Chapter Text
Valentino has decided that the universe hates sexy people.
It must, or else he would have woken up in his own bed with Vox curled up beside him, and definitely not bound by holy rope to a chair in the middle of some musty ass room, still in last night’s club outfit.
But given that he is, in fact, in that unpleasant situation, he’s got to believe he’s simply suffering from success. He’d be flattered by the effort of procuring such rare and dangerous bonds, if it wasn’t him all wrapped up in them. He’d thrashed in an attempt to loosen the ropes, tried to unfurl his wings to get leverage, but all he’d succeeded in doing was wedging them more uncomfortably between his back and the cold metal of the chair.
His head is pounding and he can’t see shit, which is par for the course, but worse now given the dim lighting, the singular bulb fighting for its life as it flickers from its lonesome spot on the ceiling. He wracks his brain for what in the hell he could’ve done last night to end up here, and comes up empty. He’d been high, sure, but when isn’t he? And even on his worst nights, when he’s so out of his mind he can’t remember how to call his driver, Vox brings him home, because Vox is always watching. Vox would never let this happen.
So where was he?
Valentino’s antennae perk up when he hears movement outside the door. It doesn’t open, but he can make out the low murmur of conversation. He cranes his head toward the door, straining to hear. Two voices, one gruff and one whiny and wavering, are arguing back and forth.
“I’m not going near him! What if he bites?”
“Well, you should’ve gagged him while he was still out of it if you were so worried about that!”
“A gag—the boss didn’t give us a gag!”
“Uh, then you should’ve made one, stupid. Just stuffed some fabric in his mouth or something, it’s not fucking hard.”
“Whatever, man.”
Great. Not only has he been kidnapped, he’s been kidnapped by idiots.
He considers his options. He has no smoke, no weapons, and no way to get his wings unbound. He’s sweaty and uncomfortable and smells like shit. He has no way of knowing where Vox and Velvette are, or if they’re alright. He is, as painful as it is to admit, completely helpless.
So he does the only thing he can think of, and throws the mother of all tantrums.
Valentino screams so loud it leaves his own ears ringing, an enraged high-pitched howl that goes on and on and on until he is forced to inhale for lack of oxygen. Then he throws out every swear and insult he can think of, spit flying from his mouth with every word. He thrashes against the ropes so violently that the chair tips over despite its weight. His head slams hard against the floor and something in his top right shoulder goes pop, but Valentino is so far beyond rational thought that the pain only serves to fuel him further. He keeps on screaming even as the door bursts open and the stupid goddamn cunts who snatched him run in, babbling something he can’t hear above his own voice.
One of the sinners reaches for the chair, probably in some foolish attempt to get him upright again, and that’s all Valentino needs. He lurches forward and sinks his teeth deep into the sinner’s hand. Blood gushes and bone snaps as those sharp fangs do their job all too well.
Somewhere through the fog of rage, whatever remnants of logic are left in Valentino’s head whisper that this is only going to make things worse. But it makes him feel better, so fuck it.
The sinner is screaming, yanking their arm back in an attempt to get Valentino to let go, but he keeps his jaw locked tight until one of the others drives a foot into his abdomen. He’s had worse, but it’s startling enough for him to loosen his grip. The sinner stumbles back, cradling their mangled hand close to their chest. With their other undamaged one, they reach back for the holster that Valentino hadn’t noticed before.
Fuck. There may have been a mistake made here.
“Alright, motherfucker,” the sinner snarls, cocking the gun. “See you when you have a whole skull again.”
He fires.
ⓋⓋⓋ
A PROBLEM HAS BEEN DETECTED AND VOX HAS BEEN SHUT DOWN TO PREVENT DAMAGE TO HIS SYSTEMS.
THE PROBLEM SEEMS TO BE CAUSED BY THE FOLLOWING FILE: WTF.EXE.
VOX.EXE_CRASH_ERROR_WHERE_THE_FUCK_AM_I_
CHECK TO MAKE SURE ALL {{WHATTHEFUCKWHATTHEFUCKWHATTHEFUCK}} HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE IS UP TO DATE AND PROPERLY INSTALLED. ASK VOX FOR ANY VOXTEK UPDATES YOU MIGHT NEED.
IF PROBLEMS CONTINUE, {{WHEREISHEISHEOKAYISHEALIVE}} DISABLE OR REMOVE ANY ELECTRIC DISRUPTOR(S) FROM THE GENERAL VICINITY. IF YOU NEED TO USE 'UNSAFE MODE' RESET YOUR VOXTEK DEVICE PRESS F5 AND SELECT 'ADAVANCED STARTUP OPTIONS' THEN SELECT 'UNSAFE MODE'
TECHNICAL INFORMATION:
*** YOU’RE FUCKED! ***
ⓋⓋⓋ
Velvette’s morning has gone to complete shit.
