A/N: I've been going back and forth with myself all day about posting this chapter early, and I came this close to waiting. But it had me all in my feels just proofreading it, and y'all were so generous with the reviews for chapter 24 (thanks, btw, I love you guys), I can't help myself. I'll warn you, though, that the happiness and relief of the last chapter does not extend to this one. In fact, I'm issuing trigger warnings for references to child sexual abuse, rape, and suicidal ideation herein. That said, I really like and am particularly proud of this chapter. And even though it's about losing hope, don't. We're getting there (slowly but surely). Also, happy Taylor Swift's birthday to all who celebrate. ;)

Mama who bore me
Mama who gave me
No way to handle things
Who made me so sad
Mama, the weeping
Mama, the angels
No sleep in Heaven or Bethlehem

- Spring Awakening, "Mama Who Bore Me"

Chapter 25.

Mother of a Monster

. . .

Mommy, wake up. I want my blankie, please. It's cold here, I'm hungry. It hurts all over. Can we go home now, Mommy? I don't like this place, it's a bad place. Are you drunk, Mommy? Please wake up.

Please!

"Plea—" Olivia jolted awake, reaching for whichever one of the children was calling out to her, Tilly, it sounded like Tilly, the timbre high and still a bit babyish, but her arms closed around thin air. Arms as stiff as iron rods, legs not much better. Somewhere in the middle a cauldron bubbled, black tar churning in her abdomen. She wished the heat would spread to her fingers and toes. She couldn't feel them anymore.

Tilly didn't know what drunk was. She wouldn't think to ask such a thing. Only Noah and Jesse had gotten the alcohol talk, because of the cartoons. What did all those X's on the bottles mean? Why did Bugs and Sylvester act funny and get the hiccups after they drank it? Jesse had piped up with the real million-dollar question: "Is that like your stinky red drink, Mommy?" The wine. She hadn't forgotten about Olivia's overindulgence with the merlot after Amanda was shot. That night she sleepwalked into the living room and caught Olivia staggering around, half-drunk and in shock from Alex's uninvited kiss.

Merlot would be so nice right now. She longed for warmth to come and wrap itself around her like a
(kitty)
cat, circling her ankles. Even better, like Gigi sleeping at her back, her solid canine body giving off so much heat, Olivia sometimes had to kick aside the covers. Amanda laughed and called them her two hot mamas.

Oh, why did it hurt so badly to think about Amanda? Not physically—but they said mental anguish registered as pain in the body. Same receptors, or something. Olivia didn't really remember. Her receptors weren't working properly.

Had she been the little girl in her dream? She'd experienced all those sensations at a very young age: neglect, hunger, fear, abandonment. Unlike Matilda, at three or four years old, Olivia did know what it meant to be drunk, or at least which bottles made Mommy angry, mean, sad, or very silly. (Don't be silly, Tilly, Jesse sometimes teased her little sister; You're so messy, Jesse, Amanda had taught Matilda to retort. If she didn't learn to stand up for herself now, she never would.) Well into her twenties, Olivia was still caring for her alcoholic mother, making sure she was bathed, dressed, and on time most mornings. Still hiding the scratches and finger-shaped bruises on her own arms, from fending off Serena's booze-fueled attacks the night before. "I'll never let anyone else have you" was not an isolated incident.

What kind of cop couldn't protect herself against a fifty-year-old woman who was so blotto she barely knew her own name?

Mom was dead, though. The Velvet Room, twenty-six steps to the bottom—then kersplat! Twenty-seven if you counted the ground that caught her, and snapped her neck in three places. She would have hated that, death by odd numbers. The last drink she had ever ordered was a whiskey sour. Olivia hadn't even known she drank those. But it seemed fitting. She hardly knew her mother at all in life, why should it be any different in death?

They had fought shortly before that. Who could remember how those things got started exactly?

("You're wasting your time at that thankless, dead-end job, surrounded by all those fat, sweaty men, Olivia. How can you stand knowing you're just there as the T&A?" Serena rounded her hand in front of her chest, indicating a pair of gigantic tits, the kind you'd see on a cartoon bimbo with a pencil-thin waistline. "Wouldn't you rather be doing something important with your life, like teaching or getting a medical degree? Something that requires brain cells? You were so gifted in school, everyone said so. All that promise, and you became a cop?"

Spittle flew from her lips, landing in the primavera Olivia hadn't touched anyway. There wasn't much use in eating when you were just going to throw it back up later. She still got terrible stomach pains whenever they argued like this. Any time she began to feel dissatisfied with her weight, all she had to do was agree to dinner and drinks with Serena—on the plus side, not only did she slim down right after, she also saved a lot of money on groceries for all the food she wasn't eating.

