Archive of Our Own ^beta

Viola never had a funeral for her; she barely grieved the death of her identical twin. Her older sister— by six whole minutes, she would always say— is lost in a refuse pile or scattered at the bottom of an old furnace somewhere. She didn't have time to think about the way the math didn't work out in her head: an algebraic fallacy, indivisible. How it didn't line up with the new, hollow sensation in her body that two minus one should leave something after subtraction; that two minus one should not equal zero.

She comes up short when her mind skitters at the fringes of this conclusion, nauseous and panicked. She circles back around the zero, looping the infinite goose egg, like Snow White staring in the magic mirror and finding no reflection to answer her. But the math could wait: revenge came first.

Getting shitfaced and trying to jump off the fortieth story of 3 Count came second.

"This is a waste of time and money," Viola mutters, forehead pressed against the tinted window of the purple Blade. The hangover throbs behind her eyes and in her stomach, dehydrated nausea and exhaustion swirling around in a murky grey mess. Black eyeliner smudges beneath her lashes, her mascara long since wept away, and she is shamefully and uncharacteristically disheveled in public view.

"Bold words coming from someone who tried to unalive herself last night," says Pink Boss. She doesn't look up from plucking at a child's kalimba in her lap, pale pink hair obscuring her furrowed brow, drawn in extreme concentration.

They recounted the story to Viola, the three of them unusually somber. She said she couldn't remember it, but her muscles ache from sobbing and lashing out at the three of them, all the split lips and broken nails. The back of her eyelids remember the white-hot frustration when they restrained her, bruising her arms, and the simmering agony when they pulled her back and embraced her instead.

It is impossible to describe to them how, in the instant she climbed over the railing, hem of her red cocktail dress whipping in the wind, the zero solidified in her mind, a perfect target, a place to land. There was nothing but the solitary moment of her sister's death, the sound of her neck breaking, and the nothingness of Viola left in her wake.

In the driver's seat, Shark Boss bobs his buzzcut to the dreadful kalimba melody. "Nice. Jock Jams."

"It's Get Ready For This," Shaundi snaps from the backseat beside her. "Jock Jams is an album."

Shaundi frowns and sits with her arms and legs crossed, sunglasses down, body language decidedly closed off to argument. She remains distinctly less invested in Viola DeWynter's grief recovery therapy and abundantly more troubled by how the bottom line will be affected by the loss of their key financial advisor. Length of unexpected sabbatical to be determined.

Viola closes her eyes, suppressing the urge to vomit with what remains of her willpower. Kiki would never forgive her for what she tried last night.

"Hang on," says Shark. He digs through the pockets of his leather pants— the same ones he wore last night, except now he's shirtless because he's always fucking shirtless, Viola thinks, showing off that god damn shark jaw tattoo that spans the length of his scarred torso so ostentatiously she'd roll her eyes if it didn't hurt— until he finds his phone. He scrolls, one hand on the wheel. "Fourteen or eight?"

"Jesus Christ. Watch the road," Shaundi mutters.

Pink's thumbs stop playing, lips pursed in thought. "Eight today. It just feels right."

"Eight fucks," Shark agrees.

"Eyes on the fucking road!" Shaundi shrieks, nails digging into Shark's headrest as he casually swerves around a pedestrian, slamming them all to the left, still perusing his music library. The opening line of Bootylicious thrums in the car.

Viola clamps a hand over her mouth, wincing as she swallows her own pooling spit. NOW That's What I Call Music 8 scrolls in neon green across the front dash screen, further reassuring her that it would have been kinder to just let her die.

They bring her to Kinzie Kensington for three reasons. The first is that Kinzie is free, financially speaking. She desires no payment, only the answer to a few questions she already knows— she's undoubtedly got Viola's dossier encrypted on her computer, a lifetime of work simplified to tidy forms and summaries— and access to a few more Saints she can use as runners. Kinzie has eyes across the world, but sometimes a reclusive hacker needs hands and bullets too.

The second is that Kinzie is free socially. She doesn't leave her crib, a massive, austere warehouse that looks like a Japanese mech shit itself inside, except on rare occasions to pick up food from Smiling Jack's or go to Safeword for a fun night of god knows what. Not that it matters much to Viola. She has no intention of spending any amount of time with her new chaperone, particularly at the sex club where she's spotted her numerous nights before. Though Safeword itself was still enjoyable enough under the Saints' control: clean and disciplined and friendly without reeking of desperation. She'd been to worse. She'd owned worse.

The third, one they all agreed upon immediately following the spectacle of last night, is that under no circumstances can Viola be left alone.

So she stands at the closest thing to a front door the warehouse has, duffle bag scraping against the concrete stairs. The noonday sun beats down on her pale skin, burning her shoulders where her night shirt slips away. The Saints didn't even let her get dressed. They swarmed the penthouse she used to share with Kiki, packed for her, as they locked her in a room with the Bosses at 3 Count. They turned their backs as she sobbed, drunk and inconsolable and too proud to admit or explain anything, too miserable to find solace in kind words. She slouches, cheeks pinkening above her ghostly hangover pallor. The combination of the ocean brine and smog outside of Kinzie's hideout threatens her stomach.

A speaker beside the door crackles to life, and a tinny voice drifts out, "Password?"

"Fuck you," groans Viola. A stray cat jumps from one level of the rickety fire escape on the side of the building to another, mocking her with its dexterity and liveliness.

"It's mint!" shouts Pink, dangling from the passenger side window.

"Like gum," Shark helpfully adds, shoving past her and wedging them both in place. "Or the color."

"Are they seriously yelling that right now?" the radio voice bemoans in a youthful soprano whine. "I swear I have to change it twice a week when they do shit like this—"

"Mint," Viola snipes. "Open the god damn door."

The radio crinkles with static as a lock unlatches, and Viola takes her chances in the warehouse where shitty music compilations from the early aughts can't haunt her. She ignores the shouted goodbyes from the Saints— not Shaundi, who is pointedly staring out the opposite window— and emphatically slams the door closed, wincing at the sound. This whole ordeal is a tragic chapter in her life and she'd rather get this banishment over with so she can get back to work.

"Just keep walking," a speaker pierces her ears overhead, ringing with feedback. "You'll see some stairs. Go to the second floor. Watch the wires."

The barren Salander warehouse would be a house flipper's dream: brimming with sharp angles and industrial concrete backdrops perfect for modern art installations. With a few hardwood floors and an interesting overhead light fixture, this place could sell for a few million. Tired blue eyes skim the sealed-up windows, perusing the cardboard and newspaper with distaste. As it stands the warehouse is a shithole, but it doesn't offer her potentially dangerous high-rise temptation like her own tenth-story penthouse does. The Saints made it clear she's to stay grounded for the foreseeable future, and she said nothing in reply, cheeks burning red.

The deeper inside she travels the darker it gets until she hears a repetitive, pounding bassline violently bouncing off of metal and stone. Viola scowls at the trashy synths. Club music is for the club.

Kinzie's massive second story living space is the thesis to her theme of could-be-good-but-isn't. Shredded newspapers unfurl where they're haphazardly taped to the walls, dark and cold, and the redhead sits at a metal picnic table, computers and phones strewn about in front of her like a mountain of casino chips. Countless screens glow behind her, a thousand different scenes of CCTV and looped footage of the Saints and Morningstars and Deckers, flickering and humming with static as they cast a cobalt halo around her head.

"Hey," says Kinzie, voice raised over the music. "Uh, take a seat."

The options appear to be a purple and black gaming chair in front of yet another computer, the other side of the unforgiving picnic table, or a beige sofa that looks like it was picked up from the side of the interstate in 1989. Viola selects the sofa: at least she might be able to sleep on it. Her headache pounds as the EDM blares like a giant's heartbeat, and a complaint burns in her dry throat before she can expound on anything about her presence.

"Can you turn that off?"

Kinzie peers over her laptop screen, glasses reflecting the pale light and obscuring her eyes. She taps two keys with rapid precision and the volume lowers.

"I said off," Viola repeats.

Kinzie's lip twitches, "I don't like it when it's quiet." Viola never expected delicacy or discretion from the Saints— they wouldn't know how to walk on eggshells if they tried— but Kinzie particularly is like a bull in a China shop.

"Then wear headphones." She points at some heavy black ones in a pile across the room, tangled in a techie graveyard with what appears to be a Walkman and a CB radio.

"Then it's too loud."

"Then adjust the volume!" Viola rises from her slouch on the threadbare sofa, black hair falling in her face. "Understand that your job right now is to keep me from killing myself, and this glitch mob bullshit makes me want to eat lead."

"First of all, that is not my job. I'm doing them and you a favor. Second of all, you wouldn't."

Viola squints, honed in on the pale blue eyes that dare her. With a defeated huff, she mutters, "You're fucking terrible at this."

Kinzie slumps her shoulders and hits two more keys. The speakers die and she sighs. "I know. I told them so. People aren't my strong suit."

The heavy purple sweatshirt swallows Kinzie up where she hunches, guiltily chewing her lips. There are a lot of compliments one could pay Viola, but her people skills don't rank on that list either. Politeness and eloquence are not at all the same as empathy or sincerity. Never known for her patience or understanding except at the negotiation table, she was considered rigid and unrelenting, too busy to wait for someone to ramp up to her speed, quick to nitpick and sever all ties.

When Viola was eighteen she dumped a girl for being three minutes late to their date at some pizza parlor— a health code violating grease trap, Kiki disdainfully labeled it— and two months later, while on a park-stroll-and-ice-cream date with a coed from her freshman seminar— how banal, drawled Kiki— she tossed her cone in the trash and called it an early night because the way she chewed chocolate chips was disgusting. She and her sister took leadership and management classes at Harvard, focused on bullshit concepts like driving team performance and strategy execution— all wastes of time, except for the negotiation bits, which were easy enough to leverage— and they hated every second of them, waiting to get back to the finance and accounting and numbers because those were concepts far more real than any person outside of them would ever be.

But the Saints aren't going to let her leave, and if she's being honest with herself, she shouldn't be alone. She's never been alone.

Folding her arms, her face remains impassive. She won't reassure her or offer her excuses: Viola DeWynter is a not a liar and Kinzie Kensington is bad with people. But she sighs out, "I'm just tired."

Kinzie perks up at once, alive with a code to crack and a problem that's suddenly solvable. Her fingers twist among themselves, mindlessly fidgeting as she presses and rubs her nails and knuckles, tracing her own tendons. Eventually she points to a closed steel door and says, "You can have the bedroom. I don't sleep much. I just crash here or on the sofa."

"Okay," Viola mumbles. She shuffles away with her bag, feet dragging with exhaustion. She barely takes in the sight of the room before she burrows into the unmade bed, curls into a tight ball beneath the comforter, and falls into a heavy slumber.

It's dark when she wakes, jolting up with a start, eyes wide in the unfamiliar room. A stack of milk crates beside her functions as a dilapidated bedside table with a power strip on it, a phone charger, a half-finished motherboard, and a soldering iron, no lamp to be seen. More newspaper cutouts line the wall above the bed in lieu of a headboard, all of these about the Deckers and their various exploits. Stacks of clothes and paper litter the floors, wrapped in the ever-present wires that trail Kinzie's every step. A loaded AS3 Ultimax shotgun— STAG issue, undoubtedly stolen— leans beside the bed for easy access.

She stretches, groaning at her lingering hangover, tugging the fallen sleeve of her loose t-shirt back over her shoulder. The bathroom door is open, and it's simple enough for Kinzie's purposes: a toilet, sink, combination shower and bathtub. Even in the dark, she can see enough of the plain white cabinets to loathe their shape and color, all tasteless and dreary. She knows little of Kensington but knows that she's opinionated, sassy and irreverent. A woman like her needs better cabinets.

With a sigh Viola emerges from the bed, quietly padding into the large space outside— it's a living room slash study if she had to pick a label, also hideous— feet cold on the concrete floor, and Kinzie's there at her metal picnic table, right where she left her, heavy black headphones framing her head like koala ears.

"Your room's a mess," Viola mumbles to her back.

Kinzie doesn't respond, her pounding EDM music or show or hacked government radar chatter too loud in her ears, so Viola sighs again, meandering to the kitchen. It, like the rest of Kinzie's house, is a model of wasted potential. Good bones with awful decorative choices and a healthy layer of dust. The refrigerator is almost entirely empty, and there appears to be a single clean glass on the shelves beside her, which she steals at once, gulping tap water like she's dying of thirst, and maybe she is. After downing two more cups she blinks away her bleariness, arms crossed as a perfectly manicured red nail taps at the empty glass. She could start with the kitchen, knowing well she won't fall asleep that night. She peers beneath the sink and in the pantry, searching for cleaning supplies that clearly don't exist in this house. Not a single bottle of bright blue Windex to be found.

Cleaning was always her job. Kiki cooks, Viola cleans, and the whole arrangement is mutually beneficial, efficient and easy. Homemade lasagna was her favorite: a special, time-consuming treat that guaranteed a huge mess entirely worth the mountains of errant flour she'd have to wipe away.

Her heart clenches as if missing a beat, and a wave of nausea overcomes her. She never learned to make Kiki's lasagna; she never learned to cook at all without her guidance. Shaking fingers grip the sink and she exhales slowly, swallowing down the memory.

There's no food in the kitchen. She leaves, lips pursed, her ravenous hunger suddenly vanished. Kinzie doesn't glance up as she passes behind her a second time, returning to the bedroom with her refilled glass. Viola finds an empty basket in the closet, ostensibly for laundry, and picks up everything dirty she can find— which is most of Kinzie's wardrobe— all tattered jeans and threadbare sweaters. She makes the bed too, eyeing its two lumpy pillows and plain white sheets with distaste. The comforter appears to be older than she is.

