Chen was getting ready to head home for the evening when her secretary buzzed the intercom. “Sergeant?”

She sighed, one of her briefing folders in hand. Setting it down she tapped the intercom button. “Yes, Josie?”

“Visitor for you, ma’am.”

Chen’s interest sharpened. “There’s nobody on my schedule.”

“No, ma’am.”

“So why, at this time of night, are you asking me to let someone new through?”

There was a pause, one that went long enough for Chen to feel suspicious. Nobody waited that long to give an answer unless they just didn’t have it yet.

She opened the middle drawer on the left side of the desk and flipped open a small plastic case she had in there, exposing a hidden screen; a camera feed into Josie’s sanctum, the office in front of her own.

Josie wasn’t the only one in there, but the only thing that made the man standing by her side look like a typical visitor (insofar as they even had those) was the suit he was wearing; he must have been close to three feet wide at the shoulders, had dark glasses, and… yep, an earpiece.

Josie, meanwhile, was sat at her desk glassy-eyed, her blouse open, bra cups pulled down under her breasts, hands steadily teasing her own breasts.

Chen sighed. Mind control.

She’d really hoped she’d seen the last of that when she mustered out of C.A.L.I.B.R.E., but apparently she didn’t get to be that lucky.

So. Someone wanted her under control, and they already had control of Josie. The big guy had been given the job of putting her under, but there was no way he was the top of the pecking order. Josie was… distracted…

She raised her voice again. “Never mind,” she said. “Send him through.” And then she winced; just saying him instead of them might tip the big thug off that his plan was already blown.

She stepped onto her desk chair, then the desk, then took a deep breath, and as the door opened and the big guy came through she was already in the air, leg extending and locking, flying toward him.

She hit him in the sternum and backflipped gracefully to land on her feet. Somehow he hadn’t ended up on the ground; by the look of things he’d been expecting much less of an issue, though, and the growl he made as he charged forward said as much.

She sidestepped him and brought her arm backward, looking to catch him with an elbow to the back of his head, but she underestimated the height difference and caught his shoulder blade squarely, probably as bad a hit for her as her target.

She was already dropping to one knee, the other leg extended as she pivoted, but his legs weren’t swept out from under him as she’d intended; he’d planted his feet and all the momentum she had wasn’t enough.

He followed up with a kick of his own but she was already rolling backward, coming up in a low crouch, and she didn’t lift her head above about his waistline.

You never knew what kind of trick someone would use for mind control. Most of them were either hand carried or in the eyes, and eye contact for even a moment could be the end of everything.

It wasn’t necessarily easy to fight someone when you limited yourself to seeing half of their body, but Chen had been trained to take on anything up to low-level superhumans in unarmed combat. She didn’t expect this guy to be a serious problem, just one who was a few notches better than her initial impression of him had been.

He seemed to have realised this wasn’t going to be the easy job he’d expected either, and he paused for a moment before starting to close in again. As he did, she saw his grip shift on something in his left hand.

Jackpot.

She stepped inside his reach, caught the arm at the elbow with one hand then secured the wrist with the other, stooped, and threw him, all in one fluid motion.

As soon as his back hit the floor she swung his wrist, jarring his hand against the upright of her desk, and whatever he’d been holding - it looked like some kind of jet injector, the kind you’d use through someone’s clothes if they were having a psychotic episode - went flying.

Chen immediately shifted position and struck him in the nose with a punch; as he reacted involuntarily to that she wrapped her thighs around his neck and locked down, choking him out efficiently.

She left it about ten seconds after he stopped struggling - long enough for someone faking it to realise it wasn’t going to stop, not long enough that the risk of long-term damage was high.

There was a pair of handcuffs taped under her desk for a scenario very like this one; when she moved in, one of her detectives had seen her installing it and laughed.

Chen had shrugged and got on with it, but she’d also made sure her other secret caches were placed when there was nobody around to spot them.

She secured the hypospray and locked it away in her briefcase. If her secretary had just been overwhelmed, that was one thing; but there was the possibility infiltration of her organisation had already been happening for some time.

Chen hated that idea - it was absolutely her responsibility if so - but she had to be prepared. Testing of this substance might need to be outsourced.