"Jesus Christ, Mother," she said, pushing away the broad pasta bowl. It looked like an Amish man's upside down hat. "Why can't you ever just be proud of me? Is it really that difficult? Why even give me this watch if you didn't mean what you said in the inscription? To my daughter, of whom I'm so very proud. All my love, Mom." She bit her lip, wishing she hadn't quoted the inscription verbatim. How pathetic, that she knew it by heart. "Or was that all just bull, like everything else you've told me my entire godforsaken life?"

Serena rolled her faded eyes—if Olivia wasn't mistaken, they had once been the color of a Russian blue, but years of alcoholism had dulled them to cold flat gray—and her meaning was clear. There went her overdramatic daughter again, dredging up the past, blaming her for things she barely even remembered. "Oh, Olivia, don't be such a child. You're acting like I insulted your kindergarten finger-painting. Look at me, Mommy, look what I made! But kindergarten's over, sweetheart. I gave you that watch as something to aspire to. You honestly think you could ever afford anything that expensive on a cop's salary?"

For a moment, Olivia stared at the watch in stunned silence, as if were a poisonous adder that coiled around her wrist. She had actually fallen for her mother's bribery, like a child being groomed by a predator. You can have the lollipop if you lick this first. You can have my love if you let me control your life.

But she knew better than that. She'd never had Serena's love, and never would. "I don't need expensive things to be happy. Not like you do. I could have settled for believing you actually cared about me. Supported me. If it's childish for a daughter to want that from her mother, just once, then so be it. Stick a pacifier in my mouth and sign me up for daycare, Ma."

"Supported you?" Serena glanced at the diners the next table over, forcing a wan smile. It disappeared the second she turned back to Olivia, hunching over her own bowl of penne to hiss, "I have supported you your entire life, you ungrateful— girl. Who do you think made sure you got into all the best schools? Kept you in a nice apartment, instead of all those shitty shelters you poke around in now? Kept you clothed and fed? I did that, and now you want to throw away the education I paid for to be just another sweaty plebeian grunt, punching a time clock? My daughter was supposed to be exceptional. What happened to you, Olivia?"

Olivia almost vomited in her untouched primavera right then. These were not new revelations, and Serena had said much worse to her in the past, but sitting across from her mostly sober mother and hearing her spew such utter crap was too much. Olivia's academic scholarships had paid for a significant part of her tuition at those fancy schools; many times, she probably would have been safer in a shelter than she was at home in that nice apartment with Serena around every corner; and more often than not, Serena was too sauced to buy food or clothes for her pesky daughter, who always seemed to need clothed, need fed. Funny how that worked when you had a child who depended on you for everything.

"You happened to me, Mother. You and your impossible expectations and jealousy and resentment." Olivia poked the tabletop with her index finger after every flaw she listed, just as Serena had done while naming off her various forms of support. She lowered her voice to a harsh whisper, sensing herself being watched from one of the tables nearby. Two attractive women having a heated argument in the middle of a swanky Italian joint were bound to earn a few stares. "And let's not forget the Olympic-sized pool you could fill with all the alcohol you consumed while I was growing up. Probably just my high school years alone. And speaking of alone, so was I. All that support you were talking about was nowhere to be found when I really needed it. I'm not talking about financially, either. If you wanted me to be your daughter—"

"I didn't," Serena interrupted, so calm and flat, it seemed she might have misspoken. But no attempt was made at retraction, no bumbling apologies or faltering glances. She looked steadily over her raised wine glass, fingers domed around the brim, and pointed straight at Olivia with an accusatory forefinger. For a woman who dealt in subtlety and literary analysis, she left little room for interpretation when it came to her feelings about Olivia. "I had no choice in the matter, my dear. Believe me, if I had? If I'd known you'd become . . . this?"

She circled her finger in the air around Olivia, indicating her whole countenance. The dark, plebeian ponytail, the sweaty bare arms in the sleeveless top she'd worn from work, the too-full lips and too-wide eyes that were nothing like Serena's, slim and cunning. "I would've gone with the coat hanger," she said, and drained her glass of merlot.

Olivia had deposited her merlot and half a breadstick in the huge urnlike planter outside the restaurant, before stumbling home, blindly, to cry in the safety of her empty bedroom. The watch she left with her mother, having torn it from her wrist and slapped it down on the table, amid Serena's protests to "put that back on" and "don't you dare walk out and leave me here alone."

That was exactly what Olivia had done. It was the final time she'd spoken to her mother. She thought her last words might have been, "Goodbye, Mom. Better call a cab before you get too blitzed." Serena was dead a month later, and Olivia had found her Breitling watch in the purse that was part of the personal effects held back for her at the morgue. The watch, a few photo albums, and some extensively annotated copies of Brontë, Woolf, and Plath were all she had left of her mother—or whatever you called the woman who raised you and hated you.