If she has to sleep here for an extended time she needs a new bedspread and at least three more pillows, maybe a tasteful ruffled bedskirt. So she shops. Momentarily distracted from her work, she scrolls through her texts from the Saints, committed to ignoring them all. She has no concept of how to respond to their check-ins. Yeah, I tried to kill myself last night but now I'm online shopping and deep cleaning the pit Kinzie lives in, so I'm fine, I guess.

The truth of it disturbs her, the mania of her grief and the lurking way it waited until she was too weak to stop it, entirely caught off-guard by the images in her mind. Too drunk, too still, too purposeless.

The mission is done and so is she, and the sum of her parts falls from two, to one, to nothing because Kiki always spoke up first. Kiki always knew when her sister felt uncomfortable, recognized the way her shoulders hunched just so and how pathetically she chewed her bottom lip. Looking back, Viola should have known losing momentum meant losing altitude, and she would crash hard and fast into the ground, shot down by the pain and knowledge that she would always be alone.

She remembers how, two weeks after they buried their father, their mother took every pill in her medicine cabinet without warning, impulsive and abrupt. And successful. More successful than her only remaining daughter, the one who inherited her darkest tendencies.

Viola shivers. She adds everything to her cart, realizing that she doesn't have Kinzie's address. It'll have to wait until they speak again. The rest of the room needs tidying anyway.

"You didn't have to do that." Kinzie stands in the doorframe. "I mean it looks way better, but you didn't have to."

Viola stacks the last set of manila folders on the dresser after idly flipping through the pages labeled Top Secret, disappointed that it wasn't anything fun.

"This place is a pigsty and apparently I have to stay here." She hoists up the dirty clothes basket, balancing it against her hip. "Where's your washer and dryer?"

Kinzie points, following as Viola snoops around the sparse laundry room. As she reaches for detergent her stomach growls, miserably empty.

"Are you hungry? I have ramen," Kinzie offers. "Or shredded cheese."

Viola scoffs as she pours the thick blue liquid, "Do you have anything remotely healthy?"

"I have grape, uh, Airheads?"

"The candy?" Viola sneers. "You know its 100% sugar and has literally zero fruit in it, right?"

"Yeah." She gives no additional information, but takes her seat at the laptop, headphones on.

Viola groans, returning to the kitchen to rummage through the unexplored kitchen cabinets. There's cereal but no milk, and the previously promised food items in various forms of disarray. Kinzie lurks at the table in the other room, curiously watching, apparently unbothered by her insults or presumptuousness.

There was a moment when she tidied the bedroom that Viola wondered if what she did was over-familiar: touching Kinzie's things and reading the newspaper clips she tacked to the wall above her bed, an alarming tale of what Matt Miller the Deckers did to Steelport, and to Kinzie. She's not named in any of the articles, her famous anonymity would never allow that, but there's a picture of her in one of them, her red hair flattened to pasty greys by the newspaper ink, crouched in terror beside the wheels of a gaudy Solar as a shootout rages around her. 

"Jesus Christ." Viola calls from the kitchen, "Where's the closest Whole Foods?"

Kinzie peeks over the bar top from the dining room she's co-opted as her office, pulling her headset off and around her neck. "I like that you think I know the answer to that question. Pick the most gentrified neighborhood in Steelport and start there."

Viola huffs a laugh before quickly schooling her face back to patented displeasure. "Where do you get groceries?"

"I just do pick up orders and the Saints bring it over."

"Well I'm going to make a list of things I need," Viola disappears into the bedroom and returns with her wallet. "And I'm ordering a pizza."

"No!" Kinzie jumps up, yanking her headphones out of the laptop with a squawk. "Don't give out my address! And god! A credit card? You are literally asking to get your identity stolen. Gimme that."

Some Saints deliver the groceries an hour later, and the pizza too— a thin crust margherita that initially leaves Kinzie perplexed and complaining that cardboard with sauce isn't pizza, ultimately quieting down after her first slice— and nothing in their order requires cooking beyond the microwave. Still hungry, Viola snacks on carrots and celery as she returns to her tidying project, rearranging the food into sensible sections in the fridge before returning to the laundry. Kinzie eats M&Ms at her laptop, big blue eyes following Viola as she wanders around her home.

The damp clothes are all dryer safe, or too worn for her to bother hanging them up when Kinzie doesn't even wash them, so she shoves them into the dryer in one big bundle. She leans against its heat, grasping for another stick of celery as she ponders her next cleaning conquest. She's got Windex now, and ample paper towels. Tackling the kitchen would set her mind at ease—

The celery snaps in her mouth, hard and loud like the twist of Kiki's spine, wrung out as easily as a chicken's neck in Killbane's massive hand. He wrapped her up like a boa constrictor, dangling her sister's body like a bear plays with a dead rabbit, and she remembers the next noises too: the thud of her corpse on metal. The sound of her own keening and Matt Miller terrified behind her. She remembers the sound of her own voice, reedy and empty, conceding at once to Killbane's requests, the ones Kiki was brave enough to deny. The concerns she voiced because Viola was afraid to speak them. The words she died for.

She stops eating, hands shaking as tears well in her eyes. She refuses to cry about it more, to let it fully take hold in her body until she makes peace with her loss and the guilt of her own cowardly survival. Feeling Kinzie's eyes on her back, Viola wordlessly retreats to the bedroom, arms crossed to hide her goosebumps. She closes the door and buries her face into the flat pillow, wide awake and breathing hard, ashamed that she has always known how to fawn her way to freedom.

Half an hour later she emerges, her face a cold, unaffected mask. Kinzie's typing away at her keyboard, lines of code plucked out in a steady cadence as surveillance footage of an empty office plays in a second window. She's moving the camera, Viola realizes, tilting it up and down, shifting her view of the street outside. It's interesting, though she has no concept of what's happening behind the scenes, how all those dots and slashes can make something tangible happen, but she can appreciate skill in any form, and Kinzie is a master of her art.

There's a second coding window half-obscured by the first, drenched in alphanumerics far more complex than the little camera's controls. She catches snippets of the words Central Intelligence Agency and a final access denied at the bottom, and wonders if this was Kinzie's earlier work. Trying to hack the CIA would would divert most of Viola's attention too, not that she could ever manage to do it. Granted, it appeared Kinzie wasn't particularly successful yet either.

"You can watch whatever you want," she gestures vaguely to the wall of TVs, apparently tired of Viola lingering over her shoulder as she works.

Viola shifts her weight, canting one hip to the side. "What do you have?"

Thick glasses slide down the end of her nose as she twists in her seat. "Have?"

"Like cable? Netflix?"

A chiming laugh fills the warehouse, echoing down the empty halls and over the wide spaces that should really be a separate dining room. She drags her mouse across the screen of her laptop with a flick of her wrist, a wizard casting a spell, and a torrenting library appears on the largest screen of the television checkerboard.

"I have everything," says Kinzie with a haughty smirk.

Viola tongues at the inside of her cheek, prodding out of habit more than necessity, not quite annoyed at Kinzie's response but unwilling to allow it anyway. She murmurs, "You don't have access to the CIA's servers."

Eyes roll and Kinzie clucks her irritation. "Fuck those guys. They were pricks when I was a fed and they always will be."

"They may be pricks but they're also beating you," Viola shrugs, checking her cuticles.

"Oh my god," Kinzie laughs. "Fuck you too! This is my hobby, and I'm going to win eventually."

"Mhmm." She turns to the TV wall, scanning the entertainment selection. It does appear to encompass the whole history of human media.

Kinzie scowls and follows with her unplugged laptop, cheeks reddening. "I don't care if you're on suicide watch, I will take away your TV privileges."

Viola flops on the couch, arms crossed. "I don't care."

It's a twofold struggle she's unwilling to admit: she doesn't watch much TV in the first place and when she does— when she did— it was always some show Kiki picked out. Her sister was more invested in pop culture, more savvy on social media. Viola generally watched whatever ended up on the screen, so long as good wine and good company were involved.

With a tsk, Kinzie drops down beside her. "But if you can't watch TV how will you keep up with the Kardashians?"

Viola sinks lower into the old brown cushions. "You can say what you want about me, but I do not watch reality TV."

Typing in the search bar, Kinzie huffs a laugh. "Then what do you watch?"

"I don't really. Whatever's fine," she shivers, arms crossed. "Do you have a blanket?"

As an answer, Kinzie squints uncertainly and disappears to the laundry room, rooting through boxes and shelves. She returns with a fitted sheet, arm extended to Viola as she takes her seat.

"Are you kidding me?"

"What?" Kinzie asks. "It's fine."

"This is literally a fitted sheet, and it smells like mothballs."

"You are—"

"An adult woman looking for basic human amenities?"

"So fucking ungrateful!"

The sentiment stings and Viola shrinks a little, chewing at her lip. She's not impolite; she's not an ingrate.

"Sorry. I'll take the sheet," she mutters.

But Kinzie pulls it back toward her and sniffs it, wincing, "No, yikes. It really does smell like mothballs. Hold on."

Kinzie returns with a sweatshirt. A grey FBI jogger like Clarice wore in Silence of the Lambs. That's a horror movie she's seen, one Kiki wanted to watch three summers ago when she was on a scary movie binge.

"I— Thank you." She shrugs into the sweatshirt, black hair popping through the neck hole, suddenly as frizzy and unkempt as Kinzie's.

"Can we watch Silence of the Lambs?"

"Oh yeah, for sure. A classic."

As the intro scene rolls, Viola pulls up the Niemen Marcus website on her phone, searching through their blanket selection, careful to use a different Saints' warehouse address for shipping. She toys with cashmere for a moment before tabbing back to cotton, a herringbone weave throw that would suit anything around it.

"I'm buying you a blanket. What color do you want?"

"Um, p—"

"Do not say purple."

"—yellow."

"Do you want to look at it before I buy it?"

"Huh? Oh, nah."

She orders the blanket and bed set she'd picked out earlier, and curls into the sweatshirt. Halfway through the movie she twitches herself awake, legs outstretched and taking up most of the sofa, feet pressed to Kinzie's thigh. She withdraws them, missing the warmth, and mutters an apology as she pulls her knees into her chest.

"It's fine," says Kinzie softly, glancing over at her. "You're not bothering me." She remains rooted in place, eyes fixed on the movie.

For four days Viola's routine barely deviates, aside from the hour-long disassociations in the shower.

She wakes at 6am and goes for a run. She returns, showers and dresses for the day, makeup a bit lighter than usual. With no board meetings to attend, no books to balance, and no wars to win, Viola usually grows bored by 9am, picking at her frozen breakfast. She cleans for several hours after that, rearranging rooms in the warehouse while online shopping. Lunch is always light, a salad or sandwich, and she spends the afternoon perusing the TV while replacing whatever furnishing offends her the most: end tables, the lamp, the full-length mirror.

It agitates her, the nothingness of her day. She hasn't lived without work since she was sixteen, always high energy and career-minded. With no concept of how to occupy her time without the stress of a deadline driving her achievement, she wanders the house and does everything in her power to keep her mind from wandering too. She no longer works for Phillipe or Killbane but the Saints, full of their own chaos and mess, and though she texted them once and only once— ignoring multiple requests for a status update on her well-being, spamming her with more shitty memes than she could bear to count— to demand that they at least let her balance the books during her forced time off. They refused.

They did deliver her a translucent orange bottle of Lexapro and she takes her dosage like their doctor says she's supposed to, unwilling to argue when she's clearly in need.

At first Kinzie never seems to eat, drink, or sleep in Viola's presence. She sits in her chair, working on something— ostensibly the CIA hack— as EDM blares in her ears, or playing a game with exploding clowns and robots and aliens. She hardly leaves the living slash dining room and certainly never leaves the warehouse to venture outside.

On Monday, the first time Viola said she was leaving to go for a run, Kinzie asked, "Are you going to go out and kill yourself?"

Her glasses slid down her nose and the prolonged eye contact unnerved Viola. The question was serious, if clunky and inelegant like most of Kinzie's words. Her eyebrows knitted together above red-rimmed blue eyes, more concerned than mistrustful.

Viola slid her phone into the band around her arm, an eyebrow raised over her purple sunglasses. "Not today."

Kinzie sucked her lips into her mouth for a moment, always slightly chapped, and typed something on her keyboard, attention fully diverted again by grainy CCTV cameras or a tracker on Viola's phone to personally map her run. Or a microchip embedded in her skull for all Viola knew.

"Okay. Have a good time, I guess," Kinzie said.

The platitude surprised her so much that Viola muttered, "I will," and for three miles couldn't manage to fathom why Kinzie bothered with something remotely close to small talk, mundane and pleasant and entirely unlike her. She returned, she showered, and she didn't miss the relieved expression on Kinzie's face when she crossed the room.

When Viola returns from her run today, she jumps in the shower as soon as possible, ready to be cleansed of the sheen of sweat. She changes into leisurewear, noticing through the open bedroom door that Kinzie sits in the middle of the sofa instead of her usual perch, deeply engrossed with a shooting game on her laptop, muttering under her breath.

Kinzie's eyes drift across all the screens before her, not just the one with her cartoon person committing atrocities, still prioritizing constant surveillance of her gang. Walking behind her, Viola watches as she explodes her opponent, R4gn0r0k, with a grenade launcher. Her own avatar— whose nametag is an unintelligible string of zeroes and ones, 10000111100101100— jumps up and down on his blood splatter.

