by Sophia Reed
Cole. He was right there inside the idea of wanting to kill the men who had taken me. The idea of who they had taken me from.
My mouth was already forming the words by the time I forced them back and down and inside. Is Cole all right? This was a stupid wife-swapping dinner party auction. Pay your fucking money or don't. Take back your brave and wonderful donation on behalf of stopping sex trafficking. Stop the stupidity of what you're doing. It's one thing to be a big, bad sexual sadist, but this is real. Stop. Please stop.
Just please don't have hurt Cole. Not for something so stupid. If it had come to that, I'd have come willingly.
Not willingly. But I would have gone with them.
I was bargaining as though the past could be changed. I knew better than anyone here that death was final. If Cole had been shot –
Last time I saw him, he was unharmed.
That meant nothing.
I wouldn't let myself think he'd been hurt. Moreover, I wouldn't let myself think that I cared. But we'd been running in the desert, outside the southern Nevada compound he had, miles from Las Vegas in the wastes where there's nothing. Running through the dawn, Cole having rousted me from a full sleep in order to go train for something that was never quite specified. Were we going to run a marathon? Or was it just Cole being Cole?
If the situation I was in were less dire, I'd admit to myself that waking somebody from a warm, comfortable sleep at five in the morning is the very definition of sadist.
It had been a long run, more than twelve miles, which I'd done surprisingly easily when my wall had always been hit at ten. Something about the number made me freeze up, convinced I couldn't run ten miles and I certainly couldn't run more.
Cole had taken me half that far again, in other runs. We'd been playing on the way back, racing each other a little here and there.
On the way back.
I stumbled again and the men dragging me swore and jerked me to my feet.
Cole had kissed me out there in the desert. There had been nothing mocking or malicious about it. He hadn't hurt me afterward, hadn't made me suck him off or get on my knees in the rocky dirt. He hadn't made me run back naked, he hadn't punished me for anything.
There had been a kiss. His mouth brushing mine, his hands splayed across my back to push me closer to him.
And then the run back to the house.
Where the black SUVs had been parked and the men in black fatigues had stood with their guns drawn on Cole's security, one of them already face down in the dirt and bleeding from a shot to the shoulder.
Cole had been standing when Vincent and Kie drove me away in the first of three cars before we reached the airport. Cole had still been standing.
But he was ringed by men with guns.
I wouldn't let them see me cry.
2
Annie
Once we were free of the airport, the tinted windows of the SUV would be up, sealing me away from anyone on the street who might offer help, from the view of any police who might see us. Once we were free of the airport, I'd be unable to get any clues about where I was. Probably blindfolded. That would make me carsick but it was better than the alternative of being drugged again.
So even then, being dragged down the stairs from the plane, I was gathering as much information as I could.
During the short number of minutes it took to drag me from the open plane, down the stairs, across the tarmac, one man on each arm and an armed guard behind, I heard traffic close by, a major freeway around the airport from what I could tell. There were planes landing one after another and taking off with the rolling thunder of large jets. That felt like a city.
It was early March and the sun was warm but the air was damply cold. I couldn't smell anything other than airport and traffic, nothing definite that spelled out anything specific, but there was a warmth to the wet air that wouldn't have been present in the Pacific Northwest and there was a taste to it, something soft and salty. A little wind, too, enticing rather than the stern, flesh-flaying winds of Nevada.
Best guess? Somewhere on the coast. Narrowing it down, probably California and not Washington or Oregon. I could watch the way the sun moved, but of course that required time and some notion of which way was which until the sun did something definite. Right now it was overhead.
That made me frown. If I tried, maybe I could figure out the timeline. Sunrise in southern Nevada at the beginning of March was about ten minutes after six a.m., but there was a kind of twilight before for half an hour. So Cole probably had me out on the trails at five-forty-five latest. We'd done a twelve mile run, with that short and strange and sweet interruption and –
Ten minute miles. A two hour run. With interruption. If we left at five-forty-five, we'd have been back around eight.
Which would stand me in good stead information-wise if I needed to guess at the time and even then I'd be wrong and even then it was a big so what? Private jets could fly faster than commercial because they supplied their own fuel and to a very real extent, could decide how fast they wanted to burn it.
I could be on the Gulf of Mexico. I didn't know.
That thought made me want to cry. Wanting to cry when I was in trouble wasn't like me and I panicked, afraid that whatever they'd given me might have awakened the addiction again.
That was stupid. That was panic. That wasn't happening.
What was happening was the guy with the gun shoved it into the middle of my back and said, "Try walking."
Nobody stopped him from holding a loaded automatic weapon on me. That told me more than I thought I wanted to know.
So I walked between my guards to the SUV and let them load me into place.
Please find me. Cole. Please.
Bring me home.
* * *
The property we approached was enormous, set into the Los Angeles hills and as protected as any superstar from movies or television could want. Definite privacy. What was it with billionaires, sick desires and land that stretched on for miles?
