"I stopped by your office today on lunch." The words hung awkwardly in the air, leaden and accusatory even though Rosa could have sworn they came out of her mouth with a light, breezy indifference. They sounded like she was keeping tabs on her wife, not surprising her with a playful romantic gesture on a bright sunny day when her deliveries took her to within a few blocks of the college campus she usually felt like such an intruder on. They sounded defensive and angry, and they sounded even more defensive and angry because Rosa had to tell Linda about the visit after the fact.

Not that Linda showed any reaction to that anger. Instead, she just took a bite of the quiche Rosa baked for them after a long day of making food for strangers, smiled politely, and said, "Oh. I must have just missed you, then." She dabbed at her lips with a napkin, looking every inch the elegant academic in her tweed skirt and tan jacket. They were supposed to have a rule about changing into casual clothes at home so Rosa didn't feel the difference between their work environments quite so acutely, but Linda got stuck late at the office. Again. And she didn't have time to dress for dinner.

Rosa wanted to reply, but the words kept getting stuck in her throat and the silence kept stretching more and more uncomfortably as she tried to make her objections small enough to fit into the conversational space she was allowed. She wanted to say that she heard Linda talking to someone as she approached, and she heard the conversation stop abruptly at the rattle of the locked doorknob. She wanted to say that she knew Linda was there because she stood by the door and listened for almost twenty whole minutes until common sense warned her that she was parked in a fifteen-minute delivery zone and she'd lose her job if the van got towed, and then she listened for a full five minutes after that and wound up desperately pleading with a traffic cop who was just radioing it in when she got back.

But all that kept getting whittled down inside her head until the only thing that came out was, "I guess." Even that sounded like an invitation to a fight, not that Rosa was interested in a fight after a long day at the bakery her wife didn't even understand why she still worked at when Linda was finally tenured and they didn't need a second income anymore. She was tired. She was tired of a lot of things, and Linda's new habit of lying about her long days at the office was definitely one of them. But she didn't want to fight about it right now.

But she knew what she heard. She knew Linda was in her office this afternoon, even as she burbled on about "going out for lunch with Professor Deane--just more campus politics, you know?" Rosa could pick her wife's voice out from across a crowded room. A locked door wasn't going to throw her off. And even though she didn't recognize whoever Linda was talking to, she'd been introduced to Professor Deane at one of those functions she always felt demeaned and humiliated at even though Linda always said she was every bit as smart as all those fancy professors with the letters after their names. That woman wasn't Professor Deane.

But if she asked who it was, Linda might just tell her. She might explain why she sounded so placid and content talking to another woman behind a locked door, so blissfully cozy that she was practically post-coital. She might explain to Rosa that the women on campus shared a common set of values and interests, a framework of understanding that a college dropout like her could never truly empathize with despite all her best efforts, and maybe it would just be for the best if Rosa found a partner a little more suited to her and let Linda go. So she smiled and nodded and bit back everything else she was going to say, just like always.

But she thought about that stranger's voice the rest of the night. Even though Rosa couldn't hear what they were saying--just a few phrases here and there about 'catalepsy' and 'fixation' and some other psychology buzzwords Rosa picked up from her wife's shoptalk--she knew she'd never be able to get that tone out of her head. The calm, unflappable certainty of it. The clipped, precise diction. The air of... there was no other word for it. The air of command. That woman was someone very used to getting her own way. And if Rosa ever met her, she'd probably punch her right in her smug teeth.

*    *    *    *    *

"Wow, what's the special occasion?" Rosa really didn't mean to sound suspicious and irritated, but practically everything came out sounding all wrong to her lately. It had been almost six weeks since that weird campus visit that wasn't, and things weren't getting better--the long days at the office were getting longer, the breezy lies were getting more condescendingly casual, and even Rosa's text messages sat on read for hours at a time before Linda got around to responding with a terse reply back. And now they were at a Brazilian steakhouse for dinner and Linda had a smile on her face as wide as the moon. It didn't make sense and Rosa kept telling herself that to forestall the inevitable self-doubt she was bound to experience on hearing her wife's perfectly reasonable explanation.

