all the sobbing and retching she did on those sleepless, feverish nights. "That feeling will wear off soon, but you'll probably have one sumbitch of a hangover."

"Great. I can hardly wait." Amanda closed her eyes and leaned back on the headrest. It lasted all of two seconds before she sat forward, tore the IV catheter from her arm with two brisk yanks that snapped the medical tape and sent up a little geyser of blood like red oil, and threw aside the thin bedclothes. "Screw it. I gotta get out of here. Going back to the precinct and see what I can do. I'm the one those bastards want to be in contact with, anyway."

"I'm not so sure that's a wise—" At the last moment, Dana sidestepped the oncoming blonde, narrowly escaping being plowed down by a hundred and twenty-five pounds moving at full speed ahead. Well, okay then. Amanda was right about the kidnappers; they were more interested in tormenting her than the NYPD, making her presence beneficial to the investigation. Just not to her mental health.

But when had Dana ever stopped to consider the negative impact of a case before jumping in headfirst? When had any law enforcement officer worth her salt? Sometimes you just bit the bullet and did it, regardless of your health or your sanity.

"Hey, hotfoot," she called, grabbing her blazer off the visitor's chair and hurrying after Amanda, who was making a beeline for the exit. "Wait up, I'm coming with."

. . .

The one-six was still in a tailspin when they returned. Grown men in uniforms looked shell-shocked, and the women wore subdued, faraway expressions, bruise-like smudges under their eyes as if they hadn't slept in days. Many of them stared at Amanda, parting like the Red Sea to let her through as she headed for SVU at a fast clip. The squad room wasn't much better, with officers and agents alike half-dead on their feet, guzzling coffee and searching for clues that weren't there.

Normally, Dana would have enjoyed ragging on NYPD for not being the well-oiled machine that was the Bureau. But not while a cop was missing. When a fellow agent was in jeopardy, the FBI banded together as well, doing whatever it took to help their brother or sister in need. She had pulled many an all-nighter, sometimes several in a row, to find agents who had disappeared from the grid. Most made it back in one piece, but some weren't as lucky—those were the ones that haunted Dana and put that hollow-eyed look on the other agents' faces.

She saw that same look in some of the cops' faces now, including Sergeant Tutuola's. The poor man seemed smaller than he had been just a few hours ago, his complexion taken on a sallow hue, and the threads of gray hair in his goatee much more pronounced. His tired eyes widened at Dana and Amanda's approach, and Dana held her breath, anticipating the worst as Amanda went straight for him. Her nose was already throbbing, she had no desire to break up any more altercations today.

But the detective didn't launch herself at Fin, nor did she acknowledge his swollen bottom lip, which resembled the ridiculously Botoxed kissers of the Kardashian wannabes who populated Noho and Tribeca. In fact, Amanda barely acknowledged the sergeant at all, beyond a gruff, "Where we at?"

Fin hesitated, as if contemplating telling Amanda she shouldn't be there (Don't do it, man, Dana thought at him), but thankfully, he checked the urge and gestured to the flat-screen on the wall. The same one where Dana got her first eyeful of the horrors that were befalling poor Captain Benson. Now the screen was ominously blank, a few randomly dispersed links in red its only signs of life. An afterimage of the letters floated in Dana's vision when she looked away.

"Ain't heard nothing back since they cut the feed two hours ago," said Fin. "TARU and the Feds have been searching the darknet for any info or a location, but you know how that goes. Like looking for a needle in a haystack of porn and puppy mutilation. One of the audio guys thinks he's got it narrowed down to a port on the Jersey side, based on a boat horn or something in the background, but it could be one of several."

"So? Did you send out search teams?" Amanda didn't sound like she was asking. She glared at Fin, ready to criticize whichever answer he gave. Her legs weren't entirely steady beneath her yet, and she still wavered a little in her thick-soled tennis shoes. But she stood her ground, demanding that the sergeant give her what she wanted.

"We don't have the manpower for that, Rollins," Fin said softly, wearily. He had the tone of someone with a monster headache, measured and wincing, as if he were speaking inside a hushed cathedral and didn't want his voice to carry. "You've seen the size of those container yards. There's thousands of them things. We'd be searching for days, maybe even weeks, and by then—" He broke it off there and sighed, too late to prevent his meaning from coming across.

"They ain't gonna kill her. She's worth nothing to them if she's dead, remember?" Amanda choked on the last part, a click in her throat as she swallowed with increasing effort. She had to be about as dry as drought season in the Texas panhandle. Dana made a mental note to offer her some water when this confrontation was through. "And what good's a force of forty thousand if you can't utilize them to find a missing high-ranking officer? Is it because she's a woman? Because she's queer? Because she's got her twenty in and they want her gone, anyway?"

Fin shook his head doggedly. "It's not anything like that, you know that. We can't assign every single officer in the NYPD to one case, no matter who it's for. Garland's got as many people on this as he could muster. We're doing everything we can."

The desk beside Amanda rattled when she kicked the leg, scoffing. A few heads turned, but the eyes averted quickly at a glare and a snap of the fingers from Dana. Sometimes, being a woman in charge wasn't all that different than being a grumpy schoolteacher. Fewer spitballs aimed at the back of your head, lots more fingers flipping you the bird. Olivia must know what that was like, having her own squad to wrangle. Then again, knowing Benson, she was probably a fair and benevolent boss, who commanded the respect and loyalty of her team, as she did with most everyone.

"Maybe I oughta just go out and look for her myself," said Amanda. She sounded a bit like a sulking teenager, but if anyone had earned that right, it was the woman whose wife was being sold as a sex slave. "Better than sticking around here and getting drugged against my will again."

"I had no idea he was going to do that," Fin said, just earnest enough to be convincing. "I swear, Amanda, I wouldn'ta called him if I thought—"

"Save it. All I care about is getting Liv back, that's what we should be focused on. I'm assuming you sent Dr. Kevorkian home?" Amanda didn't wait for an answer, instead backing toward the interview room that had become her personal headquarters. "Good. Next time, don't bother me unless you've got something on my wife." With that, she executed a wobbling about-face and disappeared into the room.

"I'll talk to her," Dana said when Fin glanced her way, looking as though he was at a loss how to handle his detective. As a woman who herself was often too much for people to handle, Dana sympathized—with Fin and with Amanda. She wouldn't pick sides, though. There was no winner in this inhuman game they were being forced to play. "Girl to girl."

. . .