"Don't quit your day job," she mutters into her headset. The yolk-yellow blanket Viola bought splays across her lap, two thick purple socks peeking out beneath it. She continues taunting, "Are you even trying, Miller, you creepy little homeschooled freak?"

The shriek carries through the headset loud enough for Viola to hear Matt Miller's lilting British accent. "I went to prep school! You were homeschooled!"

"That's why I get to say it." Kinzie doesn't rise to his umbrage, voice even and calm, "Doesn't explain why you suck so much ass though." She shoots his robot character in the head just as he turns the corner, ending the round six-nothing.

"Oh my fucking god, you rancid normie bitch—"

Kinzie chortles, "Heh heh, you're trash, bro."

The splash page reappears in garish neons and a graffiti-inspired font, Techno Zombies from Planet Slyning: Return of the Gore Clowns. Kinzie's smiling, delightedly rubbing her feet together as Miller offers another feeble rant. It's interesting, Viola decides, watching Kinzie decimate her opponents in the clown game, as ridiculous as it is. It's better than nothing.

"Can you do that again?" Viola quietly asks.

Kinzie jumps in her seat, barely catching the yellow blanket before it falls to the cold floor— she could use a rug too, thick, soft wool— and pulls off one of her ear cups with a frightened expression, scooting to the side of the sofa.

"I didn't, sorry— you want me to shoot Miller again?" A piercing complaint buzzes in the headset and she drops the mic back down to her mouth, scowling, "Shut up and get good, fuckhead. I'm not talking to you."

"Yeah," says Viola. "Get that little nerd."

There's no anger in her tone, only amusement. Of all the Syndicate leaders, Matt Miller was the only one who stood a chance at decency, young enough to fix the parts of himself that others ruined. There's a hazy memory of him again, the pitched sound of a boy whimpering in her periphery as she fixates on Kiki's eyes, perfect circles of empty and dark. His face was round and young and pale, eyes permanently red with sleep-deprivation. Red with tears after he witnessed how Kiki, seemingly untouchable, died so meaninglessly.

Viola never asked him about it. He never asked her either.

She shivers, reminding herself like she would remind a child that the stupid clown game is nice and safe, a place where they can play at violence and no one has to die.

"Here," Kinzie spreads the yellow blanket toward the empty end of the sofa, an invitation. "It gets really cold in here, and your hair's wet."

Viola nods, swallowing a lump in her throat, ready for the distraction. Kinzie tilts her head, eyes fixed on Viola as her fingers tap out the keys. She knows her complexion turns ashen, pallid with the sudden loss of blood pressure, so she turns her face away, staring at the pile of machinery and parts she hasn't worked up the courage to tackle in her cleaning project.

"Lets put it on the big screen," says Kinzie. She sucks her lower lip into her mouth, reddening it with her teeth. Pausing the match before it starts, she ignores Miller's complaints and tells Viola, "Hang on. We've got that Boudreaux or whatever you ordered." She slips away to pull a wine bottle from a kitchen cabinet, popping the cork with ease.

"Bordeaux," Viola corrects, suppressing her smile.

"Yeah, that's what I said." The glass she pours is comically, classlessly large, and she holds it out with a grin.

"I'm surprised you had wine glasses."

"Well, I've only got the one."

She accepts it without otherwise criticizing her on the massive pour faux pas, settling under the blanket they share. She watches Kinzie win, over and over again like it's something she was born to do. Nothing about her is remotely Viola's type; she's excitable and uncultured, artless in her emotions. She only peacocks in little ways though her spray of feathers could be far grander, far more arrogant, given the mastery she displays in all her undertakings. Viola can say that much: she does appreciate skill combined with a smidgen of humility. Deft fingers bound across the laptop, and she finds herself ignoring the game itself.

Other former Deckers join Matt after two back-to-back no-score rounds, and Kinzie kills them too, irreverent and unstoppable.

"I'm killing you with a trackpad right now," she snarks. "Sucks to be you."

Viola tugs the large blanket over her legs and short-shorts, bare feet still freezing. Slowly reaching out, she nonchalantly burrows her toes beneath Kinzie's thigh, as if this is something she's done before: a casual, common touch beneath her notice. Neither of them move again, nor do they comment on it.

The Deckers cheat, as expected, eventually overwhelming Kinzie's alien zombie avatar in a one versus eight shootout. Still, she laughs and derides them for taking so long to put her down, and Viola hears the fatigue and reluctant respect in Miller's voice when he mumbles, "Good game, fed."

"You too. Same time tomorrow?"

"Cheers."

The home screen of the clown game paints them in flashy colors, its electro-synth circus tune repeating on loop. Viola's ordering more wine glasses, only tearing her gaze away long enough to glance back into the kitchen, taking notes on other silverware and basic necessities that Kinzie seems hellbent on lacking. She adds a full set to her cart, the same ones she has at the penthouse. Versatile, sophisticated. Kiki always preferred Damascus steel for her knife set, so she buys Kinzie one of those too. Her feet remain firmly planted.

"Never thought I'd be able to talk to the teenage shitstain who kidnapped me, but here we are," Kinzie sighs. She loads up a practice session, cycling through balloon targets painted with robots and zombies and monstrous alien faces.

"Probably helps to repeatedly shoot him in the head."

"Honestly, yeah. It's cathartic."

It's quiet for a long time, the room filled with sounds of Kinzie firing her virtual weapon, the cadence not-quite-right for an actual submachine gun.

"He's not so bad," Kinzie blurts. "He's just a stupid kid."

Viola sips her wine. She remembers the way he screamed at Killbane, the way his eyes filled with tears and his voice cracked like her sister's neck. His kitschy leather jacket was too big on his gangly teenage frame, swallowing him up the way Killbane would if he disobeyed. And her own feelings toward Matt Miller are complicated: annoyance twisted around a begrudging sense of kinship to him. An obnoxious little brother, legs caught in a snare, entirely outclassed by Killbane's cruelty. Viola and Matt, trapped together in a hell of their own ambition's making.

"No, he's not so bad," she murmurs.

Kinzie continues, voice lowering, "He thinks he's nothing, you know? Just a lonely little loser. Everything fell apart on him and he doesn't know what to do now, and he's too stubborn to ask for help. Especially from me. He'll play games though, and he texts me sometimes now."

The balloon targets fill the screen and Kinzie shoots them swiftly and casually, destroying them before they can fully load. Viola watches the part of her lips, soft and thoughtful, still thinking about Matt Miller, the greasy-haired villain who couldn't do a push-up if he tried, who is lonely and lost and the only person he feels comfortable talking to anymore is the former federal agent who was once his greatest nemesis. Kinzie doesn't balk at the notion of helping him in her own quiet way by simply always being around, familiar and nonjudgmental.

Maybe the Saints knew this. Maybe Kinzie's too frightened to leave her own house, misanthropic and agoraphobic from years of the outside world hurting her, but she reaches out to the others in her own ways, and lets in the ones she trusts. They seamlessly join her flock, flying in formation behind her quirky normalcy and acceptance, even of Matt, whose Deckers dealt the last blow she could tolerate before permanently secluding herself in her fortress. They never talk about these things, or haven't yet, but Viola can see that Kinzie's intelligence is emotional too, and she would at least listen if Viola tried to speak.

"Yeah," Viola whispers. After a beat she furrows her brow, "I mean he has committed multiple felonies."

Kinzie shrugs, "Who hasn't?"

"Fair," Viola sips her wine, smiling faintly. "Can we watch something?"

"Hell yeah," Kinzie closes the clown game immediately, pulling up her library and selecting a film. "I'm kind of in the mood for Ringu."

"Haven't seen it."

Kinzie gawps at her, enlivened with playfulness. Two small, captivating dimples appear on her cheeks as she says, "What! You're gonna love this. It's the original Japanese Ring. The American one was a remake. Still good, but Ringu is better."

Viola shrugs, "I haven't seen either."

"What?!" she clutches Viola's knee through the blanket. "Oh my god. You're asking for a movie marathon whether you meant to or not."

Viola smirks back, face warm with the wine. "Fine by me. I've got nowhere else to be."

Kinzie thumbs the fabric of the blanket, distracted, "This really is super soft."

The touch is a gentle pressure against the side of her knee, an innocent weight, but her heart races at the contact. The veins of Kinzie's pale hand cast shadows in the laptop's light as she rubs the blanket, enjoying the simplicity of the sensation on her skin. Viola murmurs, forcing out her words, "What can I say? I have good taste."

Kinzie squeezes her leg one last time, chuckling as she falls back against her armrest and taps the spacebar to start the film, Viola's feet still pressed into her leg. "One of us has to, and it certainly isn't me," she says.

Envelopes shuffle across the hideous industrial picnic table that Kinzie uses as her multi-purpose desk, and Viola scowls as she reads the mail that is very obviously not addressed to her. But it's late and the pile of papers looms. On top of that she's terribly nosy, and she's committed far worse crimes than mail theft on a regular basis since she was eighteen.

"Your bank has sent three letters to say your checking account is above the federally insurable limit," she says. Kinzie does not look up from the bundle of plastic, steel, and wires in her lap. The chrome oblong reflects the wrinkle of her brow, drawn in focus. "Do you have $250,000 sitting in a checking account?"

"Yeah, I don't put more in there because I don't trust banks. There's like, triple that, in cash lying around here," she waves a screwdriver to the bedroom.

Viola cocks a hip, staring down at the redhead like she's speaking a language unknown to mankind because truly she is an alien at best. But this information is not a complete surprise to Viola, both because she's growing familiar with Kinzie's idiosyncrasies and because yesterday she found the drawer crammed full of hundred dollar bills in the bedroom, just beneath the drawer of assorted sex toys that held her interest for a much longer period of time. Unearthing that treasure trove left Viola's mind to wander more pleasantly than it had in months, suddenly and sincerely stimulated by extremely salacious daydreaming. She takes a seat on the sofa, crossing her legs.

Her gaze drifts back to Kinzie where she sits cross-legged on the floor, lifting the oblong device in one hand and turning it to catch the light. Dissatisfied, she tightens a blue wire. It's a bomb, Viola realizes with a lour, sighing hard.

"It's defused." Kinzie jiggles it, as if to prove its safety.

"And you said you were bad at reading people," Viola dryly responds.

"When your face gets all squished up you're worried about something."

"'Squished up'," Viola repeats, enunciating every syllable as she drops Kinzie's mail on the sofa beside her, returning to online shopping for a chest of drawers for the bedroom, wide drawers that will hold everything Kinzie needs to contain. "I'm sure that's a very attractive look. I'm buying a new bedroom set."

With a groan, Kinzie unfurls herself from her hunched position and stretches her arms overhead, twisting herself from side to side. She doesn't respond to the statement.

"If that's all right," Viola prods, legs stretched across the sofa.

"What? Oh yeah, sure."

It strikes Viola that her actions, while well-intentioned, may be impolite, and she chews her lip. "I'm not trying to be domineering by replacing your stuff. If you dislike it, I won't do it."

Kinzie's head pops up from where it dangles before her knees, hamstrings stretched in a forward fold. She groans again, standing up straight, then sarcastically says, "Oh no! A hot, rich girl moved in and cleaned my whole house then bought me free shit. I'm a freak, but I'm not the sort of freak who would complain about that."

Viola's cheeks warm with the compliment, skin unused to blushing. In their youth, she and Kiki were something of ugly ducklings, but she's thankful she spent her formative years with buck teeth and baby fat. They made her rely on intelligence and resolve, and Kiki used to joke that it amplified their subsequent post-puberty attractiveness. Whereas later her tits did the talking more times than she could count, cheapening her more intellectual efforts. Now she's used to being called sexy ad nauseum, but the compliment lands with surprising earnestness from Kinzie. The heat creeps down her neck and she almost protests, both to the hot comment and to the moving in comment, but ultimately she bites her tongue, suddenly distracted by the new development.

Kinzie unzips her purple hoodie, slips out of the sleeves, and places her glasses on the picnic table. Unveiled, she wears a tight white tank above her sweatpants, a sports bra beneath it, freckled arms well-defined with corded muscle, fabric clinging to the prevalent outline of her abs. Viola's phone slips out of her hands, narrowly missing her face.

"I like all the stuff you get," Kinzie says, dropping to the floor into a plank, then a push-up. "It's nice." Another push-up, form perfect. "And you know," another push-up, blood pumping hard through the veins of her arms, "I'm not going to do any home improvements." Showing no sign of stopping or slowing, Kinzie cranks out another ten, then twenty, then thirty.

Losing count, Viola fumbles with her phone, ostensibly bored and shopping again. The ruse loses all conviction each time her eyes flicker back to Kinzie, feet now looped beneath the table legs as she does cross-body sit-ups. Eventually the screen goes dark from inactivity, and Viola sets her phone down entirely. If Kinzie tracks her on every run through Salander, then she should be allowed to watch her impromptu calisthenics.

"You," she tilts her head against the pillow for a better view, "work out a lot?"

"Yeah. I've been kidnapped too many times to not work out," Kinzie answers. Sweat drips down the column of her neck as she squat-presses one of her heavy stereo systems. "Steelport's dangerous."

"Yeah," rasps Viola, cotton-mouthed. In a self-conscious rush, she slips past Kinzie and into the kitchen for a glass of water. Her palms press into the counter as she berates herself for being flustered by nothing. She used to run a prostitution ring, for god's sake. She was simply caught off-guard, she reasons: she knew Kinzie was slim and fit, just not this fit.

Then Kinzie, red-faced with exertion and breathing heavily, appears beside her, and Viola's resolve to minimize her startling attraction disappears. "Sorry, hey, I need the door," she pants.