Linda raised a glass of wine in an expectant toast. "Well, I thought you might want to enjoy a nice night on the town with the new head of the Psychology Department at Eastern State, that's all. I just got the news this morning, I've been sitting on it all day waiting to tell you properly." Rosa was so stunned it took her almost a full minute to remember to lift her glass as well, and she held it there frozen in shock and surprise as Linda reached all the way across the table to clink them together. She always felt a little tongue-tied around her witty and verbose wife, but this time Rosa legitimately couldn't find words for what she was hearing.

Thankfully two plates of perfectly-cooked steak silenced the conversation long enough for Rosa to regain her composure and find her way into what promised to be a long and difficult discussion. "So what happened to Doctor Maitland?" she asked, again trying hard to keep the question from sounding like an interrogation. She'd met Maitland at a few of those godawful academic functions too, and the woman couldn't have been older than forty-five. At an institution where retirement-averse department heads clung onto their responsibilities until well into their seventies, she should have been set to keep going until well after Linda and Rosa were attending their hypothetical daughter's graduation.

But of course Linda's reply didn't help clarify anything. "She took early retirement," the new department chair said with a casual shrug. "There was an announcement, but you know how these things are, they never really explain anything--'I want to spend more time with my family', 'I'm seeking opportunities elsewhere', that kind of nonsense. Who knows what she was really thinking. The main point is that I'm in charge now! It's a big salary increase, plus it gives me a lot more leeway to set my own research projects and--"

"You said you liked teaching." That one did come out angry, angry and hurt, but Rosa didn't care. She knew this meant more excuses to stay on campus until Rosa was asleep in a big empty bed, more time spent with the smug and condescending pricks who kept mistaking Rosa for Linda's maid even after they'd been introduced to her, and more of Linda's life that Rosa felt permanently and decisively shut out of. Without a discussion, without a conversation, without even so much as a warning that she'd put her name in for the job. Just like that, her wife was now fully embroiled in the campus politics she once claimed were a distraction from her true calling as an instructor, and Rosa couldn't help being upset about it.

And Linda... god, she was doing her fucking therapist voice, so calm and cool and maddeningly reasonable that Rosa wanted to flip the table and storm out just hearing it. "And I do," she replied, giving Rosa a pat on the hand she probably didn't intend to be intensely patronizing. "But it's not worth doing if the department's in such a shambles that good teaching can't even happen. I spoke to the other professors one on one, and they all agreed that someone has to step forward and take responsibility for putting things into order. Doctor Maitland wasn't up to the task, we all knew it, and now that she's graciously stepped aside we can finally begin the real work."

Rosa was almost too angry to be suspicious of that comment... but when Linda said that Doctor Maitland wasn't up to the task, something began turning in her brain. Linda had always been a fan of Maitland's, said she brought in fresh insights and fresh opinions backed with a real moral compass. It wasn't even that she defended the woman against the other professors--Rosa paid attention to all those sharp-clawed conversations among the faculty she heard at parties, she knew who was out for blood and who was secretly sleeping together. Maitland was legitimately adored by her department. There was no way they would have conspired against her behind her back.

But of course there was no way to call her on it. Not with their two worlds so separate. Not with Linda fully in 'you're just being emotional' mode. Not without knowing what was going on in that locked office whenever she stopped by and heard the silky voice of a stranger giving Linda instructions that Rosa could only half-hear... assuming she'd gotten paranoid and started taking long lunches on campus to listen at keyholes, which of course she hadn't because that would be insane. "I'm sure it's going to be lovely," she said, swallowing her anger along with the picanha, and wishing privately that she could be a fly on the wall for some of those one on one conversations. Just for a week or two. Maybe even for only a few days. Just long enough to get a handle on what her wife was really thinking.

But Rosa forgot how important it was to be careful what she wished for.

*    *    *    *    *

"Um, honey? If you're not too busy, I made you a grilled cheese and some tomato soup?" Rosa knew she sounded hesitant--frightened, even--but she didn't want to start another argument about privacy again. Not when there was so little space to get away from Linda's frosty anger and her cold, almost menacingly precise comments. The pandemic had put Rosa out of a job, she was dependent on her wife's income in exactly the way she never wanted to be, and even if she was willing to make a confrontation out of it she literally couldn't afford to right now. So she called out from the end of the hall to make sure she couldn't be accused of snooping this time.

