by Sophia Reed
"Opiates, like many drugs, build up in fatty tissue," he said, not looking at me. He seemed to be addressing his wine. "The hormones associated with fight or flight, the adrenaline complex hormones, are also triggered from fatty tissue. Access one, you access the other. So when I put you in an overly stressful situation – " He paused, as if appreciating the idea that he was stressing me out more than anything else – "both are triggered. That's why flashbacks occur at moments of stress. Because psychoactive, psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs do the same thing."
"Because just what you need is to have a flashback when you're trying to fight off a bear," I said.
He gave me an amused look. "Do that a lot in Seattle, do you?"
I blushed but laughed. "Or fight off a mugger."
He nodded.
"Is that why – ?" I started and he leaned over and put a finger to my lips. I had wanted to ask if that was why he was pushing me, not only because he was a sadist and enjoyed what he was doing.
"One question, or I wash your mouth out, and I haven't yet answered it."
I swallowed. It made sense that he would try and trigger the reaction and then create a negative association. A kind of psychological conditioning to go along with the rainforest cure.
Only this was Cole St. Martin. I wasn't sure I bought it.
"What happens next is that we continue to work until I see you've developed into a place I'm comfortable with and then there will be some real world tests to see how you do." He appraised me, frank blue eyes raking my face. "Though honestly, if you were to be street-ready tomorrow I wouldn't let you go. My contract is for longer, with exclusivity and for at least three-quarters of a year and after that, with you returning on schedule."
As if I'd forgotten that for even a second.
There were no other questions I could ask. He'd told me what the future held. I hadn't managed to work into my one question when that future would be upon us or what the real world tests would be, since I hadn't known about them.
* * *
For the next couple of days I was buoyed up by the idea that Cole thought I was doing better, that there might be some real world tests. It wasn't the tests I was excited about, but the real world.
The desert was beautiful, blooming with colors at different times of day. The distant mountains took on browns and grays in the day and blues and purples at twilight. At night we were far enough away from the city to see the Milky Way and to watch some of the many October shooting star displays, the Draconids and the Orionids, and now that November was moving along, the Leonids.
But watching shooting stars wasn't enough. In Seattle there was always something to do when I was in school or when I was first on the job. When Mark and I were first together it seemed like we spent every free moment going out with friends.
Those friends had fallen away as life took its toll. That wasn't a bad thing, but it was isolating. First friends coupled, then married, then had children or careers or both. They moved to suburbs or were simply too busy to hang out.
Mark's school became intense and though he probably wouldn't remember it or admit it, he was the one to pull back first, with less and less time for the two of us. I understood – med school was hard, it was hard on me and I wasn't the one going through it. He studied day and night, in groups and solo, one on one with a lab partner who looked like a professional wrestler and wanted to be a surgeon. I thought if he walked into an operating room where I was waiting for something delicate like my appendix to be extracted, I might run screaming, even if already sedated. He simply looked too huge to be as graceful as Mark assured me he was.
Then I started working toward being a narc, into the tri-county drug program, and before I took step one in it, there were superiors talking about how young I looked and suggesting stings where I went to school.
I believe I protested. High school was bad enough the first time and I was actually going to have to do homework. Mark had a laughing fit when I first told him that which left him doubled over and gasping for breath. I was less amused. When he could breathe again, he tackled me and dragged me downstairs and into my car and we drove to a secluded scenic outlook and made out in the backseat. When I finally came up for air and asked him what the hell that was about, he said it was like we were both back in school and at that point I was the one laughing too hard to breathe.
But after that I realized how much Mark had retreated into his school work. Because whatever he thought, I didn't have the same. It didn't matter what marks I got, as long as I got to the right people, and I did. It was almost creepy how fast I found and started hanging out with the dealers and the users. I made friends. I actually did some homework. And I didn't see much of my boyfriend.
Since I was undercover, I wasn't seeing my parents, either, who were a couple cities away, so there was little chance of running into them.
It was lonely. I didn't quite miss my sisters – I wasn't desperate – but Mark had been the first to choose career over our relationship and I was the one to follow up right away and do the same thing, perhaps spitefully, perhaps competitively. Or maybe just naturally.
Now I watched sunrises as I ran into them and watched sunsets as I tried to argue my way into smaller portions of the things I hated. Some nights it was a game, trading something I didn't like to avoid something else I didn't like. Other nights I would see Cole's face change, his blue eyes taking on a stormy quality, and I would shut up and eat whatever it was.
That one breakfast had made an impact.
But even with the discipline, the time in his special room, the lessons and the rainforest cures, I was growing restive and bored. The idea of testing out my newfound sobriety on the real world was welcome.
That didn't mean there weren't traps everywhere. I was aware of that. Cole thought that real life would throw curveballs my way and so he did too, long before anything like real life was even introduced.
