by Sophia Reed
He was in the living room when I came out of the bedroom. I'd showered and dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and I wasn't due to go anywhere for another few days and I didn't want to go like this. Not with everything so messed up between us.
Maybe some of the therapy had taken. I wasn't just going to throw our relationship out the window and run away. That was new.
Maybe the therapy with Cole would take too and everything would move back to an even keel. Maybe I'd feel I'd done my bit for God and country and I could ride a desk and maybe Mark would still be waiting when that happened.
Only that seemed more like a prison sentence from where I was now.
Maybe that would change too. I'd give it time to show me one way or the other.
"Mark?"
He was sitting on the couch in the nearly dark living room. Outside it was raining again. "Love."
My heart broke a little then. I crossed the room without looking to see if I had an invitation and slipped onto the couch beside him. His arm went around my shoulders and pulled me close.
"I don't know if it helps, but this isn't about you. It isn't about you and me. This is just something I have to do," I said. My head was on his shoulder.
"I know." He kissed my hair, then laid his cheek against my head.
"I love you. I really do love you."
"I know," he said again, and just when I thought he wasn't going to, he said, "I love you, too. Annie Knox."
My name seemed kind of added on there. "What?"
"Just wondering who you are when you're not Annie Knox."
"Nobody you'd want to know." Only I kind of liked Lily. Lily's story was one of hard luck and tough choices. Lily lost Jesse and had to keep going. Sometimes it felt like Lily had all the strength I wanted to have.
We were quiet for a while, watching the rain fall onto the terrace, illuminated by one of the streetlights. Even in the summer there's something about a rainy night that can feel cozy if you're safe inside with someone you love. The silence between us was comfortable for the first time in a long time.
Finally I said, "What are you going to do?"
Mark blew out a sigh. "I'm going to wait for you. This time. I'm going to stay here and I'm going to work my rotations. I'm going to try and like your dad."
That made me laugh. When he laughed with me, an ice cold spot in my chest warmed, just a little. "He told me you're a good man." I wasn't sure why I said it. Mark didn't need my father's seal of approval.
He surprised me, though, because he kind of froze for a second, then relaxed. "He really said that?"
"He really said that."
Mark didn't say anything. His fingers traced a pattern up and down my arm. Maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that what my father thought of him mattered to Mark. After all, I was very close to my father, very much like him.
Softly, I said, "I think you're a good man, too."
That time, all his muscles relaxed and suddenly it was just Mark, holding me on a rainy night in our own place.
"I'm going to wait for you," he said, as if he hadn't said it before. "And you're damned well coming back from this one, too."
I'd always wanted him not to wait. What did it mean that his telling me he was going to this time made a warmth flare up inside me?
But I was still going. Even now the assignment was being put together. Even now kids were ODing and dying. I was going. I had to go. But this time I knew that I'd come back. We'd work it out.
Somehow.
18
Annie
Labor Day weekend came and went. School started. My leave ended and my CO called me in to a secure location. There were meetings. We made plans. My team was put together.
This time it would be starting in three days. I had warning. John gave me such a significant look that the rest of the team was staring.
I still wasn't comfortable with it so I asked. "John wants me to let my fiancé know I'm going undercover and will be out of touch. That's the extent of it. I have a new phone and the only person with the number is my father."
A few quick glances between people then.
"He's a good cop," Alex, one member of the team said. "What's happening to him sucks."
"Not the point," John said.
"No," Alex agreed. "But I mean that I trust him. And I’m good with you letting your SO know. This job is hard on relationships."
There was scattered, hyper-laughter around the room at that as the other three men and two women agreed. So this time I wouldn't just vanish on Mark.
Good for me.
I was not looking forward to it.
A week later I rode back to the same clubhouse where I'd been with Jesse. I took my own bike, registered to Lily Alder. I carried everything I owned in a backpack. I was fresh out of prison and temporarily clean and I hurt all over and I'd lost my man.
Approaching the clubhouse, my memory offered up times with Jesse. Drinking beer and bullshitting with the guys at the kitchen table. Fucking in the room off the kitchen and knowing everyone out there could probably hear everything.
The time Jesse hit me so hard during sex because I didn't react fast enough when he told me how to move.
The time that Jesse took care of me after I dumped the bike I was riding. He patiently picked pebbles out of the skin on my thigh, and treated the injury as gently as he could with antiseptic.
Mark had never asked about the series of tiny scars up and down that leg. They certainly hadn't been there when we got together.
I pounded on the clubhouse door, directly below a Brotherhood insignia of roses and skulls, a little like the Guns N Roses logo or even the Grateful Dead.
From inside the house I heard heavy boots crossing the floor and one of Jesse's soldiers looked out. Damien was well named. He was creepy as that kid in The Omen movie. He wasn't big, but he was lean and he was definitely mean.
"Lily. What the fuck are you doing here. You heard about Jesse?" There was honest sorrow in his voice and at least no contempt for me.