The books were rotting away in a box somewhere, the photo albums stuffed at the back of the closet, full of faces Olivia didn't recognize, had no stories to tell her children about. As for the watch . . . )

She couldn't feel it on her wrist, thought she must have left it on the dresser at home. That was just as well. The men—the rapists—would have smashed it or taken it from her. Sent it to Amanda, along with her braid. A little pretty for my city girl. Love, Me. That bastard had taken her necklace, too, the one with her babies' names dangling like a chime, sweet music on the breeze. Which one of the children would find it among her personal effects? Wear it as a reminder of the mother who wasn't?

Oh, but she loved them so. It didn't matter that her blood didn't run through their veins, or that two of them had been conceived by monsters. She would never tell them she wished they had been aborted, no matter what they grew up to be. Noah, her little dancer; Jesse, who would probably take over the world, and Tilly, who would help heal it with a smile; and Sammie, the one who studied faces intently, like she was looking at a lineup. She's gonna be a cop, Amanda often commented. Look at that, she's even got your interrogation eyebrow.

"She can be whatever she wants," Olivia said then, and now. Her voice was startling in the empty room. Not so much because it disturbed the quiet—the construction site and an occasional boat horn precluded total silence—but because it sounded like a rusty hinge on a screen door. Something you'd hear in a horror movie, right before the dumb girl with the big tits got sliced and diced. Her throat burned as if she had strep again. The kids were always bringing it home with them; she inevitably ended up catching whatever they had.

She touched the base of her throat, where her necklace should be, feeling its loss as acutely as if it had just been torn from her neck. Too exhausted to cry, she exhaled a dry sob that produced no tears, just a shallow hitching in her chest, a burn like hot oil. It was the only place she felt warm, and she tried to curl up inside it, tucking in her knees, holding them in a cannonball pose. But her limbs were too stiff from cold and strain to bend that way.

The thirst was terrible. She knew how to be hungry, how to breathe through the gnawing stomach pains, telling yourself to be strong, they'll be over soon. And what a triumph when you held out long enough that the worst of it passed, and you could convince yourself you weren't even hungry anymore. Of course you were, but it was as rewarding as food, if not better, when you dropped another dress size or your mom asked if you were all right, you look so thin. Daniel made a big fuss of getting her to eat, too, but he liked her underweight. He held her hand as if it were delicate crystal, commenting how slender it was, the fingers, the wrist. He put them to his lips like he wanted to eat them. He called her his spinner.

"What's a spinner?" she asked, the first time he said it. She was far more well-read than most sixteen-year-olds, but she'd never heard the term before. From his inflection, she gathered it was a sexual reference. Daniel was a very sexual guy who took one look at Olivia and knew he had to have her in his bed. He confessed that one night after they had made love, though he swore that was prior to finding out she was fifteen at the time.

"A girl who's small enough you can practically spin her around on your dick during sex," he said, brushing the hair back from her forehead. He had just made her come with those fingers, and she could smell herself on them, still girlish and vaguely peppery. Not like Serena, whose fragrance overtook the apartment, so that even the food tasted like her. Olivia usually skipped breakfast. "Like that arrow thing that points to the color circles in Twister."

"Twister?" Olivia laughed at that, though she kept it to herself that she'd never played the game before. It required more than one player, and her mother would have yelled at her for participating in a group activity that involved tangling your body up with someone else's. She threaded her legs around Daniel's under his rumpled bedding. "Well, I don't know about that. I'm not really that small. We're almost the same height, you and I."

"Yeah, but you're a skinny minnie. Look at this, there's not an ounce of fat on you." Daniel lifted the covers with one hand, peering underneath like he was holding back a tent flap. Encouraged by Olivia's giggling, he ducked in to chomp at her belly as if she were five years old, being tickled by her father.

Well, not exactly like a father when he moved on to her breasts, taking tiny, painful nips, soothing them with warm sucks. A few weeks ago he had accidentally given her a hickey on the side of the neck doing that. She'd panicked and worn all her collars popped until it faded. Serena said she looked like a hood, but that was nothing compared to what she would have said if she had seen the hickey.

"Just don't go putting on any weight," he added, as he settled back in beside her. He was hard again, she felt it on her thigh. Sometimes it was overwhelming to be wanted so much. To be loved. "You go any higher than one fifteen, I might rethink our engagement."

Even though it was a joke (right?), a hundred and fifteen pounds had become Olivia's ideal weight for the rest of high school and most of college. She cried senior year, when she hit one twenty. Only after deciding to join the force and discovering she was well below the minimum weight requirement for her height did she give up the unattainable, unrealistic goal. Every year that she creeped further and further away from it, she couldn't help but sigh and think back to that hungry, giggling girl she used to be, getting her first taste of love and craving it more than any meal.

But water, God, how she craved that. She muttered it aloud, prayed it in her head, envisioned a Native American rain dance, calling on the gods to be quenched. She didn't care if they brought the hose again, the gods disguised as men. Just as long as they brought her: "Wat— water."

