by Sophia Reed
"Tokyo, Moscow, London, New York." I was already reading out names and assignments. I was already calling in favors even as these people hacked and slashed their way into systems not made for them. Looking for traces of anything strange, putting together algorithms that could pick up the smallest anomaly, the merest hint of a woman who looked like Annie.
The favors:
In New York City, an ex-Marine with one too many bar fights on his record. We'd gotten him anger management classes, made a conviction go away when he broke a guy's back. He was a tracker. Human style.
In London, a woman with high security clearance and an unfortunate fondness for all the wrong things in bed. Not things that would be tolerated in her society. She had the ability to bring in military surveillance.
In Cabo, a talented prostitute who just happened to frequently sleep with an American expat general I thought would have some interesting ideas for finding Annie.
And Annie – her tracker was pinging off satellites or whatever it is they do and there seemed to be six Annies moving around the world.
That would scare most people but the tracker was small. If Vincent had dismembered her, the tracker would almost undoubtedly have gone whole, wherever that part of Annie's body went. It wouldn't have sent out extra signals. If the tracker had been cut up, it would have stopped working.
He'd cloned it. That was all.
I told myself that over and over and despite the fact that I was right, it was cold comfort. An hour later there were no clear reports coming in. The clones were good. All the trackers were in motion. If one stopped moving, and the others kept going, that would mean the others were electronic fakes.
That didn't happen. Neither did any of the trackers stop moving. Of course. I'd been thinking he'd left hers on her. As a taunt. But he hadn't. The original was out of her, and out in the world - useless.
"Get me Beam." I forced myself to ease up the death grip I had on the phone.
"I've heard," came Beam's voice. Police detective in Manhattan. "What do you want us to do?"
"There'll be texts and emails coming to you. Proprietary signals. Track it. Find it."
"If it's a clone? Why?" Beam was a hard-driving woman, dedicated to her family and in over her head just a couple times on playing the horses.
Amazing in bed, too. One of those few vanilla times that totally didn't suck.
Or totally did suck. Depending on how one looked at it.
She'd bribe her way on her knees to find information for me if she had to, knowing without a trace of doubt if anything came of that, I'd make it go away.
Nothing would come of it, no matter how she got her information. "I'll round up everyone I can."
I disconnected. Called a man in Vegas, just miles from where I stood.
"Derrick." His voice was always short and choppy. This time it was shorter. More cut off.
Like maybe he knew I'd be calling. Because Vegas is a smaller town than people give it credit for. So he could have heard already.
Or he could have had something to do with it.
It would be worth keeping an eye on him. Jason could do that. Get himself back in good graces. Because I'd sacrifice the son of a bitch if that's what it took to get somebody bringing Annie back. When Kie had hurt Annie, instead of moving to protect her, Jason had laughed. I knew Annie hated him. Of all the men in my employ, he was the one who looked at her body when she was humiliated in front of them. I didn't like the way he looked at her, but I liked her uncomfortable reactions so I kept him on. He was a good guard even if he was an asshole. He could do some work on this. Pay off some of the hospital bill. He'd been well cared for after being whipped for not protecting Annie.
Call after call. Setting cops and state senators and prostitutes in motion. All of them with the same orders. Get her back if you can find her. Get me all the information if you can't.
Sending out the signal from the tracker so people in every city would be waiting for that signature. Now it would be a waiting game.
If only I meant to sit still and wait.
My boots echoed on the polished hallway floors. I'd left the control room to send out some of the secure communications to military officials and high ranking politicians. It's amazing what the fear of having one's deviant sexual history exposed will do to people. I had assistance all over the world.
Problem was, so would Vincent.
Suddenly I was running, tearing up the corridor thinking of all the cameras everywhere in the world and knowing one of the hackers in the secure communications room would know a way into one. Once upon a time hackers had broken into Department of Transportation computers and used them to light up those big orange and black roadway signs so they read ZOMBIES ON ROADWAY – RUN! It was pure lighthearted silliness but they were still arrested and charged. Apparently only the Dept of Transportation with its annual holiday warnings – ONLY SANTA'S REINDEER CAN FLY – YOU CAN'T – WATCH YOUR SPEED – can put out playful fantasy messages.
But cameras and warnings were everywhere. I could put out amber alerts or something close to them since Annie wasn't a child.
I slowed for a second. No, she wasn't, and probably she didn't have a lot of time left before she at least looked in her twenties rather than a cute seventeen, but for now she looked young enough I could tap into that system and put that out there.
Probably wouldn't help. Those clone trackers were reporting in from everywhere in about the time it would have taken Vincent to get the tracker out of her and send them on their way.
That made my fists tighten and my breathing come rough and angry - The idea of him touching her intimately enough to remove the tracker.
How he'd known it was in there was no mystery. Undoubtedly Kie was chipped. It was logical and I think at some point, drunk at some meeting of our circle, he and I had exchanged thoughts on using the sexual part of a woman to mark her.
It would have amused us.
