"Doll--" Dom frowns, one hand on the fridge door and the other on her hip. "Why did you buy eight whole chickens?"

Minion chokes on his lunch. "No reason. I mean. There's a reason, obviously. I didn't just buy eight chickens for no reason at all." He sweats a little, wishing he had taken the chickens straight down to the mini-fridge in his lair instead of letting his whiny stomach dictate he eat lunch first. "The reason is that I thought... we could... have a dinner party?"

Dom pulls her head out of the fridge and shuts the door. She spent the morning down in her half of the lair, and she's got that provocative look in her eyes, the one that says she's planning mayhem and murder. "We haven't had a dinner party in years. Not since that time my curry disagreed with Arrogant Anteater's stomach and he destroyed the dining room set I stole from the governor. What a mess that was."

"You're right, babe," Minion says hastily. "It's probably a bad idea."

"No, it's a great idea. It would be just like old times, especially since I'm all fired up over coming out of retirement." Leaning against the counter, Dom crosses her arms. "The brunch girls would love it. Would your friends from the henchparent meetups want to come? Oh, no, I know! We should invite Wynter's guardian."

Minion really chokes this time, a chunk of bread lodging in his throat. He hacks and coughs, eyes streaming. "I don't know," he gasps. "If we're inviting the villain crew, having a civilian there is risky."

Uncrossing her arms, Dom steps to his side and slaps her palm against his back. "I'm thinking just him and Wynter. Ishana has been spending a lot of time with this girl. I'd like to know more about where she comes from."

"But, uh." Minion scrambles to find a believable excuse, and also to breathe. Both are equally important. Dom doesn't know that she's just suggested inviting a hero into their home. And not dying is kind of on his to-do list, in general. He tries, "Shan might think that's weird."

It's too late. Looking very pleased with herself, Dom whacks him on the back until the chunk of bread shoots out of his throat and jets across the room to squoosh wetly against the well. It sticks there like a little grey lump of regret.

"We're her parents. It's our job to embarrass her. I'll take care of inviting them. You must have the menu sorted if you've already done the shopping. I'll see if they're free tonight. Hmm, I suppose this is a good excuse to get a new suit..." Musing, Dom strides out the kitchen.

Minion groans and puts his face in his hands. "Nice work, idiot," he mutters. "Next time hide the evidence before you eat lunch."

Soon... In the underground lair.

"Sit."

Eddie flops his butt onto the concrete floor, tongue lolling eagerly, tail sweeping dust bunnies back and forth. A string of drool oozes between his teeth. Minion tears the plastic off the chicken carcass and dumps it whole into a metal mixing bowl. Eddie whines.

"No, I couldn't just tell her the chickens were for you," Minion says. "She can't know you're here. That would mean admitting we lost fights to a teenage girl and to a dog. I get it, I suck. We can keep that to ourselves."

Eddie barks once.

"You don't have to be rude about it. I'm not a washed-up old man. I've just had a little bad luck. Okay, a lot of bad luck. Like a whole year of it. Ever since Henchr launched, to be honest."

With a loud sigh, Minion sets the bowl down and toes it across the floor towards the dog, who wags his whole body in excitement. A huge puddle of eager slobber soaks the floor before him.

"Okay, you monster. Go nuts."

With a yelp, Eddie dives at the bowl. Vicious jaws snap around pale pink flesh.

Minion throws himself onto the couch. Scowling, he watches the huge, shaggy animal maul the chicken, cracking bones between savage fangs. "You are revolting," he says. "You're abnormally large, you have no manners, and you're not even majestic like a wolf. What do those fools see in you?"

Slurp. Crack. CRUNCH. Eddie doesn't answer, muzzle buried in strips of chicken flesh.

"What am I gonna do with you?" With a groan, Minion kicks his feet up on the coffee table. "I hope you know that owning a dog is my second-worst nightmare, after waking up one day and finding myself working for a hero." He shudders at the very thought. "You can't stay down here forever. Plus, we're totally fucked, thanks to you. Dom wants to invite Wet Sandwich here. And her dad-parent-guardian-whatever he is. How could I let this happen?"

Leaning over the arm of the couch, he manages to yank a beer out of the mini-fridge with the tips of his fingers. He cracks it open against the coffee table and pours half the bottle down his throat. Moments later he lets out a long, lip-flapping burp. The beer tastes like sadness and self-pity.

"Get it together, Minion," he mutters. He slaps both palms to his cheeks, slamming the beer bottle into his left cheek. "Shit!" Moaning, he rubs his smarting cheekbone, then holds the icy bottle against it like a cold pack.

"Okay. Think. Make that noodly brain noodle. You can do this. You have to." He scrunches up his nose as though that might help with the thinky shit. "The question is: is it just Wax Sandals we have to worry about, or is the other guy dangerous too? Does he know that she's got a whole vault full of weird glowy machines in their basement? He must. There's no way he wouldn't. That door was barely even locked. And how'd a kid get equipment like that without help?"

