Author's Note: To help you on the waaay... Rafe can turn into a liquid form, Lily can turn into stone, Symphony has sonic scream and Felix is suuuuper fast.

---

Lily has her hand on my throat and it’s squeezing the words right out of my mouth. We’re hopeless at this point because I don’t know what she wants me to say and she doesn’t know how else to deal with the situation. She squeezes harder.

Harder.

Harder.

Splash.

“Sorry,” I say and she is jumping away because instinct tells her that water on new Gucci stilettos isn’t going to be a good thing. Just forget the fact that she kicked those off hours ago when she turned to stone, it’s just pure instinct. When is the only time she isn’t wearing stilettos? When she’s doing a crime, and even then she has her moments.

“Sorry,” I say again and she wipes her dripping wet hand on my thigh. I don’t mind, my throat just turned to water and my entire body is soaked from all the sweating. Not a cold a sweat, don’t mistake me with someone cowering in fear.

Lily has put me in a room lacking a proper ventilation system. Too much heat and I sweat profusely, it’s embarrassing really.

“Don’t fucking apologize,” she spits. Now this isn’t the Lily I once made out with under the bleachers in the ninth grade. She would never be caught dead spitting out perverse language like that. This is the Lily who is trying to choke words out of me so she won’t get a knife in the back from one of her boss’s boys. This Lily is scared to death and when I tell her that, she is spitting again.

“Fuck you, Rafe. You don’t know what the fuck you are talking about!”

Which would only make sense, I point out. Considering I don’t know what exactly she’s trying to get out of me. Maybe it’s for that old family recipe for baked green bean casserole, she used to love that stuff. I’m saying this, smiling, and I guess she knows she’s expressing too much emotion because suddenly she’s back to sporting that marble stone face.

All of this seems to end far too quickly than I’d like. I want to ask about her mother, and I wanted to see if she was doing anything for fashion week next month, but then there isn’t any time when Symphony shows up. All it takes from her is a couple of good yelps and doors break down and windows break into a million pieces. Ah, ventilation, thanks so much Songbird.

“Fucking amateurs!” screams Lily and while I’m sublimating so that I can now slip through my roped up hands and feet, Symphony makes the motion.

Ears covered, that’s when it all ends. Sure a bullet can’t take out the impenetrable stone armor that laces Lily’s body, but an incredibly concentrated blast of sound? It cracks the stone and even causes the rest of our ears to ache for days.

We leave and Lily is a crying mess on the ground, screaming something about how that broke her nose, she thinks. It broke her nose and now she can’t walk the runways for the next week.

“Sorry,” I say, and before Symphony can chastise me I catch up with the team to help ensure our safe retreat.

“We really need ta’ get somethin’ for our ears for when ya do tha’, Songbird.” I say.

“Yeah, just covering our ears ain’t doin’ the trick, “ mutters Phil.

She ignores me, she ignores Phil and it’s Felix, who managed to take care of all obstacles ahead and quickly, that says it looks like I pissed my pants.

“I could’n help tha’, there wasn’ a lick o’ ventilation in tha’ room.”