Not that it was a totally unjustified accusation. Rosa had nothing to do once the shelter in place orders dropped, and she assumed that Linda would at least have less of a workload than before. But instead it seemed like she spent all day every day in the guest bedroom she'd turned into a home office, taking meeting after meeting with every professor in her department almost until midnight sometimes; and, well... of course Rosa had listened at keyholes a little. She was curious. She wanted to hear all the gossip Linda used to share with her unprompted about who was day drinking, who was having inappropriate relations with a student, everything Linda used to vent to her all the time before she got withdrawn and combative. It wasn't exactly right, but it was at least normal.

Only it wasn't. Because what Rosa heard wasn't meetings, or at least not any kind of meeting she could imagine happening in an academic context. Linda spoke to her professors with that same calm air of command Rosa had heard being used on her, in a tone of low, silky persuasion that seemed to close off any possibility of disagreement without ever actually doing anything as rude as contradicting. Rosa couldn't hear everything, not even when she crept right up to the door in her bare feet and breathed so carefully she got light-headed, but it almost sounded like... well, like....

There was no other term for it. It sounded like Linda was hypnotizing her staff.

That made no sense, of course. Linda had always been one of those psychologists who scoffed at hypnosis, called it pseudoscience and made privately catty comments about the people who studied it. She taught a brief, perfunctory unit on it in her introductory courses, but Rosa knew her wife's personal opinion on the subject and the notion that she'd use it at all, let alone frequently and outside a therapeutic context, felt like obvious and patent absurdity. And yet... and yet she heard that silky voice with her own ears, talking about focusing ever more deeply on Linda's words. She heard Linda calling fully-tenured professors 'good boy' and 'good girl', and that definitely didn't feel like anything that happened outside of silly Netflix thrillers where someone got programmed to assassinate the President. And....

And she wasn't answering right now. Rosa took a few hesitant steps forward, allowing herself to put a foot down right on the creakiest of floorboards just to make sure she couldn't be accused of sneaking, and brought the tray right up to the door with her knuckles paused a few inches away from the bare wood. Linda was in her office, she wasn't paying any attention to Rosa's announcement of her presence, and there was another voice coming from the speakers. A voice Rosa recognized all too well.

"...not going to hurt anything, is it?" the other woman said, sounding exactly like Linda when she was speaking to her professors. "It's just going to make it easier for you to get on with our real work. The great work we've been building toward all this time." But that wasn't exactly accurate--it was more like she was the real thing, and whenever Rosa heard Linda use that tone it was because she was imitating this woman's silky voice and air of calm command. Like this woman was the teacher and Linda was only a student at her feet.

And when Linda spoke.... "The great work, yes," she droned, sounding for all the world as though she was talking in her sleep the entire time. There was a ghost of pleasure behind the emotionless monotone, as though she might have been in the middle of a blissful dream and not even known it, and Rosa desperately wanted to open the door just a crack and see what her wife was doing while she spoke in such an empty, thoughtless voice. But Rosa already knew she didn't dare. Not when this was the secret her wife had been so protective about. "But--"

The other voice cut in smoothly, snipping the objection off at the root with the patience of a gardener pruning a wayward branch. "I know," she purred, mock sympathy dripping from every syllable. "It does feel like such a big step, doesn't it? But you know how happy you are right now, and you know that she'll be just as happy once you show her the right way to be a good wife. She won't be snooping around anymore, my sweet girl. She'll be a part of the great work. You can include her on all the secrets you've been keeping, because you'll know she can be trusted once her mind belongs to you. Doesn't that sound so wonderful?"

Rosa's blood ran cold. She felt everything receding down a long dark tunnel, terror magnifying itself again and again in her head until her throat closed up and her head swam and nothing in the world seemed to matter except for sheer unmitigated panic. The tray in her hand began to wobble, and all she could think was that if they heard it fall and found her standing here she'd never be fully herself again, just a puppet on a string for some woman who was--who was brainwashing her wife and oh god, oh god, it couldn't be real but it was and it made so much dreadful, awful sense and they were going to catch her and hypnotize her and make her their slave--

The soup bowl slid along the tilted tray, and a lifetime of muscle memory saved Rosa from whatever fate might have befallen her when she righted it without even thinking. She watched a tiny droplet spill over the edge to land on the floor, thankfully not even making so much as a plip, and the sight of the bright red against the dark wood looked like a bloodstain waiting to happen. Linda didn't hear her approach because she was hypnotized, and she was hypnotized by someone at the university who used her to get a hold on every single instructor in the psychology department. It sounded absurd, which was maybe why Rosa hadn't put the pieces together before now, but holy hell. It was all real.

