Wonder Woman: Hell in Paradise (Part 2)

IV

 

Birds of Prey

 

Black Canary and Huntress

 

 

Dinah Lance, the blonde haired Black Canary, and Helena Bartenelli, the taller, raven tressed Huntress, waited bound to the steel platforms about three feet apart.   Both women’s eyes shot baleful glances around the room, looking for a way out or someone at which to aim their fury.

 

Dinah looked at Helena. 'Well this is another fine mess,' she quipped.

 

Helena ignored the attempt at humour and glared about her. She again tested her bonds – uselessly, for she already knew they were too strong.  They had been secured in here now for the better part of an hour, and neither crime-fighter believed they had been brought here and so efficiently immobilized for any good reason.  The air in the room was stuffy and both women were sweating a little, panting a bit with the strain of trying to break their bonds.  Though she never would have admitted it out loud, Helena was glad Dinah was here with her.  Whatever happened, it was good to know that a friend was nearby.

 

Dinah was outwardly calm, but inside her guts were churning.  Unbidden, her mind kept flashing back to the previous times she had been in this situation, captured by ruthless killers. Only a few months ago the villain called Savant had captured her to use as leverage for blackmailing Oracle, in the process breaking both her lower legs.  And before that…

 

Dinah ducked mentally from the memory of the first time she had been truly helpless in the hands of a madman.  Not even a super-villain, just a thug with a penchant for inflicting pain. 

 

She had been investigating a drug smuggling operation when her contact had been murdered and she had been taken by the dealers, for questioning.  She had woken in a warehouse to find her arms tied to the upraised bars of a forklift, the black choker she had been wearing cut away and stuffed into her mouth.  It had been so ludicrous – the idiots did not even realise who they had. She was a costumed heroine that had fought beside the Justice League and the Justice Society, and in one quick fluke they had disabled her greatest asset, her patented hyper-sonic canary cry.  Gagged she was helpless to use her meta-ability to escape.  It was too absurd.

 

Her sense or irony, though, had evaporated quickly when the man with the knife cut away her skirt, and then her bra and panties.

 

She had fought back, of course – even with her hands bound she still had the use of her feet and knees.  At one point it had even looked like she might disable enough of the them to buy time to free herself.  But there had been to many of them and too few minutes – they had overwhelmed her by weight of numbers and beaten her half unconscious, leaving her hanging with her feet raised of the floor and the sheer lavender top she had been wearing as her only garment.

 

Then while the others watched, he has started torturing her.

 

It was the gag that had defeated her.  ‘Soft little moans,’ that was what the knife-man had said he wanted from her. With her mouth stuffed with the silken cloth of her choker, she had tried to scream, only to find that her own power was reflected back upon her.  As the blade began to cut the skin of her arms and legs, she had done the worst thing possible – she had panicked.  Desperate to escape the horror, she had tried to channel her power into a burst that would pierce the muffling cloth and set her free.  But her efforts had instead caused such terrible stress that her canary cry had burned itself out with a shock that had rendered her unconscious.  And the men watching had never even known – had just assumed the ‘weak woman’ they had captured had feinted from pain and fear.

 

Until, of course, they sluiced cold water over her to revive her.

 

Hanging there coughing and bleeding, the wet cloth clinging to her body and hard-peaked breasts, she had been a gift from the gods to the men allowed to stand guard over her.  And with her stoic resistance and refusal to break, a glorious challenge for the man set to question her.  This gorgeous spy would be his masterpiece, and he would paint her firm, smooth flesh as a canvas of suffering.

 

Perversely Dinah had ended up being grateful for gag in her mouth, because after an hour had passed she could no longer voluntarily suppress the need to scream.

 

The next two days had been a nightmare of torment and degradation for the feisty street-fighter.  The man with the knife would ask her questions about who she was and who sent her as a spy.  When she refused to tell him anything he wanted to hear, he had hurt her.  Mostly he had used the knife, proving quite skilled with it, able to cut her so that she felt maximum pain without suffering a mortal or debilitating wound. Sometimes he would take a pause from the cutting and beat her with rubber hose, loud enough so that the sound of the improvised weapon hitting her had echoed around the empty space. Dinah was used to taking a punch, but the length of hose had soon had her grunting in pain as it marked her belly and legs with vivid welts and bruises.  She had tried to protect herself with her legs but he just smashed the hose against her back and sides until her strength failed and her lovely legs fell back down towards the floor.

 

He hit her hard enough to make her sway gently. Her body glowed with perspiration under the electric lights.   Sometimes he would make it curl up between her legs and the men would laugh as she gargled in agony and bucked wildly.  When he used it on her ripe breasts, she had thrown back her head and moaned like the most wanton whore as the tender meat was pummelled black and blue.

 

Dinah had lost track of how many times she had passed out, only to be revived and tortured again.  The hours of suffering had blurred into a nightmare haze of red anguish, broken up by short spaces where the man refreshed himself, or paused to pee or jerk off while she hung shivering from cold and fatigue. Then he would make the overture of asking her questions again, before the aching torment of the previous abuse gave way to the fresh hell of the new.

