“Are you sure this is the route you want to take with all of this? Because there isn’t any going back after we-” 

He casually motioned towards the detectives strewn across the other side of the table like sections of a discarded newspaper already read. He spoke more into the perfectly creased, flat fronted lap of his perennial tailored fit Havanasuit more than directly to his client, whose eyes had already unnerved him at every step forward they’d made in this. 

That he’d volunteered to help had been brazen enough. Had flown in the face of everything his peers had seen and known of him up to that point. Any plays at biting the hands that had fed him were anathema to his public profile. 

A career-ender, anyone with sense superseded by business acumen had sniffed upon hearing of what he’d thrown himself into. Everything swaddling him in the comfort of his day to day life that he’d busted his ass for screamed all of it would be a catastrophe.

The “lost cause” they’d all sneered his client was had actually been the opposite of what he’d seen burning in her eyes, a light that reminded him of MC.

MC Megan, who’d graduated Magna cum Laude, beat all kinds of ass to graduate early from the most prestigious law school in the nation and then elbowed her way into the respected upper reaches of one of the top law firms on the planet. The noses she’d broken on the way had made her little brother proud.

None of the heights she’d slammed her way up into had saved her from the mindfuck roosting in the aftermath of waking up at twelve to find the sorry excuse for a boyfriend their newly divorced, doing everything in her power to be a dumb hippie mom had unofficially allowed to move in, on her. It had never been the actuality of the assault that had eaten away at her under the surface of all of her relentless success. The first guy nose she’d broken had been his, when he’d tried again. It’d been pulling herself up from the depths their selfish, sick mom had gone to gaslighting her daughter into almost believing she’d done it to herself, the rape. Had tempted him… that he just couldn’t resist the lure of her budding, darkly powerful, witchy femininity. Whispered into her own child’s defiled ears just so she could keep him around so She wouldn’t “look” alone. And vulnerable.

The first female face she’d finally cracked was their mother’s. After she’d tried to take over the celebration dinner MC had thrown for getting into her desired college. She’d never talked to her again after that. And he hadn’t blamed her. Their mom was a cunt. But the last one she’d broken had been her own when she’d flung herself off the balcony of some fancy hotel in London, hollow again on the tail end of some gigantic corporate victory. 

His guardian angel Megan’s face bloomed in front of his down-turned head and his jaw, mind and fists set. 

He looked up at Beatrice Belle Malone.

Their eyes locked, molten fire to steel. 

“Are you ready?” he asked. 

She nodded. 

---

He began.

“Have you watched the-”

“How did you even acquire-” the female detective gruffly interjected.

“DO. NOT. Interrupt me…when I am speaking on behalf of my client-” his voice dropped with each syllable in opposition to the detectives brow almost shooting off of her face in shock.

“Okay-okay-” her partner broke in before any more words come fumble out of her mouth.

“Look, I am here for her!” The female detective snapped. She glared pointedly at the men in the room like she was the penultimate victim present and would demand until her dying breath to be treated as such. 

“Mara, come on!” Detective Ben Jacobs muttered, long over her performative protective female ally bullshit that he had to work around and through every grating day for the last five years. He massaged his temples, already seeing the clusterfuck she was keyed up to make all of this.

Bea chuckled softly over the allyship so graciously on offer. She leaned back in the designed to be uncomfortable chair like it was a luxurious divan, looked up at and through Detective Mara like she was a book she’d been forced to read for her own safety.

“Did you even read the case file, Mara?” Beatrice asked evenly.

“What? Did I -of course I- I mean what is there to-” Detective Goff, “Frankly, unfortunately, it’s a tale as old as-”

Beatrice laughed out loud as her lawyer Eric Moreman looked at the detective like she was an idiot. 

“Ya know what, Mara? Give it a rest for a minute-” Detective Jacobs snapped authoratatively.

“But~!” she whinnied.

“Prosciutto!” he growled the safe word they’d both recently agreed to in counseling to stop him from rightfully roaring Shut the Fuck UP, Mara! when she needed to, like things had devolved to on a multitude of cases that had been flagged for review. 

The admonishment hit her unnecessarily inflamed forehead like an icecube and plopped down into her lap as she fell silent. She’d already lost two weeks of the agreed to pay for rolling past said stop word for the last three pay periods and couldn’t afford hitting her quotas to mean nothing one more month in a row.

Detective Jacobs took a breath and began everything again.

“Ms. Malone. I have poured over your file…and,” he turned to address her lawyer respectfully, “Mr. Moreman , I just got to see the video footage you turned over that had been forwarded to your offices without any indication of from whom, fully understanding your client has yet to-”

“None of which will be admissible due to-” Detective Mara muttered under her breath. An alarm blared in the room that startled everyone in the room but Mara, who cursed under her breath and sunk deeper into her seat.

