by Sophia Reed
For my sins, I suppose. I don't believe in sin. I believe in bad people but they aren't sin. It’s human intention and bad behavior and more often than not, something that had been bent on the inside.
There were things I wanted to fix and cure and take care of and there were things outside of me that didn't care what I wanted.
He had punished me, creatively and thoroughly and for a very long time, for calling and finding out about the job and making myself impatient for getting back to it.
The job that punished me in its own way.
When he was finished, he took me out of the room as though I couldn't stay there. As if I might become too familiar with it.
As if that room could ever lose its power to make me afraid.
He took me out and gave me a series of orders he expected me to follow. What areas to disinfect. How long to shower. What to wrap myself in when I got into bed.
He did not stay or offer aftercare.
He was still angry.
For once, my own anger wasn't glowing hot.
I stood watching as he walked out the door of the suite and heard him lock it behind him, sealing me in. Without moving from where I stood I turned my head and looked to the bathroom where I’d find the disinfectant and the shower.
Then I wandered on trembling legs to the bed and slid into the sheets and pulled the softest of the microfleece blankets over me. I curled into the tightest fetal curl I could manage.
I fell asleep.
9
Cole
For the moment, she was broken.
On the monitors I watched her as she contemplated doing everything I'd told her. Surprisingly, I thought she probably had heard me and remembered the orders.
Then she walked, stumbling, to the bed and climbed in, curling into a tiny ball and pulling the blankets almost over her head.
I smiled and turned off the feed.
She'd earned a little privacy.
10
Annie
When I woke, Cole was sitting on the edge of my bed. My first reaction was utter panic because I hadn't done what he said to do. I started to struggle up in the bed and was appalled at the pain that surged through my back, ass and legs. The strap he'd taken to me had felt like nothing but fire on each stripe, but it had left behind the solid bruising of something that thudded into place.
"Take it easy," he said. "I'm not here to punish you."
"Yes, sir," I thought, but I was happy when the little voice in my head said, Ya think maybe I've had enough? Because I didn't want to lose that voice.
If he ever broke me to the point where I was afraid of him, all forward progress would stop. There was a level of afraid that meant I was going to have to prove something to somebody, like in a test to get onto PD or prove myself in oral exams or infiltrate a group.
There was the level of afraid that woke from nightmares, and the level that feared something had happened to my father or Mark or someone else I loved.
But if Cole made it through to the level where I actually feared him rather than fought him, to where if I had the choice of fight or flight, I'd run - It would be game over. All I would do is fight.
"How long did I sleep, sir?"
"Not long. About an hour and a half." As if he hadn't had me monitored the whole time and could tell me to the minute.
So I'd slept about the same amount of time that I'd been in that room.
"Sit up," he said, and when I did, he arranged the fleecey blankets around me so I didn't get cold, allowing me to cover up in his presence. He held a glass of water with a straw in it and let me drink. I swallowed half of it in one go, then reached out to take it from him before realizing my hands were shaking so hard I'd end up baptizing myself in it.
"Adrenaline and reaction," he said, nodding to my hands. He held up the water, silently asking, and I shook my head, answering the same way. "I'm going to draw you a bath," he said, and then surprised me and possibly himself by saying, "Doesn't that sound like an art project? And your response would be something like – "
"I'd rather have water in a tub, sir," I said and for a second we shared a goofy grin and the world became even more inexplicable than it had been for the past - how many months?
I heard him in the bathroom, getting the water the temperature he wanted it, then he must have added product, because I suddenly smelled orange, cinnamon and cloves. It made me hungry. My stomach grumbled.
He had returned to the bed. At the sound, he laughed. "I've sent Geo out to get a stack of pizzas for dinner. You okay with pizza, Officer Knox?"
"After doughnuts, it's my favorite food, sir," I said and he laughed again.
Wonders would never cease.
He drew me up out of the bed and made me turn around and bend over it. My heart rate accelerated but only a little. I had no doubt he knew I hadn't taken care of a single cut or bruise when I got back to the room. His fingers on my skin were gentle. This was the doctor at work.
The water in the tub was full of essential oils. I sank into it with a moan of pleasure as the bite of new cuts subsided into the pleasure of the warmth. Cole shucked his clothes, leaving them in an uncharacteristic heap on the floor as he climbed in behind me.
For a while I just sat between his legs, his cock hard against my spine, my head on his chest. He scooped water and gently washed my face but the custom tub was deep enough that I was up to my neck. He didn't have to scoop water to keep me warm. Eventually he drained a little of the water and I leaned forward and turned on the hot until the tub was full again and almost too warm.
Then he pulled me back against him, lazily making small circles on my inner thighs. "Tell me what's going on that was so important you were willing to risk what happened to you to reach out to this Tad Charles person."