She’d gone to bed the night before thinking all was right with the world, but because Hell seems intent on refusing her even a moment of peace, she’d woken up to no less than 50 missed calls from Vox’s frantic employees asking if she had any idea where her fellow Overlord was. Vox started his days at four am, because he was a madman, and he simply did not miss work. Vox wouldn’t risk his iron grip on Pentagram City for anything, and so Velvette had been forced to take all the nagging seriously and drag her sleep-deprived ass down to Vox’s floors of the tower.
Her first instinct had been to call Valentino on her way there, but he hadn’t picked up either. With a growing sense of dread, she’d pivoted to contacting the little moth bimbos who guarded his door and confirmed what she already suspected—no sign of the pimp since he’d gone clubbing the night before.
Two of the Vees are missing, and it’s not even eight in the morning. She needs a drink.
By the time she actually reaches Vox’s creepy voyeur lair, she’s forced to accept the reality that there’s only one reason both of them would be gone without a trace. But goddamnit, it’s such a stupid reason that she wants to tear her hair out.
She doesn’t know what pisses her off more: that her pea-brained excuses for business partners have gotten themselves kidnapped, or that said kidnappers didn’t bother to go for her too.
She knows why, of course. It’s true that her apps and promotions and influence would cease to be without the tech Vox provides, and that’s probably what these assholes were banking on. That with the boys out of the picture, she’d be left floundering, a scared little girl willing to capitulate to all their demands.
Well, they’ve got another fucking thing coming.
Velvette knows better than anyone that all the likes and comments and pure, sweet, addictive attention that fuels her are dependent on the technology Vox has woven throughout their world. She also knows that the fact it belongs to Vox is exactly why she can’t depend on it.
She has seen Vox lose control; seen him overload himself and send the city—all their security, surveillance, intelligence—into a blackout. It’s happened more than once. Rarely, but she won’t be satisfied until rarely becomes not at all.
In some ways, it is frighteningly easy. Vox is highly emotional, which isn’t a crime by itself, except that he’s emotional about too many things and too many people. And while she can’t rag on him too much for it, considering both her and their other business partner’s quick tempers, the consequences are far more widespread when Vox is the one losing it.
To maintain what she is, Velvette needs the internet. And like it or not, that means she needs Vox to stay stable. And since that is a tall order, to put it lightly, there’d been a need for a contingency plan.
“I don’t give two shits about whatever or whoever makes you throw a hissy fit,” she’d told Vox at the very beginning of their collaboration, “but it better not fuck with my status.”
So Vox had installed the server.
Given that Velvette was not a walking piece of tech like he was, the procedure had been invasive, to say the least. She had insisted on staying conscious the entire surgery. Even with local anesthesia and her natural regeneration, it had been grueling. But the thought of being cracked open and fused with machinery while completely unaware revolted her so much that she endured.
At the end of it, she walked away no worse for wear and with an entirely new world opened to her. The server was nestled carefully in her chest; a piece of VoxTek entirely separate from its creator. A taste of that power for Velvette alone to wield. Protected and powered by her own heart, her own brain, her own firing neurons. It’s not something she’s forced to use often, which is fine by her—the energy it takes to navigate the unregulated web is substantial.
She collapses into Vox’s giant fuckoff chair (compensating much, V?), dragging a hand down her face before booting up the monitors in front of her. She’s immediately hit with a screen demanding a passcode, and she barely restrains herself from slamming her head against the desk.
Alright. Contingency plan it is.
Velvette takes a deep breath and closes her eyes, then focuses on the hardware thrumming in her chest and goes online.
This is always the worst part—the sudden surge of information is so intense and overwhelming it nearly brings her to her knees. The first time she’d accessed the web this way she’d burst into tears, ripped herself out of the network and shut everything down in a panic. She’d nearly killed Vox in the aftermath, convinced he’d installed it wrong intentionally and betrayed her. It had been staggering to learn that no, this was just how he lived, every single day and a thousand times more intensely. Her server was for emergencies for a reason; her brain was simply not built to handle the consistent flow of information the way Vox’s was.
Over time, she’s learned how to brace for it and navigate until she’s able to zero in on exactly what she needs. She pushes past all the noise, ignores every image and voice and piece of gossip that begs for her attention, and starts flicking through camera footage. Every club and bar Valentino might have gone to since yesterday, every possible route his limo might have taken, all the long hallways and countless workrooms contained in Vox’s stretch of the tower; Velvette’s head starts to pound at the sheer amount of cameras she has to cover and review.
What makes her worry the most is that she feels no other presence as she peruses. Vox would have known the moment she logged on—any disturbance in his network might as well be a bright flashing neon sign directly in front of his face. The fact that he hasn’t taken the opportunity to latch onto her signal and siphon power to himself means he’s either too hurt or out of it to recognize what she’s doing, or—no, shut up, she’s not thinking about the other possibility.