She stepped out into Josie’s sanctum, where her secretary hadn’t budged, hadn’t reacted to the sounds of fighting, was still helplessly groping and stroking her own tits.

Chen frowned at the phone resting just by the keyboard in front of her; its screen was lit up. On a call.

She picked it up and ended the call, then stepped into the bullpen, leaving Josie in place.

“Lawson,” she barked at one of the few detectives currently in the bullpen, “there’s some shit in my office. Sort it out.”

She left his bewildered face staring after her as she swept out, frowning.

*

“Okay,” Darby said, and exhaled. “I think… think, mind you… that I’ve got everyone I’m going to get, everyone I had any rumours of.”

Melissa looked up immediately, and Darby could see her eyes refocus as she reminded herself what the other woman had been working on. It was obvious she went very deeply into her own thoughts. “Ah,” she said at least. “Every one of her political rivals, right?”

“Every political rival or enemy that Evelyn knows about,” she said, “and therefore that I know about. I can’t guarantee she doesn’t have others in hand.”

Melissa got up and walked across. “Let’s see what we have.”

The two sat for some time, their heads bowed together, their voices barely above a mutter, going through each name point by point.

At one point early on, Darby had said “But, I mean, this wasn’t much. In the long run she’s probably better for Penny having done that. So we can mark her off, right?”

Melissa laughed shortly and shook her head. “I can see where you’re coming from,” she said. “I just can’t agree. It’s not about how big the impact is, it’s about how much they dwell on it. You see this a lot when billionaires get mad - it always turns out someone tweeted about their hair replacement or something and they just lost all sense of proportion.”

Darby’s nose wrinkled. “I think I’d hate that,” she said. “The idea that someone was driven to commit crimes against me, and the thing that pushed them to the edge was this tiny, trivial thing. I think it’d stick with me.”

“You don’t notice so much at the time,” Melissa said absently, but with such clear authority that Darby was taken aback. “Right. This is really good work, Darby. I want you to go back over these looking for two extremes.”

“Extremes?”

“People who’ve completely disappeared off the political map since their clash, and people who’re more politically active than ever before.” Melissa looked up at her and gave her a small smile. “The most driven, and the ones who feel they’ve been robbed, are the ones most likely to pull the trigger on something like this.

“Hundreds of scientists get new jobs every year. Not many fewer lose old jobs, one way or another. But you only see one or two of them go criminal about it, and they’re always the ones who were most emotionally invested in what they lost.

“I have to figure politicians run the same way, and let’s face it, politics is something people can really get worked up about, right?”

Darby nodded. Melissa went back to her own computer, but Darby didn’t start work immediately. Instead she opened another document, and she started recording everything she’d picked up about Melissa Wilder from their conversations so far.

It was Darby’s considered opinion that nobody would talk about scientists going criminal unless they dealt with them on a regular basis. There were only two lines of work that might do that - HR officers and superheroes.

Melissa didn’t strike her as an expert on contract law, and now Darby was even more curious.

*

“Say I was interested in the bull you were peddling earlier,” her owner, a couple of hours after using her and leaving her to clear up, said to Penny. “Just hypothetically.”

She remained silent. Pushing the case the way she had earlier was something you did when you weren’t sure it was going to be well received. When your customer was selling himself on the idea, you shut up and you just let him do exactly that.

“What would be the first step here?”

“Do you want to return to where your family should be?” she asked. “If so I’m afraid we do need to play Pygmalion a little.”

“What?”

She looked at his blank incomprehension for a moment and recalibrated how to approach this. Most senators recognised that kind of reference; occasionally, though, she ran into someone with a different background, or someone who just didn’t remember names when they attached to stories instead of real people.

“We’ll need to do something with your appearance if you’re to move back into politics,” she said. “I know that’s not your ideal here, and if you want to stay behind the scenes, we can work with that.”

He frowned, chewing thoughtfully on his lower lip. “I guess,” he said. “I could just do some magic on people…”

“Not enough to show up at the Capitol without a suit,” she said gently. It didn’t feel right to contradict him; felt like she was using her words wrongly, somehow. “Remember, they’re televised. And people actually do watch C-Span.”