The tests and traps didn't matter. Cole could and sometimes did, simply punish me for his pleasure. So far, that was the extent of it. What he did in the shower after was his business. Mine was to go as long as I could without having sex with him.
Because I wasn't ready to leave yet. Bored and restless as I was, hungry for information from the real world and for getting it unvetted, I wasn't taking a chance on leaving too soon again and winding up using. That meant not rocking the boat now. He'd said my having sex would be up to me but that was the first agreement. I was aware that sex between us was definitely on the table now and would eventually become something I could no longer ignore.
At the height of pain, at the height of anticipation, those times I craved it and looked hungrily at his pale, muscular body.
Every other moment I was there I hated the idea. He wasn't my fiancé. He wasn't Jesse. He wasn't someone I even liked. He was the means to an end, the same as I was his play toy for now. I was learning to adapt. Being exposed – to the cameras, to his eyes, to his staff – still bothered me. His playroom still terrified me. There were things we hadn't gone near yet that I could sense would someday happen.
But the promise of real world kept me going.
Until the night of the dinner party.
30
Cole
She was learning. She was conforming to my will and yet she still fought. That made her nearly perfect.
I loved disciplining her. But just as much, I loved watching the changes in her as the drugs cleaned her out and straightened her out. Her old life would be waiting for her. Probably. There was always the chance she'd lose an aspect of it. If Seattle PD didn't want her back I could make arrangements for her to get in somewhere else. I'd read her personnel files and I knew she was damned good at what she was doing. One reason to get her off the drugs was to keep her looking as young as she did for at least another year or two so she could go on doing good in the world. I believed in her work.
I'd lost my little sister to drugs. I was in med school at the time, planning to be a doctor, like my fathe
r and grandfather. Probably I would have been a good one, if not the one with the best bedside manner. I saw problems of the flesh as challenges to solve. Other people saw them as excuses or conditions or life afflictions or reasons to get out of whatever it was they wanted to get out of. That put me at odds with a great many patients. Added to that, I didn't like to prescribe after I lost my sister Emily because I thought drugs were more of a mask for whatever was really going on than, in most cases, a solution, and people would have had a problem with me.
Also telling a frustrated woman to have her husband take her across his knee once a week for a maintenance spanking, or to really take her to task with a hairbrush or enema if she'd been too bad - that would probably get me in trouble with the medical board rather than an award for knowing what a lot of women really needed.
There were places Annie wasn't coming along so fast. So far she was resisting our sleeping together which would only make it sweeter when I did take her, with or without her consent. She thought I didn't know that the mists of addiction still curled through her veins.
I knew. That's part of what the real world tests would be about. Chancy, but she couldn't spend the rest of her life in my hidden Southern Nevada compound. There was a danger that she would revert to her old ways and dive face-first into the opiates.
But it was a better chance to take while she was still in my control and I could clean her up and make it a hiccough in her recovery, rather than a derailment of it.
So the tests had purpose.
That, and pushing her would be fun.
I began to plan the dinner party.
31
Annie
"Dear, if you keep fidgeting, I'm going to end up stabbing you with a straight pin."
That wouldn't be the most painful thing that had happened to me in the last forty-eight hours, but I took the seamstress's instructions to heart and stopped trying to climb down off the stool or up another rung. Or fly somewhere and do something.
Soon enough there'd be stuff to do. Cole had told me the night before that on Friday he was throwing a dinner party for a number of very wealthy individuals who contributed to several of his charities.
Of late, as November slid nearer to Thanksgiving, he was less inclined to answer questions so I only looked as curious as I could. He was pacing around me as I ran on the treadmill, well into my eighth mile. I didn't have the breath to ask questions anyway and if I had, he'd probably turn up the speed.
He saw my curious look, though, and apparently tucked it away. Because first he told me about the seamstress who would be coming in to customize some of the gowns that hung in the amazing closet, and to make certain the shoes fit. I definitely wouldn't be running away during the dinner party; the shoes he had in mind were all stilettos. I'd never learned to walk in regular heels. I was going to be either lurching my way into the dinner party, greeting the guests while already seated, or being carried around from place to place. That, or I could spend every minute until then learning to walk in heels.
The last was the most reasonable and the least interesting option.
When he'd explained everything about the outfit, the seamstress, the requirement that I look perfect, the woman who would come in to do my hair, the woman who would come in to do my makeup, and the woman who apparently was coming in to do my bath and I had no say in that, he went on to explain about the dinner party itself.
Apparently he threw them several times a year, elaborate meals that gave the ultra rich attendees a chance to come together and find causes they agreed to donate to. That sounded curious enough. I knew that Cole St. Martin had a reputation as a philanthropist and that he contributed massive amounts of money to the causes he espoused.