 

When she had first realised she could not escape unaided, Dinah had prayed her lover Green Arrow would find her. By the end of the first day of captivity, Dinah was praying she would die before he saw what these men had done to her.

 

She tried to die. 

 

She had goaded him, her torturer, baited him.  Sworn at him, the ‘fucking limp-dicked cunt’ who was hurting her.  If she could get him angry enough his knife hand might slip, might cut and artery of pierce a vital organ that would end her nightmare.  But he had only smiled and then gone back to slowly and methodically making her scream.  Her blue eyes were wet with tears than ran down over her face like salty diamonds, filling her with shame.  He was in no hurry – she would tell him everything he wanted to know, and then, yes she would die.  But not quickly – slowly.  As slowly as he knew how to make it. Maybe if she begged he would end it for her, but he didn’t expect her to beg. 

 

She knew it was what he loved most about her.

 

Cutting her, cutting her.  Blood running down over her thighs and dripping on the concrete floor.  Blood spilling down the cuts on her belly and dripping down between her legs, warm and sticky.  It ran in little streams down her arms and traced the outline of her breasts.  He didn’t slice her tits, just pricked them, taking the soft globes in his hands and stabbing them with shallow pricks of the knife point, working the invading point back and forth. Smiling like a happy child and listening to her whimpering and cursing, looking up at her face pinched with hurt, lips twisted or pressed tight together to muffle the sounds she knew he loved to hear from her.

 

Two days.  The pain and her suspension kept her from sleeping.  His excitement did the same for him.

 

Hanging from her bonds, one eye so swollen it was closed shut, her lips spit and bleeding, she had felt the knife edge down to her groin, the razor sharp edge gliding over the lips of her womanhood, shaving her roughly.  He had enjoyed her more than any woman he had had in this position, but his masters were growing impatient.  He had saved the best for last, but how the cold metal was prying apart the pouting slit between her legs, probing inside.  A shiver from her and the edge nicked the pink lips behind her labia, making her gasp.  He was going to carve her sex with terrible patience, exquisite sadism.  She heard him offering to end it with one gutting stroke, or make it last through days of endless howling agony.  She felt the blade sliding in and out of her pussy slit and the point twirling back and forth as it was nudging her clitoris. Dinah had never been more terrified than that moment, knowing the pain her could make her feel before the life went out of her mutilated body.

 

‘Go…to hell,’ she had gasped.  And hoped that she could die before he made her plead for it.

 

And them, the sound of a bowstring, the wet thud of metal cleaving meat, and the arrow emerging like magic from his chest, dripping with his hearts blood.  He had fallen still holding the bloodstained knife and staring at the arrow sticking out of him, as if he could not believe he could be cheated of his ultimate moment.

 

As she had been cheated of her vengeance.

 

It had taken a long time for Dinah to get over that – that she would never be able to make the man who had tortured her suffer as she had suffered.  Months of therapy, years of wondering whether tonight she would sleep though til morning or wake up screaming as she again felt the knife opening scarlet channels in her naked body.

 

She looked over at Helena again, and recognized the fear on those flashing eyes.  Others might have only seen the anger and the grim determination, but Dinah knew.

 

‘Huntress,’ she said softly.  The very softness in her voice was what made Helena turn to look at her. She saw the cold calm in the blonde’s eyes and her own face relaxed just a little.  She was brave, but she was smart too.  She would not loose control easily, but Dinah had to be sure.

 

‘This is going to be bad,’ Dinah said without expression.  She forced herself to breath slowly and evenly, and smiled inwardly as she saw the younger woman start to do the same.  That’s my girl.  ‘This is going to be bad,’ she said again.

 

Helena looked at her, setting her jaw and nodding tightly.  She was enough of a fighter that she knew how to accept pain. Or thinks she does, Dinah thought, trying not to despair.

 

‘We don’t panic,’ Dinah said evenly.  ‘We joke, we swear.  When it gets too bad, we scream. But we do not panic. They can make us scream if the want to…’

 

‘Speak for yourself,’ Helena spat, then looked away.  Barbara had told her the rough details of what had been done to her in that warehouse. 

 

‘Huntress,’ Dinah repeated, and met the Italian born beauties gaze as she lifted her head.  ‘They can make us scream, but that doesn’t mean anything.  The only thing that matters is that we don’t give in to the fear’.  She titled her head, looking at the caped woman strapped to the platform in front of her with eyes cold as ice. ‘Fear is what will kill us, if we let it.’

 

Huntress met that look with one of her own, nodding again.  ‘You remember when Savant had your legs broken and you were lying on the floor behind me, and I told him and his pet Spetsnaz* that they’d have to go through me to get to you?’

 

Dinah nodded.

 

‘I just wanted you to know, if I’d known that decision would bring us here,’ she said with a little smile, ‘then I’d have jumped out the damn window.’

 

 Black Canary felt her own smile tugging the corners of her mouth.

 

 

*elite Russian special forces