Shame doesn't usually have anything to do with my life, my lifestyle, my choices. When it does, it's met with rage.
The two emotions swept through me, one after the other, and both of them ignited the need and yearning to fuck some submissive within an inch of her life.
Instead I kept moving. Back to communications.
"How many of you can get me into municipal cameras in the cities that are showing up for the tracker?"
There was no hesitation. Every hand went up.
"Do it," I said. "If there's any fallout, I'll handle it."
There were no questions. Annie's photograph graced the top left corner of every station. Now they'd set algorithms to search for her or whatever it was they did. Probably some of them had already done this.
Maybe all of them had already done this. I was out of my depth. That's why I brought them in. That and I was currently too upset to think straight. Because this should have occurred to me hours before.
Pacing made me more anxious. Nervous tension ratcheted through my muscles. I wanted to run again or –
anything –
to burn off the anger and fear and fury at being bested.
I left the communications room, headed in the opposite direction from which I'd come. Moving fast. Moving with purpose.
The compound, as Annie called it, is rural and set in the southern Nevada desert, surrounded by so much land and surveillance that there was no way Vincent should have gotten in. But sometimes balls and guns overcome technology and precautions.
Didn't matter. He'd gotten in.
Now I had to get some of this rage and fear out of me so I could think again and think faster and better.
The compound is made up of wings, boxes of buildings nearly independent from each other but usually connected. Annie's cell wasn't, because I wanted everything self-contained there. It stood at the northeast of the main house, closer to Las Vegas than everything else. The locked doors were programmed to open in the event of actual emergency but otherwise, she was trapped there. Big, beautiful windows looke
d out onto empty desert, but the view was seen through bars. Annie's room was mostly one big, hard-surfaced white space. In the corner of the room was the bed and even there she couldn't feel secure, there were cameras trained on it and more than once I'd used them to humiliate her there.
There was a method to my madness. She needed to be broken down completely before being put back together free of the drugs she was addicted to. Even with the rainforest naturals, her mind had to be beaten down and her body with it so the idea that I can beat this thing on my own, mind over matter and all that was proven as false as it is.
Flesh is weak.
Mind is weaker.
We tell ourselves the lies we want to hear (she's all right, she's all right, she's still all right).
And I also kept her there, humiliated and hurt and fucked, all of it by me, because it pleased me.
And though she'd never tell me in a million years, it pleased her, too.
"Fuck!"
I was tearing through the corridors now. Past Annie's bedroom section there was a hallway along the north side of her cell, with a luxurious bathroom and beside it, my office to use when I was there, and the computers she'd broken into and hacked her way through to civilization with. Punishing her for that had been a pleasure. Knowing she had the spark to do it was even better.
Further to the west, up the hallway and north so it didn't interfere with her view of the mountains through the west wall window, there was the room where I took her to hurt her. To tie her to a St. Andrews cross. To take her into another room off the main one and tie her to the four poster bed, sometimes suspended by her limbs, and to cane her. To crop her. To strap her. To whip her.
To fuck her.
The main building past the secure communications room became an almost inward spiral. Hallways turned inward to a few central rooms. One was a medical suite. Best way to never need it was to make sure it was ready and discreet medical professionals could be summoned at a moment's notice, the way they had been with Jason.
And there was another room there.
It belonged to Ariel.
She'd been here longer than Annie had. Ariel had been in residence the entire time Annie had. Annie had no idea.
Ariel was thirty-two. I found her in an alley during a business trip to Chicago. She'd been stabbed during a drug deal and left to die. She was just thirty at the time, beautiful and empty. There was nothing in her life but the drug and selling her body for more of it. She had bruises and scars and someone had robbed her instead of giving her heroin.
Ariel was the first person I'd ever met who wanted nothing more than to blot out every essential spark of life. She didn't want to die. She just didn't want to live.
And she was a pain slut. When she could feel, when she wasn't so zoned out and high or low or whatever it was heroin did to her, she wanted pain. Beatings, fists and wood, canes and straps, crops and whips, anything that would make her scream. She wanted a needle in her arm and she wanted other needles in other places and she wanted to be taken roughly wherever anyone wanted to take her while all that was happening.
I didn't touch her for the first year other than to meet her needs. Blood tests, medical tests, a regimen of nutrition so she wouldn't die.
Whoever had hurt her originally, they'd done far more to her head than anything else.
I wasn't the only person who knew she existed. There were minders who came in weekly to do wellness checks. She had made friends while in captivity because she'd worn out every therapist I threw at her so I just brought in other women I knew from the scene. When it clicked, they kept coming.
Ariel didn't want her life back. Ariel didn't want her life. But we were slowly working toward release, or I was. Her room was large and beautifully appointed, with a skylight for sun and vents she could open and close for fresh air. She had books and streaming services but no email. If she wanted to communicate with the outside world ever again, I wanted to know about it.
So I could celebrate.
And as for her needs? Those pain slut needs? I saw to those.