He shrugged. “I’m not paying for a suit.”

“I think we can arrange that,” she said smoothly, and he sighed at last, a long exhalation, breath spilling out of him for second after second before he finally drew in air again.

“Not here,” he said.

“No,” she agreed, and the shortness of her answer wasn’t quite a reproach, even if they could both hear the unspoken Any tailor would refuse to do good work for someone they met in this place.

“And not in their shop.”

“No,” she said. If you’re seen too often around that sort of thing, people will remember.

He looked up. “Your apartment, then.”

“Yes,” she agreed. When the client was thinking the way she wanted them to, the job was always easier, but when the client was also her owner, trying to steer his thought process seemed almost like betrayal.

If she didn’t know for certain she would be pushing him to a better life, she didn’t think she could do this. As it stood, it was still uncomfortable. Penny wished she wasn’t having to deal with the effects of this strange spell - but her priorities would certainly be different if it had never been used on her.

It was hard to balance these contradictory impulses.

“Arrange it,” he said, and she nodded.

“To hear is to obey.”

*

Shannon Whittaker’s mind, as she got out of the car and turned to pluck her samples from the back seat, was on the extra money that house calls paid.

This had become a bit of a reflex, whenever she was out on one; inevitably these were the worst clients to deal with. Anyone picky enough to summon a tailor to their home would always have dozens of changes to make, then realise they were a mistake, not admit it, and revert the change. Over and over and over again.

It was worse when it was a politician doing it, somehow. Probably just because they had the biggest egos in Washington; she couldn’t imagine she’d feel much differently about superstar actors if she worked in LA - but LA also had a lot more competition, and Shannon had decided, some while ago, that so long as there was money enough for luxuries and retirement she didn’t really need to work any harder than that.

She was met at the door by Penelope who received her with the usual practiced bright smile. “So good to see you again, Shannon.”

Shannon returned a smile of her own, a few notches down from the radiance of Penny’s. “Likewise, I’m sure,” she said, and ventured in. “So this has to be a new client, surely? Someone you’re keeping under wraps?”

And her curiosity about that was the other thing, along with the money, that had made her agree to the call.

Penelope’s expression went blandly unreadable, which puzzled Shannon more than a little. “Come on in,” she said, “and let’s get to work.”

She followed the other woman inside. “Let’s,” she said. It was strange, she thought, that Penny would be so cagey about the client’s identity on the phone and not spend any time, now they were face to face, extracting a promise to keep things quiet. She could be so secrecy-focused, but she seemed to have completely forgotten.

In Shannon’s experience, Penelope Rutherford didn’t forget things.

The door closed behind them and Shannon heard a clunk, one she hadn’t heard before. Had she just been locked in?

She stopped and slowly turned to face Penelope, and the other woman’s expression had changed completely. She was suddenly cold, expressionless. It looked like she’d put a mask on, but Shannon knew it was the opposite.

The mask was off.

“This is her, is it?” The voice came from behind Shannon, deeper in the house, and it belonged to a man; she whirled on the spot, suddenly nervous, and saw something she absolutely didn’t expect.

His hair was long and needed a good stylist’s attentions at the very least. He had a pec tattoo that was probably meant to be some kind of hunting hawk but was so poorly executed it looked like a bucolic chicken.

And the reason she could see his pec tattoo was he was completely naked, and semi-erect as he looked her up and down.

“Yes,” Penelope answered. Shannon turned back to face her; saw in the intentness of her expression the strange, glowing pinpricks in her eyes.

“What the fuck,” she breathed quietly. “Look,” she said. “I don’t know what this is, and I don’t really feel like I need to know…”

She tried to shove past Penny, thinking that four years of never skipping leg day might be just enough to beat that front door lock, but Penny kicked one foot out from under her, grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her down, twining around her, and for all Shannon knew she had a better fitness routine than Penny, when one of your arms is twisted behind your back and your opponent has her thighs wrapped around your own, you just don’t have much leverage.

The other figure stood over them both, and Shannon could see now he was fully erect as he looked down on their struggle.

