A/N: So, this one took a while, but it's on the longer side (14k words) and hopefully worth the wait. It's going to be four chapters altogether. It's also a sequel to "Haunted" and "The First Cut is the Deepest," so if you haven't read those, you might be a little lost with this one. As for where it falls in the Devilish timeline . . . I tried to stay somewhat ambiguous about that, because I'm not quite sure myself, lol. But I'm thinking it's set after the in-progress third long installment. There are a couple references to that fic in here, so if something makes you go "hmm," that's probably why. Also, I'll warn you ahead of time that I left this one open-ended in case I decided to revisit some things later. I might not, but I wanted to have the option. OH, AND! It will help if you're familiar with SVU canon, particularly season 14. TW! Mild references to statutory rape & child sexual abuse. /TW! First person narration because of reasons. Thanks for reading! Look for chapter 2 soon.

Chapter 1: Every Breath You Take

. . .

She was Liv, plain Liv, in the morning, standing five feet nine in socks. She was Olivia in slacks. She was Captain at work. She was Benson on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always my city girl . . .

Okay, so maybe I'm paraphrasing a little. But as I sit here listening to him drone on and on about the genius of Nabokov's prose, his use of alliteration, his taboo subject matter—so ahead of his time, old Vlad! (As if perverted older men hadn't been preying on young girls since time immemorial)—and his egocentric narrator, I have to occupy my mind somehow. There is a very good reason that I didn't major in English as an undergrad: I fucking hate literature. Books and reading I like, but the second some four-eyed professor handed me a novel fatter than a phone book, written by a stuffy old white guy about a stuffy old white guy who whined over his man-pain for five hundred pages, I would have laughed my way right out of the classroom and never looked back. So I became a cop. And ended up in a literature course, a dog-eared copy of Lolita splayed open on my knee.

I'm not here for the lecture, obviously. I'm here for the instructor, although he's not particularly noteworthy, either. Mildly attractive, with his salt-and-pepper beard and sharp features, his cozy sweater vest and browline glasses. A bit pretentious if you ask me, but I suppose at (almost) twenty-two he had looked like the all-American '80s boy with his collar popped and his large feet tucked into a pair of leather boat shoes. He's tall. Over six feet. "Like that's a skill set," she had said, when I noted Trevor Langan's height all those years ago. I find myself comparing the heights of other men from her past in my mind's eye—had Stabler been tall, I wonder—and questioning if that is her preferred stature. I'm not short, especially for a woman, but I'm no Trevor Langan. I'm not even an Alexandra Cabot, you might say.

"So, what do we think, class? Is Humbert Humbert a reliable narrator at all, or is every word out of his beady little mind total bullshit?" he asks, and flashes a row of top teeth as straight and white as he is. His eyes are a piercing blue-green, discernible even from my seat midway up the tiered lecture hall. His joke isn't that funny, but several students, mostly male, titter appreciatively at its smooth delivery. I've been trying to figure out what bothers me so much about him, and now I realize that's it—his smooth, almost calming voice. I keep imagining him whispering into Olivia's ear with that same voice while he raped her.

She doesn't know I'm here, scoping out her ex-fiancé and statutory rapist. Had I told her my plan, she would have unequivocally put her foot down. This way, I only had to lie about where I was going—to watch "the game" at Daph's, although no such game exists and Daphne Tyler cares even less about sports than Olivia Benson does—instead of lying and defying her orders. And to be fair, I didn't know what my plans were until I showed up outside Professor McNab's office, tailed him to his evening lit class, and filtered in among the students as they took their seats.

Daniel McNab, that's his name. Olivia let the "Mc" part slip the night she disclosed to me that her first time had been a sexual assault, followed up with a few months of stat rape, by this man, this McNab. For a moment, while I was thumbing through the Hudson University 1984 yearbook and choking on library dust, I almost laughed out loud at the sight of his name. If Olivia had married him, she would have been a cop named McNab. It was funny for all of two seconds, then I thought about him on top of her ("Please, God, don't let him climb on top of me again"), hurting her like she'd described, before she had anything resembling muscle on her slender, unblemished sixteen-year-old body, before she knew how to say no, and the humor was suddenly gone.

His students call him Professor Dan. Dan the Man. He seems to have a good rapport with them, an ability to communicate on their level, though he's pushing sixty and, at a few months shy of forty-one, I'm approaching grandma status to most of these kids. Luckily, I don't look it yet, and I more or less blend in with the crowd, in my pink plaid hoodie, scruffy jeans, and high tops. A couple guys were eyeing me with interest when I first got here, so I think I'm pulling off the ponytailed coed façade pretty well. He hasn't singled me out yet, or even glanced my way, probably because he's too busy extolling the clever turns of phrase of a fictional pedophile to notice a real woman in his midst.

"Personally, I think the dude's fucking hilarious," says a guy who didn't raise his hand and looks like Jesus, if Jesus were a nineteenish stoner with lackadaisical hygiene and a Nirvana t-shirt. He points to a line in his copy of the book, which makes mine appear in mint condition, and recites, "'My little cup brims with tiddles.' Man, I laughed so hard I almost shit my pants reading that."

A few of the students—again, all male—snicker along with Stoner Jesus, although some at least have the decency to hide their grins behind a hand or the book they have rolled into telescope form in their sweaty mitts. Dan the Man glances down at the podium he's leaning on and tries to hide a smile, the way I try not to crack up when one of the kids hears me swear in the car and repeats it.