She stepped carefully out of her shoes and picked them up before heading back down the hallway, avoiding every creaky spot with a care born of long practice before gently setting the tray down on the kitchen counter. Rosa didn't know how long she had before the stranger smoothed away Linda's objections to hypnotizing her own wife into obedience, but she wasn't about to wait to find out. Fuck the shelter in place order, fuck the quarantine. Rosa was going to get out of this house and she was going to figure out how to get Linda back.

And she knew exactly where she was going to start. Rosa collected her keys, her purse, and her phone, and slipped out the back door and headed for the car. She didn't know the address, but the Internet was a wonderful thing and Calista Maitland wasn't exactly a common name. Rosa drove away from her home into the overcast gloom, unsure of when or if she'd ever be able to return.

*    *    *    *    *

Finding Calista wasn't the tricky part. It wasn't easy, either, and Rosa spent the night in her car when she drove around to the third address she found online for the former department head only to find that it, too, was an outdated one the search engine had dredged up out of public records... but eventually she pulled up to a small bungalow at the end of a cul de sac after what must have been an ungodly fucking commute back when the woman was still working, and knocked on the door only to get absolutely no response despite the car parked very obviously in the driveway. And Rosa didn't know what to do next.

She'd prepared for a lot of scenarios on her way over. Urgent pleas to believe the absurd story, angry confrontations with a sinister accomplice, sympathetic understanding with the difficulties of resisting a skilled and talented hypnotist, even a fistfight if she arrived and found Calista Maitland a blank-eyed drone with murder on her mind... but somehow, just not answering the door hadn't even occurred to Rosa and she felt stymied. She sat in her car and had a good long cry as it began to rain.

But the thing about tears was that when they dried up, you were still left with the same problems you had before they started... whereas taking a heavy rock from the front garden and putting it through one of the glass panels of the back door just as a loud thunderclap crashed overhead to mask the noise solved Rosa's most immediate issue quite effectively. She carefully reached past the broken glass and unlocked the deadbolt, letting herself inside.

When she went in, the house was such a total mess that Rosa wasn't even sure anyone would notice the rock and the smashed glass in the front hallway. There were discarded food wrappers strewn randomly across the floor, as though someone had been eating while they walked and simply let the detritus of their meal fall away without a moment's thought. The whole place smelled vaguely like body odor and sweat, although there was a strong undercurrent of a slightly different kind of musk that made Rosa's cheeks darken a little when she placed it. Someone had been living here like a fucking animal for months.

She crept carefully from room to room, already thinking about the ways breaking and entering had limited her options for social interaction with a woman who probably barely even remembered her, but it turned out she might as well not have worried about it. When she did come upon Calista Maitland, she found her kneeling naked on the floor next to her own bed, one hand holding her smart phone and the other buried between her thighs, feverishly masturbating while she mumbled something slurred and incoherent while staring into a screen that pulsed with a weird, twisting tunnel of light and color. She didn't even know Rosa was there.

Her oblivious ignorance continued, even when Rosa came close enough to make out the mantra she was repeating. "I have a purpose and my purpose is service, I have a purpose and my purpose is service," the middle-aged woman repeated, her eyes glassy and her chin soaked in drool. She looked as though she'd been at it for hours, taking breaks only to care for the basic and inevitable biological necessities, and Rosa wondered if this had really been her entire life since leaving the university. Surely she must have been able to snap out of it at some point, right? She couldn't just have spent her whole time jilling off for the last two months. It would have gotten painful, if nothing else.

But maybe it was more complicated than that. There was always a twist in those cheesy Netflix thrillers, a post-hypnotic command that made them forget they were brainwashed until their handler came back to them and triggered them back into helpless trance. Maybe Calista woke up sometimes just enough to sleep and buy food and charge her phone and give her sore vagina a rest, only to go under again when Linda's friend--and Rosa knew it had to be Linda's friend--tugged on the leash. Maybe she couldn't fully rouse herself no matter how hard she tried.

