Typically, a police department does not consider someone a missing person until twenty-four hours have passed. When the person in question is reported missing by a Senator’s wife who claims to have witnessed an abduction, that speeds up response significantly.

That Penelope Rutherford made a significant donation to the Widows and Orphans’ fund administered by the D.C. police force doubtless also helped. In any event, Evelyn had made her statement within an hour of Penny’s abduction, and the detective who took it had gravely assured her a report with his progress so far would be with her PA by 9am.

Evelyn went to bed feeling satisfied with the response and confident that her friend would be in a safe place once again in not much more time. She got up and checked her phone, expecting some message of reassurance, and didn’t receive it. By nine she was waiting impatiently, fuming, for her PA’s arrival.

Some years into their work together, Evelyn still wasn’t a huge fan of her PA in any case. Prior to Darby she’d had Ethan, twenty years her junior, a graduate of Princeton with one year abroad at Oxford where he’d taken up rowing. Ethan knew how the game was played; he would learn from the person he worked for, put up with awful hours, and if his boss happened to want her pussy eaten out, well, there were useful extracurriculars at Oxford and he’d put his tongue to good use. After a few years, she’d pass him up the chain to a much better job and nobody would ever speak of what they’d actually done together.

Darby wasn’t playing the same game; her husband had ordered her to replace Ethan with a woman after he’d paid for Evelyn to be enslaved, and denied her fun, she’d decided to find someone who was just very, very good at their job.

The problem was, when you overindulged as part of brokering a deal and didn’t get to bed until 5am, hungover, as Evelyn did not inconsistently, what you absolutely didn’t want was a PA who would insist on making sure you were up and out at a working breakfast by 9am.

Evelyn had tried complaining and her husband had simply looked her in the eye and said firmly, “You won’t replace her until I tell you to.” Evelyn had lowered her gaze so she wouldn’t meet his eyes, squeezed her thighs together, and meekly agreed - then, the moment she had some privacy, she’d locked herself in the bathroom and fingerfucked herself senseless on the memory of how powerless she felt.

Darby hadn’t been present beyond the start of the gala last night - she’d been across town talking urgently to someone else. Not every deal could be made in the lap of luxury, and in spite of refusing to spend good money on a proper power suit, wear makeup beyond a touch of concealer, or even apparently to think in any detail about her light brown hair, Darby was perfectly presentable enough to tie down any of those where the lack of presence of a Raines wouldn’t be seen as an insult.

They were both in the car before 9. At five minutes to, Darby checked her phone. “Oh. That’s… Ma’am, did you file a police report last night?”

“Yes.” Evelyn enjoyed the few times she could actually surprise Darby. “Do you have an update for me?”

Darby skimmed the email before answering. She was prone to delaying her answers until she had all information to hand, which Evelyn was willing to acknowledge had real benefits but was frustrating when it created extra delays. “They haven’t found Ms Ruther- Penny’s missing?”

“Kidnapped,” Evelyn said soberly, her voice suddenly soft. For all her irritation with Darby, hearing the younger woman react protectively to her own friend was always going to warm her heart. “How bad is it?”

“Well, he’s talking about seven or eight different angles he’s working…” Darby sighed. “To me, ma’am, I’m afraid that means he probably doesn’t have confidence in any of them.”

Evelyn sighed. “I was afraid of that,” she said. “Right. Thank you, Darby.”

“No problem, ma’am. Would you like me to source a good private investigator?”

Evelyn tilted her head thoughtfully.

“Ma’am?”

“No…” Evelyn said slowly. “Not yet, anyway. You’ve given me an idea.”

“Oh.” Darby sounded confused. “Happy to be of help, ma’am.”

*

Evelyn decided to allow the police all the way up until lunchtime, when Darby was brusquely dismissed from her meal to go phone and insist on an update.

She smiled politely but thinly at her lunch ‘date’ - Jerry Masterson, the lobbyist’s lobbyist - and said simply “I’m afraid my attention can’t be entirely with you today, my dear. I’m sure you understand.” As she’d expected, Jerry translated this as an attempt to play hard to get on behalf of her husband. He rolled with it, assuming it to just be part of the game, and that gave her the breathing space she needed to think things through.