He reached down and took her by the throat, his hand spread wide across her neck. Her eyes widened, staring up at him in horror, as he raised one finger and began to inscribe his sigil where she could see it…

*

“I’d love to help you,” Colby was saying, “but you know I can’t risk it.” Meaning, there was just too high a risk that any intervention by C.A.L.I.B.R.E. would be noted, and considered as stepping beyond their remit.

“Yeah,” Chen sighed. “I know.” But rather than say goodnight, or change the topic, or just cut the call, she fell silent and she waited.

“I know what you’re doing,” Colby told her.

“Yeah,” Chen said. “I know.” Still she waited, and as she knew would eventually happen, Colby broke first.

“Alright,” he said. “I’ve maybe got some connections I can call in. That suit you?”

“Just fine.”

“Good. I can’t promise how quickly they’ll respond, though.”

“Right now, I just need to know I have support from outside my team, because I don’t know how much of my team I can trust,” Chen said bluntly. “And I kind of hate that.”

“And you’re right to. There’s no regular mental screening?”

“Colby, C.A.L.I.B.R.E. is the only federal agency with a budget for ongoing mental screening, and let’s face it, it’s not big enough.”

He snorted, but didn’t disagree.

“So what are you sending me? ‘Retirees’ or freelancers?”

“Let me shake the phone tree before I answer that,” he said. “But it’ll be a pleasure to come to your rescue for once.”

“Twice,” she corrected him, and she couldn’t help smiling when she did.

Colby took a few moments to answer, and when he did she could hear in his tone that he was smiling too. “Sure. Twice. I’m pretty sure you’re still in the lead.”

“Damn sure of it,” she said. “Thanks, Colby. I owe you.”

*

Shannon was shaking with emotion as she dropped her suit jacket in the hallway, already rumpled and a little torn after Penny’s attempts to restrain her. She moved slowly, carefully, trying to maintain her usual precision despite her pulse thundering in her ears.

Her breathing was ragged and in spite of her better judgement, she was excited.

Penny was standing close by, watching her with a smirk, her hair drawn up in a bun which, alongside thigh-high pull-up stockings and her high heels, she somehow contrived to make seem like she was properly business dressed. The hands on each hip probably helped, as did the fact one foot was tapping impatiently.

It made Shannon feel even smaller, even more unimportant, than she now believed she actually was.

She discarded her bra and tucked a stray lock of her long hair back behind her ear, then looked across to Penny, knowing the red pinpricks she saw at the heart of her betrayer friend’s eyes were mirrored in her own.

There was a brusque nod, with no real approval to it, and the message was clear; this is fine but there’s more to be done. Shannon discarded the pants of her pantsuit, then hesitated, looking back to Penny. She was trying to make herself stand still but couldn’t, her thighs grinding needily together whenever her body idled.

The spell coursing through her had put sex right at the top of her mind, and sex with her new owner at that. But he had looked at her, and he’d smirked, and he’d said “Well, let’s see if you deserve it.”

She’d offered him anything he wanted, any deviant act, promised to furnish him with the most wonderfully tailored suit, and to the second of those he’d laughed and said “You were always going to do that.”

She couldn’t deny it, just as she couldn’t deny him, and for the same reason - he owned her; she was his property, so of course she could deny him nothing.

All the same, it rankled a little, to be discounted in the way she had been. Looking at Penny now, she thought judiciously that if he liked a little softness on his women, he’d prefer her; her curves hung a little lower, swelled a little more ripely, were a little more welcoming and inviting. Unless he was into skinny bitches…

…in which case if he ordered her to diet, she would. But she wouldn’t enjoy it.

Unless he told her to enjoy it, too.

Penny looked mildly disapproving, so Shannon wriggled out of her panties, enjoying the suddenly hungry expression on the other woman’s face when the scent of her juices was suddenly so much clearer in the room, no longer something that could be ignored.

“Good enough?” Shannon asked, a little tartness to her voice, and when Penny just smirked and flapped a hand, waving her through, she almost stalked toward the door that hid Penny’s bedroom, which was where their owner was waiting.

Shannon knew how wrong this was, but her body didn’t care, her lust didn’t care, and the spell she was under certainly didn’t care. That spell just sealed the deal; there was so little she could do about it.