At what point her longing for water became a longing for Amanda, she couldn't say. The two seemed interchangeable. Amanda, her peaceful, healing waters, her raging ocean tide. The caress of a gentle rain, the sheltering embrace of a steady downpour. She could only live three days without Amanda before dying of thirst, and that deadline was fast approaching. It had been early evening—of the second night, she was almost positive—when they doused her with the hose, she saw it while the container door was open. But several hours (weeks?) had passed since then. Her t-shirt and hair were dry, but the mattress was still bloated and squishy, like an old man's leg retaining water, with damp and her urine.

Surely it was morning by now. The shivering hadn't ceased, though it came in shorter bursts and her teeth weren't chattering as much. That was good; the pain in her shattered molar was unbearable, stabbing at her jaw whenever she forgot and clenched it shut. Despite years of nighttime gritting, she'd never had a bad tooth before. Given the choice, she would have preferred getting shot.

Like Amanda. The look of shock on her face, the near betrayal—both times—was imprinted on Olivia's brain. Don't cry, city girl. A hand reached out in comfort, even as she crumpled to the ground. The blood smell, sharp as a blade, and those horrible red poppy blooms on her white coat, her white shirt when Olivia unzipped, crimson oozing through metal teeth. So red, Amelia said when Lewis shot her. Wait, no . . . Calvin, not Lewis. It was difficult keeping so many rapists straight.

He did not rape me, he did not sodomize me. You look at that rape kit. After four days, he did not have the balls to rape me.

But Barba didn't believe her. A jury of her peers didn't believe her, Warner didn't believe her, children's services didn't believe her. No matter how often and how adamantly she denied being raped by Harris
(or was it Daniel, or was it her father, or maybe her mother?)
no one ever took her at her word that nothing had happened. That she was fine. They all took her for a liar, a sad little victim. So she refused to be that. If they tried to pressure her into saying she'd been raped, she simply denied it. She was the one who got to decide if it was true or not, if she was going to be a victim the rest of her life or not. No one else got to tell her that, not even Amanda.

At least that's how it had been before. There would be no pretending if she made it out of this alive. No inconclusive rape kit for her to rely on as absolute proof that no one had forced a penis into her vagina, though there were plenty of other ways to be fucked. No chance for her to rinse and spit, scrub her hands, or urinate, literally pissing away evidence.

She hadn't done the latter with the sole purpose of flushing away incriminating DNA; she genuinely had to use the restroom when Lewis held her captive for four days. Her body might have naturally flushed away the remains of his fumblings and fondlings from that first day, but it was only after seeing the rape kit results, so ambiguous, so open to interpretation, Olivia had decided he didn't rape her. Whatever he did do—and that was plenty—he had never put himself inside her, at least not all the way. That meant she could deny being raped, and it wouldn't be a total lie. It had kept her sane through that entire trial and the ordeal which followed.

But now. Her injuries were too extensive and damning to be mistaken for anything other than what they were. And there was the recording as well. Whoever was watching would have irrefutable evidence that Olivia had not only been raped once, but several times by multiple assailants in various orifices.

She shuddered at the thought of that word, orifices, applied to herself. That's what she was now. An empty space, a void, something to be penetrated for the sadistic pleasure of men who would just as soon kill her as fuck her. As long as she was worth something ("So this is what million dollar pussy feels like," the Kid had said, his arms hooked under Olivia's knees while he plowed into her), she was pretty sure they would let her live. The question then became, did she want to?

On the first day, she would have said yes, without hesitation; yesterday, her resolve began to crumble with each new degradation; today, she couldn't imagine life outside this hellhole. It was as if the world beyond the container door had simply ceased to exist. And if this was all that was left, this place, the men, she had no desire to remain.

Just as her mind strayed to the belt Parker had left behind, its buckle a perfect match to the P-shaped welts in her skin, and which she'd hidden underneath the mattress, in what was a fortuitous oversight on the CO's part, the door to the container creaked open. Olivia snatched her thoughts back as quickly as a hand tucked under a mattress. She was starting to tell them apart by how they entered the room, and this one she recognized because she'd heard it the least.

Soft-soled and courteous, as if he were trying not to disturb her, Gus sidled over to the bed, after closing off her view of the outside. She'd been right, it was daytime, sun glinting off the metal containers stacked to the sky in the shipping yard. She'd been wrong, the world had continued on without her. Maybe Amanda and the kids had already forgotten her. Maybe that was better.

He stood over her for a while, contemplating her like a fish in a koi pond. Her t-shirt in ribbons, stiff from air drying, from blood and semen, her bareness beneath the hem. The bruises were stark against her skin, white as a fish belly. There must be hundreds, she thought dispassionately, studying the fingerprint-sized smudges on the underside of her arm. It looked like Swiss cheese. That thought made her want to vomit, and on reflex, she jerked over the side of the mattress to retch violently—and unproductively.