Shifting back without a sound, Viola leans against a counter beside the fridge. Kinzie hops up with practiced ease, catching a wrought-iron bar that runs across the doorframe— Viola's walked beneath it a hundred times without guessing at its function— legs bent at the knees, ankles crossed. She begins a series of pull-ups with the measured precision and proficiency of a Marine, toned biceps flexing. Sweat darkens her low ponytail and the muscles of her back ripple as they constrict, curling on either side of her spine. She could be a cover model on a fitness magazine. She could easily lift Viola: throw her over one shoulder, position her however she wanted—

Feet hit the floor, and Viola closes her mouth.

"Whew," Kinzie exhales, arms flopping at her side. "I need a shower." Her chest rises and falls deeply, slowly steadying as she smiles across the kitchen.

"Kinzie," she breathes, "you're jacked."

"Thanks," she cheerily responds, hands on her hips. "I hide it well." With a final nod she disappears to run herself a shower, old pipes knocking the next room over.

Taking another sip of water, Viola bites back her agreement.

By the end of the first week they have an entertainment schedule and a new dining room table. She's found Kinzie asleep at the old metal one, holes imprinting half of her face, glasses askew, on more occasions than she preferred. If she's going to pass out there four nights out of five then she should at least do it on ethically salvaged yucca trees. The sofa's next on her to-do list, maybe a five-piece corner sectional. White, to brighten up the space.

She sits on the old brown one, lounging with the massive yellow blanket, idly inventorying her shopping list as she tilts her head against the armrest, gazing across the room. She might be able to convince Kinzie to install blinds and curtains. Or she might just do it herself. She's not certain Kinzie even noticed that the table changed, wheeled in by four sweating Saints, despite the swap literally occurring beneath her while she typed away on her laptop.

"Do you ever get tired of working?" Viola asks.

It's a stupid question and she doesn't particularly care about the answer, but the words fall out of her anyway, filling the silence. Kinzie's a scientific experiment to her, a weird little culture in a jar that should be examined under a microscope, or some variant of exotic performance art she'd pay an exorbitant amount to see in a gallery on opening night. Fascinating and foreign.

"Not really. It's mostly fun. I'm kind of annoyed right now because the stupid Burns Hills Reactors are all analog except their security cameras, but there's just like," she huffs, "nothing going on there. They don't even let people jump in the pool. I thought it would be more exciting or yield important intel or something. Trying to hack the CIA is more interesting at this point, and that's saying something." Kinzie glances up for the first time since beginning her tirade, and scratches her nose with a small shake of her head. "Sorry. I'm blathering."

Viola tears her eyes away, suddenly self-conscious of her own amused smile. Still, she says, "You're not bothering me. I asked. Do you mostly play games for fun?"

"Mostly, but sometimes I want to do something else and I'll watch movies or X-Files or Investigation Discovery."

Viola tilts her head back, doubly invested. "You like true crime?"

"For sure. The good stuff, at least. None of that shameless sensationalism and copaganda." Kinzie closes her laptop, "Do you?"

"I do."

"Oh my gosh. I've been wanting to watch Wilderness of Blood: Filthy Rich Mayhem for the longest time. Have you seen it?" She backs out of the chair in a rush, stutter-stepping her way to Viola's side on the sofa.

"I haven't." She doesn't bother clarifying that, while she prefers to think of herself as a gourmet in all regards, with entertainment she is very much a gourmand. She'll watch anything, bingeing on too much of it, so long as it holds her interest.

"Perfect!" Kinzie exclaims, dropping beside her for the briefest moment. "Wait." She hops back up before Viola can answer, disappearing to the kitchen where the only sign of her presence is a series of loud clattering noises. When she returns, her arms are filled with her laptop and a mess of snacks: chips and cookies and candy, and several sugary sodas Viola wouldn't touch if someone paid her. She sets them on the ground between them— Viola makes a mental note that they need a coffee table— rummaging for a single bubbly water that Kinzie holds out to her. "I know you judge my sugar thing but I'm hungry."

"Thank you," says Viola, surprised she remembered an offhanded remark she made three days ago about her preferred bubbly drink of choice.

Kinzie takes a seat beside her this time, close enough to share the blanket, the edge of which Viola wordlessly lifts for her. Settling in close, Kinzie says, "I love this blanket. So soft."

"Mmhmm," says Viola, hands wrapped around her bubbly water. She sits up rigidly, hoping Kinzie won't feel the heat that radiates from the right side of her body. It takes mere minutes for the show's thesis statement to clarify: the mysterious forest family butcher is still at large.

"The dad did it," Kinzie scoffs, unimpressed.

She extends her arm over Viola's lap, sharing a bag of gummy worms. Viola takes one against her better judgment. It's foully saccharine and chewy. She takes another.

"Always," she agrees.

"But he's a rich white guy so when they show him on the news it's going to be a family photo of their last camping trip or some shit. Like this guy's going to chainsaw murder kids and that's still the picture the paper's going to choose. Like, 'Well, we had a wonderful time last summer hiking in the Ozarks until daddy chopped up little Benjamin.'"

Viola snorts. "You're not wrong."

The episode concludes with a cliffhanger ending, and a shuffling of snacks. Kinzie twists and reaches for a Dr. Pepper that's rolled away, her t-shirt riding up her chest for a clear view of her well-cut obliques. For an instant, propriety wars with vibrant attraction, and risk with the domestic relaxation of her evening. Viola stares daggers at the ceiling, exasperated with such sudden desperation for her glorified babysitter. She cannot for the life of her remember the last time she developed such a vivid preoccupation, if she ever has.

To fill the silence, she jokes, "So you can forage, but can you cook?"

Kinzie pops open a can of Pringles. She shrugs, "I've never really tried. I could probably Google it though. But not literally on Google; they sell your data, the chickenshits." She crunches on her chips, pulling up the next Wilderness of Blood, and its ominous minor key opening credits splash across the big screen. "Actually, I make a pretty good grilled cheese. And soup? Like you can just throw stuff in a pot and it's almost always good. If I can hack a nuke plant and build a sex machine from scratch, I feel like I can probably cook."

Viola sits up, facing her. "Explain."

"I mean, following a recipe is just like a specification—"

"No, the sex machine thing."

"Oh," Kinzie's cheeks pinken prettily and she swallows her chip, pausing the show. "You know the new sex machines at Safeword? The Saints ones? I built those. I have one in the back. I mean like, a prototype. I do maintenance on them and check the club's security databases and stuff. That's why I go all the time."

Viola reaches her hand into the Pringles can, daintily taking a chip between her nails. She smirks as she does it, tacitly calling Kinzie's bluff. Technomancer she may be, but she's seen Kinzie at Safeword in her skintight latex catsuit enough times to know she's not solely there for maintenance purposes. Even before the Saints owned the BDSM hotspot and it was firmly entrenched in Morningstar territory, Kinzie visited. Viola was always very fond of the sex club, one of the few places available for people to safely indulge, or simply spend a night without worrying about their own self-preservation, a rarity for women in the criminal underground. She and Kiki made certain that their spaces were safe for women, for sex workers, for themselves. It pleased her to know the Saints maintained that tradition after they routed her old gang.

She and Kinzie had been formally introduced at Saints meetings after a few anonymous, passing brushes at the club: Viola in a pantsuit with one hip jutting out, looking emphatically disinterested, and Kinzie, adorned in her sweatshirt uniform, clutching her laptop to her chest like she held pressure on a wound. If she recalls Viola from her secret kink life, she's never mentioned it, but that's the image of Kinzie that Viola prefers: elated at Safeword, beaming at the dominatrix holding her leash.

"That's why you go all the time?"

To her surprise, Kinzie doesn't balk, but steals back the chip in Viola's hand. She leans forward and says, "Absolutely. Have to stay on the cutting edge if you're going to build fuck machines." She nibbles the chip thoughtfully, eye contact unbroken. "You have to know what people want."

Viola licks her lips and takes a sip of her water instead. She catches herself in the reflection of Kinzie's glasses, lips slightly parted, dark hair falling around her shoulders as she leans forward, interest completely unhidden. She cannot help herself. "And what do people want?"

Kinzie laughs, silvery and unashamed, "If they're using my machines, they wanna get fucking railed."

"Mm. It's hard to argue that. But if my memory serves me," Viola purrs, now firmly balancing on this tightrope of unexpected flirtation, "you preferred a variety of flavors. Always willing to try something new. You were a good customer. Our doms liked you."

Kinzie doesn't blush at all this time, but smiles widely and fondly, as if remembering her time handcuffed to a pommel horse. "I leave good Yelp reviews on a burner account. But I swear, they're artists. Not everyone could do what they do." Her glasses slip down the bridge of her nose the way they do when she's concentrating. Her voice lowers to an undertone, fragile with an intimate admission, "You always had really pretty ropework. The Shibari, I mean."

Her brow furrows less because of the admission that Kinzie recognized her in the dim light of the sex club she once co-owned— a delightful confession on its own— and more that she could distinguish her from her twin. Viola asks, "How could you tell it was me?"

The DeWynter twins in combination left most too intimidated, entranced, or both to identify them as individuals, and, aside from their faces, they shared a number of traits in common. Meticulous and self-motivated, inquisitive but unaffected. Even Phillipe, who knew them better than anyone, assumed they solved problems the same way, entirely unaware of their disparate personalities and preferences.

Confusion creeps into Kinzie's reply, "I know what you look like?"

"No, I mean how could you tell it was me and not my sister? We're— we were identical."

"I mean, yeah, you look a lot alike but you don't walk and talk the same way. Kiki never did ropes, and she was obviously into dudes. You, uh, weren't."

They sit beside one another, arms pressed together, staring at the wall of televisions. A huff of air escapes Viola's nose and she smirks again, unable to resist prodding. "You were watching me?"

"I like to watch," says Kinzie matter-of-factly. "I mean— not like that. Well— yeah, like that too. Uh, sorry."

Viola snorts, "I've seen you in the Second Basement. I know." Kinzie flushes beneath her freckles, painted fire engine red at last, and Viola revels in it.

"Well what were you doing in the Second Basement?"

She shrugs, "Same as you, I imagine. Sipping a martini and watching strangers fuck each other."

"Ew," Kinzie frowns. "Martinis are disgusting."

Shoving her gently with her shoulder, Viola steals another chip and says, "You have bad taste."

"Yeah, yeah. We've been over this already," says Kinzie, sinking comfortably into the cushions. She side-eyes Viola, hands wrapped around a flat Dr. Pepper, index finger tapping the can. "Wanna watch another one?"

Viola side-eyes her back, mirroring her tapping with a bemused expression. "Yeah, I do."

They stay like that, sitting under the blanket with their sides pressed together like sardines in a can, and Viola feels Kinzie's eyes on her more than once, though whether she checks in out of curiosity, care, or compulsion, she cannot discern. It has a shade of flattery to it, she decides, warm and comfortable, and Kinzie doesn't press her for anything, content enough to share the room with her at all.

On the big screen is a familiar view: the street outside the office window whose camera Kinzie hacked two weeks prior, except now Luchador corpses litter the ground. Shaundi and the bosses are cleaning up leftover Syndicate messes in a dockside blow out, and Kinzie winces in her headset at the volume of their most recent explosion.

Viola watches Pink sprint into friendly fire, miraculously unharmed, Kinzie's bomb tucked under one arm with something massive and purple flopping over her other shoulder. "Is that a dildo bat?"

Kinzie nods, clicking her mouse aggressively to redirect drone cover fire to the south, "The Penetrator. A Saints favorite." Pink bashes three men at a time with it, rendering them all toothless, then sets the bomb, tapping at the crude keyboard timer, and sprints away. As the bomb detonates she drops into a front split just out of the explosion's range, waving the purple cowboy hat to Kinzie's cameras. Her victory pose, Viola recognizes.

Beside her Shark wheelies a stolen motorcycle off a nearby roof and into a Luchador boat, launching himself out of another fiery eruption. He rolls onto the wooden dock planks, dusting off his tasseled vest as he rises, spurs spinning behind him. Quickly crunching the numbers, Viola estimates that the property damage from that stunt alone would be astronomical, not that they're going to pay for it.

"Seems Shaundi didn't get the memo about matching cowboy outfits," she notes.

Kinzie nods again. "Texas Tuesday. Tomorrow is Hot Dog Wednesday."

"That's not even alliterative," Viola complains from her place over her shoulder. She plants her arms on the back of the sofa, looming over Kinzie's head, staring down at her lap. This time Kinzie doesn't protest her presence.

"Neither is Reba Friday, but they love the outfits."

The rest of the mission is a rout, a rousing success for the Saints, and Kinzie responds to a slew of texts— mostly heart and explosion emojis from Pink and Shark and a curt, "Done," from Shaundi, followed by a, "Sorry. Good job. I just wanna go home and smoke a bowl and take a damn nap."— before she settles at the new table in front of her laptop again. Her fingertips bounce along it smooth wooden surface and she smiles, giddy with their win and the safety of her friends.

The Morningstars never celebrated that way, especially after joining the Syndicate. Viola's former peers were as likely to stab her in the back as they were to save her life. Back then there was only Kiki and Viola. No one else could be trusted.

Pulling up the code she's come to recognize as the CIA's security files, Kinzie begins work her pet project again. Viola glides her hand across the navy upholstery as she sits in one of the new chairs, contemplating that she knows a great many things: mathematics and statistics and finance, interior design and art history. But she also knows what she doesn't know, and she doesn't know hacking. She doesn't even know how to code. It's not Iike in films with zeroes and ones spilling down the screen, fingers flying across the keyboard. There's no dramatic Rayban removal or gravelly, I'm in. There's just Kinzie, hunting and pecking at lines of code as she pushes up her glasses.