I'd take what I could get. "I heard. Paid my respects from jail."
He raised his brows. Damien was nearing forty. Salt and pepper ponytail. Mostly salt in the scruffiest beard on the planet. His leathers were well worn. He had tattoos I could never quite make out blurred across his knuckles. He did not smell good.
I did not want to ride on the back of his bike. The plan was for me to ask for an intro to another group up in Vancouver. Hopefully I wouldn't have to hook up with any other riders before I got there. I had a fake record in place that had me jailed in Portland for the past couple months. Past that everything was up to me.
It felt weird to be back in the clubhouse. My eyes kept straying to the room off the kitchen where Jesse and I had fucked so many times.
Three of the soldiers were in the house, Kev, Tony and Damien of the warm welcome. "We'll ride with you. There's a Brotherhood there. You out on bond?"
That was the story. Get out of the area for a while into another where the dope was flowing too fast and too strong and too many people were dying. Same organization but fewer people who had known me with Jesse and fewer still who had ever run into Rodrigo's real Lily. Because in Vancouver there was the same MO, fentanyl on the street and the Brotherhood selling to kids who were younger and younger.
It didn't even have to be my last assignment. If I was there when a bust went down or a buy went south because the buyers were cops, I could do some fake jail time in Portland or in solitary in Washington, followed by my hard luck story getting me in one more door.
That would make Mark happy. I'd probably be edging up to twenty-five by then anyway. I could go in a different direction, go after gunrunners or something like that, but I'd be used up for drugs unless I transferred to another city and probably another state. Too many chances of running into the same people.
Too bad. I had a serious hard-on for stopping opiates from getting into the hands of kids.
Or anybody else. Nobody was stronger than this shi
t.
I ought to know.
Three months later I proved that all over again.
Because two months later I was using again.
That was after a kid who was clean and college-bound got hit in the crossfire of a drive-by. He lived. His Grandmother, who’d raised him, who ran out instantly to his side, did not. Because she got shot when the shooters circled back around.
I wasn't the only member of the Vancouver Brotherhood who started using. Vanessa did too, young and black and full of anger and unable to do anything constructive with it. We'd sit together in her apartment and drink Absinthe and shoot up until the night she got busted.
I was on my way back to the apartment with cheap Chinese food and a bag of chips, anticipating nothing more than getting high and getting some more information. I hadn't even started thinking about getting clean yet. Partly because there was nothing big going down. If the gang was busted now, everything would be small change. There was no point putting someone undercover for a few drug busts. I was waiting for something big. It would come.
Only there was gunfire from Vanessa's apartment as I got close enough to see the flash and smell the burn, and that was enough to send me running. I heard her scream and I heard it cut off. I didn't have any doubt she was dead.
I took the bike. Two streets over I found an actual goddamned payphone and called it in.
Then I ran. I ran because it was possible my cover was blown and I ran because I couldn't go in as fucked up as I was.
I ran all the way to Vegas. Not that I knew how to find him.
Billionaire philanthropist pharmaceutical kings can buy a lot of privacy.
The first day I rode around the desert and tried to find anything at all that reminded me where I had been.
Vegas is a big damn place and the desert around it is even bigger. Vast. Warm, at least. In Seattle, November would be getting cold.
When that didn't work, I tried everything I could think of to connect with Samuels, but he seemed to have gone to ground after being fired. His phone had been changed. He didn't respond to texts. He didn't respond to email. I tried to think of anybody who might have been tied into his interesting little sideline of selling people to Cole St. Martin and whoever else he might have dealt with but to be honest, I knew little about my handler. He had a shaved head and a big moustache and he was a thin, wiry guy with nervous habits that should have screamed junkie to PD. He worked nearly undercover within the department, definitely autonomous because it was safer that way.
He'd stayed that way after he was fired.
On the fifth day I was in Vegas, Cole's people found me.
19
Cole
She was back in Vegas.
Even the photographs sent from hotel security in the casino resort where she first appeared showed she was strung out and using again. Knowing that, I followed established hacks left behind for me by IT people I'd hired and paid well enough to go away again.
The departments where she worked and the ones cooperating with each other had good security. They never actually listed her name. But if you knew the dates and what she was probably doing, it was possible to follow. The media got the details wrong because the details are up to the police, not the public. But there's enough that can't be covered up that's pretty obvious if you know what to look for.
More deaths. More senselessness. Dead children. A dead biker. Suspected opioid involvement.
I understood why she'd run.
Now it was just showing her she couldn't run again. Not if she wanted any part of her life back.
And besides – I wouldn't let her.
I owned her.
I wasn't going to let her forget it.
20
Annie
I woke to the sound of the mockingbird.
My first thought was a kind of confused joy. The second was outright terror. I couldn't remember the last couple days. They were a haze of searching and riding the Harley all the hell over the damned desert, then holing up in a hotel room and subsisting on booze, Cheez-Its and fet until the world started to spin.