Detective Jacobs unflinchingly glared at his partner flailing on thin ice breaking under her, daring her, then turned back to the victim. He noted the bemused yet sincere smile dancing under all the fire in her face. “Beatrice, what would you have us do with all of this?” he slid the tablet he’d walked in with across the table.

She tapped play and the admission of guilt that corroborated her initial complaint filled the room. She shot a look of momentary disbelief at Eric Moreman who smiled triumphantly at his client and mouthed the only words she needed to see more than hear in all of this.

“We got’em if we want’em, bea.” 

Bea looked away in soft shock, bright tears brimming on rims of her lids.

Detective Mara came out of silently licking her own wounds in response to the atmospheric shift in the routinely effectively oppressive space as Bea pushed her chair away from the table and began pacing the room.

“She befriended me,” Bea laughed to no one in particular. “Yeah, I should’ve known, considering how I’d grown up and who around. Had “seen,” been seen as, you know?” she whispered. “And in all that I’d seen it all- so much so that by the time shit was trying to reload yet a-fucking-gain, I was numb to the particulars of all of it.” she paused.

“But her? Totally blindsided- never saw it coming. I thought she liked me, we’d do sheet facials together and shit- after a while I thought she was coming on to me– for me, you know? She’d been fluid that way until …but nope! She was just trying to re-tangle me in all the chaotic shit I’d spent my fucking twenties cutting my self the fuck out of with him, after-” Bea snarled.

“I was high, thinking I was safe with her, that this fuck I’d wasted my life trying to prove to myself I wasn’t harmed by, that I’d wasted years proving to myself I wasn’t a coward by defiantly staying in the circle of anyway, outright refusing to be a victim…believing my mom’s bullshit excuses for Not protecting-”

Bea stopped and centered herself. “Believing I was any safer with any bitch drawn into his sick light than I’d been with the one who’d fucking reared me in the shadows of it… was my fault. I SHOULD have KNOWN BETTER.”

This fucking chick- I truly believed liked me for me, and wasn’t like all the fucking “men” in this town from the day they wake up realizing they have a fucking dick – She seduced me, plied me with alcohol, knowing what I WAS ON, PLUS WHAT… I’d taken, trying to loosen me up. She claimed he was out of town-” she scoffed.

“I came to with her between my legs and him in my mouth and… “ her voice faltered, “something in me died. Because I knew him, knew it’d be the same kind of hell it’d been the last time getting his grimy, tobacco-tinged hands off of me. Everything I’d first felt when he’d… touched me at fourteen flooded back into me and …as soon as I got away from them I tried to kill myself. Again-” 

She smiled ruefully. “Didn’t work,of course. Or I wouldn’t be here.” she bit her lip. “So I had to think fast, move quick, you know? Play it off like all was cool and just get and stay the fuck outta dodge, as often as I could-”

---

A shudder passed through her as she sat back down. “They were fucking relentless too. Nevermind my mom giving me that sickly, fucking syrupy smile, all “up to ole tricks again, I hear” wink-wink, nudge-nudge bullshit of hers. No survival instinct embedded in that bitch for her offspring at all!

“I was like “Yeah! He is!!” all pointedly, but it glided over her empty fucking head, as usual.” Bea muttered.

“Incessantly trying to get me alone, together, then one on one… I kept making excuses, casually refusing, hanging out with friends my age that’d always been rightly creeped out by him without ever knowing what he’d done to me-“

“I kept blaming logistics, you know? Never addressing the…the fucking assault for what it was-” her fists curled up into tiny, angry balls, her throat on fire from having said the quiet part aloud. Eric Moreman shot a hand forward to steady his client.

“She KNEW what he’d done. Explicitly. There was NO fucking gray area. Not just from him and whatever he’d told her, or whatever the smoke blown up my mother’s ass was making her say, hedging her fucking bets …she knew it from me- From my fucking mouth, All of it! All the shit I’d ended up doing to others, to myself in the tailspin his fucking my underage ass tossed me into. Knew the pit I’d climbed out of. That I’d flung myself into in lieu of fucking killing myself again and again after the times I’d tried that had failed me before too, fucking left me here.” she stopped again.

“And she set me up. She’d lied. Outright. Said he was out of town, knew what I’d taken wouldn’t mix well with booze…and let him climb on me while I was damned near dead to the world. When it finally became obvious I was avoiding being alone with either of them, she casually dropped the bomb-”

Eric Moreman interjected “The video clip she texted my client of the three of them- which was really the two of them cavorting with an obviously inebriated her- was not reminiscing. It was a threat.” he said simply.

