She can't take it anymore.

"Eve," she cries, "just -- "

She extends her spikes, an inch long each, stabbing the inside of Teresa's cunt in a hundred places.

Teresa shrieks.

It's sharp and sudden and it doesn't feel quite real, and, ignoring her desperate orders to stay still, her body jerks wildly in hopes of escape from the thing destroying her flesh -- but it's buried inside her, gripping her insides with its dozens of cold sharp needles. And now her skin is tearing free of the suckers attached to it, slicing itself apart.

She can barely even feel it, because the torture Eve is inflicting on her vagina is such a completely new kind of pain, and it's worse than everything that came before. Tears leak from her eyes. She can't even imagine what those needles must be doing to her insides -- cutting tissue, piercing organs. Will Eve destroy her womb? Has she already?

It's horrible. She can't think any other thoughts. The pain is horrible, and Eve is horrible, and Teresa wishes desperately that she was dead, or that they'd never found Eve, or never adopted her, or that she'd go and torture Lynia instead --

-- and there is nothing Teresa can do to accomplish any of that, nothing at all, because every last atom of power here in this alley belongs to Eve.

Eve sends a pulse down her tongue. A ripple. The needles flex in place and tear at Teresa's flesh.

She's screaming again. Once more the pain is different, and still it just keeps getting worse.

And Eve experiences it all, and it is incredible. She can feel the sparkling little bits of pain zipping up her tentacles and into her; she can sense the exquisite torment being visited upon all the many delicate nerve endings in Teresa's cunt, which were made to feel gentle pleasure but are so, so vulnerable to pain.

She moans. It is a decadent and guilty sound, but Teresa will not hear her over the sound of screaming. And -- and it's not embarrassing to feel good anymore, because Teresa is broken. All Eve's to play with. Like that tattered old teddy bear, its head swinging loose, that was clutched in Eve's arms when Teresa and Lynia first found her. The one somebody had tossed in the gutter for the beasts to find...

Why worry about what a thing like that will think?

"It hurts," Teresa whispers. She's sobbing. "Eve, it hurts, I'm going to die, it hurts so much..."

"Shhhh," Eve tells her, and brushes a tear from her eye with the tip of a tentacle. "Don't worry, I'm here. You're not going to die. Everything's going to be fine. You're just going to hurt for me.

"For Lynia, remember?"

She twists her tongue. The needles slice and stab and tear.

She feels dizzy. It's strange that she can even tell.

How can the whole universe contain so much pain, let alone a single soul? How does it fit?

But it's -- it's what she deserves, she thinks. Isn't it? Because she betrayed Lynia --

-- because she was stupid and she agreed to this --

-- because she's spent half her life cutting sxelanthe open without ever being in danger herself --

But it doesn't matter, does it? Whether she deserves this punishment, or whether Eve is the essence of evil itself. She couldn't fight it either way. All those instincts of hers, sharpened by years of combat; all her planning and her worries -- none of it means anything, because what's going to happen is that she is going to suffer because Eve wants her to.

That's the world she's in, and there is nothing for her beyond.

She seizes on that thought. It's...soothing, somehow.

For the first time since Eve first showed her true face, Teresa's breathing calms.

Eve's turning her inside out. Bit by bit, thought by thought, skin and muscle and bone and spirit --

She's almost dug it out. That thing, precious and beautiful, nestled amid the shards of Teresa's devastated heart. It has no name, but the sxelanth knows it.

What's that look in Teresa's eyes?

She's staring up at Eve. She's not struggling anymore, and there is something frighteningly like peace upon her face.

The pain -- the intensity -- the crushing weight of it all --

It feels so different when she thinks of it like this. When -- when she knows that it's all for Lynia, and it's all for Eve, and that she can't fight it and she doesn't need to fight it and all she has to do is endure --

Then it is almost like there is nothing she must endure at all.

The final layers of Teresa's fractured heart crack open.

Eve clenches down with all her tentacles and stabs her spikes deeper, and the sxelanth reaches in and plucks out the delicate prize from the core of Teresa's soul.

It is something like the petal of a flower, white and delicate and coated with morning dew.

Teresa screams.

It is such a different kind of scream from the ones that came before. There is no panic here, or dread. Only agony and relief.

Eve shudders deeply.