One of the henchmen quickly choked off a snigger. She thought it was Shark #2 and gave him a smile.
“You don’t have to call me anything, Executive. You have a family—do you care about them?”
Calm, ever calm. “I do.”
“I had to ask. I couldn’t assume that they’re anything more than extra pawns in your game, your personal pet superhumans. If you won’t cooperate, we have other ways of pressuring you. Like you said, it’s a family business. We’ll go after them next.”
“Oh, you can try.”
“I really don’t expect you to agree to my demands on my first request,” he said. He’d begun pacing, and his henchmen stepped back to make room. Perversely, this made her want to agree to everything, just to throw him off. Turned out he had a script and wasn’t really paying attention to her at all. “If you could see reason, you wouldn’t have done any of this to begin with. So I won’t insult you by expecting you to see reason now.”
“You just keep going, this is getting better and better,” she said.
“I can’t trust the courts and police here to see what you really are—they all take orders from you. I’m sure most of the superhumans do as well. So all I have are threats.”
“How very noble of you,” she said, deadpan.
He stopped, glared at her. “You’ve forced me to this.” He seemed agitated, like he’d expected her to be frightened and was frustrated that she wasn’t. They always were.
“Yeah, you just keep telling yourself that.” She was way too tired for this, and her stomach had started squirming. Vomiting all over their nice empty office would be gross, but it would serve them right. But no, she had to stay well and alert. As well as she could, anyway.
“Sonic, Shark, bring her daughters here. Then we’ll have this conversation again.”
“Shark?” Celia questioned, raising an eyebrow at him. She’d been calling him that to herself as a joke. “And what you do, bite people?” Nobody answered.
The mentalist said, “We’re not going to hurt them—”
Majors cut him off with a gesture. “Of course not. But we need to have some kind of leverage.”
Celia’s imagination spun out because she’d had too much experience with men like Majors and their plans. He could find plenty of ways to threaten Celia without physically hurting the girls: take them away, hold them hostage for the rest of their lives, brainwash them, turn them against her. Convince them to convince her. Make her hurt them. His mistake: seeing them as pawns. Her girls were better than that.
“I’d rather you kept your hands off them,” she said, and was pleased to hear an edge in her voice. A supervillainy edge, even. You meddle with powers beyond your ken, puny mortal …
Majors smiled like he thought he’d gotten claws into her. “You see? I’ll get through to you. Soon enough you’ll understand that this is for the best.”
He nodded at the others, who moved into action. They began stripping, peeling off jackets, shoving down trousers, and unbuttoning shirts. They all wore skin suits of some sleek, shimmering black material. She guessed the fabric had some kind of reflective, antitracking properties. It might even have been bulletproof. At least that was how she’d have done it. The woman put her hair up with a clip, a couple of the guys put on gloves, they stretched muscles and cracked joints in an obvious show of preparation. When they all lined up with Majors, still mundanely clothed, they looked as badass a team as Celia had ever encountered.
She raised a skeptical eyebrow at them. They made an effort to ignore her, but they had to make the effort.
Majors said, “Mindwall, you’ll have to stay so her pet telepath won’t find her.”
“I’ll give you as much protection as I can,” Mindwall told the others.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be back before you know it,” the woman said.
“Pet telepath?” Celia said to Majors. “Really?”
He chuckled. “What else should I call him?”
“The father of my children?” she said to the departing team, heading toward the elevators. “You might want to keep that in mind. Just saying.”
“Can we gag her?” the remaining shark said.
After thinking a moment, Majors said, “No. I want her to be able to say she’s changed her mind.”
They settled in to wait. Majors retired to a chair across the space. He sat facing her, his arms crossed, studying her. She wondered what he was discovering. She just looked back, her expression still. Maybe she’d learn something about him, if they kept up the staring contest long enough. Like whether he had superpowers, and if so, what were they. He probably did, to be able to head up a superpowered team like this. Or he might have just been the money, the organizer. So, Delta had superhumans. Majors had to win this battle, or he wouldn’t be able to keep that secret for much longer. That was all she really needed to know, that his threat came out of fear. Frankly, she didn’t much care about Majors in the long run. She knew his type, and his type made mistakes. He needed her alive, so she was okay for the time being. A solution to this would present itself.
The second shark planted himself in a guard position behind her. Her skin crawled, sensing his presence without being able to see him. He was probably some kind of heavy, with a combat-related power. A kinetic strike or superstrength. She wondered if he had a temper to match. The superstrong ones often did. Like her father, who’d have made short work of Majors.