Gus stared down without expression while she dry heaved on his shoes. He could have been waiting curbside for a valet to retrieve his car, for all the interest he showed in her plight. When she had it a little more under control, the hacking at a minimum, he pinched the legs of his trousers and squatted beside her, arms on his knees.

"Empty stomach," he commented, as if that explained it all. Her current wretched state, her fragmented thoughts and feelings, the reason she couldn't roll sideways far enough to prop herself upright with her elbow, instead dropping back to the mattress in defeat. The pain below, above, inside, swirling, swirling, swirling around her like a dark, dreadful incantation. Something loosed from Hell. All of it could be explained by the simple fact that she hadn't eaten.

"Just get it over with," she rasped, too tired to care if her bluntness pissed him off. He would rape her either way, so it might as well be on her terms. And she'd learned from Lewis that there was no reasoning with men like this. As soon as you figured out their game, they switched it up on you. They handed you a revolver and told you to blow your own brains out. And you complied, because they were God now. They were Alpha and Omega, beginning and end.

And you? You were the good, nice girl who did whatever Daddy wanted. His little valentine baby, sweet Livvy, his strawberry girl.

"What's that?" Gus inclined his head, bending an ear in her direction with his forefinger. He didn't have the playful nature of Lewis or his lanky son, the one Olivia knew only as the Kid. Whether that made him more or less dangerous, she couldn't tell. More, probably. Cold and calculating power was always deadlier than the helter-skelter whims of madmen. Rather than handing over the gun, they put it to your head and pulled the trigger. "Something about strawberries?"

She must have been mumbling out loud without realizing it again. Unless he was in her head, reading her thoughts. (Some of them could do that.) It was so difficult to tell what was real and what wasn't anymore.

Buried beneath the waterlogged padding of her scant little pallet, the serpentine lump of Parker's belt jutted reassuringly into her spine. That was real. That would be the anchor tying her to life, until it ushered her into the inviting arms of death. The sirens' song was sweet and clear in her ears, far more beautiful than the clamor of the construction site, the industrial hum of a city on the river. She had pounded on the floor, signaling to anyone who might be watching that she heard hammers in the distance.

"Babe, not in front of the kids," Amanda teased whenever Olivia made a gesture that could be construed as even remotely sexual. And, God, how she laughed when Olivia glared over her glasses, knowing full well the response she would elicit with that reprimanding look. It was all for show, and they both knew it.

No one had seen, though. No one deciphered her meaning, somehow magically guessing which construction site out of thousands in the city she referred to, and rushing to save her. She still hoped Amanda would put it all together and come to her aid, but the longer she was here, the more her hope drained away. She was running on fumes, and Gus had brought the matches.

"It's funny you should mention strawberries," he said, tucking Olivia's hair behind her ears with an almost paternal touch. Or at least she assumed that's what a paternal touch would feel like. She tried to remember if her father had stroked her hair or trailed his thumb along her cheek like that, but all she recalled was the solid girth of his penis in her hand. (You wanna finish me off, baby? You wanna take care of daddy?)

Gus's movements were crisp and certain, as though he knew what each would be before he made it, and yet so spontaneous Olivia flinched every time. She crushed her eyes shut when he retrieved something from inside his jacket, expecting him to pull out the cattle prod or an equally horrific implement of torture. But after a lengthy silence, she cracked an eyelid to see him holding a cell phone in one hand, a bottle of water in the other. He offered her the latter and helped her sit up to drink it, his phone hand at the back of her head, the bottle tipped to her lips.

"Because I have yours." He took the bottle away from her then, carefully, and dabbed moisture off her lips and chin with the cuff of his jacket. He withheld the water for a moment, not taunting but giving her the chance to swallow the large mouthfuls she'd gulped and sputtered on. To her surprise he patiently waited for her to take several more pulls of the liquid, slaking her thirst just enough that she could answer.

"M-my what?" She couldn't follow his logic, her body, her brain crying out for another drink as they were. Mouth open, she panted like a dog left in a hot car for too long. Suddenly, all that mattered was the water and getting more of it. She hadn't felt so greedy for something since she was five years old, gobbling down a box of Pop-Tarts from the neighbor boy because she was quite literally starving. No other food had ever tasted as good as those untoasted pastries. The strawberry kind.

"Your little strawberry girl," said Gus.

Or was it Si, who was really Joseph Hollister in disguise? That didn't seem possible because Hollister was dead, and even if he weren't, he'd be an old man by now. This guy was in his fifties. So how did he know about the nickname Olivia's father had bestowed on her at fifteen, moments before sexually abusing her? Bet you wouldn't pass out drunk mid-fuck and leave a guy with blue balls, would you now, strawberry girl.