I had a bad feeling about the night, even more so than the idea of being bathed by someone else brought on. But I couldn't breathe and I still had more than a mile and he wasn't going to tell me anything that I really needed to know anyway. If it was a trap, he was hardly going to say so.
Now I stood on a stool being threatened by the wizened woman with a mouthful of pins sticking out of her softly lined lips. She was sweet and tiny and utterly uninterested in making any kind of conversation. I assumed that Cole paid her in cash and probably enormous amounts; in return, she didn't make small talk with the inhabitants of the cell.
I'd become interested in what had happened to the girls before me. That I wasn't the first resident of the cell was moving from beyond speculation to a sense of certainty. What I didn't know was where they’d gone. The speculation gave me a cold hard feeling in the pit of my stomach.
The thing with Cole was, he wasn't real. In the most essential way possible, he was a shell. He had personality and looks and brains and money. He could be charming AF and he could be a monster, the worst nightmare someone had ever had.
But there wasn't a man under all that I could find.
I didn't have an explanation for that. I'd read tons of interviews with him, watched him on YouTube, read biographies people prepared when they part of organizations that were giving him humanitarian awards. He came off smooth and polished, funny at times, always a little daring, a little controversial. The kind of thing where he could be on an episode of Oprah and smile that devilish, triangular smile that looked so much like Loki's and ask, "What do you think?" about allegations that had made the rounds about him. Then he'd be trending for days and totally unconcerned. The more people talked about him, it seemed, the more the actual story was muddied. It was a kind of anti-PR that kept him such a secret, nobody would believe the truth if it were put out there as a headline in 24-point font.
It was actually impressive.
I spun at the little woman's command, getting a glimpse of myself in the mirror before I turned too far. There was only one mirror available right now, the others covered. She didn't want me to see the gown until she was ready. Apparently it was a surprise.
I was willing to bet it wouldn't be a surprise I liked. She worked for Cole, not for me.
I retreated back into my head, wondering if the guests who were coming knew about Cole's little predilections. Did they know about the girls who had passed through this cell? Had any of the girls left their mark anywhere and if so, how? I had located most of the cameras and there was nowhere but the water closet that was safe from intrusion, including the shower and the tub.
That made sense. More than once Cole had worn a bathing suit and taken me into one or the other, getting me thoroughly wet before giving me a massive spanking, once with a rubber paddle and once with his hand.
Both hurt.
He was endlessly inventive.
And the girls? Had they had substance abuse problems? Boyfriend issues? Or had they only known someone like Samuels who took them in hand before literally selling them up the river?
"Ouch!" I bent sharply to rub my calf where the pin had gone in.
"I told you to stop fidgeting," the vicious little old lady said. She was smiling.
The fitting lasted longer than my patience. In the end she didn't allow me to see the dress and informed me that on the night of the dinner party, I'd be dressed by the person assigned to me.
I could feel the dress. It felt like it was all there.
Never trust in anything with Cole St. Martin.
Before I left the closet, slipping back into a t-shirt and jeans, padding barefoot around, I looked for any marks, any leftovers, any ribbons or makeup or false eyelashes or jewelry, any notes or marks or pleas for help from whoever had passed through the room, becoming more and more troubled as I went on.
Cole had the money. He could easily pay to have the rooms sanitized, scrubbed and repainted, every single artifact from a previous tenant removed.
He could also pay to have somebody disappear.
That was a chilling thought. I needed to remind myself of that before the next time we sat on his big sprawling couch eating popcorn and watching Pixar movies.
He was dangerous.
I'd do best not to forget
it.
The day of the dinner party rolled around. Cole, creature of habit, took me for a run in the desert. We could see our breath and the temperature was in the thirties. He made certain I had on lined tights and a fleece top, that I had gloves and a headband. He wore similar clothes and the run was shorter because the cold air hurt the lungs.
Back in the compound he let me go after a short yoga session. Breakfast was in my room, all strawberries and scrambled eggs and bacon and coffee.
Something was up. It reminded me of a boss I'd had for a stupid office job in college, who would give everybody some small treat right before telling them they were working through the weekend on some project that was otherwise going to be late and which was his fault.
I began to actively dread the coming evening.
32
Cole
The dinner party would be a turning point. If she tried to run, she'd be brought back forcefully.
If she didn't try to run, I'd learn something more about her. How far I could push her. How much I could make her do.
The turning point was, in part, that after this, the limited amount of unstated consent she had retained would vanish.
The charitable aspect of the evening was real. Five couples would come together, couples of varying interests and relationship status. We raised money for everything from animals to the environment, once raised the money to save a failing business, and more than once donated significant amounts to at-risk inner-city schools. We'd saved whales and earthquake victims.
Tonight we were collecting funds we'd donate to organizations that fought human trafficking.