Where nobody can hear you scream I paraphrased to myself, the tag line from some old science fiction movie I'd probably seen with Mark.
The thought didn't come with an accompanying rush of longing for my long suffering fiancé. Mark had stayed with me through several long term undercover stints and through my addiction and what he believed to be my returns to rehab.
Rather than to Cole.
Or into shit like this.
When my life was in danger I often wanted the strength of my father, not to mention his experience as a cop. Or now –
Cole.
They hadn't blindfolded me or brought up such tinting in the car as to make the outside world disappear. That's why I knew where we were, in the Hollywood hills, way too much nothing between us and the nearest star for me to bother screaming.
I’d expected something during the ride. Handcuffs, but those had been removed. A taser set against my skin to stop the slightest twitch. Drugs. Threats.
Nothing. Kie sat on one side of me again and Vincent on the other. There were armed guards in the car and armed guards in the car following and nobody was bothering to talk and though it shouldn't have worked, it did: My fear was ratcheting up by the minute.
Since that first dinner party with the auction, when I'd stood up and said what was happening was stupid and did any of the other women want to walk out with me and cross the twenty miles of desert or so to Vegas and get help? Since that catastrophe Vincent hadn't hurt me.
Kie had. And this time, despite the kidnapping, neither of them had hurt me and I had to believe Cole was still alive and unhurt.
My heart still pounded and I was still waiting. Just because they hadn't touched me didn't mean they wouldn't.
The house was huge. No wonder the property was so extensive. Huge and white with columns and a weirdly flattened roof. It made it look like a bank from the 1930s or something equally improbable.
Locked iron gates swung open to let the cars through. They wer
e operated by a remote inside the car. Probably Vincent had one also. Kie, not so much.
I ran an eye over the gates. Iron bars, nearly impossible to scale. The fence went up a good eight feet. Some counties prohibit such high fences but you can see right through one that's just iron bars so why not? If I was going to run from here, I'd have to have a way to get over the gate.
The drug was wearing off. The headache was receding. The cottony confusion was exiting and my thoughts were more clear. The fact that they didn't care that I knew where we were could be a bad thing or mean nothing at all. It could mean they were never going to let me go or were even planning to kill me.
Or it could mean that nobody was going to believe a thing I said if I got out of here, either because they would have returned me to being a junkie or because Vincent had shitloads of money.
One last reason snuck up as we pulled onto the grounds. Maybe we weren't going to stay here long enough for it to matter if I knew where here was. If I was right about the timeline, they'd taken me at about eight fifteen and it wasn't much past eleven a.m.
Vincent had money. He could move as fast as he needed to.
No one took my arms to drag me from the car and up the stairs. I missed the support, however meanly provided. At the urging of the guns behind me, I made my way up the drive and the curved front stairs, through the entryway and into the cool of the marble floors and airy ceilings.
The place would be impressive if I were there willingly. Maybe spending the weekend with a beautiful movie star. The guy who played Thor, maybe. Just for a second the fantasy was seductive. The whole thing wrapped around me, the idea of being the wife of some guy and living just somewhere, a rental house maybe, saving up to buy our first, and he'd come home from work and have a beer and take me to bed and partway through my mind would wander, maybe imagining Chris Hemsworth while he imagined I was - who? Scarlett Johansson? Halle Berry?
A young Winona Ryder if we wanted somebody I actually resembled.
And then after we had sex –
"In here."
Vincent had come out of a room off to the side of the entrance and I realized I hadn't even noticed him leaving. Usually in a new place, all my senses are on high alert. Paranoia. It's part of the undercover job. So the drug was still working on me, softening all my usual instincts.
Going in the room was a bad idea. Mostly because he wanted it. Not going in there meant dealing with the guys with guns. Or Kie and her taser. Or more drugs. Not going in wasn't an option because I had zero control and fighting would just be delaying whatever was going to happen.
For now, it was watch and learn and hope I'd learn enough before all the bad shit started coming down.
That there was bad shit in the offing was inescapable. It wasn't even a question.
I shrugged and went along and the instant I stood in front of him, he slapped me. Not hard, but it was enough to rattle the drug a little more out of my system.
"You say yes, sir to me, the same as you would to that idiot St. Martin. You don't look me in the face, you look at the ground. You do not shrug; you obey."
I dropped my gaze without speaking. Not looking at him would be a pleasure. Vincent wasn't bad looking. A woman seeing him on the street might notice him if she liked very clean cut, very blond, tall and semi-muscled men.
But hopefully any woman with an ounce of self preservation would run the fuck the other way because his eyes – they were stones. Small and hard and dark, indeterminate in color and full of a slow, cold anger and the will to hurt.
Not looking at him was just fine.
But right before I dropped my gaze I saw what else was in the room. I was running before I'd made the conscious decision to move. The drug was out of my system. My newly developed runner's legs were doing just fine.
I was in flight.
Kie's taser dropped me and Vincent nodded to the men with guns who picked me up and put me on the exam table.