Viola props her chin in her palm, not bothering to hide her quiet observation of Kinzie behind her phone's screen. She should have noticed her physique long before the big sweatshirt reveal. Her jeans are stretched tight across toned legs, and when her hair isn't obscuring them, the lithe muscles of her neck pull and roll in an entrancing pattern to the tempo of her pulse. Her face is delicate, gaze intense, all high cheekbones and long, pale eyelashes.

Kinzie freezes and throws her hands up like a surprised red panda. A shocked epiphany is written on her face, eyes locked with Viola's across the table.

"You did it," Viola blurts. She doesn't really need to ask— this whole situation is entirely out of her wheelhouse— but she wants to hear her say it.

"I did it," Kinzie stands, knocking over her chair. "I did it!"

She scrambles around the table and pulls Viola into a vice-tight embrace. Though the air is squeezed entirely from her lungs, Viola wheeze-laughs at her triumph, hugging her back as much as she can twisted up like a pretzel.

Kinzie pulls back just enough to let her stand. Her hands dance around Viola's blouse, touching her hem and buttons and pockets like she needs something as tangible as keyboard in front of her, her fingers phantom-typing against the fabric. Viola's hummingbird pulse thrums in her ears, beating so loudly the whole neighborhood might hear her excitement.

She breathes, "What are you going to do?"

"I'm gonna write a Fuck You script. And every day at 1pm I'm going to restart all their office computers. It's gonna drive them crazy trying to deal with it, and even crazier trying to figure out how I did it. Those CIA jackoffs think they're so smart, but they're not. They were so shitty to me, but I got 'em. I did it."

Fists grab Viola's collar, emphatically pulling her closer, her eyes shining frenzy-bright. Viola swallows thickly, a voice in the back of her mind reminding her that, under normal circumstances, simply letting another woman in her personal space would not so thoroughly distract and enthrall her, but that voice is as quiet as a whisper over the sound of her heartbeat and the realization that, while she is staring at Kinzie's lips, Kinzie is staring back at her own. They're the same height, she dimly notes. It would be so convenient to kiss her.

"Sorry," mumbles Kinzie, releasing her shirt and stepping back. "I didn't— mean to grab you. I— got excited."

Viola deflates like an untied balloon, dropping unceremoniously back to earth, berating herself for such naïve daydreams. The sentiment is new, not something she's ever had to manage before when sex and romance were two very different things in her eyes and they never coincided. And now, even worse, she has no Kiki around to knock sense back into her when her own scatters like wedding doves as soon as they see the sky. A pit opens in her chest, the dizzying vertigo of gravity shifting and a body falling to match it because the fundamental forces of the universe stop for no one.

It is a fact, clean as numbers on paper, that she is flighty and heartless. It is a fact that she is not emotionally equipped for this, and Kinzie deserves better than being the object of her affection at her lowest point, the worst form of grief-rebound.

Viola widens the gap between them, retreating to the bedroom as she flatly intones, "It's fine. Congratulations again."

So she cleans, rabidly and single-mindedly, a whirlwind of Clorox and vacuuming. Plundering the laundry room for more cleaning supplies, she clunks up the back stairwell of the warehouse into the third floor she hasn't had the energy to explore. Her fingers catch on a light switch after blindly batting at the wall, bathing the hallway in florescent white. There's a whole half-mezzanine that appears mostly livable: three other spacious rooms behind rusted doors, what could be a study or office, a full bathroom.

It's strange that Kinzie didn't offer her this space, opting instead to just sleep on her desk or the sofa because she still won't return to her own bedroom with Viola inside. Guilt swells in her again. She's no concept of how long she's meant to stay here, and assumes no one else does either. She feels better now, she thinks, less likely to do something impulsive and violent like her mother would, but still disassociates when she's left alone entirely, her self-awareness the worst part of this whole experience.

After jiggling the third door for half a minute, making zero progress with opening it, she throws her shoulder into it until it swings wide, revealing a dark concrete space. This time when she finds the light, her eyes are draw immediately to a large stain on the floor, a bizarrely symmetrical shape, almost perfectly ovular like a gruesome brown egg. It is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, dried blood sunk into the cement. Above the stain are several high windows boarded up with plywood and duct tape, an old bed, and several dusty, empty bookshelves. This room is larger than the one downstairs, obviously intended to be the master suite, if this warehouse was designed with any measure of cohesion or logic in mind, but it sits cold and useless like an empty grave.

The night she went to 3 Count to celebrate the defeat of Killbane— the night she tried to kill herself, she mentally corrects, unwilling to sugarcoat it, even internally, especially internally— she'd spent the hours prior fixated on Kiki's funeral. Focused on the ceremony her sister would never have that Viola wasn't certain she wanted anyway because they never discussed that sort of thing, and it was the first time she had a moment to process since her sister's death, bloodless and abrupt. It was the first moment she had alone, unstressed with work or a mission or vengeance, and the stillness and open mouth of the nil, a welcoming zero waiting for her surrender, swallowed her whole.

The pipes rattle as she fills a bucket with water, staring at herself in the mirror. Her hair is clean but tangled, and the bags beneath her eyes are for once unhidden by concealer, beginning to lighten naturally since she started sleeping more regularly. The insomnia and repression should have clued her in, she ruefully thinks. She remembers her mother before she swallowed a month's worth of pills: how she wandered their home at night, unable to sleep, how she couldn't talk about their father with anyone. How, in the two weeks after his death but before hers, she worked herself to the bone to sever herself from mourning.

Mixing in soap, she dumps the bucket onto the blood stain, still perplexed by its shape. The brush scratches against the cement in a steady rhythm and she tells herself that she cannot smell the iron in the air, surprised that so much blood could have come from any one person. Kiki was still warm in the few seconds when Viola held her body, their last moment together, before Killbane put his hands on her too, slotting his massive palm on the back of her neck. She works the spot, repetitive and ineffectual, another naught to mock her and reaffirm that the math wasn't quite right: that two minus one sometimes equals zero, and when Kiki died, she should have died too.

"You could be resting, you know."

The brush slips in her grasp, pausing its course for only a beat before Viola resumes. "I'm bored and your house is still a wreck."

"We could literally just close the door and not come in here. It's an empty room."

"It would be a nice guest room."

Kinzie huffs, "When do I ever have guests?" From her knees Viola looks up at last, leveling her with a flat expression. "Other than you. Just for the record they didn't give me a choice or like, any warning at all. Shaundi just texted me and said I needed to watch you because of the—" she stumbles over her words, guilty and uncomfortable.

"Because of the jumping thing. I know," Viola finishes for her in a clipped tone. "Look, I'm medicated and I don't feel like that anymore. I don't know what I was thinking." She scrubs the bloodstain harder, arms burning with effort. "I was just drunk and sad, and— and I didn't know what to do." The suds remain white, wholly incapable of pulling the blood from the concrete. After a final vigorous burst that improves nothing, Viola sits back on her heels, breathing hard. "I don't want to talk about it."

She wipes the back of her hand across her eyes, jaw firmly set. This is no time to cry in front of Kinzie or anyone else, not when she's sober. Not when she's trying to convince all of them she's well enough to be released to work.

"Yeah, I get it. And— I haven't said it, but you can stay as long as you want," Kinzie softly says. Her eyes drag from the foam bubbling in the valley of Viola's fingers to the bloody egg shape beneath her, unusually mournful. "I didn't used to be like this. I mean, I never liked most people, but I never felt unsafe. When I got kidnapped the first time it really messed me up. Then this happened," Kinzie mumbles, gesturing at the puddle. Viola asks no questions, but listens raptly and reverently as she continues, "A guy came in through the window one night when I was asleep. One of yours, actually. A Morningstar."

A pit of anger and dread blooms in her stomach— not at Kinzie for the implication that some assassin was once hers— but that she never gave that order. And now, looking back, it terrifies her how easily she might have.

"I never put out a hit on you," she breathes.

Kinzie sits on her heels beside the ineffective, soapy puddle on her floor, hands picking at her jeans. "I don't even think he was coming here to kill me. I'd just started working with the Saints, and I think he just wanted intel. He looked surprised to see me and pulled a gun, and I got him first. I kept shooting, more than I should have, even after he was on the ground. And I left him there— his body— for a long time. That's why it looks like that. I moved downstairs, and I left him there until Shaundi found out and took him away."

Flashes of the warehouse's overly-complicated security measures and the messy second floor bedroom pop in Viola's mind, suddenly cast in a sensible and tragic light. She thinks of the times she's found Kinzie asleep on the sofa or at her table, unwilling to sleep in her own bed.

"It's not the same thing, but I know how it feels to be overwhelmed and scared, and just like— it's never going to get better, you know?"

Viola nods, swallowing hard.

"It does though. It did for me, at least. It got better. I'm still working on things and had to do a lot of online therapy, but I get out a little with the Saints. They keep me company, and text me stupid shit all the time."

"Lots of memes," Viola faintly smiles.

"Yeah, they're terrible." Kinzie drags her fingertips through the water, grazing the stain. "This isn't going to come out, I think."

Viola sighs. "I'd just cover it up but it's a terrible place for a rug."

"Maybe we could stain the whole room? All or nothing?"

Viola hums, recalling a lovely stained concrete floor from a Morningstar client's estate southwest of Budapest, nestled on the shores of Lake Balaton. She and Kiki visited several years prior, admiring the red marbled flooring. "That would look nice, as long as we don't veer into soulless-art-gallery-brutalism territory."

With a groan Kinzie rises to her feet, one hand extended to Viola, who slowly accepts it. "I don't even know what that means, but I trust your judgment."

They rise, facing one another, eyes pinned to the floor. The heat of Kinzie's body boils over and melts into Viola's clammy palm, the hotspot where they're still connected, the source of her sudden, feverish warmth. They are standing very close together in the empty room that Kinzie no longer trusts, that she no longer visits unless someone opens the door on her behalf. Viola doesn't have the words to explain that she could make this place safe for her again. The statement slips away and feels so foolish in its original form: a little broken-winged bird, rebuilding her nest bigger after a storm so it can home more than just herself. So she can keep them both warm at night.

"This place is going to look really nice when I'm done."

"I have no doubt about that," Kinzie breathes, swallowing apprehensively as she releases Viola's hand at last. A barely coherent sentence stammers from her mouth, "I'm gonna— try to make an omelet— because I'm hungry— with ham— and cheese— if you want one. The omelet or the ham. Or the cheese."

"Sure," she steps back to clear her head, still deciphering. "Thank you. I'll have a ham and cheese omelet."

"Don't thank me yet. It might be a crime against humanity." The corners of Kinzie's lips turn up before her face stills into mock-seriousness again. "But you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs."

Viola pauses only long enough to express her disdainful revulsion. "You ruined it."

"Or did I improve it?"

"Ruined. Get back in the kitchen."

There are no windows in second story bedroom, but when Viola wakes she can tell it's late, well after midnight, and there is the faint sound of a voice, Kinzie's voice, solemn and low in a tone she's never heard. She rises at once, bare feet cold as they pad over to the open door, forehead wrinkled with concern.

"It's not your fault," Kinzie says. She's perched on one of the new barstools, her back to Viola, one arm hugging a leg as she shoulders a burner phone to her ear. Her nails pick at her sweatpants, betraying her worry, and her voice catches in her throat when she repeats, "Matt, stop. It's not your fault. You've done things— we've all done things— but that was not your fault."

Viola stiffens, her mind swimming with a ghostly apparition of her sister and the sound of a boy sobbing beside her. A shuddering breath locks in her throat.

Kinzie's chin rests on her knee as she listens. She heaves an exhale, her words pained, "You couldn't have stopped him. He would have killed you too." Her head hangs low, shaking slowly at his response. "No one blames you. Viola doesn't blame you. I don't blame you. No one thinks you're weak because it still hurts. Sometimes these things hurt for a really long time. You're sixteen years old. You were in a place you thought was safe, and you watched someone die right in front of you."

The claustrophobic pressure builds in Viola, and she feels the egg of her grief beginning to crack along the shell, to hatch or to shatter, she cannot discern. But she knows she can't stand there eavesdropping anymore. She knows she needs space and air and something cold to shock her system because she cannot bear the weight of a child who blames himself for her sister's death just the same as she does.

"Yeah," Kinzie listens for a long time again, nodding as she hugs her leg tighter. "I know. It's okay. I would never make fun of you for crying, only for sucking at Techno Zombies," she chuckles, more relieved than amused. Silent as he replies, she answers, "Yeah, dude. Anytime. I mean it. Bye, Matt."

Her farewell fades behind Viola as she bolts upstairs to the roof, not caring if Kinzie hears the door slam. Tears well in her eyes, unfallen still, always held at bay, and she approaches the edge of the roof, standing on the thick concrete lip that runs its periphery, treacherously close to the edge. The zero looms in her mind's eye: the looping track that says without her sister she is nothing, and her very presence alone is division by zero. She shouldn't exist.

The wind tears at her shirt, and she sits on the ledge with a huff, wiping her eyes. She isn't that person. She refuses to be that person. Not when she's sober, not when she told Kinzie she wouldn't, not ever again. But she doesn't know how to go on existing when she's fine one moment and profoundly ill the next, a tea kettle relieving pressure too little, too late. It can't come out all at once, she knows. If she faces this pain directly it will kill her.

The metal fire escape door bangs closed behind her, and she hunches, anxiously chewing her lip. The berating and questions will begin soon, as if she needs more guilt piled atop her mountain.