In a rage, in fury and terror and unbearable stress, I ran to Ariel's room. She must have heard my boots in the corridor because she was on her feet and facing the door when I came in, her face open in delight and fear and surprise.
She's unmarked. It's been weeks since I've taken her. Weeks since I've touched her, marked her, or done the thing that makes her craziest: Dragged her down to the couch with me, turned her over my knee, given her a spanking that blisters her ass and my hand.
Then turned her upright and held her. Pressed against my chest. Her head pushed into the crook of my neck. My breath stirring her hair. Her tears of anger and fury and fear dripping onto my shirt or skin. Holding her while she cries out all the ugliness that was her life and all the ugliness that is her life and everything else she wants to drag into it.
The sight of her makes my cock hard. Unmarked. Clean. Ready.
"On your knees."
Seconds later my cock is in her mouth but it's not enough, there's no way I'll come this way, there has to be pain. There has to be screaming.
"Get up. Kneel on the bed."
Her reaction is so fast I can't help wondering if she practices. I should ask. She has communications systems to reach the main house but she rarely uses them. And there's surveillance of course – anything else would be foolish and dangerous and just because she wants to die doesn't mean I'm going to let her or in any way aid and abet.
I should ask if she practices.
Rising smoothly, stepping easily, climbing onto the bed on her knees, kneeling, head down, arms out ahead of her, ass up.
Presented.
I stepped away from her and heard her groan, anguish that I wasn't already touching her and I felt the barest response of smile. Patience, little one. Good things come. Or bad. Or at least, desired.
I gathered up what I thought I wanted to use, unlocking it from the shatter-proof glass case that taunts her when there's no one here to remove the tools for her.
The Lexan cane. The bamboo. The oak. The birch bundle. That was enough. Ariel's face fell. I could see her looking at the case, at the slappers and paddles there. She loved having my belt used on her, loved whips and crops.
But I needed her to scream for my cane and I needed it fast. This was no play session.
"Face forward."
She did so instantly, head up and eyes on the opposite wall until I told her otherwise.
Her ass was finally filling out. She had been here years, being fed, being cared for, being locked away from the world. Not dead. Not alive. In some stage she could somehow tolerate.
I brought up the bamboo. "I want you silent. Can you do that?"
She nodded.
"Stretch your arms out." Because she'd come up to all fours. Instantly she went down again, naked boobs hovering above the covers, hands fisting the blankets. Her head was as up as she could manage. Her ass was high and white.
I brought the bamboo down and the blow rocked her body. Ariel pushed back against the pain. I saw her breathe. Blink. And focus.
Good.
The sound of the cane flying through the air, the meatier-than-expected sound of it on her flesh. The angry red of her skin starting up, on her ass, on her thighs. I caned her until she was striped and threw down the bamboo, picked up the birch, the collection of thin canes held together by a handle and I went after her, finding her meeting each blow, crying silently but presenting herself to me. Thirty - her skin taking on the hard, shiny redness of enough.
Only ten then, with the oak, a thudding cane rather than a sting that bloomed into outraged red pain. Now she was crying openly, sobbing with every blow and when I stopped she begged for more.
I'd kill her if I didn't stop. It was inside me. That rage. That fury that made me unfit to be the doctor my family had expected and moved me to pharmaceuticals where I started St. Martin Pharma and then started working in natural solutions to unnatural problems.
&nbs
p; "More. Please. Please. More, sir."
The darkness swirled up inside me. The need to seriously hurt. The drive that made me stay away from relationships, from anything that might be mainstream. Because it was too dangerous.
Because I was too dangerous.
"Pick your tool." My voice was rough. All the need and fear were right there.
She crawled from the bed, ran to the cabinet, came back with her tool of choice. Designed, insanely, by someone who sold them on an online arts site, independent artists and, apparently, freelance freaks. Who knew? An eight inch paddle not including the handle, hardwood and decorated with what looked like four plastic flowers but which were each a circle of spikes, rubber I thought, hard and sharp and wielded with force - it was a fearsome weapon.
"On your knees," I ordered her and she dropped where she was. "Hands behind your head. This time, I want you to count."
Tell me you've found her.
Truth to tell, I'd been with Ariel less than thirty minutes. Beaten her, fucked her, didn't hold her this time. Left her crying in a ball on the bed.
No time. I wanted to get back to communications.
It had only been thirty minutes. But maybe someone would have found something.
And in all honesty, I was afraid of being with Ariel any longer. I was afraid of what I might do to her.
Afraid of what I might become of her if I didn't find Annie.
Heading back to communications, I ran.
4
Annie
Three more cities in two more days. By the time we landed somewhere we were going to stay, I had no idea if we were even in the U.S. anymore. Being blindfolded fucks with your sense of time. And Vincent got in the habit of putting sound-canceling headphones on me. I couldn't see or hear or move from my seat as each plane took off and landed. I kept waiting for the violation, the pain, the punishment or just the general fucking with, but it didn't happen.