Realistically, she already knew the news that Darby would bring back to her. Evelyn had absolute confidence that if Penny had re-appeared on the scene, there would have been a message by now.

It still felt like a gut punch when she looked up and saw Darby’s crestfallen expression on the return. After a moment, the painful doubt curdled into something more destructive; anger. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen to women like her or Penny. Her own abduction had been more of a house arrest, and it had turned out well for her - but Penny couldn’t expect to be so lucky; her abduction wasn’t being overseen by Candace Kraft. If it were, after all, Evelyn would doubtless have been a pawn in that plan, and willingly - delightedly - so.

She put the best face on it she could. As Darby approached the table she called, lightly, “No news?”

Darby shook her head and Evelyn rose, folding her napkin and setting it beside the plate of salad she’d been mostly picking at. “Jerry, I have to apologise,” she said briskly. “This is something requiring immediate personal attention. I’ll make it up to you-”

“Oh, come now, Evelyn,” Jerry answered. He was still smiling, though out of respect for what he still thought was feigned distress, he’d dialled it back quite a bit. “We’re only looking at one big deal at moment. I need something a little better than favours for the future-”

Evelyn stooped to his level, taking the back of his head in her hand, and pulled him in to a tender kiss. She smiled into his surprise, waited for his initial uncertainty to turn into something more positive, and opened her mouth to him fully, a promise for the future. “I didn’t mean my husband will make it up to you, Jerry,” she said with a grin. “Although we can go that way if you prefer?”

“Ah - no. I’ll - I’ll handle our appointment this afternoon?”

“You’re an absolute dear.” She let her fingertips trail down his shirt, impeccably expensive silk so thin she could practically feel the chest hair underneath, until her long nails were close enough to nip at the tip of his cock in further promise. Then she sashayed away from the table, to the bemused entertainment of most of the other diners and bemusement tempered instead with shock from Darby.

“I… didn’t think you did business that way, ma’am,” Darby said as she scurried to keep up. It was a measure of how far away Evelyn’s thoughts had taken her that she had to play Darby’s comment back twice before she realised she didn’t know what she meant.

“Hmm?”

“Well - ah - promising someone favours from an, uh, personal store. I’ve never seen that before, is all.” Darby was blushing crimson, and Evelyn found herself for the first time confident that her young PA wasn’t sleeping with her husband, although that didn’t mean she didn’t occasionally report back to him.

Which being the case she gave her a gentle smile. “Why do you think I cut lunch short?”

“Penny,” Darby said simply, and after a moment added “Ma’am,” as a way to confirm she hadn’t forgotten protocol.

“And from what you’ve seen of us all, is Penny mine and my husband’s friend, or my friend?”

“Oh, yours.”

“Therefore any upset I cause Jerry is on me, right?”

“I suppose so, Ma’am,” Darby said thoughtfully.

“Unfortunately, that means any favour I owe on this has to come out of my favour bank. It’s not fair to put that all on the Senator.”

“And that means no political capital.” Darby sighed. “I just… I’d really hoped that sort of thing was on the way out, ma’am.”

“Yes, well…” Evelyn shrugged. “Darby, let me ask you a question.”

“Of course, Ma’am.”

“How…” She took a deep breath. “How close do you want to be to this?”

“I’m here to support you, Ma’am.”

“And that’s a great, plucky answer.” Evelyn met her eyes. “The police aren’t acting as fast as I want, and my instinct tells me that something’s not right here. I want to call in some favours of my own.”

“Oh.” Darby nodded. “I think that’s a great idea, Ma’am.”

“Right. But these favours… well, you’d say that me keeping Jerry’s attention like that was dubiously ethical?”

Darby nodded again, flushing slightly.

“Some of what I’m doing here is going to be only dubiously legal,” she said. “I don’t mind telling you that, because you’re not going to be able to use that against me without killing your career. Neither of us want that. But you might not want to be around as it happens.” She was thinking back to her first encounter with Doctor Kraft; back to the way several other people had been caught in the crosshairs. Doctor Kraft didn’t mind that.

Asking someone to do a job was taking responsibility for the consequences of that job. If Darby was nearby, she might be splash damage in one direction or another.

There was no good way to make her aide understand that, but still she wanted to be sure that Darby had the chance to get clear before anything happened.