"I'm not gonna jump," Viola snaps.

"I didn't think you would. It's only three stories. It would probably just—" Kinzie flourishes the yellow blanket she carried up from the living room over herself, taking a seat facing inward, back-to-back with Viola— "hurt."

Saying nothing, Viola turns forward again, noticing for the first time the black and indigo skyline of Steelport, blinking with headlights and flashy neon signs, and the few stars visible over the choppy ocean water. Past Yearwood she sees the ferocious purple of 3 Count jutting into the sky of Port Pryor, a marvel of engineering bursting with energy on all 60 stories of the gargantuan casino. She mimics Kinzie as she sat before, hugging one leg to her chest as the other dangles off the side of the warehouse, goosebumps prickling her skin from the autumn wind. They stay silent for so long that she wonders if Kinzie has fallen asleep, or somehow left the roof without her noticing.

But a small voice drifts over the wind, "I'm sorry I woke you up."

"I don't— sleep the whole night," she stumbles, embarrassed by the eloquence she lost in her frenzy. The come-down from these moments is as equally humiliating as having them at all, fallen tears or not.

"I hope it's okay," the blanket rustles, "that I talk to Matt about it. He's having a really hard time."

Viola sniffs. The ocean air smells smoother at night, broader and older. "It's fine. It's good he can talk to you. It's good to talk about it."

She exhales the brine and hypocrisy from her lungs, bracing herself for the inevitable prodding that's sure to follow. Questions she will refuse to acknowledge. Pressing that will only drive her further from wanting to dredge up these emotions at all—

"Do you wanna come sit with me? I'm cold."

Black hair whips in the breeze, stinging across her furrowed brow. So surprised is Viola that she leans over her shoulder, looking down at Kinzie's wide blue eyes and the cocoon of her body beneath the yellow blanket. "Okay," she says, and spins to face her, dropping safely off her ledge.

The pebbled rooftop is far from enjoyable, but Kinzie lifts the edge of the blanket as an invitation, and Viola slides beneath it anyway. It is significantly warmer and more comfortable beside her.

"You know I never come up here, but it's pretty."

"Can't see as much from this angle," says Viola.

"I can see those damn reactors." Kinzie points to the North, where bright blue spotlights cast a cerulean glow on three curved structures, a hovering, pale fog barely visible over them.

"Ah, I didn't notice the smoke stacks earlier."

"Actually," Kinzie pushes up her glasses, "they're cooling towers. They release heat and steam, not smoke. I'm extremely pro-nuclear energy, but very anti-those-assholes-in-particular. They're just so boring."

Viola chuckles in spite of herself, "Good to know." She points across Kinzie to the West. "The Whole Foods is that way. There's one in Ashwood."

With a cluck of her tongue Kinzie nods, feigning extreme interest. "Oh, good to know. I need to jot that down."

They rest their heads against the concrete wall behind them, and Kinzie never once asks her to disclose the words she still can't voice. The moon is round and full and she's on a roof with a woman who's been kinder and more understanding to her than anyone she's ever known, never asking for anything or trying to tie her down, and just when Viola thinks she's eroded her sense of self-preservation enough to say some of these things, Kinzie's stomach growls.

"Oh man, I'm so hungry," she groans. "So I was thinking I could try to cook something, if there was something you wanted?"

A memory pangs in her chest, sentimental and precarious. It borders on the edge of dangerous, legs dangling over the rooftop. Still, Viola murmurs, "My sister used to make me lasagna. It's a bit time-consuming though."

"No, I love lasagna. That's a great idea. I'll order the stuff." Kinzie pulls out her phone at once, simultaneously sending messages and searching "how to make lasagna".

They go inside, heating the oven, and the Saints, bless them, are apparently up at all hours and willing to both find and deliver Italian comfort food ingredients without asking for details. Though, she supposes, Kinzie has probably requested stranger things of them at 2 AM. She cooks meticulously and Viola cleans as she goes, and they share a bottle of Chianti just because Kinzie says she's in an Italian mood. There's no flour to contain this time— the flat sheet of noodles came from a box, and the tomato sauce came from a jar, and Kinzie nearly burned the meat, onion, and garlic— but when Viola takes her first bite she barely crushes the urge to cry, overpowered by gratitude and nostalgia. She compliments the meal as much as she can with her throat choked up, but Kinzie just laughs and says it's hard to ruin carbs covered with cheese and marinara.

It's very late when they start Bram Stoker's Dracula and fall asleep together on the sofa beneath their yellow blanket, their bellies full and legs comfortably entwined.

"I'm going to Safeword on Saturday. If you want to come." Kinzie swallows her Fruit Loops in a thick gulp. She sets the bowl on the new coffee table, a pale teak hardwood to compliment the white sofa.

Viola's eyebrows raise. It would be lovely to go, if only to get out a little, but she would prefer to be with Kinzie and not flying solo, particularly if Kinzie has a dom date or some workshop planned. Third wheeling her pseudo-roommate who regularly gives her butterflies at the sex club is a new level of desperation for Viola, one that bites harder than not attending at all. And the invitation itself is vague— not-quite platonic, not-quite romantic— so Viola stands there with her own bowl of cereal getting soggy in her hands.

"I—"

"You don't have to. I wasn't trying to make it weird." Kinzie ducks her head.

"No, I don't— I just don't want to interrupt if you have an appointment or work to do or something—"

"No! Nope. Not this time. Just gonna go, uh, hang out," she sighs. "Yeah. Sorry. You don't have to come."

Viola stares, then sits on the white sectional, then takes a bite of her protein cereal. Tentatively, she adds, "I like Safeword. The bar's solid. Great showcases, good music. Better dress code than anywhere else in Steelport."

"So you," Kinzie peeps up at her between strands of wayward orange hair, "wanna go with me?"

"With you," she clarifies. "Yes, I want to go."

A broad grin sweeps across Kinzie's face, toothy and sincere. "Yeah, for sure. I didn't really wanna go if you didn't wanna go, but I wasn't trying to pressure you into it or anything. I just thought it would be fun because you like it and I like it, so why not?"

"It's a good excuse to shop for a new outfit," Viola smiles back, covering her lips with the rim of her bowl.

So they go at midnight— fashionably late since neither of them can sleep through the night anyway— joking about their black latex and the lack of bondage rope as Viola slides into the passenger seat of the borrowed Saints-purple Raycaster, surprised but pleased that Kinzie volunteered to drive. She's as good behind the wheel as she is behind her laptop and Viola is learning that, if she's a sucker for one thing, it's easy, unassuming expertise.

The street signs blur as they speed on the highway to Rosen Oaks, passing the Syndicate territory that Viola once called home. The penthouse she and Kiki lived in feels hollow now, a distant memory she doesn't care to keep, dusty and meaningless. Where she lived never mattered to her, only what she did there.

As they valet at Safeword, Kinzie unzips the front of her literal catsuit— triangle ear headband and tail included— pulling out a cash tip from the wad somehow hidden between her breasts. When Viola steps out of the car, laughing at the improvised wallet, Kinzie sheepishly shrugs and says, "No one ever complains about it."

"You're flashing your tits and paying them. I wouldn't complain either."

Kinzie bumps their shoulders and the latex squeaks between them. Viola's outfit is high-collared, long-sleeved, and wrapped with a matching corset. Thigh-high stiletto boots and a slick bun round out the image.

"Grab my tail," Kinzie hands her the black cord attached to her low back. "Sounds busy in there and I don't wanna lose you."

"Absolutely not," Viola scoffs, but the illusion of derision is broken by her smile. She takes Kinzie's hand in her own instead. "Lead the way, Catwoman."

"Me-wow," Kinzie claws at the air with her free hand.

"No. I will leave right now if you're going to do cat puns all night."

Kinzie pouts for a second, opening the door, then whispers as Viola passes her, "You're fe-lyin."

"Oh my god. You could've just gone with 'lion'."

"Ah, yeah," she tsks, catching Viola's hand again.

Stepping into the lobby of Safeword is a shock to her senses despite its familiarity. An electronica remix of Whitney Houston's greatest hits blares from the speakers behind the cage dancers, painted bodies illuminated by the strobe lights playing on their skin. A firebreather works the tables for tips, careful to avoid both his customers and the topless servers weaving nearby, wearing only bowties and thongs. This floor is littered with small stages and dancers with routines coordinated to the music and each other: synchronized stripping, they liked to call it. People of all body types crowd around them, tossing money, pleasantly raucous.

Kinzie's hand presses to her low back and she says, "Wanna go to the speakeasy?"

Viola nods, thankful for her consideration. The first floor's back rooms are quieter, less circus and more lounge, smoky and intimate. A beautiful bearded man in a ballgown croons Dean Martin, live music for the strippers in this room, syrupy slow in their elaborate, gymnastic pole routines. A short woman in silks contorts on a ring overhead, a better centerpiece than any chandelier. They slide into a booth near the stage.

Without ordering, they're served drinks— a martini for Viola and a bourbon for Kinzie— by a familiar woman outfitted with well-loved leather, one of the Morningstar dominants later recruited by the Saints, and she greets them both with warm affection, staying momentarily to chat. Her brown eyes glance curiously between the two of them, much too discrete to ask the status of their relationship outright, but later that night Viola notices her staring fondly at their table. She tells herself it's not because Kinzie rests her hand on Viola's knee when she leans over to speak quietly in her ear. She tells herself that she has to lean against Kinzie in return— the two of them tangled in the booth— to better see the stage.

At 1am the late shows start and the traffic in the speakeasy lightens. Viola immediately vetoes the furry contest happening in First Basement, opting instead for her usual haunt on the floor below it.

They walk arm in arm past the private rooms and cocktail bar, down to Second Basement where the most erotic and explicit showcases begins at midnight, Kinzie's favorite. Viola sips her martini as they pass the glass-lined hallways, idly appraising the performances inside. They linger on a plush red couch near the Shibari room for half an hour, whispering their admiration back and forth for the bakushi inside, a petite woman with a serious face, wholly concentrating on the mastery of her art. Her models smile to the crowd, as pleased as their audience is by their intricate bindings.

Another group in elaborate animal masks begins a strip tease on the main stage down the hall— the prelude to an orgy, no doubt— and Kinzie whispers in her ear, breath warm against Viola's neck, "Wanna go see?"

Suppressing a shiver at the sound, Viola turns to face her, nose-to-nose without leaning away, and smirks, "I do."

A thoughtful hum drifts from Kinzie's lips and she takes her hand, pulling her up from the red couch. She doesn't release it as they stroll down the corridor, Viola suddenly hot in her latex bodysuit, tall heels clicking on the tiles.

A gleeful person in a suit is paddled by two bunny-girls to her left, and on her right a massive man in a mask drips candle wax across the chest of a woman bound to an X-cross. One large hand reaches up to gently squeeze her throat.

She sees Kiki's feet lift from the ground, his hand around her neck.

Viola drops her martini, glass shattering across the floor in a spray of glittering crystal, a crack in time with the sound of her sister's body breaking.

She staggers, lightning searing down her spine and through her brain. A ragged breath knocks out of her, petrified and overwhelmed. There is only the violent clarity of Kiki's death, the snap of her bones, of Killbane tossing her aside like trash he couldn't bear to touch any longer. Tears pour, heavy and silent, and her throat constricts, unable to breath. Her body is limp and limbless, a sobbing, helpless thing just like she was the first time, and like she'll always be.

Kiki would've been stronger. She would have stopped her little sister's murder.

Kinzie exclaims. Viola hears her name, muffled; she sees the other guests staring, a faceless mist before her eyes. There is pressure around her waist: Kinzie, guiding her upstairs. But she's insensate, and weeks of unshed tears blur her vision. Each step feels like an eternity with this millstone of guilt around her neck, and her knees buckle completely, collapsing in a quivering heap. Kinzie lifts her in a bridal carry without missing a beat.

Dimly, she hears questions, answers, and explanations— "she needs quiet, and water, please"— and feels Kinzie reach near her tear-stained face for more money, chucking it without counting at someone Viola cannot see.

Viola's breath hitches again, hiccupping and shallow, and she shakes uncontrollably. Her skin is too hot; her tears are too heavy; her heart feels like it's splitting in two.

A door closes and they are alone in a room now, a quiet room, with a chaise and a bed and rich red curtains. Kinzie sits her down on the bed, kneeling before her with an imploring look. 

"I can't— breathe," Viola chokes, terrified and lightheaded.

Kinzie moves behind her in a flash, unlacing the corset she helped tie earlier that day with single-minded efficiency. She pulls it away, unzipping the latex bodysuit as low as it will go, and reaches for a silk robe on a rack beside the bed, draping it over Viola's bare back. The relief of it does nothing to allay her choppy inhales, each asthmatic sob worse than the one that came before.

"I'm gonna pick you up again, okay?"

Barely hearing her, Viola nods and Kinzie scoops her into her lap. She sits cross-legged on the bed, cradling Viola like a baby under her knees and shoulders. She presses a quick kiss against Viola's temple, whispering, "It's okay. You can do this. Breathe with me."

With every gasping, keening exhale, Viola tries to match her cadence. Her lips quiver, breath shuddering, and she presses herself into Kinzie's chest, arms wrapped around her like a lifeline. They stay tethered for what feels like hours, but Viola's breathing finally steadies. She shifts, and her whole body aches like toxins leak from her pores until she is left with nothing but exhausted embarrassment.

"I'm so sorry," she whimpers, cheek pressed to Kinzie's sternum. "I don't know— what happened."

Readjusting the robe to better cover Viola's bare shoulders, Kinzie slowly lowers her legs, gently unfurling her. "What do you need right now?"

