Powerless (The Girl in the Box Book 40), page 24
I nodded slowly. “There's this other old saying that I think applies here, maybe you've heard it – 'Pride goeth before the fall.'”
“Why do you waste your time with these foolish proverbs?” She waved a hand in front of me. “Words spoken by ancient fools, with no bearing in your world today.”
“Oh, I think some of them might apply to human nature, given its rather fixed and timeless quality,” I said with a ghostly smile. “I thought power was my shield and my sword, once. That I was unbeatable, because I had more than anyone else. But that's the foolishness, see – the pride. Because there's always someone badder than you, who perhaps is preparing in secret, or who will hit you at your vulnerable point. The more powerful they perceive you, the harder they'll hit when they come. And the more people you beat, the more your own mind roots in itself the idea that you're unbeatable.” I shook my head. “If all I was concerned about was protecting my own life and power, I would be the greatest monster the world had ever seen. Worse than Stalin, even, perhaps. Or Mao.”
“But you would be 'great' by all measures,” she said sadly, taking a step back. “None could stop you, if you but took the most basic step. Just absorb your enemies. They have done evil anyway. Put them to work for you.”
“My own personal mental Gulag?” I asked. “I don't think I can do that. Sorry.”
Aniya's eyes jaded over just then. “Then you are a fool. Because they will come for you.”
“Like they came for you?” I asked.
She nodded slowly. “Like they come for anyone who has something enviable. Power. Status. Or simply a desire to be left alone. They cannot let that stand unchallenged. Someone must be most powerful. And others will always seek to take that throne from you.”
“They can have it,” I said, turning my back on her because coffee had finally started to drip. It sloshed as I poured a cup, filling my mug with something hot and terrible that would probably burn my tongue and sear my insides if I drank it without cream or sugar. “They can take that throne and enjoy it, because I'm done fighting the state. I just want to be left alone.” I slipped the carafe back into place. “I just want to live in peace, and help where I can. Is that too much to ask?”
There was a smokiness in her eyes. “For them...yes. For if the authority of the state is to be supreme, they can brook no challenge to their power. You see?”
“Maybe,” I said, taking a sip and regretting, once again, that it had come to this. Bleh. Even the FBI coffee was better than this shit. “But I'm not sure I believe that they'll come and–”
As if stirred to action by fate itself, I heard the door crash in and a voice shout, “POLICE! We have a search warrant!”
They came thundering in at top speed, at least for them. A SWAT team with guns, both real and of the dart variety, pouring out of the short hallway from the bullpen to the reception area.
I was caught in the doorway when they started shooting, and before I could throw up so much as a coating of ice around any part of my body I was riddled with darts – neck, biceps, stomach, chest. I even had one stuck in my bra strap.
So I stood there as they swarmed me, the drug already working. I dropped my coffee, which was both a terrible loss and no great one as they slapped the cuffs on and threw me over a desk, my cheek smashed into the unyielding surface, the hard edge ramming into my gut, the darts pushing deeper into the muscle and tissue because no one had bothered to yank them out before manhandling me down.
And there I sat, cuffed, face-down on the desk, for the next hour, as I listened to them tear through every drawer and file cabinet in the place, seething alone in the silence of my own thoughts, and weak as a human, unable to fight back.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
“Do I get to call a lawyer?” I asked, once Lt. Mann finally showed her damned ugly ass face, and I'd been escorted into Reed's office and tossed unceremoniously in the chair. I recognized the chubby goon who brought me in – unkindly, I might add – from our run-in at the capitol, when he'd shoved me just because he could. He'd been one of the team that busted down the door (unnecessarily; it was unlocked, the dumbass) and he and his buddies had secured the place while BCA executed their search warrant. Now he grinned from beside me, lording his authority over me. Prick.
“You're not under arrest,” Mann said, pushing one of Reed's desk drawers in so she could roll his chair in closer. They'd torn the place apart; every single object in the office had either been thrown out onto the floor or bagged and taken away.