That was probably not the way she should think - any new slave might turn out to be a tremendous benefit for the Master, or at least someone he’d enjoy. It was probably more ‘correct’ for her to put Darby in the line of conversion.

But if it was so correct, why did she feel so guilty about the very idea?

In any event, Darby nodded slowly, and the expression on her face showed she was taking this seriously. “Can I… think about it?”

“Not really. You’re either heading home early today or you’re with me.”

Possibly that had been the wrong thing to say. Her jaw set. “I’ll stick with you, Ma’am.”

“Right.” She pulled out her phone. “Just all the same, give me some peace while I call in a favour.”

*

“Rikki speaking,” said the voice at the other end of the line. Evelyn didn’t recognise the name, but she wasn’t entirely surprised. “How may I serve?”

On her phone’s screen, Rikki dominated the display, the camera placed close to her, angled up so that the bottom third of the screen was a canyon of cleavage - on the Doctor’s island, there was no need for adjustments that needed to be easily explained to observers. The brunette was wearing a string bikini top with the panels in khaki green; on her bare shoulder, at the edge of the screen, there was just visible a tattoo.

Evelyn could see that it was banding on top and below with the block-capitalised words SEMPER and FIDELIS; what was in between was a little less clear; it reminded Evelyn of the image of the globe with an anchor protruding from the base, but the anchor was instead a bright pink heart.

It looked like her brown hair was starting to grow long on one side; the other remained buzzed close to the scalp. Evelyn would have taken her for the acme of lesbian femininity, if she hadn’t been certain that any slave of the Doctor’s was functionally bisexual; all the same, beneath the soft flesh, she was sure Rikki maintained the same muscle and fitness levels she’d had as a Marine (which she was confident she had been; this looked exactly like what she imagined the Doctor might sculpt a former soldier into, for his own titillation).

“I need to speak to one of the Doctors,” Evelyn told her.

“Your name?”

“Evelyn Raines.”

“You understand, ma’am, that we do need to verify the identify of anyone contacting us?”

She hadn’t expected this, but it seemed a perfectly reasonable request. “Yes?”

“Phone sex.”

Evelyn was still wondering what this offhand remark might mean when her hand lifted the handset, bringing it in toward her, and tucked it in to her open blouse. Her arms were already pressing in around her tits, lifting them and bringing them together; with a sudden cooing excitement, the Senator’s wife was squeezing and releasing her cleavage to milk the phone deposited within like she was working a cock. At the same time, the sensations in her head insisted it WAS a cock, that it was a cock she wanted desperately to please, and that letting it fuck her tits was the best and best-feeling thing she could possibly do.

If her mind had not been occupied entirely with the response to the trigger, she might have been grateful that Darby wasn’t here to witness this. It would have been very hard to explain.

Then again, she might have welcomed the squirming, exciting embarrassment of having to explain just how utterly enslaved she truly was…

Evelyn’s eyes rolled back in her head as gasps and moans of pleasure from the phone revealed that Rikki was just as conditioned to enjoy this test as she was. Bringing pleasure to another of the Master’s slaves was almost as good as bringing pleasure to her husband, which in turn was almost as good as bringing pleasure to her Master (but which in practice had often been better, as bringing pleasure to her dupe of a husband maintained the facade that he was wholly in control, which brought pleasure to her Master in turn).

She was giggling and cooing over the whole experience, scalp tingling, mind cast almost adrift, as submission-drunk as she had been when Candace first conditioned her, when a chime sounded in the messaging program. She and Rikki both came at once, bodies spasming, crying out their joy in obeying the programmed need to submit.

Her mind entirely cleared the moment after, a sudden shift and shuddering snap back to herself, as if whoever had programmed this had intended it to end with business as usual, no matter what. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment and she fumbled her phone back out of her cleavage, clearing her throat.

When she could see the screen again, it was clear that Rikki was recovering from much the same reactions.

“I take it I’m verified?” Evelyn asked.

“That you are. Can I ask how important the call is?”

“Urgent.”

Rikki nodded. “May I have a topic I can tell them it’s about?”

Evelyn only meant to say: A friend of mine has been kidnapped, and if she’s found, she could be useful to us. But perhaps the emotional impact of what she had just done had not gone away; perhaps it had only seemed to, and now she had a prompt, she found herself spilling all her web of fears and worries for her friend out to this complete stranger.

