The Storm in the Cell
A little more prodding and Derek would have poured the whole situation out on his own. Sophia began to play at being terrified. The change took only a few seconds. She twisted to slip his hands, and a pained sound broke out of her.
Derek never noticed anything wrong. Delighted, he ran his hands over her breasts with eyes gone bright with frenzy, a man playing with quarry already in his grip. The chains on her arms clattered and swung. The skin at her wrists was worn nearly raw, and the sting of it only cleared her head.
"Stop! You're saying Tony's dead?"
They had never been close enough for his name, but she threw the question back as if despair had her.
"Shh, Lieutenant. Why kill a spy who already talked? Wilson's dead, sure. Kept his mouth shut right to the end. So if you know something, Sophia, you tell it nice and easy. Then you get to live. Course, you'll be getting your belly full of my love while you're at it."
He ran his tongue, wet and clinging, along her ear as he talked. The coaxing was childish to the point of insult. For an instant no one else would have caught, Sophia's eyes flashed. So Wilson had been named too. But Wilson had not talked. Then Ella had not been found. Tony Brown did not know the precise shape of her tie to the rebels.
"You thought a minnow's little trick could rock the whole war? Naive Sophia."
The operation in her charge had never been a minnow's trick.
From what she could see, they had located one of the operations team's bases, taken it, and exposed only Sophia. They did not even know, in any real detail, the part she had played. Aiden Miller, head of the operations team, was safe, and so was her younger sister Ella. The operation had succeeded. Nothing had changed. The only variable was a death that would not be a clean one.
Stupid pig. She watched with cold eyes as Derek began to work her pants down. Did he imagine she would sell her body to buy a little more life? In that, he was far too much of a worthless bastard to be sitting in a company commander's chair. Of course, even this worthless bastard had been a piece of an operation planned down to the bone. Had he not been quite so stupid, it would have been difficult to lift the layout of the commemoration hall, the list of who would attend, and the fine secrets of the agents posted for the deployment.
He panted without pause as he dragged her uniform trousers down, lost his head over the black panties that showed, and yanked those down as well. Sophia waited. The moment her body was bare, Derek started tearing at his own belt in a rush. He tried to press what he had freed against her. The timing was exact.
Doesn't even know the first rule of torture.
Closing in on any part of a subject that could still move was dangerous. She was glad she could teach him the lesson herself. She snapped her head back as far as it would go, then drove the recoil home, square into the flesh above his lip and the bridge of his nose.
"Guhk!"
Derek made a strangled noise, staggered, and went down. She had even taken some of the force out of it, and still he shuddered where he lay. Blood ran from his nose. The sight was so pathetic that a nasty little laugh broke out of her.
"I'm sorry, Captain. I got too excited, and— Can you even manage it properly like that?"
She had no idea who had decided to gag her, but she judged it a serious mistake. She could not bite through her tongue, yet forming words was no great difficulty. Being able to speak was as good as being able to put a killing blow on Derek Smith.
"You— you son of a bitch..."
Sure enough, he clamped a hand over his nose and crawled backward, shaking, fumbling at the small of his back. She had marked the thing the moment he walked in. A small pistol caught the thin light along his bare body and came up level with her.
If he still could not give up toying with her, and if a shot to the leg or the arm let her bleed out around the time the rape was finished, it was not a bad trade. Sophia did not drop her mocking smile. She only stared him down.
That was when she heard a new set of combat boots. Tension hit her, and disappointment with it. A little longer and she could have died cleanly. Stupid Derek did not even register that someone was coming. He kept the gun raised and did nothing but glare.
Now. Shoot. Right now.
"Captain."
A cold, low voice cut the air. The chance was gone. The man who appeared in the cell doorway was not who she had expected. Sophia's eyes widened without a sound.
"M-Major."
Derek jolted, hitched up his shamefully lowered trousers, and rose in an awkward half-crouch. No one had expected this man. Major Louis Kane. A face too clean for a battlefield took in the cell in a single swift pass. Eyes packed with cold traveled, slowly, over the bare lower half of Sophia's body as well.
A faint shame moved through her, and she frowned, but she made no effort to cover herself. Her arms and legs were bound. Covering herself had never been possible.
"What brings you here, sir? This is the 2nd Company's jurisdiction— ghk!"
Derek, his clothes more or less in order, closed the distance and asked, but the question never finished. A heavy boot took him square in the shin. He went down and rolled again. The blow landed harder this time. He could not get up at once, and lay on the floor writhing like an insect.
"And why would this case belong to the 2nd Company. The entire division is on it."
For a man who had just dealt out violence with no preamble, Major Louis's voice was calm to the point of indifference. Sophia looked at the floor and kept her face in order. His reason for appearing in the cell was plain. He meant to interrogate the insolent traitor himself.
But why? The information can't all have leaked.
It was an unwelcome complication. Major Louis was regimental staff, sent down from the regiment itself to sit with the battalion. Once the 5th Battalion became the spearpoint of the purge against the rebels, the regiment had dispatched its own man to oversee the work and carry it out. Wartime favored competence more than any other season, and of all of them, the record that shone hardest belonged to Louis Kane. To the rebels he was a target to be removed—the first name on the list. That went without saying.
If Louis meant to question her himself, she would have to set her mind like iron. He was a trained technician, with a history of pulling information out of the mouths of rebels beyond counting. She felt cold sweat slide down her back.
"As of today, I will conduct Lieutenant Sophia Yu's interrogation myself."
"...But—!"
Derek pushed back, the pain still thick in his voice.
"If you have a complaint, take it to the Battalion Commander or the Regimental Commander yourself."
The major hauled a chair out of the corner of the interrogation room and set it hard in the center, cutting the objection off. Derek huffed as if the injustice of it were choking him, and got to his feet.
The aide who never left the major's side came in with a small table. Louis tossed a sheaf of documents onto it. Sophia's eyes ran over them fast. A yellow folder. Nothing written on the cover.
"What. You still have business here?"
Louis asked it of Derek, who had not left the cell. Derek could not keep the defiance off his face as he went out.
"I will be reporting to the higher-ups how you handled the spy today. Discipline to match will follow."
The even voice went after him. Derek spun around, his face gone hot, but the aide was already stepping out and pulling the door shut, and the exchange ended there. The aide's voice, soothing him and drawing him off, thinned and faded.
It felt as if a storm had passed through the room once and gone. The man who had been that storm stood in front of her. For a moment, silence bore down on the cell.
"You do mean to put my pants back on before the interrogation. Don't you?"