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IV
Birds
of Prey
Black
Canary and Huntress
Dinah Lance, the blonde haired Black
Canary, and Helena Bartenelli, the taller, raven
tressed Huntress, waited bound to the steel platforms about three feet
apart. Both women’s eyes shot baleful
glances around the room, looking for a way out or someone at which to aim their
fury.
Dinah looked at
Dinah was outwardly calm, but inside her guts
were churning. Unbidden, her mind kept
flashing back to the previous times she had been in this situation,
captured by ruthless killers. Only a few months ago the villain called Savant
had captured her to use as leverage for blackmailing Oracle, in the process
breaking both her lower legs. And before
that…
Dinah ducked mentally from the memory of the
first time she had been truly helpless in the hands of a madman. Not even a super-villain, just a thug with a
penchant for inflicting pain.
She had been investigating a drug smuggling
operation when her contact had been murdered and she had been taken by the
dealers, for questioning. She had woken
in a warehouse to find her arms tied to the upraised bars of a forklift, the black
choker she had been wearing cut away and stuffed into her mouth. It had been so ludicrous – the idiots did not
even realise who they had. She was a costumed heroine that had fought beside
the Justice League and the Justice Society, and in one quick fluke they had
disabled her greatest asset, her patented hyper-sonic canary cry. Gagged she was helpless to use her meta-ability
to escape. It was too absurd.
Her sense or irony, though, had evaporated
quickly when the man with the knife cut away her skirt, and then her bra and
panties.
She had fought back, of course – even with her
hands bound she still had the use of her feet and knees. At one point it had even looked like she
might disable enough of the them to buy time to free
herself. But there had been to many of them and too few minutes – they had overwhelmed
her by weight of numbers and beaten her half unconscious, leaving her hanging
with her feet raised of the floor and the sheer lavender top she had been
wearing as her only garment.
Then while the others watched, he has started
torturing her.
It was the gag that had defeated her. ‘Soft little moans,’ that was what the
knife-man had said he wanted from her. With her mouth stuffed with the silken
cloth of her choker, she had tried to scream, only to find that her own power
was reflected back upon her. As the
blade began to cut the skin of her arms and legs, she had done the worst thing
possible – she had panicked. Desperate
to escape the horror, she had tried to channel her power into a burst that
would pierce the muffling cloth and set her free. But her efforts had instead caused such
terrible stress that her canary cry had burned itself out with a shock that had
rendered her unconscious. And the men
watching had never even known – had just assumed the ‘weak woman’ they had
captured had feinted from pain and fear.
Until, of course, they sluiced cold water over
her to revive her.
Hanging there coughing and bleeding, the wet
cloth clinging to her body and hard-peaked breasts, she had been a gift from
the gods to the men allowed to stand guard over her. And with her stoic resistance and refusal to
break, a glorious challenge for the man set to question her. This gorgeous spy would be his masterpiece,
and he would paint her firm, smooth flesh as a canvas of suffering.
Perversely Dinah had ended up being grateful for gag
in her mouth, because after an hour had passed she could no longer voluntarily
suppress the need to scream.
The next two days had been a nightmare of torment
and degradation for the feisty street-fighter.
The man with the knife would ask her questions about who
she was and who sent her as a spy. When
she refused to tell him anything he wanted to hear, he had hurt her. Mostly he had used the knife, proving quite
skilled with it, able to cut her so that she felt maximum pain without
suffering a mortal or debilitating wound. Sometimes he would take a pause from
the cutting and beat her with rubber hose, loud enough so that the sound of the
improvised weapon hitting her had echoed around the empty space. Dinah was used
to taking a punch, but the length of hose had soon had her grunting in pain as
it marked her belly and legs with vivid welts and bruises. She had tried to protect herself with her legs
but he just smashed the hose against her back and sides until her strength
failed and her lovely legs fell back down towards the floor.
He hit her hard enough to make her sway gently.
Her body glowed with perspiration under the electric lights. Sometimes he would make it curl up between her
legs and the men would laugh as she gargled in agony and bucked wildly. When he used it on her ripe breasts, she had
thrown back her head and moaned like the most wanton whore as the tender meat
was pummelled black and blue.
Dinah had lost track of how many times she had
passed out, only to be revived and tortured again. The hours of suffering had blurred into a
nightmare haze of red anguish, broken up by short spaces where the man
refreshed himself, or paused to pee or jerk off while she hung shivering from
cold and fatigue. Then he would make the overture of asking her questions
again, before the aching torment of the previous abuse gave way to the fresh
hell of the new.