“They taped it, then, when she made it clear this was a mistake, and not the beginning of the re-instatement of the running gag of happy endings he’d ruined her teens demanding of her…sent it to her like a ransom of some-”

The blood that had drained from detective Mara’s faced throughout the arduous recap Bea had just put herself through now knowing this was about to be over flooded back up to her cheeks. She was embarrassed because she’d skimmed over all of that in the file.

“I still said No. Fuck no. No interest, come the fuck on.” Bea snapped. “Then my fucking mom…kept bemoaning I come to this and that shindig they were, whatever, whingeing there’d be loads of people present, that if I didn’t make at least an appearance like the last time, it’d be weird, and they’d press her, and how I knew she couldn’t take it, blah blah-” Bea hissed with disgust but then weirdly softened.

“But I went. And he started finding ways to pretty much corner me, outright asking for it. & I’m glad I did. I got to say no to his face. See the shock, then the fake incomprehension fade to what was really under it. My presence started to torment him the way it should have the whole time in light of what he’d done to me as a kid.

“For the longest time I didn’t even put two and two together about how every time I rejected him he’d go back spiraling into bitching and moaning about some writer chick he’d called a groupie, some bitch who’d awakened to the …folly of her misplaced “par asocial affections” for him or whatever soon as she saw him sync up with the bitch who went on to set me up so the grown-assed man who’d made me go down on him as a kid now had video fucking proof of my being a willing participant as an adult just in case…”

“He started harassing her in direct relation to my refusing his ass-” Bea snorted softly. “Eyeing me as he did it, as he bitched and bragged about having her computers key logged and accounts hacked into.”

“In case she was speaking badly- or worse, writing about him.” He’d openly stare at me as he said the shit, making sure I got the threat he was broadcasting Just for me~” she sniffed. “And every other person present would just look away.”

---

“High irony that it’d turned out she was so good at paying him no mind, no matter the fucked shit he tried to rain down on her, or kick off to harm her as she pursued her life sans any deference towards him whatsoever.”

“But Highest irony? Her fucking books were all about adult survivors of all kinds of child abuse, growing up, circling back and offing their abusers-”Bea chuckled, “and their enablers.”

“Oh! And that she had, on her way out of orbit of the fucking DeathStar, had locked eyes with Francis and…they got all…oddly… wildly …appreciative of one another- Telling you, after a while I was solely staying around to watch all that making him spin on a spit like the fucking pig he-”

“Look! This is all- horrid-but we can’t USE any-” Detective Mara snapped in frustration.

“Enough! That’s it! DOCKED! Get her the fuck out of here!” Detective Jacobs yelled at the ceiling. The door to the room sprang open and Detective Mara stormed out of it in a futile rage.

---

One of the Detectives who’d watched the footage on the tablet with Jacobs and had been listening on the far side of the two way glass respectfully waited at the doorjamb to be officially waved in.

Detective Jacobs watched Bea size him up and rest her eyes back on him. 

“He’s a good guy.” Jacobs intimated. “He’s got daughters too-”

“And a sister. And a facking mom.” Detective Buster Potts offered. “This fucking guy is not expecting a string up over this shit because guys like them and the bottom bitch Bettys they put in place never do~”

Bea looked back at him with fresh curiosity beaming out of her eyes. “ What is a-” she started.

Potts took it as his cue, stepped all the way in the room and strode across the floor to the still warm from Detective Mara’s fumbled from having no female friends nor affinity for other chicks in real life allyship seat and made a grand gesture towards it.

“May I?” he asked politely.

Bea leaned back in her chair and murmured “please~”

“A bottom bitch~” Detective Potts began, “Is a bottom feeder chick, often dressed up to the nines and positioned as if she is of epic importance and worth… to the scumbags they service. Their entire reason to you know uh~ be… is to help frame up the helpless damsels their wannabe pimp boyfriends want forced into service within his rag-tag harem-”

Bea wrinkled her nose, pondering it.

“It’s from the olden times,” Potts murmured, “The seventies. It’s streetspeak, pimps and prostitutes.”

“There’s some dank dumb dude at the top of every pile …but it’s always a gaggle of feckless females thinking they are better than their ‘brethren” keeping the whole thing running- they’ve procurers of new talent, gaslighters of any awakenings, finders of weak spots to leverage- comforters after he’s attacked some chick,getting the victim to take the blame for it…” Potts sighed. “Just real dirty, weakminded workhorses, these hoes enabling these fucks- who are usually fags, like 9 out of ten times anyways-”

Potts paused, feeling Jacobs eyes on him as he flowed, appreciative of the rhapsodic pagentry proceeding from Potts lips as he always was. “The misogyny shared between a pimp and a bottom bitch is the purest, most honest thing these motherfuckers ever have going for them- ” Potts blushed a bit, wondering if he’d gone too far. “Umm- Excuse my french?”