Except, of course, that Rikki wasn’t a complete stranger. She was another of the Doctor’s slaves, and really there was nothing more Evelyn needed to know to place complete trust in her.

Rikki listened attentively; Evelyn was dimly aware of the sound of keys clacking as Rikki took notes, but the information was filed away, and there was a gentle, sympathetic smile on the ex-Marine’s lips as she nodded at the end. “I’ll summarise,” she said, “but I’ll stress the important you feel and the opportunity. If the Master wants to call back directly, I’m sure he will. If not, I’ll get you a report on what’s to happen. Unless I’m ordered not to, of course.”

“Of course.” That hadn’t needed saying. Both of them knew that Rikki could be ordered to forget about this, and it would instantly be gone from her mind. Both knew too that Evelyn could just as easily be ordered to forget Penny, and she would do so, in spite of the confusion it would cause in her work.

*

Penny’s jaw was starting to ache and her lips were dry, but she didn’t stop talking. The cum he’d left across her tits after she eagerly titfucked him was dry now, becoming a strange texture to her breathing.

When he’d cum all over her, he’d told the other man to listen, and then he’d simply looked at Penny and he’d said “Tell us everything you know about every politician on the Hill.”

He’d left the room before she finished echoing “To hear is to obey.”

After that she couldn’t stop the words. Secrets, blackmail material, pet names, private jokes, and drama more than thirty years stale fell out of her mouth as easily and eagerly as the public knowledge factoids she’d often use to make outsiders feel like they were getting an inside scoop. As easily as his cock had pumped in and out of her cleavage not so very long ago.

Except that she wasn’t likely to stop any time soon. There was so much to tell, and there was no limiter on her. She kept talking, babbling, spilling everything anyone could wish to know and dozens, even hundreds, of obscure facts and trivia of no use to anybody.

The other man was listening, was taking notes, but taking them much less often. It was as if their owner was using the two of them to create a database, where she might as well have been a diary or a biography, having no judgement about what to pass on; all the judgement came from her owner’s other property, who presumably had a better sense of what knowledge was necessary for their goals.

She was uncomfortably aware that she would talk until her knowledge was exhausted, and was not sure that she would then have the free will and initiative to take a drink and start to recover. But nonetheless, she had orders, and she would obey.

*

Darby was the one to answer the knock. Evelyn had, much to her own frustration, had to get back to work while she waited, and it was Darby who was free to see to the door. Evelyn and her guest hadn’t even noticed, she didn’t think.

Her first thought on opening the door was: Wow. I can really see why they think we come out of a mould.

The woman opposite her was dressed in a pantsuit; to Darby’s eye it wasn’t expensive, but someone, probably the blonde in front of her, had painstakingly taken it in and let it out so that it looked tailored rather than off the peg, just the way Darby had had to do with her own. Her long blonde curls were scraped back into a messy bun, several strands dangling artlessly from either her forehead or from the bun itself. The kind of artless suggestion of casualness that took a half hour of careful work to achieve.

Her makeup was relatively subtle - you might not notice it - but what little was there spoke to a restrained sexuality. This was all part of a dance of presentation and signals Darby had learned before ever coming to Washington; it was the way aides were expected to be, without anyone ever presuming to write this down and make the whole thing vulnerable to critique.

They were even about the same height; from there, of course, there were some key differences. Darby didn’t need spectacles, while the blonde was fiddling awkwardly with thick black-rimmed glasses (actually, Darby thought, fiddling so awkwardly that they might be something she didn’t usually wear; her gut instinct was that the blonde usually wore contacts and wasn’t used to having the frames on her nose).

Blonde and brunette were, of course, very different; and the careful illusion of tailoring on the blonde’s suit showed off a curvier figure than Darby’s, enough that the young aide found herself wrestling immediately with a spike of jealousy. Darby liked to think she was above the lures of sexuality; whenever she proved to be wrong she was always frustrated.

“Can I help you?”

“Is this Senator Raines’ address?”

So much for the slim chance the visitor was just in the wrong place. “Yes. I don’t recognise you, Ms-?”

“You, on the other hand, are Darby Harrison,” the blonde said briskly. “Evelyn Raines’ PA. Correct?”