Maybe Rosa could, though. She yanked the phone out of Calista's grasp, throwing it out of the room, and pulled the older woman's hand away from her slick and messy cunt. "Hey, hey, wake up, wake up," she called out, trying to make her voice loud enough to get through the fog of trance Calista was experiencing while not so loud it freaked her right the fuck out when she finally did wake up.

There was a momentary struggle as Calista tried to follow her programming, but Calista very clearly didn't know what she was supposed to be fighting against in the absence of direct instructions and she couldn't muster up the will to push Rosa off. Oh, she wriggled and writhed, mewling frantically, but eventually her thrashing subsided and something like intelligence came back into her eyes. "Morwen?" she croaked, throat clearly raw from so many hours of chanting.

"No, I'm--okay, look, it's complicated," Rosa replied, her thoughts still on the broken glass and its potential legal consequences. "Who's Morwen?" She felt like she knew already--there weren't many people a hypnotized sex slave might ask about when they came out of trance, and Rosa knew most of them. But she needed to hear it from Calista's own lips.

And after a long, greedy gulp from a nearby water bottle, Rosa got what she was looking for. "Morwen Reese," Calista muttered, her voice still hoarse and raspy despite the infusion of fluids. "She was a... a professor in the psychology department, although she had a knack for weaseling out of actual teaching in favor of 'independent study' projects with her favorite students. Got very heavily into h-hypnosis, broke some serious ethical guidelines, even misappropriated department funds to renovate her office. I was forced to terminate her position."

Rosa helped the older woman up onto the bed, wincing in sympathy at the way her knees creaked and popped. She must have been down there for ages. "But let me guess, she found you anyway?" she asked, unable to keep the weary frustration out of her voice. This all must have happened ago, long enough for the ripples to subside before Linda started at the department, and to discover that her wife had been in danger from some creep this whole time and no one had ever said anything was absolutely infuriating. It made her really want to punch someone, but of course the only person here was a sad, withered middle-aged lady who had the pathetic air of a wet kitten.

It came as a nasty shock when Calista replied with, "No, I... I don't know where Morwen is now. The last time I saw her was when we terminated her post and told her to go clean out her desk. We blocked her phone number, emails too, cut off all communication and sent her last check to a post office box... I was a little bit frightened of her, you see. She was an amazingly talented hypnotist, had a knack for getting inside people's heads and... and twisting their thoughts around." She looked down, as if suddenly aware she was naked, and compulsively wrapped a blanket around her body. "No, it was your wife who did this."

Rosa's shoulders drooped in resignation. Of course. It all made sense. Linda didn't know this Reese woman, she didn't even believe hypnosis was real--she would never have known what hit her. Morwen brainwashed her and taught her all the tricks of the trade, bringing her into the fold and using her as a stalking horse to get to all the people who would have been wary of talking to someone so well known as a master manipulator. She was a devil on Linda's shoulder, whispering in her ear and convincing her to take over the department and pick up on everything Morwen was forced to drop when she was fired. And this... this extremely degrading lifestyle of constant masturbation and mindless servitude? Maybe just a little extra bonus for the woman who dared to cross her.

But that still left one very important question. The question Rosa absolutely had to answer if she wanted to save her wife. "You're sure you don't know where she is, Doctor Maitland?" she asked, calmly and quietly but with desperation shading every syllable. "An old address, a family member or friend who might have heard from her. Anything." It hurt being so close and yet so far away. It hurt knowing she'd spent so much time furious at her wife for shutting her out, not even realizing Linda was being isolated and manipulated into some sick and twisted scheme by an utter megalomaniac. Rosa felt tears pricking at the corners of her eyes again, thinking back to that day at the office and what she might have stopped if she'd just banged hard on the door until Linda was forced to let her in.

"No. Nothing," Calista sighed, her voice dead and defeated. "She could be anywhere. I only ever heard from her over your wife's phone."