“What were you searching for, then?” I asked, trying to keep that deep, seething feeling buried. I hadn't seen Aniya since the raid had started. They'd hustled her out first thing. Without darting her, even. Lucky devil.
Mann produced an official-looking piece of paper that I recognized as a search warrant. “Things.” She put it on the desk between us, where she knew damned well I couldn't reach it, since my hands were still cuffed behind my back.
I rankled at the gross exercise of authority over me. The sheer flexing going on here was enough to set even a milder personality than mine to a hard boil, so the fact I hadn't exploded on them was merely a product of a mix of my current lack of power and some insane efforts at self-control. I did feel like I wanted to shake, though. I didn't, but I wanted to.
Taking all this in and not responding meant that without Mann offering anything, we just sat there in silence. I had no idea what my face looked like, but I could imagine it was a harder version of my standard RBF. Trying to keep a lid on my burning rage wasn't my strongest suit, after all.
“The Minnesota Attorney General empaneled a grand jury to investigate your recent activities,” Lt. Mann said coolly. “That's the genesis of the search warrant. They found sufficient cause to think you've broken the law.”
“I have done nothing since I got back that wasn't rooted in self-defense,” I said.
“Mall of America,” she said.
“Fine, and defense of others,” I said tightly. “He had a hostage, remember?”
“Oh, I recall,” she said, picking up the search warrant by the edge and playing with it. “You know, this will go easier on you if you cooperate.”
I slumped back in my seat, grimacing because I caught my left pinky and ring fingers between the chair and my body. The snap was barely audible, but it set stars flashing before my eyes. I didn't dare say a word, though I'm sure my face evinced some hint of the pain I'd just inflicted on myself. It seared and radiated up my hand, and for a second I thought I was going to black out.
“...no use denying it,” she said when I regained enough presence of mind to recognize that she was speaking to me, and probably had been since before I'd snapped my fingers. “Your activities are like an iceberg; we know there's more going on beneath the surface. Like at that hotel yesterday, for instance.”
“I'm helping the FBI with a survivor of the war,” I said, trying to keep the pain out of my voice. “One with potentially hostile intentions toward me. That was the hotel incident. He's been following me around, looking to provoke a conflict or something.”
Mann smiled. “I can tell you're lying. You just went pale.”
“Because I just broke two of my own fingers from having them trapped behind me when I sat back.” I leaned to the side so I could brandish my hands for her to see.
She caught a glimpse of them and apparently it was her turn to get deathly pale. “Be that – as it may–” she stuttered. “You – we – um–”
“I am playing by your damned rules,” I said, no damns left to give. “I am trying to stay alive in spite of people who are desperately seeking to harm me, kill me. Present company apparently included.”
“Forgive us if we don't immediately believe you,” she said. “You have a little bit of a credibility problem.”
“I don't even care anymore,” I said sitting back again, taking care not to disturb those broken fingers. They'd heal – whenever I got my powers back. “Charge me or release me. I want to talk to my lawyer.”
She leaned forward, very intently. “You need to understand your situation here–”
“Oh, I do,” I said, patience exhausted, pain wearing on me. “I'm not cooperating with your bullshit investigation, and I'm not talking to you any more without a lawyer present. Charge me, release me, or let me talk to my lawyer. I'm done.”
She sat back in Reed's chair. “You just made this so much harder on yourself.”
“Don't care.”
A dramatic force caught me by the back of the neck and slammed my face into the desk, smashing it into the wood surface. Stars flashed in my eyes for the second time in an hour, and I bounced right out of my seat and hit the carpet, blood rolling out of my nose even as a shock of pain exploded across my face.
Pain, agony, screaming anguish, took over every nerve, and blackness squeezed in around the edges of my field of vision. I wobbled, vertigo setting in, and I lay flat on the carpet, cuffed and defenseless, against whatever they wanted to do to me next.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
“Bennett, what the hell was that?” Lt. Mann shouted. I heard it over the ringing in my ears as I hit the ground.