She catalogues her throbbing muscles, wincing at every twinge and burn. "My head hurts, and," she sniffs, "I'm thirsty."

"Okay." She easily slides away from her, resting her half-dressed on the pillows. Briefly sticking her head out the door, Kinzie returns with a bottle of aspirin. A mini-fridge sits stocked inside, and she reaches down for a cold water. As she sits on the edge of the bed, untwisting the bottle tops before handing them to Viola, she rests a warm palm on her knee and quietly says, "When things were really bad for me, I used to have a lot of panic attacks. I was usually in public when they happened, and it made me never want to go outside again. I think you had one just now, and I want to take care of you so you don't feel alone."

The robin egg blue of Kinzie's eyes flashes bright against the puffy redness of her own tears. She grazes Viola's knuckles, encouraging her to drink her water.

Viola takes the medicine and drinks. She is listening to Kinzie, trying to process her words in the lingering throes of her pain, but she's never had a panic attack in her life. Her body has never before shut down from simply recollecting a memory, even the worst one of her life.

Thickly, remorsefully, Viola says, "I ruined our night out."

"No, I still had a really nice night with you. But I think we should take it easy. I have the room as long as you want, and if you need to be by yourself, I can go get another one."

She shakes her head, neck screaming in protest. "Don't leave. Please."

"Do you wanna change into the robe?"

Viola nods, hunching. Without a word, Kinzie helps pull off her boots and roll down her sleeves, respectfully staring at the buckle-covered headboard instead of her nudity. The silk robe glides across her skin, stimulation so soft it makes her shiver, but she wraps it around herself like armor and slides under the sheets. Kinzie changes too, tugging off her cat ears to slip into a robe of her own.

"Can I get in?" she murmurs.

Without saying anything Viola reaches for her arm, pulling it over her body like a blanket, tugging Kinzie closer against the length of her body. She curls up again with Kinzie wrapped protectively around her back.

"I saw them. I thought— it was like she died again," Viola's voice cracks. "I think this— is what happened to me at 3 Count. It had been a few weeks since she— since it happened, but I didn't give myself time to stop or think about it. And when I was drunk and alone on the balcony, and I finally did," fresh tears spill down her cheeks, "it was too much. I never got to say goodbye. I couldn't stop it— I just watched Kiki die and couldn't— do anything. I did nothing and she was just— gone."

Black hair threads through Kinzie's fingers as she wraps her arms more tightly around Viola. Kinzie presses warm lips to a notch in her spine, a chaste kiss where words would never do her sentiment justice, fitting their bodies closer. She doesn't need to speak. Viola rolls to face her, nestling her eyes in the crook of her neck, tasting the heat of Kinzie's skin and the salt of her own tears. She yearns to kiss Kinzie back, to kiss her properly and deeply, to show her gratitude and how she likes her so, so much that she doesn't know how to do the things that used to come naturally to her body.

But the time isn't right, and she feels this certainty in every steadying breath. Instead she lets herself cry and be held until her guilt and grief disappear like birds in the distance, vanishing into the horizon. The impossible division by zero that trapped her mind in stasis finally disappears, the cruel equation erased from the page now that she knows it cannot be solved alone.

She exhales against silk and skin, suddenly lighter, as if the rocks piled onto her chest have shifted to the side, falling away, and her lungs have space to fill with air again. Breathing freely with Kinzie wrapped around her, Viola sinks into a deep sleep.

A knock at the door wakes them hours later, groggy in the early morning dawn. Kinzie groans, squeezing Viola's shoulder as she disentangles herself, and rasps that she'll answer it. The crimson robe plunges low on her chest as she nods to the Safeword cleaning crew, explaining that they'll be on their way shortly, before she turns back to Viola with a crooked smile.

"We shut down the kink club."

Viola blinks away her streaked mascara, fully appraising her environment for the first time. Toys, tools, and towels surround them, along with an entire shelf dedicated solely to lotions and candles.

"This is a waste of a sex dungeon," her voice scratches out, sore and raw.

"There's always next time," Kinzie grabs her another water bottle, lopsided grin still plastered on her face. "You feel okay today?"

"Better, yeah." She softly adds, "Thank you."

Her tongue darts out to lick her lips, nervous and bashful about returning to the house after everything that happened. Worried that, though Kinzie told her otherwise, a line was drawn in the sand between them, a vulnerability exposed too quickly. "Are we— are you good?"

"We're good. I'm good. Other than waking up at 5am to get back into yesterday's latex, I feel better too."

Viola laughs, her head pounding with the motion. "Not bringing pajamas was a terrible idea."

"Probably doesn't meet the dress code," chuckles Kinzie, reluctantly handing Viola her clothes.

Viola sits on the new gray bedspread with her hair in a towel, makeup wiped away in the shower, cataloguing the furniture she still needs to replace, and patently ignoring the steam that curls beneath the bathroom door.

Kinzie's showering now. She'd left the front of her black catsuit unzipped as she squinted through the windshield at the orange-pink sunrise, mercifully turning West to go home. And as they sat in a spent silence on the highway, all Viola could think was that she should have kissed her back last night. She grew flushed and sticky in her own latex, fingers coiling around the laces of the corset in her lap, lamenting both that she burdened Kinzie with so many things she never asked to carry, and that she still wanted more from her.

Her hands wring together now, lower lip sucked between her teeth. She rubs the pad of her thumb, no comparison to how much better it felt an hour ago when Kinzie held her hand in the car. Viola reached for her, fingers brushing her wrist, and she obliged without hesitation, her only response a tiny smile. When they arrived she led her back to the bedroom, one hand on her back like she needed to guide her through an unfamiliar space, like she took home someone new for the night, insisting Viola shower first to get comfortable. To sleep again, if she could. She poured her more water and set the aspirin on the end table, and fetched her a clean towel from the laundry room.

After everything, she is so good to her. Viola's heart aches and her body's sore, and when the bathroom door swings open, she sees only the lips she failed to kiss, alluring as always.

Kinzie stands before her, inquisitive and attentive, only a towel wrapped around her perfect body.

Viola rises to meet her at the boundary of the doorframe, appreciating the planes of her broad shoulders and the pink curve of her mouth.

She steps closer and murmurs, "I don't want to go to sleep yet."

"Viola?"

Her heart races. Her name in Kinzie's mouth sounds different, low and sultry, a safe, dark night blanketed across the three syllables. Kinzie doesn't back away from her, auburn hair loose and damp against her neck. There is the dizzying sensation of fighting gravity and the soreness of half-healed wounds, but they stand eye-to-eye, and Viola breathlessly answers, "Yes?"

Kinzie watches her lips, asking, "Do you want to?"

"I really do."

One warm hand spans the gap between them to rest against Viola's hip, thumb playing against the soft skin of her stomach, and the other reaches up to cradle the back of her neck. Viola's arms thread over Kinzie's shoulders, fingers interlacing behind her, and when their lips finally meet she shudders, unbearably grateful for the strength of Kinzie's body and the softness of her mouth.

Weeks of suppressed need and desire leave her weak in the knees and she pulls away long enough to catch her breath— Kinzie smiles brightly at her eagerness— before pressing their lips together again, her tongue searching for more from Kinzie, anything from Kinzie, as she falls against her entirely.

The sense of weightlessness returns, not of falling but of floating or flying or some other metaphor Viola's not equipped to identify with Kinzie's tongue working so sweetly against her own, and Kinzie presses the length of her body into her. Viola whimpers desperately, half-sitting against the bedspread, pulling Kinzie down with her, falling onto her back, an echo of last night's embrace and the comfort of her body blanketing Viola's.

Damp orange hair drapes around her face, tickling her cheeks, and Viola grasps at Kinzie's jaw as if she can pry open more of her and inhale her directly. An eyebrow raises but Kinzie ardently complies, deepening their kiss as one hand slides up Viola's cotton t-shirt, slow and questioning.

"Are you sure?"

Viola pulls back, nodding, "Yes."

A pleased hum pours from Kinzie and she kneels beside her, towel still wrapped securely by some unfortunate twist of fate and fabric, tugging up her t-shirt until it bunches around her collarbone, baring Viola's breasts beneath her. Arms pressed to her sides, Viola blushes faintly, surprised by her sudden sense of shyness. It's the conspicuous appreciation, she realizes, that makes her feel so demure. Like Kinzie could kneel over her all day, simply staring at her body, a welcome voyeur, an aesthete admiring a work of art. Her self-discipline dissipates beneath the gaze of Kinzie's hooded eyes, and Viola squirms.

"God damn," Kinzie breathes.

"Kinzie," is all Viola replies, urgency clear in her tone.

Kinzie exhales reverently, "You're right."

She kisses her again, gingerly divesting her of the rumpled t-shirt. Her hands travel down the curve of Viola's shoulders, softly grazing her skin until the pads of her fingers travel up the slope of her breasts, brushing against her nipples. When Viola sighs into her mouth, Kinzie grabs a handful of her, rolling her nipple, pulling her lips away to follow suit.

A moan drifts from Viola as she scratches at her muscular back, urging her on. But she takes her time, licking and fondling until Viola murmurs, "Please, please," and at last she pulls away the damp towel between them. It falls to the floor and Kinzie is nude above her, perfectly chiseled body flexing as she bends down for a deeper kiss, tender and slow. Viola's hands roam, desperate to touch every inch of her, but Kinzie sits down on her shins, the back of her hand rubbing the apex of Viola's thighs, taunting her over her shorts.

"Take these off," Kinzie whispers, endearing but demanding. Her free hand returns to a hardened nipple.

The shorts sit low on her hips and Viola wastes no time shimmying out of them, keenly aware of her own arousal and the wetness Kinzie must already feel through the fabric. She presses her body down on Viola, holding her head and stroking her shoulders, kissing her deeply as she writhes.

"Fucking gorgeous," she breathes against her lips. The trail of kisses moves with tortuous slowness down her torso, teasing her breasts as a palm presses flat against slick heat, more weight than friction between her legs. Viola groans, trying to shift against it, but Kinzie pins her hips, saying, "Not yet."

Instead she slides down her body, tongue writing binary against her skin, and pulls Viola by the knees to the edge of the bed. She kneels on her towel, nails tracking gentle scratches up her calves and over her ass, twisting around her knees before taking hold. She spreads Viola's legs before her, sighing her appreciation, then resumes the lacework of her kisses, starting at one ankle and moving inward.

"Please, Kinzie," she whispers, twitching with need and craving her in every way.

"You know I can't say no to you. I would love to eat you out," Kinzie presses a lingering kiss to her inner thigh, smiling up impishly from between her legs. "Would you like that?"

Even in her sex-drunk haze, Viola can applaud her commitment to unmerciful teasing, shocked that, of all the women she's taken to bed, only Kinzie Kensington dared to try it. Only Kinzie asked what she wanted and waited for an answer, all restraint through mutual arousal. Viola feels the ache of delayed gratification, and the dripping warmth of relinquishing control, of being made to say exactly what she wants.

She smiles, color on her cheeks, "I really would."

Kinzie kisses her thigh again, sucking this time until her teeth lightly prick at soft flesh. It's going to leave a hickey, Viola knows, and while she thinks she should protest to maintain some sense of control over this situation, she whimpers and spreads her legs wider, too desperate to play at objections.

Hooded eyes flick upward at her response, and Kinzie hums into her leg. One hand stretches up to work Viola's breasts as the other loops around her thigh, thumb and index finger gently opening her more. She admires her again, only for a moment, before the flat of her tongue finds center.

The heat of her floods into Viola's chest— her back arches and eyebrows knit together in ecstasy— made all the better when Kinzie moans in harmony, steadily, feverishly lapping at her like she's finally found the pinnacle of her sugar rush. Kinzie's face presses hard into her, tongue plunging deeper, and Viola's hips buck uncontrollably, fingers digging into the sheets.

"Oh fuck," she heaves, delighted.

Kinzie's tongue works her hard, returning to her first rhythm, expertly matching Viola's ragged breathing, twisting her nipple as she grinds against her face. It's wanton and desperate and slick, and Viola likes being here, on her back in Kinzie's bed, worshipped beneath her hands and tongue, soaked and senseless until there is no room for vacancy left in her, only Kinzie and the way they take care of each other. She's panting hard and it's happening so fast, faster than she's ever experienced because it's Kinzie's tongue plunging inside her again, darting back out to drive her mad with lust and passion, holding her steady as she drives her closer and closer to unity.

This is the thought that sends her over the edge, and she comes so relentlessly she nearly faints, black curtains pitching her vision. It bolts through every atom of her, quivering and molten hot. She pants, shaky hands finding Kinzie's head as she slowly pulls herself up on the bed to slide in beside her. One muscular arm loops over her shoulder, steadying Viola as she sighs and shivers with the saccharine aftershocks of her release. Viola clings to her, relishing the weight of her body beside her own.

Kinzie delicately pushes black hair away from Viola's eyes, propped up on her elbow. She scoots closer until their legs entangle, and the first vestiges of Viola's senses begin to return. Her toes tingle and she laughs lightly, blinking herself awake. She rolls onto her back and takes the warm hand on her shoulder into both of her own, kissing the pulse point on the inside of Kinzie's wrist.

"You look so pretty when you come," Kinzie says, earnest as ever, the lower half of her face glistening wet as she smiles, utterly enchanted.

Viola grins back, pressing up against her until Kinzie flops onto her back. Her voice is all smoke and promise when she answers, "You look so pretty with my come on your face."