After what seems like hours, she finds what she’s looking for. At 2:24 in the morning, Valentino stumbles out the back door of a club at the very fringes of their territory, fumbling with his phone. The footage has no sound, but she can practically hear him yelling at his driver to get their ass in gear and pick him up.
She zooms in, enhances the footage as best she can. A doglike sinner rounds the corner so quickly Valentino doesn’t even have time to say anything before he’s being beamed in the face with a flashlight so bright even Velvette winces.
The reaction is instantaneous—the phone falls from his hand as Valentino goes rigid, eyes wide as he stares into the light. Velvette is so stunned that she almost misses the other sinner that emerges from where they’d been hidden behind the club’s dumpster, holding what looks like a busted-up length of metal piping. They bring it down against the back of Valentino’s head, hard enough that there’s absolutely no way his skull doesn’t cave in. He goes down like a lead weight, a crumpled heap on the filthy ground.
It takes both the sinners to pick him up, attempting to wrangle his height and many limbs as they carry him. Velvette follows them through the cameras as they rush to a van idling at the curb. Even while lugging someone as big as Valentino along, the fuckers move fast enough that if someone were to stumble across the scene, they wouldn’t have time to figure out exactly what was happening, or who it was happening to. Valentino is tossed into the back of the van and the dog sinner climbs in with him while the other hops into the passenger seat, and they peel off into the night.
She’s so glued to the scene in front of her that it takes Velvette several moments to realize her hands are shaking.
There is no conceivable way those goons could have known what light can do to Valentino. No one fucking knows. They’ve made sure that no one fucking knows. If the knowledge got out that the most famous pimp in the Pentagram could be reduced to a mindless zombie by something as simple as a too-bright lamppost, his empire would fall to ruin. Outside of Velvette and Vox, the only people who had that knowledge were Valentino’s old clients when he still worked the streets, and as far as she knows he and Vox disposed of all those assholes a long time ago.
Didn’t they?
Solving that mystery will have to wait, though, as much as it grates on her. There’s no use in figuring out who’s screwed them if two-thirds of the team are incapacitated. So she curls her hands into fists and dives back in.
None of what she just witnessed could have happened if Vox hadn’t already been down for the count. He thinks he’s subtle, but Velvette knows that if Valentino isn’t in his physical line of sight, Vox will have every camera possible focused on his partner from the moment he leaves until he returns. If Vox had even an inkling that Valentino was being followed last night, he would have taken care of it.
Which meant someone had taken Vox out first, then maintained the facade that everything was normal long enough to catch Valentino unawares. Electricity can run fine without the Overlord micromanaging it, sure, but Vox would only need to have thought about it and he would have a warning pinged to every device owned by the other Vees. He’d been caught off guard, which should be impossible, because nothing escapes his cameras. Nothing is supposed to, anyway.
This was planned down to the second, every player in place to move at exactly the right moment.
“Who the fuck are these guys?” She asks aloud, irritated and unnerved.
Half the flops and hags that call themselves Overlords can barely use a flip phone, and even those who can really haven’t shown any interest in cutting into the Vees’ domain. And despite what Vox thinks, the Radio Demon definitely doesn’t care enough about their supposed rivalry to enact such a complicated plot so reliant on dealing with technology.
In the end, it doesn’t matter. This is their fucking city, and as soon as Velvette gets her two idiots back, there won’t be anywhere these wannabes will be able to hide from their wrath.
Despite her digging, none of the cameras turn up anything useful on where Vox could possibly be. Valentino, thankfully, is a different story. She’s able to track the van carrying him as it travels across the city—she swears loudly when it crosses into Carmine territory. Her dread at the idea of a possible turf war only lasts a moment, though, as the van parks in front of a dilapidated warehouse Velvette doubts could be fixed even if anyone wanted to. There’s no way Carmilla would ever keep anything of value there, so it shouldn’t be an issue if it somehow ends up destroyed.
She watches them drag Valentino, who’s now bound in glowing white rope—damn, okay, these guys have access to blessed shit—into the building. She loses sight of him once they enter, as there’s no cameras inside, but it doesn’t matter. She’s got her lead.
If she can’t find Vox through the cameras, the stooges who are holding Valentino hostage will surely have some idea. Velvette grins despite herself. It’s been so long since she got to really bare her claws.
She downloads the location of the warehouse before pulling herself back into reality, shaking her head as her mind tries to process the massive amounts of data she’d swept through in her search.
She’s no longer angry about the fact they’d deemed her useless enough to not bother taking her down. It means she gets to prove just how badly they’ve miscalculated. And oh, is she going to enjoy every second of it.
“Alright, fuckers,” she says, cracking her knuckles, “let’s dance.”