*

When your entire life was covert operations, the communication devices you used tended to be custom designed and built.

In the years before their first enslavement, the Symphony had experimented with dozens of different gadgets for the woman now known as Gigi, from earpieces (sometimes still audible, if she was in vents and the acoustics betrayed her) to secured phones (which occasionally caught on things, when she was passing through tight squeezes).

As General Walters’ tools, they hadn’t needed covert communications; comms were built into the control helmets they’d all worn. It had been under their new ownership that their own minds had had enough freedom to play - and been liberated from enough embarrassment to realise - that it was easy to make sure someone got a silent message, just so long as the message was delivered somewhere sufficiently sensitive.

At least, that was their official explanation. In truth, Daisy (who had become the team’s subMistress, under Doctor Kraft, under Doctor Bimbeau) had just absorbed a number of new fetishes while their Master had visited them. Nobody was quite willing to point out to her that a vibrating comm device worn against the clit was clearly the result of a new fetish, in case Daisy believed she’d always had it.

Which seemed like a very real possibility.

She was sitting cross-legged on a rooftop, a computer open in front of her, when the heart of her new comm unit sprang to life.

Gigi had been programmed to allow no sound to escape her lips when the vibrator was triggered, and to find a quiet place to answer if she wasn’t already in one. Her eyes rolled briefly back in her head, but not a whimper escaped her lips, and the laptop was connected to her system. She keyed to answer there, and a chat window opened with a small camera view.

She’d expected it would be one of her teammates - there weren’t exactly many others who had the frequencies to find her and the access codes for a successful call - and wasn’t entirely surprised to see Daisy smiling out at her.

“Gigi! Are you in private?”

Even cross-legged her posture had immediately straightened just seeing the woman who had immediate authority over her mind. Her eyes were vacant. “Yes, Mistress,” she droned, her mind suddenly suspended halfway between emptiness and awareness.

It was surprisingly good for her missions to find herself in this space, as it left her with access to most of her mental capacity but almost none of her other streams of awareness. She would sometimes awaken from a briefing trance to find the answer to a puzzle had worked itself out, heedless of her own involvement.

“Good. Are you making progress?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“Excellent. Well,” she chuckled. “Some new information for you. Although I think it’s only going to complicate things. I just got a call from an old friend in the government…”

*

The noises coming from her bedroom told Penny that Shannon was doing exactly what their owner would want, and doing it well; fleetingly she regretted that she didn’t encourage the same level of primal growling when he used her, but all that really did was mean she had to work harder to please him in other ways.

Her owner had tasks enough for them all, after all, she they would all serve him in whatever way they best could.

And that was why, as Shannon screamed her heart out and their owner’s pounding hips made her bed thump-thump-thump against the wall, Penny was moving about the rest of her home tidying up, absentmindedly remembering with every object and item how important it had seemed when her life was still her own.

She felt the importance still, but only at a distance; in no real sense did it still matter. What mattered was the pleasure and the success of her owner, and if her body was less effective at bringing him that pleasure than Shannon’s, she would find another way to please him, because that was, now, what she was for.

Something was bothering her, all the same. Something was nagging at the corner of her thoughts. Penny tried to ignore it, assuming it was some tiny portion of herself that would fight to resist her owner. She couldn’t allow thoughts like that to take root; she might end up as resentful as her owner’s first conquest, the woman who’d discovered the spell that he’d gone on to use upon her.

Penny stopped and stared at the window of her washer-dryer. That was what she was uncomfortable about, she suddenly realised. Something about it didn’t look right.

Her mouth suddenly dry, she moved forward on tiptoes, as silent as she could be. There was no chance anyone but her owner and Shannon were in the house, and yet somehow, everything was wrong now; this little thing was off, and that meant everything was off.

She unlocked the hidden compartment and immediately frowned. Rising, she turned and walked over to the door to her bedroom, but she realised just before she knocked that her owner might not be happy to be interrupted.

She would wait, then, just as long as it took, and then she would alert him that someone had been in her apartment.

There weren’t many reasons that someone would break in not just to her place but also to her safe, and many of them probably involved her abduction, which made this a problem she needed her owner’s insight on.