Their breasts press together as Viola climbs onto her, hungry to repay the pleasure she was dealt. She kisses her deeply, tasting herself as she slides one of her thighs between Kinzie's. It's clear her freckled skin is electric-wired and already on edge, and she moans hotly into Viola's open mouth. She wastes no time moving lower, licking and sucking her nipples as short nails dig into her scalp, rocking her hips just to feel Kinzie tremble more profoundly against her.

She's too inflamed to ease off, to tease Kinzie the way Kinzie teased her, however briefly; it is too tempting to bring her fulfillment, too delicious to make her wait when she can simply do it again. She already wants to, she realizes as she presses her thigh down with another roll of her hips. She longs to fuck Kinzie again and again until they have a grand total of nothing left.

So her fingers find wet heat— Kinzie's already dripping for her— and she indulges herself with feather-light touches, exploring and appreciating that this is every bit as good as she dreamed it would be. She slips a single finger into her, content for now with coy, soft bliss, and Kinzie groans a string of incoherent, intoxicating expletives that leave Viola voracious to give her more. It's been a month of denying how badly she wants to kiss and touch and taste her, how hopelessly she wants to unravel her every single night, but as she presses deeper into the warmth inside of her, she knows it was worth the wait.

"I need to taste you, Kinzie," she whispers against her navel.

Kinzie clenches around her finger, the taut muscles of her abdomen flex as she pushes down, begging for more, which Viola indulges with a string of peppered kisses. Withdrawing slightly and savoring the desperate whine of complaint she receives, Viola slowly twists two fingers inside as she runs her tongue up the length of her. Red hair falls against the pillow as Kinzie cries out, entirely wordless, her body matching the movement of Viola's deft fingers. Her thighs quake around her head but Viola's pace is persistent: sustained rapture dancing at the edge of a release. Her fingers and face drench with her pleasure, left hand interlacing with Kinzie's as her fingers squeeze and release of their own accord, her body rapidly spinning out of control.

When Viola finally relents and brings Kinzie to the finish she craves, her climax is half a yelp and half a sob, every muscle shaking as her palms press into the wall overhead, and Viola works her down slowly, smiling into her skin and relishing the shimmering wetness of her fingers and tongue.

They pant together in silence until Kinzie, eyes closed, opens her arms. Viola could never deny that request, so she rests her head above her breasts as she slots in beside her, enjoying the staccato of Kinzie's calming heartbeat. She kisses her chest, chaste despite their sweat-slicked nudity. As her lips press hard against Kinzie's sternum, Viola thinks that this feeling is uncontainable, too good to fit inside the limitations of her body. That kissing her and laying with her is better than anything she's known. This quiet relaxation overwhelms her— it's the best she's felt in as long as she can remember— with an unfamiliar sense of safety and happiness that she never expected to find in another's arms.

"Oh my god, Viola," she giggles. "You're amazing. We should have done this sooner."

Her hands trace circles on Viola's back, weaving a path from her neck to her ribcage, tingling up her spine. Viola tilts up her chin and kisses her like she wanted to the night before, tongue searching gently against her lips. She feels her cravings return as Kinzie opens her mouth, pulling her closer as she moans obscenely, thumb grazing her nipple. Kinzie's eyebrows shoot upright, as if surprised to see that Viola already breathes hard with anticipation, eyes half-closed with renewed lust.

"Again?" she asks.

"Please," Viola murmurs into her ear, pulse thundering. "I want you to fucking rail me this time."

A huge smile splits her face as Kinzie sits upright, shifting Viola easily down her legs. She stretches as she leans out of bed— muscles flexing lasciviously— to dig through a bedside table drawer. It's Viola who whines with excitement this time as Kinzie removes a purple dildo and its harness, lazily asking, "May I?"

"Yes, please, yes."

"You're so polite when you wanna get fucked."

Kinzie smirks and buckles into the strap-on as Viola kisses her, pressing a hand against her stomach. "We mustn't sacrifice etiquette." She drags her fingers across the valley of her abs. "But why does everything have to be purple?"

"We love a theme." Kinzie turns back to the drawer, muttering, "Hang on, I know I have some lube—"

In one fluid motion Viola flattens her palm against Kinzie's muscles and grips the toy with her right hand, stopping her in her tracks. "I won't need that," she breathes, and takes the dildo into her mouth, sliding it down her tongue again and again until it shines wet with spit, never breaking eye contact. Kinzie likes to watch, and Viola likes to show.

Kinzie tenses beneath her, holding her breath as she stares at the filthy display. "Oh my god," she finally whines.

With a wet pop Viola leans forward, languidly kissing her, fingers guiding the toy. Kinzie slides it into her, gentle and slow, and she moans, sinking back for more. She sighs, rocking on her, playing with her own breasts and one of Kinzie's too.

She hears a reverent, "Oh my god, you're so tight," so she shifts off her knees and onto her feet, bouncing with mounting fervor, her muscles clenching every time she lowers, and Kinzie's hands find their way to her head, tugging lightly at her hair as she rides. Viola cries out, bouncing faster, desperate to give Kinzie every last drop of her pleasure.

Two hands lock onto her hips, holding her in place and supporting her shaking legs, the dildo only halfway inside her.

"Stay right there," Kinzie orders, a hushed purr. "Don't move."

"Okay," Viola pants, slurring.

Kinzie's heels dig into the mattress as she drives up and buries the toy into her, thrusting in a deep, steady rhythm until the edges of Viola's body blur and her mind swims in the cadence of it. The syrupy moan that falls from her lips is a raw, animalistic thing, and Kinzie's pace quickens, melting the boundaries between them as she pumps harder. Viola's breath catches each time she's pounded, struggling with the onslaught and the euphoria of it, and her throat opens wordlessly into a whining moan.

Kinzie groans, clean sweat beading at her temples. She grits her teeth into a feral smile, entranced by her work and delighted by the dripping slickness she causes, fingers squeezing Viola's hips, pulling her down each time she pushes up into her. The tension building in Viola's body consumes her, all built-up and poised for release again, a hungry pressure and a wetness she can hear. It's too much: the arching of her back and the fluttering of her eyelashes, and the rough inhales of the woman working her body so well, marveling at the shape and sound of her as she comes undone.

"Come for me," growls Kinzie.

Viola leans back, shuddering and clutching Kinzie's ankles as she drives into her from below, fucking her faster, and her own hand barely find its way between her legs, uncoordinated and slippery, before her orgasm swells and crescendos, and she goes slack with a guttural cry, falling forward onto Kinzie's bare chest, mindless and quivering from the intensity of the aftershocks. She rides herself down slowly, mouth open, nipping and sucking against the pulsing arteries of Kinzie's throat. She kisses her languorously, totally spent, body boneless and relaxed.

She shivers as Kinzie removes the toy, overstimulated as she nestles in the crook of her arm. Her left hand reaches down, fingering the buckles of the harness in a daze.

"Kinzie," she murmurs.

"Yeah?"

Viola contentedly sighs, "You fucked the shit out of me."

Kinzie smiles, "Yeah."

Viola's hand traces her breast, counting her freckles, teasing her as it travels lower, knowing well that Kinzie, for all her focus on Viola's pleasure, is wound back up to a peak of arousal.

"Kinzie?"

"Yeah?"

"Take that off and flip over."

Joyful anticipation melts down her face and Kinzie heaves, "Oh my god, yes."

She complies immediately, clumsily unbuckling herself from the harness as Viola chuckles lazily at her enthusiasm. She reaches down to help her, fingers grazing the leather, metal, and plastic as her other hand gently rolls a nipple.

"Slow down, stud. I'm going to take such good care of you."

A whimper floats from Kinzie, desperate and wanton, and Viola cannot help but laugh again, capturing her mouth with a deep kiss.

"Flip," Viola whispers, biting her lower lip for good measure.

Situating in the harness as Kinzie rolls onto her stomach, Viola tuts. That position would not do.

She spreads Kinzie's legs to kneel between them, hoisting up her ass by the hips until her face and breasts press into the bedsheets and she's entirely exposed on her knees, wet and ready to be taken from behind. Viola presses the dildo against her, just to let her feel the length of it, nails dragging gently down her magnificent, muscular back, simply enjoying the view spread before her. Kinzie trembles, biting the inside of her own elbow.

Slowly, Viola pushes herself in, ignoring the soreness of her own body in favor of the pleasure racking Kinzie's. With a lewd sigh the redhead presses back into it, as if to speed herself along, to set a pace of her own, so Viola pulls out, licking her lips with a smirk.

"No," she simply says.

And Kinzie's back muscle tense through a battered sob of longing, but she behaves, growing still. Viola returns to her, slowly sliding in until she moans and shudders, and the front of her thighs presses to the back of Kinzie's. This repeats, slow and unceasing, returning a shameless moan muffled by Kinzie's elbow, wet with spit, her eyes rolling back with every long thrust.

It takes no time for Viola to adjust, to strike just the right spot, quickening her pace. She drapes over Kinzie's back, jostling them both as she fucks her, gripping her hipbone with one hand as the other slides between her legs, teasing at first, then circling with her own rhythm. She sweats with the sustained effort of these reckless collisions, smiling against Kinzie's spine as her legs spread farther apart, throbbing for more.

When she hears Kinzie choking on her own breath, she deepens the movement, pounding her harder, circling faster, and the spine beneath her lips arches fully at last. Kinzie screams her name, coming hard until her jaw snaps open and no more sound comes out. She shakes, tensing around her pillow, before her whole body goes limp, half-falling away from Viola with a ragged exhale, her face red, still overflowing with pleasure.

Viola gently removes herself and harness, dropping it to the rug before returning to Kinzie's side. She kisses her, parted lips pliant and clumsy, but her quivering hands roam the length of Viola's back, grounding herself on the shape of her.

Side by side they lie together, basking in the quiet and exhaustion and each other. She holds Kinzie against her chest, rubbing her neck and arms and back, contentedly dozing.

After a few minutes of silence, Kinzie mutters against her, "I think— I need another shower. I have never been this wet in my entire fucking life."

Viola laughs and cups her cheek, serenely kissing her again. "All right. But I'm getting in with you, and then we're going to sleep all day. Just like this."

"Just like this," Kinzie agrees.

It's half past seven and they're late for dinner because— even though they live the closest to Smiling Jack's and the rest of the Saints are also perpetually tardy— the third floor concrete stain they laid wasn't quite dry. But the color was taking beautifully, and they stood around admiring their handiwork for a bit too long. So they offer a quick apology and cheerfully slide into their booth, Viola holding Kinzie's hand as she takes her seat beside Matt. The others already ordered food and drinks for everyone from the limited menu— pasta or burgers only— plates still warm from the cheap heating lamp in the kitchen.

Shaundi eyes their interlaced fingers and says, "Interesting."

"Shaundi, shut the fuck up," Shark pokes her with a fork. "You're literally dating a STAG agent."

"We are not dating. It was a one time thing—"

"Your text messages say otherwise," says Kinzie, sipping from the coffee mug Pink slid toward her. Viola smirks.

Matt pulls onions off of his cheeseburger, primly noting, "I don't think that's what they meant by 'Respect the Troops,' but to each their own."

Shaundi's cheeks alight with red. "I will fucking kill you all—"

"Dude, she literally used you as a human shield," Pink says. She jabs at a meatball as it rolls across her plate. "Actually, you're probably into that."

Shark casually shrugs, "It's okay to make weird romantic choices, Shaundi. No one's judging you."

They bicker back and forth as Viola leans into Kinzie's shoulder, reading the dossier she pulled up on her phone. Information on former STAG Agent Kia Flint lines the screen: USMC 13-19, Sergeant E-5, Callsign Staple, etc. Viola loses interest immediately, glancing across the table as she rests a palm on Kinzie's thigh, commenting, "She's cute for a jar head."

"Did you look her up?" Shaundi squawks, totally aghast, grasping across the table for the phone.

Kinzie waves it out of reach, grinning, "Not like I didn't have her info before. You're literally fucking the enemy."

"She quit the force! And— and so are you!"

"Incorrect," Viola snips. "I'm a card-carrying member of the Third Street Saints now. Note the purple sunglasses."

Beside her Matt pouts out his lips, showing off the purple lipstick that rounds out the rest of his gothic techie look.

"We have cards?" asks Pink. Shark stops mid-spaghetti slurp, noodles dangling out his mouth as he waits for an answer.

"No, Jesus," Shaundi rolls her eyes. "Eat your fucking food."

The banter steadies into something less inflammatory, and Viola finds herself untroubled as she polishes off her rigatoni, appreciating her time at the cheap local eatery with company she never thought she'd enjoy. She thinks that, maybe, if given enough time, Kiki would have liked this too. A warm hand finds her own, and she smiles back at Kinzie, squeezing her knee. This is their first group outing to anywhere but Safeword, and affectionate pride swells in Viola at how well Kinzie's done in public these last two hours.

"Wanna go home?" she whispers, sliding closer in the booth.

"We don't have to," Kinzie quietly reassures her. "If you want to stay out, I can stay out. I feel okay."

"I was thinking," Viola leans closer, lips on the shell of her ear, "we need to break in the new mattress. And the ropes."

Kinzie clears her throat, announcing, "Okay guys, it's been fun. Time for us to go. Have a great one. Don't do anything stupid."

She leaves a stack of money on the table for their waitress, not bothering to count the hundreds. Shark and Pink shake their heads— unwilling and unable to comply with that request— as Shaundi distractedly shoos them away, texting her not-so-secret STAG girlfriend, and Matt waves his black nail polish in a pleasant farewell.

Viola and Kinzie walk back to their nest hand in hand, a happy little twosome, matching equals on either side of a perfectly balanced equation.