"There's a new gang on the street in Seattle," I said without pause. He'd asked me directly and he'd asked me in a way that sounded like it was outside the construct of him owning me. "They're rivals of the gang I was undercover with. They're not affiliated in any way. They're bad news." I considered for a minute, then agreed with myself. "Yeah. I mean, they're all bad news. But these guys? They thrill kill. They don't seem to get that killing off your clientele is a stupid way to do business. They act like there's an eleven year old born every minute and – what?" Because he'd gone utterly still behind me.
"Eleven?" he asked.
Confused, I said, "That's the youngest DOA I've ever seen. There could be younger but younger kids don't have money and they seriously don't seem to understand the drugs. Plus they talk. It's not worth it."
I'd lost him somewhere. That totally wasn't what he'd been asking me.
But that seemed to be all right. He'd asked and I'd answered and he'd listened.
For some reason, that seemed important. For some reason, I kept thinking, It's a good start.
Not that I could have said what I thought had started.
My afternoon nap meant I didn't sleep well that night. When the alarm went off at 5a.m. so we could head out for a run, it was all I could do not to beg off and tell him I was sick.
I didn't because I could think of all sorts of horrifying activities he'd think up if he thought I needed medical attention. And even more if he thought I was faking it.
We hiked that day, in low, Las Vegas foothills, then went back to the compound for weights workouts but he skipped the yoga, the meditation and the massage.
I was fine with all of that.
He was distracted over breakfast, reading through documents on his phone and eating absently. After I watched him inhale a second croissant, I thought it would be safe to add sugar to my coffee. If he noticed, he didn't say.
In my real life, a leisurely breakfast had to either include someone to talk to or something to watch or something to read. I never just sat and listened to birds outside the windows. Probably I could have fetched the constitutional law book and gone on studying, but there was a chance this was a time I should just be decorative and think my
own thoughts.
That was actually more boring than meditation until he looked up and said abruptly, "How are you at crowd control?" His blue eyes bore into mine.
Living with Cole was making me much more decisive. Where once I would have asked whoever had just said that at least half a dozen questions before responding, mostly in the hope of not looking foolish if I answered a question he or she hadn't asked, now I simply started with information and waited for him to impatiently direct me in the real direction he was heading.
It helped that most of the time this seemed to be the result of a mind even more impatient than mine and not a trap.
"If you're talking about a witness or suspect being transported, there's specific protocol to follow whether or not that person is considered a risk. If you mean at a large event, that's usually handled by security for the venue, though I did some moonlighting on that sort of thing in the beginning of my career."
I'd have gone on, but he interrupted then, like I'd expected him to, and let me know what he was looking for was someone who would be armed and deadly and have his back if he were to have a meeting with a company working illegally in Brazil.
"That doesn't sound hypothetical," I said, and when he just watched me, expressionlessly, I went on to outline the scenario. How many people I'd want on each person being guarded, what kind of weapons, what kind of transportation, when the routes to and from the meeting place would be set and no, what he'd started to suggest would not happen, the meeting would not take place at his hotel. We'd run scenarios beforehand to see what the conditions were like in real life, outside the theoretical. At least one of those dry run scenarios would include the person being protected. That was non-negotiable. It wasn't just that the bodyguards and security team needed to know how to react.
The target did also.
"If I brought you in to cover me at a series of meetings with what might turn out to be cartel but probably won't, what would you need?"
My head examined? But I answered him with requirements for guns, for body armor, for GPS units and backups, for actual hardcopy maps, for more than one bulletproof car, for the dry runs, and for the number of people I'd want on the team and how they were to have been trained. "None of the guard from here, either," I said. When he started to argue, I said, "They can be compromised. They're too close to you." Also, if he handed me a weapon, at least one of the two main guards wasn't going to walk away from the meeting.
He looked at me for a long minute, looking more like Loki than ever, and finally said, "If I armed you, gave you the weapons you're asking for in your outline, what would you do?"
That was an odd question. "I'm not sure what you mean, sir. I'd protect you, since I thought that's what the questions were about."
He waved a hand as if I had missed the point. "If I gave you a gun, who would you shoot?"
Oh. Loyalty test. "Hopefully no one," I said and saw him consider whether I was being smart or honest. He must have settled on the second, because nothing happened other than that long look.
He went back to his reports and I went back to wondering how I could get in touch and stay in regular contact with Tad. Some time later Cole rose from the table, pocketing his phone, and said, "If I gave you the rest of the day to yourself, what would you do with it?"
My heart leapt, because this didn't have the feel of a test. More that he had things to do and wanted to go do them and didn't mind if I entertained myself along the way. The idea of having an entire day to not be messed with, not be someone's property, not be used or trained or taught or be working on kicking my addiction -It was almost good enough to just luxuriate in the time.
"I haven't done any Taekwon-Do in a while," I said. "If I could get on YouTube, I could take some classes in my style." And I held my breath.
He didn't look away from his phone but paused, seeming to consider, then said, "That would be all right. You understand if I find you've been in an email or chat program I'll make you extremely sorry." And then he did look at me, and I shivered. It was an honest reaction and it seemed to please him.