No, she wouldn't leave a guy or a Gus with blue balls. She wasn't a tease like the other juniors who led the boys on and wouldn't put out. She was a good girl. A nice girl. Daddy's girl in more ways than one. Daniel was impressed that, despite her lack of sexual experience when it came to intercourse, oral, and anal, she gave a good handjob. It came so naturally to her, and she'd never been able to figure out why . . .

The Sandman slapped Olivia's cheek and raised his phone to hit her with it. But the second blow didn't come, and when she gazed up at him in confusion, he was scrolling the screen of his cell phone intently. "I can see you're having difficulty with this, so let me make it clearer for you," he said, looping an arm under Olivia's shoulders and sitting her up, partially cradled against him. It looked as if he were about to baptize her in the name of the
(Joseph Hollister)
the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

He held the phone in front of her face, too close for her to focus on the image it displayed. Instinctively she squinted, though that method had stopped working for her long ago. Her prescription was so strong now, Amanda teased that she could probably make out the surface of the moon. One night, not so long ago, she'd swatted Amanda's naked rear and replied, "Yours is the only moon I care to see, little pretty."

"I have your daughter. The little redhead, I believe she goes by Tilly." He forked his fingers across the screen, enlarging the picture for Olivia to get a better look. It very clearly depicted Matthew Parker with Tilly in his arms. She was wearing her pink dungarees made of the lightweight linen that some trendy baby shop charged an arm and a leg for. Olivia hadn't cared when she bought them. They were purposely oversized, and Tilly was small for her age. She would get a lot of good use from them before outgrowing them.

Or so Olivia had believed at the time. Would there be anything left of Matilda when the men finished with her? She could picture her daughter's tiny body bruised and torn, scraps of pink linen scattered on the floor of a filthy shipping container. She'd seen it a hundred times before, with girls even younger than her sweetest child, her lovebug. And nothing made the imaginary more vivid than firsthand experience.

The cry that rose to Olivia's lips sounded inhuman in her ears. The closest thing to it she had ever heard was the screams that accompanied each thwack of the bar when she used it on Lewis. It was all in her head, though—she didn't have a voice left to produce those awful, primal vocalizations, those echoes from the deep dark, that sometimes still woke her in the middle of the night. Dreams of howling wolves, of being eaten alive. She didn't even have any tears left to weep for her little girl.

"Wh-where?" she finally croaked, using all the strength she had to reach for the phone. He let her take it from him, and she wondered vaguely if it was a trap. There was no kindness in him, so why would he give her a single moment's grace, to stare at her daughter's angelic face beneath the stupid red ball cap? It bloomed around Tilly's small head like a mushroom top. Make America Gangrape Again.

"Not anywhere you need to be concerned about," Gus replied. He zoomed out on the photo and swiped through a few more, each one showing Parker toting his petite bundle, her curls springing cheerfully in the sunshine. (Would they let her keep them, or would the Sandman hack the dainty ringlets off and send them to Amanda?) They smelled sweeter than any flower after bath time, those curls. Even now, in the midst of this stinking rathole, Olivia could pick out the scent. "You'll never see her again, aside from these photos."

He plucked the phone from Olivia's hand then, extinguishing the screen and the picture on it. Tilly's smiling face became a blank void like the rest of the world inside Olivia's new home. She clawed for the cell, wanting one last look—craving it more than food or water—but she missed, swiping only at air. "Don't worry, though," Gus said, calmly tucking the phone away, as if he hadn't just destroyed the very last shred of hope she clung to. "She's not close enough for you to hear us breaking her in. We'll go a little easier on her at first than we did with you. Don't want to wear her out all at once."

"N-no. No." Olivia shook her head, repeating the word under her breath as he spoke, each iteration gaining momentum until she was whispering it, then saying it aloud, albeit more hushed and hoarse than her normal speaking voice.

It might have continued building into a scream if Gus hadn't grabbed her by the chin, jerking her bottom jaw to one side, teeth scraping against each other. She yelped in pain, the taste of blood and bile coating the back of her throat. So, that was her nutrition now: the tang of agony and stark blind terror. She nursed at its teat like Sammie gulping down the breast milk she needed to develop into a healthy, happy little girl.

What would Olivia grow into, with the alkaline mixture as her only food source? It burned when she swallowed, probably eroding her bruised esophagus, filling it with holes like
(baby swiss)
torn stockings. All her insides felt that way. Shredded, diaphanous. Incapable of mending. Perhaps she would finally get back to her old goal of one hundred and fifteen pounds?

Her throat was full of gravel again, what little use she'd regained of her voice lost beneath the rubble. She could barely whimper when Gus brought his face inches from hers, close enough for her to see his chicken pox scars like the surface of the moon, the ingrown hair near his neatly trimmed sideburns, the devil in his eyes. That devil had followed her wherever she went since the moment of her conception. It only took him fifty-four years, but he had finally caught up with her.