He pulls out his phone and thumbs through the photos from White Squall's house.

"What are these things, anyway?" he asks Eddie, glaring at the one, painfully blurry photo he got of the mysterious boxes with blinking green lights. "This looks like something in the most high-tech villain lair. Or a tech startup. Same difference, I guess. Is that what they are? Computers? Really, really big computers?"

He swipes over to the photos of the corkboard papered with articles about heroes hindering hits and heists. With great difficulty, he uses two fingers to enlarge the image until he can read the pixelated headlines. He spots mentions of nearly every hero and villain operating today. "Helix Hurricane halts Hairy Hollower's hasty hegira. I mean, what do you expect when your talent is incredibly fast-growing hair? Fat Friar foils Fainting Felicia forever. Except she broke out of jail a month ago. The ol' play-dead trick never fails. Valiant Virgin arrests Professor Force. Wait, what?"

Brows drawing together, Minion jabs futilely at the screen. The image can't enlarge any further. The text of the article is too blurry to read. "What the fuck? Are they talking about the job we were on? Willowy Sage took down Professor Fumble. Why're they giving the credit to Vanquished Varnish?"

There's no answer. Realizing the lair has become very quiet, Minion looks up.

Eddie wriggles on his back, paws twitching, eyes bulging hideously. Chicken blood coats his jowls and tiny gagging sounds spurt from his throat.

"Oh, fuck me."

Hurling his phone and beer aside, Minion leaps over the coffee table. He falls to his knees and wrenches the dog's jaws apart. Wafts of fetid breath make him gag. Eddie stares up at him pathetically, eyes starting to roll back into his head.

"After all the shit you put me through, you're not gonna choke to death on a fucking chicken bone. If you die, it's because I want you to." Growling, Minion shoves his hand down the dog's slimy throat.

A chunk is wedged between gooey folds of flesh, deep inside. Eddie thrashes, whining pitifully. Minion jabs a knee into his ribs to hold him still and fights to get a grip on the hard, sharp piece. It slips. He wrenches it free.

The wishbone sploops out absolutely dripping with saliva and chunks of chicken. Minion chucks it aside in disgust and slumps back, sighing.

Eddie licks his bloody chops casually, as though all the trauma of moments before hadn't happened at all.

"You're welcome, you ungrateful beast." Minion hauls himself to his feet. "You owe me one."

Looking utterly content, Eddie lays in an ocean of half-chewed chicken and his own saliva. The repulsive product of the animal's digestive tract coats Minion's arm to the elbow. It stings his skin as though the slaver is half stomach acid.

"I didn't realize it was possible for you to get even more disgusting."

With great effort, because this dog is really ridiculously massive, his head nearly up to Minion's chest when he's standing, Minion herds the hairy brute under the safety shower. When the water hits him, the dog lets out a piteous howl and tries to bolt. Minion seizes him. They wrestle under the spray of icy water, paws scrabbling, hands dug into fistfuls of dirty yellow fur, until they're both clean.

Finally, he lets go. Eddie hurls all two-hundred-plus pounds of himself across the room. His shaggy fur clings wetly to his skin, somehow making him look skinny and sad. With surprising pliability, he manages to squeeze the enormous mass of his body under the couch and huddles there, shivering and whining.

Minion collects the mop to clean up the putrid mess of meat and dog dross.

"Well, we're not doing chicken again," he sighs. "How does anybody afford to feed you creatures? You think they'd invent something cheaper. Like some kind of dry food just for dogs."

Slopping warm water over the offal, he squints at the cement. He doesn't recall it looking so pitted and rough. Even his lair is getting old. This is just embarrassing. If he was smart, he would have retired like he was supposed to instead of getting involved in this whole chaotic tangle with White Squall and her horrible pet. Too bad he's the opposite of smart.

The mopping soothes the sting of regret a little, so he proceeds to mop the whole lair. This takes a while because even his half of the lair is huge. This is where he keeps his TV, his mini-fridge, his home gym, and his expansive arsenal of weapons designed to look even more intimidating than the average killing device. It's half man-cave, half reprobate business. On the other side of the elevator lobby, Dom's lair is part sex dungeon, part criminal mastermind's hideout. It's the class struggle in two lairs.

"So," he muses as he pushes bloody water across the floor towards the drain. "Winky Squint is coming here. No stopping that if Dom's set on it. If we can keep it together, maybe we'll learn something. Maybe she'll give herself away. If that doesn't work and she doesn't somehow cotton onto us, then tomorrow night we unmask her, before this goes any further."

He puts the mop away. Tapping his chin thoughtfully, he stares at the wall of weapons. Over the years he has collected everything from umbrella swords to pink rocket-propelled grenades with cats painted on them. He's spent hours arranging the display for best aesthetic effect, with a colossal two-handed battle-ax on one side, shoe daggers in the middle, and fifty feet of auto-strangling cord coiled over a hook on the other. He considered giving that last weapon to Dom, but he decided it was a bad idea because the wire doesn't respond to safewords.