“No excuses needed,” Bea muttered. “You’re giving me a rubric I can use to make sense of this- Please continue-”

Potts looked at Jacobs for permission, got the nod of approval, looked up at the ceiling and called out “Can I be frank?”

“No, Bob, be yourself-” Frank called out across the intercom, snickering. “But you heard the lady, please continue.”

“Your…case may seem on the surface to …not have anything to do with all this alleyway Pimpage and Prostitution verbiage~ but people pick Pimps and whores up and instill them in the Hills of this town all the time,” Potts said plainly. “It’s the unseen engine of this crazy town.”

“You’d be surprised-” Jacobs murmured.

“Not these two, I can tell looking at’em” Potts chuckled. “ The titles may be new but I can tell you both know exactly what this is that you’re wanting to fight back against , don’t you?”

Bea and Eric looked at one another and shook their heads.

“Look- times have changed,” Jacobs added. “I mean, there’s enough admission here to get what we need to go forward, DA-wise, but we’ll be fighting tooth and nail every step of the way with the letter of the law that was written when shit like this wasn’t even conceptually possible.”

“Which we’re here for,” Potts clarified. “This shit is getting fucking ridiculous out there with these fucking predators.”

“But…especially with this latest little shall we say cache of -as the lovely but always utterly out of pocket and wrong Detective Mara indignantly crowed-inadmissible – evidence , I am here to echo the question my superior asked of you once You had seen what your lawyer wanted you to see first here, with us- which was very wise, mind you, Mr. Moreman-” Potts nodded to Moreman.

” Beatrice…what would you have us do with all of this?

“We can go down the roads open to us and get in to some good trouble doing some classic damage this fucker’s going be outfitted to go into full spin control mode against.” Jacobs muttered.

“But there’s a lot more dicey shit you to can get up to with us standing at the ready to corroborate whatever road you’d like to take,” Potts intimated. “The carnage you can create here going from Victim to Victor is going to be more potent than anything we can get up to within the confines of the system.”

“So… Do You want damage, Ms. Malone? Or motherfuckin’ Carnage?” Eric Moreman asked plainly, feeling the spirit of his big sister Meg stand strong in the room in solidarity with whatever call Beatrice made, like the shark she once was that shit akin to this had snuffed out.

“We can also just let the chips fall where they may, seeing as though I still have no fucking idea where the video came from. There’s a lot of disgruntled moving parts in this shit, from what we know so far, none of them moving in his favor.”

“That IS a wildcard in all of this,” Potts agreed. “We may not be the only parties in possession of this, any more than you possibly already are not the only person in possession of the threat sex-text footage.”

“Plus the fucking bear of a “string up all sex offenders” writer chick he keeps poking,” Jacobs counted on his fingers.

“Though something tells me, from that inadmissible video on that tab that…whatever compels her to write what she writes in the first place…has probably only pulled her punches and kept her peace regarding all this mess- with an assist from that Francis dude, of course…possibly due to sensing you still being in the midst of this, Beatrice.” Potts points out.

“She very well may see all of this as a story you’re supposed to tell,and end, no matter how much he keeps trying to force her into being who does what needs to be done-” Moreman added.

“Like he thinks he can get you to cower in shame at her saying anything on it, like he’s not the Fucker in all of this that should be ashamed. The true threat of aggravating her is forcing her to out you… trying to make her be a flying monkey triggering your trauma anew so you will burrow into complacency . He’s betting on the victimization of you keeping your mouth shut since the support system you have is maintained by women beholden to him.”

“If he can spin her standing up for herself to make him stop harassing her as an attack against You to the “family,” you’d be effectively cooked, and he’d be abusing you all over again. Which’d explain why he glares at you when he brags about harassing her, and why he’s so fucking livid each time she pays him no mind.”

“Which is kinda honorable of her, considering how much this fuck seems intent on riding her ass. he’s obviously trying to back her into a wall with his machiavellian shit. But…in the end-“

“The same way you already get- his continual harassing of her is threatening you too..KNOW that he probably already has your shit keylogged up as much as hers.”

“Her pause underscores the call really is yours.” Frank added over the intercom. “But clearly, the fuck’s not gonna stop until someone makes him stop. One way or another.”

Beatrice Malone sat back in the chair, invigorated enough in the present moment to feel how uncomfortable the chair was for the very first time. That the discomfort registered made her eyes water…because it meant she finally wasn’t numb.

She sat in silence….thinking about which road she really wanted to travel.

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