Over Linda's phone. As if she was standing there with Linda, speaking to her. And that day Rosa visited, Morwen was physically present, an actual voice in the room and not someone coming in over speakers. Which meant she had to be--no. No, that was... no. It couldn't be that simple, could it? It couldn't be that utterly bugfuck crazy, could it? "You said she renovated her office," Rosa heard herself say, as if from a thousand miles away. "What did she do to it?"

*    *    *    *    *

In the end, it was that simple. And that crazy. Rosa got Calista dressed and half-cajoled, half-dragged her to the entirely empty college campus, where it turned out that the former department head still knew how one of her former students used to sneak into the building through an old window on the second floor that refused to shut properly. "It's funny--we were going to fix it about five years ago, but someone spent a big chunk of the budget on renovations to her office and we had to put it off," she said wryly, showing Rosa where to put her foot to give herself a boost up the wall.

And when they went down to the ground floor, and Rosa jimmied the latch on her wife's office door with a credit card, it all made perfect sense even before they found the hidden switch next to the floor-length mirror built into the suspiciously wide bookcase that covered the entire far wall. "She didn't come back here to clean out her desk," Rosa whispered, carefully poking and prodding at the knots and dimples in the weathered wood. "She just came back here. I wonder if she let you find out about the ethics violations on purpose so she could disappear like this, talk to the next professor through the mirror and get herself a patsy in case anything went wrong?"

Calista frowned, reaching out for a decorative twist in the silver frame that looked almost exactly like any other and finding that it swiveled under her fingers. "Maybe," she said, a note of concern in her voice. "I... I don't think I should have found that so easily. I--I think I might have been here before and just... forgot." She turned it a little faster, and the mirror slid aside entirely to reveal a small alcove perhaps three feet wide and ten feet long. And inside....

Inside was a woman with winter-pale skin, a woman who looked like she hadn't seen the sunlight in years. She sat with her back to the mirror on a twin bed that just barely fit into the space, talking into a microphone to someone the view in the monitor instantly revealed to be Rosa's wife. On the other end of the narrow space, a small ladder led down a floor into the basement, probably to some other hidden exit she used when she needed to go to the bathroom while the office was occupied. It was an entire hidden apartment made just for Morwen Reese, a bolthole made in anticipation of her inevitable disgrace, and whether she'd planned all along to disappear like this or whether it was simply a contingency, either way she knew exactly what she was doing when she started hypnotizing Linda.

So naturally Rosa hit her. She sprinted the few feet that separated them before Morwen had even fully turned around, swinging out with a right haymaker that grazed one wall of the narrow space before it connected satisfyingly with Morwen's chin and sending the startled woman bouncing hard into the other. She followed up with two quick left jabs to the cheek, screaming, "You get your goddamn woman-stealing hooks out of my wife's head!" without actually realizing she was doing so. It was five months of emotional trauma coming out in three intensely cathartic punches, and for just a moment Rosa legitimately thought that all she might need to do was knock the bitch out and call the authorities.

But that was before Calista grabbed her from behind. "The great work must go on," she hissed, putting Rosa into a sleeper hold that cut off her oxygen and proved remarkably difficult to break out of. She must have timed it to Rosa's breathing, because the world started to gray out around the edges in mere seconds and Rosa's struggles soon became weak and uncoordinated. She realized too late what a mistake she'd made in thinking she was bringing along an ally and not a potential enemy, but by then her legs were getting wobbly and she knew she only had seconds before she became nothing but deadweight in Calista's unexpectedly strong arms.

And if she passed out, she knew she'd never wake up. Oh, someone would, someone who sounded enough like Rosa to be able to fool her casual acquaintances, but she'd be lost deep inside her own mind at the far end of one of those swirling vortices of hypnotic light and she'd never be able to find her way back out. Once she was vulnerable, Morwen and Linda would double-team her with their talents and she'd be helpless to resist, the same way she was helpless now to resist the beckoning call of unconsciousness as it sapped the strength from her muscles and left only the tiniest view of the monitor in the center of her field of vision. The last thing she was going to see as a free woman was her wife, and somehow that felt kind of touching. Losing herself might not be too bad if she got Linda back.