“Sorry, I must have tripped,” my friend the SWAT asshole said coolly. He grabbed me by the elbow and jerked me up, clutching my messed-up hand and tweaking my broken fingers in the process. It hurt, everything hurt, and dear God, I wanted to go home.
But I couldn't. I was cuffed and helpless, my powers sapped by their suppressant – again, and pain was infusing my every nerve like someone had taken an angle grinder to various parts of my body. Warm blood dripped from my nose, mouth and face, tasted vividly and coppery in my mouth as I dribbled it down my lips. I was dazed, but not dazed enough to fail to realize Bennett – so that was his name – was trying to provoke another response.
He wanted to hear me scream, the son of a whore.
Turning my head, I concentrated hard on the double-vision apparition of him coalescing in front of me as he clenched my busted fingers tight. “Oh, I'm sorry,” I said through bloody lips, “what did you trip over? Your fat feet?”
I saw the flash of rage in his eyes and knew him in that instant. This was a man who would rip the wings off butterflies for his own perverse pleasure, who would slap his wife or intimate partner for offering him the slightest amount of backtalk. I'd seen woman beaters before, but never quite so clearly outside the act.
The bones in my fingers snapped apart under his deathly grip and I couched my cry of pain under a laugh, because hell if I'd give him a scintilla of satisfaction. In these days of anger and powerlessness, spite was all I had left, and I would be damned before I surrendered the control it offered.
“Put her down!” Lt. Mann shouted, and he did, a flash behind his eyes telling me he was barely keeping control over his basest desire, which was to crush me in every way he could.
Instead, he slammed me right back into the chair, and my tailbone made a cracking noise.
Lt. Mann's eyes blazed like wide-open flames had been lit behind them. “What the hell are you doing?”
“My job,” he answered laconically. Knocking the shit out of a prisoner? No big deal.
“You're giving her grounds for a lawsuit!”
He looked me over with feigned interest. “She seems fine. Don't these metaswine heal fast?”
“She's been depowered, you idiot,” she ground out between gritted teeth. “She's human right now.”
“Then she's definitely fine,” he said with a shrug. “If she was hurt, she'd be screaming.”
“Don't be so sure,” I said, smacking my own lips, tasting my own blood. “I get hurt pretty brutally in my line of work. All the time, really, to act as the buffer between you and more powerful people than you. Which is just about everyone, because you're so damned impotent and insecure you make a hundred-year-old who can't get a prescription for Viagra look potent–”
He made a move at me and Mann shouted, “That's enough!” and came out from behind the desk like she was going to physically block him from having another go at me. “Get out of here, Bennett! Go cool off!” And she physically railroaded him out the door and slammed it behind her.
He didn't even bother protesting, but I did catch a malicious look in his eye as he left, and had a feeling I'd be seeing him again soon.
Lucky me.
“You really got a way with people, you know that?” Mann came back around the desk and sat down. She took a moment to compose herself, fiddling with the edges of the warrant, and taking a steadying breath. “Listen–”
“No, you listen – lawyer, now, or let me go,” I said, firing a steely glare at her in spite of the blood gushing down my face. “I'm done talking with you.” I mopped my nose against my shoulder, the only part of my body I could reach with both hands cuffed behind my back. “Actually, I'm talking to my lawyer regardless.” The pain was steady and...well, painful, all across my face and my cheeks. Sucked that it wasn't going away anytime soon, either, thanks to these assholes and their darts.
“All right,” she said, folding her hands in front of her. “I can't help you, then.”
“You could barely keep your rabid dog from beating me senseless while you watched,” I said, sniffling blood. “I doubt there's a lot you could do to keep the State of Minnesota's raging hard-on for me from finding a soft target at this point, so you can piss off with your sweet talk about 'helping' me.” I dabbed my nose against my shoulder again, probably ruining my blouse, but hey, losing an outfit was the least of my problems this morning. “The only help you're looking to give me is the kind that ends in me confessing to shit I didn't do and ends with me in a jail cell – again. So you can take your so-called help and shove it up your so-called ass, Skinny Minnie.”