“Actually, I’m her aide?” Darby felt a prickle at the back of her neck. Whatever this was, she didn’t like it.

“Melissa Wilder.” The blonde extended her hand and, having no good reason not to, Darby shook it. “May I ask how up to date you are on events with Mrs Raines’ friends?”

Ahhh.

“Are you here about Penelope Rutherford?”

“Among other things.” Melissa Wilder stepped past her into the house. “You’re quick to put the pieces together. I think we can work together well.”

“…What work are you going to be doing, exactly?”

“I’m… an investigator. Although I’ll need to pose as if I’m an aide, like you. Hoping you can help me with that.”

The blonde flashed a smile and Darby instantly knew that wasn’t the whole story. If it had been, why all the cloak-and-dagger stuff Evelyn had been asking?

Darby considered her options. “Well,” she said, “in that case you may as well talk with me as with our employer, at least to begin with. Let’s find a seat, and I’ll send for coffee.”

*

Another had arrived, but she had no intention of making herself known to the Raines or anyone in their social circle. She had no interest in the assignment, except that the Doctor had ordered her to resolve it; politics, however, were not something she enjoyed and she didn’t want to be in Washington ever again.

She’d spent the best part of five years in brainwashed storage in Washington DC, being taken out of mental mothballs only when the shadowy military cabal that had abducted and brainwashed her friends wanted someone monitored or silenced. Occasionally, she had learned, she wasn’t even woken from a mental stasis while the former soldiers making up the cabal undressed her body and used her.

It was only afterward that she discovered that she - and the superteam she’d been part of - had found themselves in that situation after being betrayed by a teammate, the ‘super-soldier’ Maya Reeves who had called herself Slide.

During, she not only didn’t know but could not have learned; while her skills were often prized by her controllers, they saw her mind as being superfluous. The control helmet she wore allowed them to give commands directly to her spinal column, and her body’s own reflexes put them into practice.

Rescue from that role (and, she later found out, from something called Project Broodmare) had come in the form of a completely different brainwashing, one which didn’t need a helmet to remain active. Indeed, despite the well-known (in intelligence and metahuman circles) rule of thumb that control would always fade within six months if the control stimulus ceased and wasn’t re-administered, the woman who now thought of herself simply as Gigi figured she was in a much better situation now than she had been while under General Walters’ control.

She had returned to the costumed vigilantism that had been her calling beforehand, along with her team (minus Slide) and the fact they were brainwashed slaves came up only when their owner wanted sometime - which wasn’t often, unless he was visiting them.

It had been a year or so - after the Doctor had been put on trial he’d been careful to avoid America, at least for a while - since the last visit, and Gigi had actually been glad to be called in for this job.

A slave served when waiting for orders just as much as she did when given orders to obey, but it could become frustrating to wait and wait and wait, especially if you had no reason to think that would change any time soon. Being called into Daisy’s office in the team HQ to be told that the Doctor had specifically chosen her for a task - an order - he wanted executing without hesitation, delay, or failure had been a moment of jubilation.

Privately she thought the happiness Daisy had shown for her was likely mingled with a quiet jealousy - she would also be looking for any opportunity to please their Master, and simply assigning someone else to the task didn’t seem nearly as much fun - but she was too good a team leader, too good a friend, and too loyal a slave to complain.

She had taken up residence in the Raines home without bothering to inform any of them, figuring she’d do that once she’d got a sense of the situation. The next step had been to tap into the internet and start a program running that would monitor all traffic. It seemed unlikely that the Senator and his aide were involved, but it was something she wanted to rule out early, just in case.

(After all, this would be a perfect opportunity to remove the contradictory submissions in Evelyn’s mind, if it turned out the Senator was doing things that would displease the Master).

Having unrolled her camp bed in the attic, set up her comm station, and secured a reliable way in and out of the house by bypassing the skylight alarm, Gigi had immediately left the house; she now stood instead, clad in the sleek, dark red jumpsuit that was her costumed identity, in the penthouse suite maintained by Penelope Rutherford, going through all the paper records she’d found methodically while the USB drive plugged into Rutherford’s desktop attempted to creak its security.

Unfortunately, she was rapidly coming to the conclusion that the suspect list for this might well be everyone who had business on Capitol Hill.