"You don't get to say no anymore, remember?" the devil whispered, his breath scorching her cheek, her ear. She had heard that somewhere before, though she couldn't quite place it. Hadn't people been saying it to her, one way or another, her whole life? Maybe it was true. Olivia Benson didn't have the strength, the authority, or the autonomy to say no, and she never would. "You belong to me now, and since it looks like I'm getting stiffed by your buyer, I'm going to take my money's worth out of the skins of your little whelps. Starting with Strawberry Shortcake."

After a ruminative pause, Gus relaxed his grip and patted Olivia's jaw, smiling like an affectionate papa. "Is it true that redheads taste differently? I'm more of a brunette man myself. Ah well, I'll find out soon enough."

"Please," Olivia whispered, clutching at his sleeve. She knew his game. If she couldn't say no, then the other option was to beg.

That's what she had done with Lewis in the end, begging him to let her live, to keep her around because she knew just how to pleasure him. It hadn't been an exaggeration, she had years of experience bending herself to an abuser's will. If that had meant spending the rest of her life fighting off his advances, only to be overpowered and violated time and again, in that moment she'd been willing to accept her fate.

Bound to that table in the granary, she had made the same choice, pleading with him to rape her instead of Amelia Cole. The language he forced her to use had been vile—"Fuck me, daddy, you don't want that little girl pussy"—and sometimes she feared it was that experience, hearing the pornographic script Lewis demanded of her, which so warped Amelia that she became accomplice to a serial rapist/killer. Olivia's efforts to protect the girl's innocence and save her life were what ultimately ruined her. Lewis would have loved that. Knowing he still had that much power over their lives, just as he'd predicted.

But he had prepared Olivia too. He had taught her to speak the language of monsters and men who would rape a child just to prove a point. She'd already known the basic vocabulary, but under Lewis' instruction she became fluent. And once those words came from your mouth, you never forgot them.

"Please," she said again, trying to speak from the diaphragm to make herself audible. It hurt too much to sustain, like a knife twisting in her gut. One in her heart too. She ignored the pain enough to produce a crackling whisper, similar to a radio voice when you'd gone too far and lost the station. "Please don't hurt m-my little girl. I'll do anything you want. Anything. I won't f-fight you or say no anymore. I promise." Lowering his arm by the sleeve she still held onto, she fitted his hand to the swell of her sore, pendulous breast, and squeezed. "Fuck me, not her. She's— she's a baby. I know what men like. I can make you feel good."

The Sandman gazed down at his hand with mild bemusement, but he listened, intrigued. When she'd said her piece, he exhaled a long, deep sigh and began kneading her breast, weighing it heavily in his palm with the same up and down motion as a Slinky, toying idly with the nipple. He pinched, looking on dispassionately as she gasped and blinked through the pain, fighting the urge to twist free of him, fighting every natural instinct she possessed to be still. Just be still.

He reached into the ragged neckline, now more of a bustline, of her t-shirt and scooped up the other breast, squeezing until she was certain it would pop like a mishandled water balloon. What would ooze out, she wondered. Slushy red gore? Tissue that resembled minced meat being fed through a grinder? The coral-like milk ducts, withered and dry in her case? Oh, what she would have given to breastfeed Samantha one last time. Even though the milk wasn't coming from her own body, she had never believed in God more than when she nursed her baby girl.

That was over and done with now, the nursing and God. Any inkling of spiritual faith that had survived her childhood, being raised by a woman who wore her atheism like armor, and all the darkness since had been driven out of her during the last few rapes. It wasn't that she no longer believed in a higher power, but at last she had accepted that he didn't give a damn about her. He must have taken one look at her—what he had created, for God only knew what purpose—and deemed her unworthy. Not his daughter, but that of a monster, and to be treated accordingly.

"You are learning, I'll give you that," said Gus, studying her face for signs of defiance or dishonesty. He rummaged inside her shirt for a while longer, drawing out the torture with his merciless hands; when she complied with every cruel tug, twist, pinch, and poke, barely reacting beyond a gasp or a painful hum, he finally dumped her back inside the mangled top and wiped his palm on his pant leg. "But there's still the problem of your buyer not keeping up their end of communication. What do you have to say about that, Olivia?"

As if she had any control of the situation. She didn't even know who the buyer was, let alone why they weren't in contact with Gus. Did he really expect her to provide an explanation? An apology? From the impatient expression on his austerely handsome features, it appeared that, yes, he did.

Olivia struggled to find an answer in her lethargic, muddy thoughts. She got into the bad guys' heads for a living, and she had seen her share of cash drops go south. There had to be something in those past cases for her to draw on, to buy herself and her daughter some more time. In the end, she relied on her own strategy from those last few hours in the beach house with Lewis. Selling herself for all she was worth.