Her eyebrows soared like majestic eagles, and she blinked a few times. Then she checked her ass, got embarrassed at me seeing her do it, and huffed, “I'll go deal with the paperwork to arrange your release. You stay right here.”
“Where else would I go?” I asked as she saw herself out, shutting the door behind her. “Paris? Already been there this month.”
She left me in silence, seething, staring across Reed's desk at the empty chair. The pain was like a throbbing drumbeat, the baton hitting me steadily in the nose, the cheeks, the teeth, the jaw, tailbone, and every other place that had been worked over. My fingers just screamed, but they'd subsided from siren levels to maybe alarm bells since I'd stopped moving them.
Running on pure spite, I heaved myself out of the chair where she'd left me cuffed and strolled around the desk. Careful not to land on my fingers, or tread too heavily on my angry tailbone, I eased into Reed's chair, dripping blood on the mat beneath it in large droplets. I'd be damned if I was just going to sit quietly in the subservient chair when she came back. Not in the office I helped pay for. Not to some penny-ante, two-bit cop on a power trip that was riding mob justice like a sewer tide into my life.
The sound of the cops talking in the bullpen was muffled through the closed blinds and window that separated me from them. Good. I didn't need to hear them shit talk me or my people right now, because I was already in enough of a white-hot rage. Someone laughed out there; probably some SWAT ass laughing at Bennett's story of busting up my nose and face.
I slid back in the chair, trying to catch the right angle on the glass to see my reflection. When I did, I immediately grimaced.
My cheek was swollen, one of my eyes looking like it desperately wanted to close. They'd taken my phone before bringing me in here, or I'd have tried to get it out so I could document the abuse I'd suffered at their hands. As it was, I shimmied my bound hands down past my ass in the cuffs, then gingerly lowered myself to the ground. Legs up, I brought the cuffs and chain around, squeezing it past my feet so my hands were in front of me instead of trapped behind. Then I rose, gently sat back down in the chair, and rifled through Reed's desk drawer until I found a paperclip. Once I did, I broke it in half and picked the handcuff locks, tossing them on the desk. Hell if I'd just sit here cuffed.
Now that I was free, I slid the chair closer to the window for a better look at myself. Yeah, I was pretty messed up. I touched my nose and immediately flinched; that was broken. Taking a closer look at the fingers – yeah, those were broken too. I resisted the urge to set everything; I was definitely going to take some pictures once I was free so I could sue the shit out of Minnesota for Bennett's actions. Hitting Mann with the subpoena was going to be hilarious, and probably have amusingly destructive consequences for her personal life, too, as she was faced with covering for dog dick Bennett or breaking the blue wall of silence. I was sure I'd shed a few big, crocodile tears at her squirming under that predicament. Not.
Mann came banging back in, taking note of me sitting in the chair opposite where she'd left me, eyes widening in surprise as she realized I was uncuffed. Her mouth moved as she tried to find something to say, but finally just spit out, “Well, I guess I don't have to let you out, then.” She slapped a document on the desk. “You're free to go.”
“Are you shutting down my office?”
She straightened slightly. “No. I just meant you're released from custody. We've bagged up everything we consider evidence.”
I picked up the paper she'd dropped; it was a release order from Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, all formal and official, with a copy of the search warrant appended it. I glanced at it, and my head almost snapped from the ricochet as I found something in it I wasn't expecting. “Wait – you searched my residence?!” I looked up. “I don't have a residence.”
She pointed at the top line, where two addresses were listed. The office–
And Ariadne's house.
“Dammit, that's not my house!” I threw the papers down on the desk.
Mann shrugged. “It's where you're hanging your hat, so it got searched. We didn't take as much as from here. A couple guns–”