Kie stripped me. She enjoyed the hell out of it. She cut my clothes off, in no hurry, letting me sense the men around me, the lights overhead, the huge empty room the table was in and Vincent standing there waiting.
My heart pounded so hard she saw it.
"Look, sir," she said, stroking one sharp nail down my breast. "She's scared shitless." Then she giggled. "We could make her shit."
Vincent grunted. "Some other time. Get on with it."
In pique, she dug a nail in and a thin line of blood ran from my nipple onto the table.
Vincent pulled her off me by a handful of long dark hair. "Are you too stupid to realize this has to be fast?"
I didn't miss the hate that raged across her face. He couldn't see her face, because he was standing directly behind her, but she was right above me.
The hate wasn't all for me.
After that, Vincent dragged off my running tights. I kicked, screamed, fought and twisted on the table. It was impossible not to. Kie had been sent away, but there were guards there and Vincent simply nodded to them.
No restraints. Just a man on each limb. My face flamed with heat, humiliation as awful as the fear, and Vincent there, someone I hated, no one I would ever have hooked up with, been with, no one I'd have let touch me –
With his tools.
His light.
"Hold her!"
And he was inside me. At least something of his was. But though Kie had pleasured herself by stripping me halfway and Vincent had enabled whatever he was doing by cutting off the rest of my clothes, apparently that wasn't the intent.
Instead there was a sharp, agonizing pinch deep inside me that made me scream and he said in an almost human voice, "It's over, never mind, that was it," before he dropped something from the forceps into a metal pan. It didn't bang like a bullet in a television show.
It made a plastic and wire sound of something maybe tech-like, something small, something plastic, with bits of something harder. My brain scrambled and I struggled with the men holding me down, wanting to get my head up far enough to see but they did an admirable job of stopping me from moving, from being able to lift my head or kick my feet, still shod in running shoes.
I couldn't even get my head around far enough to bite one of them.
They were utterly, eerily, uninterested in my nakedness. That maybe more than anything else scared me. It was of paramount importance to me. Being forced into being naked with everyone else around me was humiliating. It could go on happening forever and it would never be anything but humiliating, leaving me frantic to cover up, to get away, to never be seen by those who had seen too much of me – ever again.
Being naked is being vulnerable, not just in a new relationship, the first time with someone new, but because the paranoia of being human screams of the need to be able to move fast, to protect the skin, the feet, the hands, to run without the pain of body parts bouncing, to protect against the elements.
To be able to go out the door and save yourself because even an open path and your own gun at that moment would have made you at least hesitate. The need to be clothed is too ingrained.
They didn't give me the chance anyway. Not to run. Not to see.
Vincent handed the metal dish off to someone and said, "Clone it and disperse it." Then he threw a stack of sweats onto my belly and said, "Get dressed."
Five minutes later we left Hollywood.
3
Cole
"I don't fucking care what it takes, just get it done!"
I disconnected and shoved the phone in the pocket of my trousers, pulling it out again seconds later. Pacing over and over through Annie's room, heart pounding, forehead wet with sweat. All I could think about was what she must be going through. If that sadist let Kie touch her, I'd tear them both limb from limb.
Annie was a cop. Annie was a black belt. Annie was a badass. All that should mean that Annie was uniquely suited to take care of herself, even in the situation that had unfolded.
She wasn't. She was not. How could she be? Vincent was dera
nged and dangerous and his wife was a borderline personality or a sociopath or a psychopath. She wasn't normal. She was dangerous. What she'd done to Annie at the dinner party haunted me.
I pulled the phone out again, and checked another major city. Systematically going through them. London. Hong Kong. Miami. Los Angeles. New York. Dubai. Anywhere that madman might have taken her.
He could be anywhere in the world by now. I slammed a fist into the wall. She could be dead by now.
Could be. But I didn't believe it. Because her tracker was sending out information just like it was supposed to. Tracking dots bloomed across the screen with the U.S. mapped on it and then sent out ripples showing she was there.
And there. And there.
That was the problem. There were multiple signals and they all had the same signature. They were all the same tracking device I'd implanted in her.
She couldn't be in half a dozen places at once. But a cloned tracker could. When I'd put it in her, I hadn't been thinking in terms of Vincent Geddes. Mostly I'd been anticipating a time when she would run again. Or maybe she'd be taken in a kidnapping for money, ransom and extortion.
Not by the billionaire down the road.
I moved through the halls of the compound, in and out of spring sunlight. Through corridors Annie had never seen. Into a secure communications room, and through it, into a room like an emergency services 911 dispatch room.
On the far wall, maps flickered up into being and were gone again. There was a low, tense, electric current of excitement and anticipation. Everyone wanted to bring Annie home. The reward would be tremendous.
Because they all know I don't misplace my property.
In the blue-lit room were the best hackers and computer techs in the country, sitting in front of stations, collected and brought here within the last ninety minutes. Some of them owed me favors. Others hoped to collect. Still others simply wanted a flat fee. They were the best at what they did or they weren't here.