"Maybe they never planned to follow through," she said thinly, a sound like dead leaves skating along the sidewalk on a cold autumn wind. Her throat hurt too much to try clearing it. "The buyer. Maybe the objective was to piss you off so you'd kill me. But you don't have to do that. It would be such a waste. I've made a lot of enemies over the years. Powerful ones. Men like you who'd pay top dollar to— to fuck me. Show me who's boss. You could make a lot of money off me if you kept me around."

His eyes strayed to her thighs, blood-stained and dusky with bruises in storm-cloud colors. She moistened her lips, trying to draw his attention back to her face. It had to look slightly less ruined than the rest of her body, slightly more human, thanks to the anonymous buyer's request that she stay pretty. She suffered no delusions that Gus would recognize her humanity with anything other than contempt, but at least he might see her as something besides a piece of meat too. "Little kids are a dozen— a dime a dozen. Why not let Tilly go home, and you focus on me? She'll only attract scumbag pedophiles who'd rather buy a kid overseas no one will miss. I'll bring in the real customers for you."

She was counting on the universal hatred of pedophiles, even among men who viewed their business ventures involving underage children as loftier than just having the hots for little kids, to drive her point home. And for a moment, Gus did seem to be taking her ploy into consideration. Then he smirked, tapping his finger to her temple with a sharpness that went through her like a jolt of electricity.

"That mind of yours is always working, isn't it? Even when you can barely string together a coherent sentence, that big beautiful brain just won't let you rest." Gus offered her another drink of water, propping her forward with his arm, the bottle tipped as patiently to her lips as a kiss. Olivia drank, God help her, accepting all that he would give. "I can't even be irked by it, since it's one of the things I admire most about you. It's what drew me in when you were still tromping around in those atrocious faux leather Oxfords and off the rack pantsuits, like some toddler playing dress-up cop. God, you were gorgeous, even back then. But your tenacity, your intelligence and willpower . . . . You know, most women break within a day or two of arriving here. You're holding out even longer than I expected."

Bully for me, she thought, lips pressed together to keep it inside. He sounded almost proud, as if he had somehow contributed to the endurance he was praising her for. Little did he know, he had her mother to thank for it, her wife and children. Serena taught her to function under unbearable amounts of distress and pain; Amanda and the kids kept her fighting far longer than she could have on her own. But that strength was wearing down too. They had Matilda. Olivia could withstand almost anything being done to her—she knew that for certain now—but her children . . .

Never her children.

Before Gus could continue waxing poetic about her days as a rookie detective, she brought her hand toward his, intending to cup the back in her palm. She found she couldn't bear to be skin to skin with him, at least not voluntarily, and at the last second, diverted to holding his wrist where it was covered by his shirt cuff. "Please, G-Gus. Don't hurt my little girl. I'm begging you. Send as many men in here as you want. Just leave her alone. Please."

Expecting to be met with coldness, she almost recoiled when his face softened to something verging on pleasant. It was like watching video footage of Hitler smiling, laughing with children, and dancing his little Nazi jig. The devil liked to have his fun too, she supposed. "Your loyalty to your little band of bastards, strays, and half-breeds is admirable," said the Sandman, and devil that he was, he stroked back the hair that clung to her cheeks, the ends tacky where he'd sheared them off days earlier. He pinched the stiff strands away from her skin delicately. "But I'm afraid it will only hurt you in the end. I'm your family now. Your mother, father, brother. Your spouse and child."

It required every last ounce of self-control Olivia had left not to scream when he lowered his face to hers, and asked, "How does it feel to be the mother of a monster, Olivia?"

A trick of the light. That had to be why, for just a split-second, she saw her mother's face in his. (How can I love someone who was conceived by a monster?) She saw Calvin Arliss' face, telling her she was responsible for the beast he had become; Lewis calling himself Daddy Bill, his hands everywhere at once. She saw them all, hurting her, blaming her. No escape, just endless suffering, forever and ever, as long as you both shall live. And now she was passing it down to her children, that marriage to the darkness which had been preordained before she was ever born.

He left her alone to cry without tears, to sob without sound, pleading for him to rape her, not
(Amelia)
Tilly. Left her alone in the knowledge that she had brought this on herself and her family. How could she have been foolish enough to believe she would ever escape it? That they wouldn't be dragged down by it, right along with her? Amanda shouldn't come for her. She should take the kids—what was left of them—and run as far away as possible, never looking back.

In the overpronounced light of the cruddy room, so bright it seared afterimages to the insides of her eyelids (the desk where she was raped, the bucket of filth that she hadn't used in at least a day, her bare legs beneath the t-shirt), she rolled onto her side, keeping her back to the camera. She slipped a hand under the mattress beneath her, feeling for Parker's belt until her fingers closed around the initial-shaped buckle.

Finally she knew the way out.

. . .