But then, as if echoing from the bottom of a deep dark well, Rosa heard Linda say, "Calista, release her." The grip around her neck suddenly loosened, and Rosa sank to her knees sucking in great gulps of precious oxygen while from the speakers her wife snapped out imperiously, "Restrain Morwen. Let her breathe, but don't give her a chance to speak." And without a moment's hesitation, the middle-aged woman leaped past Rosa and wrestled Morwen easily into submission. As it turned out, one of the drawbacks of living in a small space like this for years on end was a lack of opportunities for good exercise.

"I... I told you Rosa was off-limits," Linda snarled, rubbing her temple as if to massage independence back into her muzzy brain. "She was the one thing I wouldn't let you touch, Morwen, the one last boundary you knew I would never surrender, and... oh god. Oh sweetie, are you alright? I, I don't know what got into me, she made it all sound so warm and fascinating and I guess I just sort of lost myself for a while. I--I'm back, now, though. I'm really finally back and I'm so sorry I let it happen."

Rosa used the wall to lever herself upright, waving off the apology--she knew they'd have to have some more conversations on the subject, maybe get into couples therapy to rebuild the trust Morwen had damaged, but all that could wait until they figured out what to do with the creepy sociopath living in the goddamn walls like some kind of fucked-up horror movie supervillain. Could they turn her in to the authorities? She was probably guilty of something, but not necessarily anything that would put her in jail for a long time and Rosa didn't trust her not to twist a judge or a prosecutor around her little finger.

That only left violence, and as much as Rosa had enjoyed giving the woman who tried to steal her wife a few pops in the face, she didn't really see herself as a murderer. And it didn't feel like anything else would make Morwen see people as people. Really, the only reason she didn't have her hooks in Rosa right now was that she got Linda to do all the actual dirty work of brainwashing and manipulating people into obedience, and--

"Look at my eyes, Morwen," Linda intoned, dropping her voice into the same sultry register and silky cadence Rosa had heard from the other side of the door so many times. "We both know this is going to work, because you taught me to be an irresistible hypnotist and you know that every trick you taught me truly subjugates even the strongest and most unbreakable will. You know that my voice is so compelling, my gaze so magnetic and inescapable that you're going to find your body going limp in Calista's arms and your eyelids beginning to flutter, and there's nothing you can do to stop it."

Rosa felt her breath go out in a gentle whoosh as she caught the edge of Linda's mesmerizing performance, even though it wasn't directed at her, and for the first time she completely and fully believed her wife's ability to talk her way into controlling the minds of a half dozen psychology professors. There was just something so compelling and charismatic about the way she described sinking into sleep that Rosa instantly knew she wouldn't have been able to resist if Linda had turned her talent fully onto Rosa's vulnerable mind. "Calista already belongs to me, Morwen. They all do, even if I let you tell me what to tell them. So you know I can break any will I choose. Is it any wonder you can feel yourself beginning to slip away?"

Rosa watched Morwen give off a few thrashing convulsions, but she knew intuitively that they were an extinction burst--the frantic struggles of a sleepy toddler who was trying hard to fend off that inexorable, inevitable lethargy before it claimed them. "The more you fight it, the more energy you use, Morwen. The more energy you use, the less you have left to resist me. And the less energy remaining to you, the more your mind and body just wants to give in and sleep, sleep, sleep." Linda traced a finger through the air as she spoke, and Rosa had to physically turn away to prevent herself from following it with her gaze. She could already tell that Morwen didn't stand a chance.

It took about an hour before the hypnotist was fully subdued, and another hour to smooth away her memories of the hidden room and all her plans to carry out unethical experiments in mind control on an unsuspecting student body. Rosa brought both women back to the house, uncomfortably aware that Morwen's programming would need the kind of constant reinforcement that made it impossible to let her go--it wasn't kidnapping, exactly, since she was really just trading in one concealed form of confinement for another, but it didn't sit well with Rosa either.

Then again, Rosa was out of a job. And she did need something to do with her hours upon hours of quarantine time. Perhaps it wouldn't hurt to take up a new hobby, learn a new skill that she could use to help deprogram Morwen's victims and keep her from getting any new bad ideas. And if it was purely consensual, just between the two of them with everything agreed on in advance, maybe Rosa could spend a little time sinking into Linda's gaze and finally getting to enjoy what she'd felt just the fringes of before.

THE END