"We can't risk her house again. That was a fucking shitshow, and nothing we found there was conclusive, anyway. So we have to draw her out. Make it public. Get some cameras on her and literally tear her mask off. So. How do we draw out a hero?"

Minion squats down into a calf stretch.

"Well, she's a teenage girl. What do teenage girls like? Ishana likes math puzzles and finding loopholes in tax law, but that's probably not normal. The mall? But how do we make sure we don't attract a different generic hero?"

All this thinking has already set a headache throbbing behind his left eye.

Plopping down onto the damp floor, he leans forward to grab his toes. From under the sagging couch, Eddie yowls. Minion glares back at him over the twinge of his reluctantly relaxing hamstrings.

"Stop judging me. Plans are hard, okay? I'm the muscle, not the brains. And tonight I'm the chef for my enemy. Do you think Shan would be upset if I just said fuck it and poisoned them?"

Eddie yips three times.

"You're no fun."

Later... Upstairs in the ornately and illegally appointed dining room.

The air hangs thick with rich spices. Mouth watering, Minion lays out gold cutlery next to scalloped white plates on the antique wood dining table. Along with the matching stained-glass sideboard and polished chairs, this furniture came from a previous Mayor of Big City. Twenty years ago, in the middle of his re-election campaign, his political opponents paid Dom a stupendous sum to humiliate him. She crept into his home the night he was hosting a critical fundraising dinner and stole all of it out from under their noses: table, chairs, dishes, even the gold-dusted appetizers that had been laid out to impress his filthy rich guests. And it worked. The news went crazy over the robbery, saying the mayor couldn't protect the city from villains if he couldn't even protect his own home. He lost the election, and Dom walked away with a wad of wealth, an amusing anecdote, and a fancy new dining set to replace the one Arrogant Anteater's abusive ass destroyed.

Minion sighs nostalgically. Simpler times.

"But why?" Ishana wails from the kitchen. "I haven't even invited Wynter over yet."

Dom sounds unaffected. "Don't worry, sweetheart. It'll be fun. Your dad's made a lovely dinner. We'll all just chat and get to know each other."

"You're acting like Wynter and I are engaged or something."

Minion walks into the kitchen just in time to see Ishana's annoyed eye roll.

"Oh, no," Dom says placidly, scooping curry into a silver serving dish with a pearl-encrusted lid. "If you were engaged I'd be doing background checks."

"I can't believe you're even using the intimidation dishes!"

"The what?"

"The dishes you use when you want to prove how rich we are. There are people starving in this city and we're eating off plates made of solid gold. It's humiliating."

"What's the point of having nice things if you're not going to use them?" Dom asks in a tone of perfect reason. "Your father and I have worked very hard for everything we have, and not using these dishes isn't going to make those poor people any less hungry."

Scowling, Ishana agitates the ice in her glass of cola. "Wynter doesn't even wanna come. Her dog is missing and she's freaking out. She thinks someone kidnapped him."

"Sounds like she needs a nice social outing then. Take her mind off the stress." Dom puts the pearl-loaded lid onto the dish and pulls out the next bowl, equally decadent with its polished jade inlays like rising suns.

Minion reaches for the plain cups, then checks himself and pulls down the crystal wine glasses. He clears his throat. "He probably ran away. Dogs do that all the time."

"Maybe." Ishana shrugs. "I guess she could just be paranoid. She does spend a lot of time reading about all the crimes villains commit." She narrows her eyes at them both. They stare back innocently. "But she says he's really obedient and this is really unlike him."

"That's too bad." Minion tries to look like he's not actually very interested in Wynter or her dog.

Minion sees the whole evening stretching out ahead, just like this. Excruciating. He knows Wynter is White Squall. She doesn't know who Minion is. He hopes. Her guardian may or may not know anything about anything but most likely knows something about something. Their dog is trapped in the lair, a short ride on the secret elevator away, probably howling until his lungs burst. And Dom and Ishana are both still totally in the dark. Maybe he should pull Dom aside. She's always careful, but they've never knowingly had a hero inside their home before.

"Wynter really loves that dog," Ishana says, and there's this softness to her voice like she thinks her girlfriend's affection for that slobbery monster is sweet. Minion has never questioned his daughter's judgment more. Except maybe a moment later, when Ishana laughs. "If Eddie was kidnapped, I sure wouldn't wanna be the person who did it when she catches them. She will hunt them down."

Minion fumbles a wine glass. It nearly hits the floor but he manages to pick his jaw up and scoop the goblet out of the air moments before it can explode into crystal dust on the tiles.

Of course! He was staring at the abominable animal all afternoon and he didn't even think of it. The stupid dog has a purpose after all.

His plan clicks into place. He smiles devilishly.

The doorbell rings, and Dom perks up. "Our guests have arrived."

Smile vanishing, Minion grits his teeth. First, he has to survive this fucking dinner party without revealing he knows anything. And without giving in to his base fatherly urges and doing something nasty to the hero his daughter is in love with.