"I'm not looking for email." That was true. I've always preferred text.
But Tad Charles had several YouTube channels. Among others, he did high level black belt workouts on one of them and since he worked out daily, he generally posted daily.
If I commented on his site. As Annix. And asked for a backdoor into some kind of communication about what was happening with the new gangs, it would give me a way to stay current and work on what felt more and more like a problem that was my fault and something I should be able to help solve.
I'd get a good workout in, too.
11
Annie
Galeao International Airport in Rio de Janeiro reduced its call letters to GIG. Something about that entertained me.
When we stepped into the tropical air, it was summer. I'd never traveled internationally before, which meant I'd had to get a passport. That meant I'd have had to have my birth certificate and probably my social security card and all sorts of identification that I clearly didn't go undercover with.
I didn't go into treatment for addiction with mad billionaires carrying my most basic forms of ID either.
Somehow, even when I was working on the heavy bag and sitting in Cole's enforced meditation, enduring a massage I didn't want and doing the yoga I definitely didn't want to do, I never imagined myself at a post office or federal building or anywhere else presenting my ID and walking away with a freshly minted passport. Or having one mailed. I didn't even know how that process worked and by the time we were on his private jet flying to GIG, I still didn't know.
Billionaires have a way around the system. That wasn't something I wanted to look too closely at.
Though I'd never gone out of the country and didn't have any great plans to do so when I got back to that increasingly mythological seeming "real life" of mine, getting a real passport now seemed like it might be problematic. There had to be some record of what he'd procured for me, didn't there?
I forgot about it when I stepped into the airport. It was huge, modern, and actually called something else, I discovered, with the original name being the GIG name. Gleaming modern surfaces reflected light. We landed around noon local time and the city gleamed in sunlight. We stepped out of the airport into summer.
From Southern Nevada it wasn't that big a jolt. The days there were in the mid-fifties. The days in Rio were in the mid-eighties.
We'd traveled with hired guards I'd walked Cole through screening. It was a weird hybrid experience for me because I was used to the muscle the Brotherhood would sometimes bring onboard and the screening that PD might do if a local business was hiring, maybe for a concert. PD did background checks. Brotherhood did informal tests to find out who they were working with and also did background checks. At least, it did under Jesse, who ran his drug trade like a business. A well run business, too.
From those two things I knew about, I cobbled together with Cole's head of security a way to find the right guards to take with us. It was as much fun as a session in Cole's punishment room, because the guards had anticipated going with him and now only the head of security was going and he'd just be in Rio. Most of the people traveling with Cole would be the muscle we hired.
So yeah, I was making friends in the compound right and left.
All of that fell away when I stepped out into the warm tropical air and smelled a thousand different scents that weren't home and weren’t Vegas, either. The air was soft, much higher humidity than the Nevada desert, and warm, unlike Seattle's sea air. I breathed in deep and thought just by the sense of smell alone, I'd have known I was somewhere else.
"What do you think so far?" Cole was grinning, that triangular, mischievous grin seeming here like the excited smile of a kid. He wanted to impress me with this, as though everything he did didn't impress me already.
With a start, I realized there was no way he could know that. In fact, I hadn't known it myself. But his philanthro
py, his caring, his focus on rainforest-based drugs that were affordable and could help people - All of that impressed me. His pharmaceuticals all underwent the same rigorous FDA approval processes and even Cole couldn't speed that along, which was too bad, if my own results were anything to go by. The opiate addiction cure was working. Every day I felt stronger.
Where my own treatment was probably lacking and where a lot of other people would find problems, was in not having some kind of talk therapy to accompany it. There were reasons I had fallen into addiction and they weren't just that a bunch of bad shit happened all at the same time and then the drug turned up in the pocket of my jeans. That I was as low as I'd ever felt and bingo! Addiction.
There were reasons I'd used that poison in the first place. Doubtless some of those reasons were still in play since when things got difficult with Cole I still wanted it. The difference was it was a yearning for escape, not a painful physical imperative I couldn't answer.
But I'd turned to it because my support system wasn't there. I wasn't anything resembling "close" with my sisters, my nieces and nephews were a source of stress I avoided. Children and their screaming didn't interest me. I wasn't motherhood material. I loved my parents but I'd never have gone to my father with my fentanyl problem even if he'd been healthy. The fact that he'd been so sick had driven me to it.
I didn't buy the "perfect storm" scenario, though. It wasn't just that everything had gone wrong. I wouldn't have fallen if there hadn't been things in my past and things in my present that weren't working. Things that added one too many stressors and one too few supports.
That was what I wasn't working on. I couldn't see doing it with Cole. I couldn't see him bringing in a therapist to work with me. Somehow the idea of a legitimate psychotherapist who was good enough to help me work through my issues coming to work with a captive slave in a remote desert compound stretched my imagination until it broke.