Smug bastard.

"Thank you for that . . . graphic contribution to the discussion, Bode." Professor Dan shakes his head and knocks on the Lolita cover in front of him; it's the one with the adolescent girl's legs, bare beneath a short skirt, knees turned in, bobby socks and saddle shoes on her small feet. An innocent image meant to titillate. Exploitation disguised as a high ranker on most Top 100 Books to Read Before You Die lists. "I'm sure none of us will ever interpret that line quite the same way now."

"What's to interpret?" asks another student who doesn't wait to be called on. This one is female. She's a wisp of a thing, dressed in solid black, a beanie slouching against her long, stick-straight hair. She vibrates rage, perched cross-legged on an uncomfortable plastic chair (my ass is numb from sitting in this one), heavy combat boots poking out from under her skinny thighs. I like her already. "You do know what he's talking about, right?"

Here, she whips her head around to shoot Stoner Jesus (aka Bode) a glare of pure disdain. "He just finished describing the size of a little girl's breasts and when she sprouts pubes. That cup brimming with tiddles is him saying he jizzes to the thought of ten-year-olds. Is that funny to you?"

The classroom goes deathly silent for a moment, and Stoner Jesus' dopey grin falters the slightest bit. "Well, it's not like I got off on it," he says, affecting an indifferent attitude, though clearly unhappy about being called out. "I just got a kick out of the way he put it, geez."

"I think what Bode is trying to say," intervenes Professor Dan, just as the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo gears up for another retort, "is that, in Humbert, Nabokov created one of his most memorable and complex characters. Many scholars consider him an antihero, and his use of colorful, grandiose language as a cover for his own ineptitude and insecurities."

"Let me guess, those scholars are all insecure white men?" Dragon Tattoo fires back, clasping her fingers together behind the beanie and flicking a subtle smirk in Daniel's direction. (Oh, I really like her.) "Humbert is nothing but a lowlife piece of shit pedophile who can't get it up for a real woman. Lolita is the only good character in the book, and he spends half of it demonizing her and all the other 'nymphets' he lusts after, just so he can justify what he does to them. It's sick. This isn't literature—" She wields the book like a fire and brimstone preacher with a Bible, then slaps it back down on the table in front of her. "—it's kiddie porn and an instruction manual for child rape."

I kind of want to give her a standing ovation, but that would be conspicuous. Instead, I turn an eager eye to Professor Dan, gauging his reaction. He must have heard the argument before, from a host of outraged female students to whom he'd assigned the novel over the years, because he is thoroughly unfazed. If anything, he looks more relaxed and sure of himself now. A little amused as he gazes around the room, stooped casually behind his podium. Observe, class, the feminazi in her natural state: ranting bitch mode.

"I agree with Gretchen," says a girl of about twenty, who is soft-spoken compared to Dragon Tattoo, but no less wispy. (Was I that small at their age? That inclined to disagree with an authority figure, especially a man?) She twines a curl of her long black hair around one finger and nudges the book, cover down, away with another. "I'm uncomfortable reading it. I don't see how it's a 'classic' when it's just page after page of some old man fantasizing about young girls."

The "old man" comment almost makes me snort aloud, partly because it takes the wind out of Daniel's sail for just a second. I haven't actually read the book I checked out from the campus library an hour ago, but I know the gist of its plot—middle aged man, preteen girl. It's a subject I deal in daily as an SVU detective. And the fragile male ego is a recurring theme. Dan the Man has a good twenty years on this Humbert fella.

"Lolita was published in 1955," he begins.

(Is that the year you were born? I'm tempted to call out. Truthfully, I wouldn't be that far off.)

"It predates the Me Too movement and most current age of consent laws. May-December romances were much more prevalent in those days. Elvis Presley met his first wife, Priscilla, when she was just fourteen years old. Jerry Lee Lewis married his thirteen-year-old cousin in 1957. Love stories weren't as . . . restricted in that era, and girls were considered young women at earlier ages than they are today—"

The longer he goes on spewing his rape apologist bullcrap, the more I start to twitch. If he knows the current age of consent laws, he is undoubtedly aware that New York's laws haven't changed since 1984, when he deflowered his newly sixteen but still underage girlfriend. My girlfriend.

I hear myself speaking before I even know what's going to come out of my mouth. It's this: "Just because it used to happen doesn't make it less of a crime. Rape has always been rape, Professor, even when men get away with it by sexualizing and blaming the victim. Bet if you asked Priscilla or Jerry Lee's cousin, they'd tell you there's no such thing as a romance between, say, a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old girl and a grown man, and there never has been. Even if he proposes, it's still stat rape. Statutory rape."

It might be my imagination, but I think the professor colors a little towards the end of my speech. He definitely narrows his eyes at me behind the Mad Men glasses, listing sideways as if he's peering around a corner for a better look at the mouthy blonde who interrupted him. "I'm sorry, I don't believe I caught your name," he says, studying my face too intently for my liking. I'm not worried he'll make me as a cop, I just don't want this prick to remember me.

"Probably because I didn't throw it," I say, offering a tight smile. None of the Georgia peach charm and definitely no dimple. If he does think about me later, all he's getting are the basics: blonde hair, blue eyes, pale, slim. That could be anybody. "Call me Jo."

"Well, Jo, you make a good point. Mind coming home with me to have a talk with my sixteen-year-old?" He shows me those straight white teeth of his, and I can't help wondering how many times he used them on Olivia. "I mean my daughter, of course."

. . .