Then there was a long blank, black patch.
Now. Here. Wherever here was.
I pushed myself up in the bed. Comfortable. Smooth sheets. Good temperature in the room. A glass of ice water near the bed with the ice unmelted, which meant somebody had been in here recently.
There was the small matter of the shackles and the long chain connecting me to the bed.
Oh-kay. Maybe a hospital? The room I was in was certainly white enough and smelled of clean. But there was no equipment attached to me or beeping in the room and there was no sound of nurses rushing around being loud, which I definitely associated with hospitals after visiting my dad.
I shoved the idea of my dad out of my head and listened hard. Nope, no beeping monitors. No swishing nurses. No sound of people talking in other rooms, using hushed voices, or of competing televisions showing different shows.
I did a visual scan of the room and on the second time through saw the camera up in a corner. I gave it a long look. I was dressed in a long white t-shirt and nothing else. The scan of the room hadn't showed me anything like my clothes. Or shoes.
Or gun.
At a guess? Cole St. Martin had been looking for me, too. I didn't know how much he'd paid Samuels for "selling" me to him, but he didn't seem like the kind of man to let his investments just take a walk. In the back of my mind, I'd always figured no matter how long or invisible it was, there was a leash on me after he let me go.
I took inventory of the room. Camera. Right. Clean, white t-shirt. Shackles. Camera.
I waved at the camera. No clue if it would pick up sound. "Hello? I'm awake. Anybody out there listening?"
Almost at once there were footsteps in the hallway outside the closed door to the room I was in. My heart started pounding and I found myself, unbelievably, hoping beyond hope it was Cole who had me. There were other, less tenable possibilities. Cole St. Martin wasn't the only man in the world who traffics.
The woman who stepped inside was unfamiliar. She wore a white nurse’s uniform and she probably was a nurse, but she wasn't currently working in a hospital.
"Where am I?" I demanded. "What are these for?" I shook the shackles, reminded with an unexpected pang of Mark cuffing me to our bed with my own cuffs.
"Your questions will be answered later. You're in a holding cell before you're taken where you're going. Now you're awake, I'm going to strip search you and then you'll be transported."
"The fuck you are." That seemed like the right response until the men holding guns came into the room.
Whether the nurse was really a nurse I didn't know but she was determined and thorough. In short order my shackles were taken from the bed and attached to a hook in the ceiling. The big white t-shirt lay in pieces on the floor. Her simple expediency was to cut it off.
The guards took up positions on either side of me, guns actually pulled and leveled at me.
When I’d ridden with Jesse I was unarmed because Jesse's woman didn't ride armed. If I needed protection, Jesse would protect me.
When I was with Seattle PD, which I was rapidly starting to wonder whether I still was or would ever be again, I'd pulled my service weapon exactly once during my tenure.
Here, the guards automatically drew down on a naked, apparently unarmed woman, then stood at attention, obviously fascinated by what the nurse was doing. Humiliation raged through me, turning my face and neck totally red. She ran her hands through my hair, her gloved fingers into my mouth until I gagged on the invasion. She felt under my breasts and then for no reason I could determine, squeezed them and drew her hands down each until she pinched the nipples and released.
Did she think I had sewn weapons into my own boobs?
I might have, had I anticipated this.
She moved down my body, performing a complete cavity search as the guards, nowhere near uninterested enough, looked on. My face was still flaming and my fu
ry still peaked when she ordered me to follow her. Behind me, one of the guards made a sound like a muffled laugh.
I swore to myself one day I would kill him.
It wasn't a surprise when she said I should follow her to the main house. The sounds around the place proved at least that I was in the same place I had been before. I was getting an idea how huge it had to be since the "holding cell" was an entire suite and apparently was a building that stood alone. How many buildings must he have and on how much property were they located?
Or, how long would it take someone to find me?
Answer: Forever. They have to know you're missing first.
Through sunlight and shadow. Through indoors and out. I was given a shirt to wear, something so short it was all but useless with every step.
I suppose that was the point.
Cole St. Martin had warned me of his proclivities. He had borne them out on my skin the first time we met. He had corrected me repeatedly but in the end, had released me to try and make my way in the world, to beat my addiction while returning to my hometown, my theoretical fiancé, my job. To return to all the stressors that led me to use in the first place.
And allow me the time and space to prove to myself I couldn't do it alone.
I took a misstep, nearly falling as I hesitated between one step and the next.
I had awakened without the addiction chewing at me.
Holy wow.
21
Cole
"Annie."
Her face creased when I said her name. She was trying to remember if she'd told me Annie or Lily. Or guess at what Samuels had sold her to me as. Maybe she was wondering how deep my hooks were into PD's servers.
I'd known all along. It was hard to believe she still thought it mattered.
"Have a seat." I fully expected her to say she'd stand. That's the sort of pointless protest subs make at the beginning, before they start to learn their place.