When she had first realised she could not escape
unaided, Dinah had prayed her lover Green Arrow would find her. By the end of
the first day of captivity, Dinah was praying she would die before he saw what
these men had done to her.
She tried to die.
She had goaded him, her torturer, baited
him. Sworn at him, the ‘fucking limp-dicked cunt’ who
was hurting her. If she could get him
angry enough his knife hand might slip, might cut and artery of pierce a vital
organ that would end her nightmare. But
he had only smiled and then gone back to slowly and methodically making her scream. Her blue eyes
were wet with tears than ran down over her face like salty diamonds, filling
her with shame. He was in no hurry – she
would tell him everything he wanted to know, and then, yes she would die. But not quickly – slowly. As slowly as he knew how to
make it. Maybe if she begged he would end it for her, but he didn’t
expect her to beg.
She knew it was what he loved most about her.
Cutting her, cutting her. Blood running down over her
thighs and dripping on the concrete floor. Blood spilling down the
cuts on her belly and dripping down between her legs, warm and sticky. It ran in little streams down her arms and
traced the outline of her breasts. He
didn’t slice her tits, just pricked them, taking the soft globes in his hands
and stabbing them with shallow pricks of the knife point, working the invading
point back and forth. Smiling like a happy child and listening to her
whimpering and cursing, looking up at her face pinched with hurt, lips twisted
or pressed tight together to muffle the sounds she knew he loved to hear from
her.
Two days.
The pain and her suspension kept her from sleeping. His excitement did the same for him.
Hanging from her bonds, one eye so swollen it was
closed shut, her lips spit and bleeding, she had felt the knife edge down to
her groin, the razor sharp edge gliding over the lips of her womanhood, shaving
her roughly. He had enjoyed her more
than any woman he had had in this position, but his masters were growing
impatient. He had saved the best for
last, but how the cold metal was prying apart the pouting slit between her
legs, probing inside. A shiver from her
and the edge nicked the pink lips behind her labia, making her gasp. He was going to carve her sex with terrible
patience, exquisite sadism. She heard
him offering to end it with one gutting stroke, or make it last through days of
endless howling agony. She felt the
blade sliding in and out of her pussy slit and the point twirling back and
forth as it was nudging her clitoris. Dinah had never been more terrified than
that moment, knowing the pain her could make her feel before the life went out
of her mutilated body.
‘Go…to hell,’ she had gasped. And hoped that she could
die before he made her plead for it.
And them, the sound of a bowstring, the wet thud
of metal cleaving meat, and the arrow emerging like magic from his chest,
dripping with his hearts blood. He had
fallen still holding the bloodstained knife and staring at the arrow sticking
out of him, as if he could not believe he could be cheated of his ultimate
moment.
As she had been cheated of her vengeance.
It had taken a long time for Dinah to get over
that – that she would never be able to make the man who had tortured her suffer
as she had suffered. Months of therapy,
years of wondering whether tonight she would sleep though til
morning or wake up screaming as she again felt the knife opening scarlet
channels in her naked body.
She looked over at
‘Huntress,’ she said softly. The very softness in her voice was what made
‘This is going to be bad,’ Dinah said without
expression. She forced herself to breath
slowly and evenly, and smiled inwardly as she saw the younger woman start to do
the same. That’s my girl. ‘This is
going to be bad,’ she said again.
‘We don’t panic,’ Dinah said evenly. ‘We joke, we swear. When it gets too bad, we scream. But we do not panic. They can make us scream if
the want to…’
‘Speak for yourself,’
‘Huntress,’ Dinah repeated, and met the Italian
born beauties gaze as she lifted her head.
‘They can make us scream, but
that doesn’t mean anything. The only
thing that matters is that we don’t give in to the fear’. She titled her head, looking at the caped
woman strapped to the platform in front of her with eyes cold as ice. ‘Fear is
what will kill us, if we let it.’
Huntress met that look with one of her own,
nodding again. ‘You remember when Savant
had your legs broken and you were lying on the floor behind me, and I told him
and his pet Spetsnaz* that they’d have to go through
me to get to you?’
Dinah nodded.
‘I just wanted you to know, if I’d known that
decision would bring us here,’ she said with a little smile, ‘then I’d have
jumped out the damn window.’
Black
Canary felt her own smile tugging the corners of her mouth.
*elite Russian
special forces