by Sophia Reed
I didn't ask her where we were. I assumed everything I asked her or told her would go straight back to Vincent. So no questions about cities or countries or about who the men he'd been having dinner with were or who she liked to hang out with here. Or if she wanted to show me the ropes, more than Vincent had ordered.
Or maybe literal ropes. The kind we could tie around something, tie the other end around our waists, then out the window and a walk down the side of the building to disappear at least long enough to find out what country we were in and head back to the American embassy.
If Kie would even go.
When Vincent was in the room, watching, making pointed suggestions, either his voice loud and frightening or his favorite weapon, a heart-shaped rug beater that left its design imprinted in the flesh of my ass. He'd taken to correcting my style and form with it, but otherwise there was little that was remarkable about the days other than how much I really didn't give a shit about hair and makeup. Or shoes.
I was learning, though. More than either of them thought. I was learning the patterns of the household, how many guards, at least in the places I could see them, and what their shifts were, which of them was semi-human and which existed for a chance to hold a girl down on an exam table and watch her stripped and examined.
I learned how Kie and Vincent moved around each other, purposeful as old enemies. I already knew Kie was mentally ill. From what I'd seen during the time I was searching for Cole in San Francisco because I couldn't find him in Vegas or even find the scene, there were plenty of healthy-minded people who simply liked kink. Before being plunged into it, I'd never thought about it at all, other than the occasional foray into wanting to ask Mark to spank me or those rare times we drank a little too much and put my handcuffs to interesting use.
What I learned was the shame that society so often put on alternate or deviant behavior was deeply felt and absurdly pointless. It wasn't that I could say "it harms no one" because the person asking for it was being harmed, though usually only to an agreed upon extent. In good, safe, consensual play, it was always only to the agreed upon extent. That freed the masochist up to scream and yell and protest and sob and sometimes that was the whole point and sometimes they spent the session asking for (and sometimes getting) more, harder, do it.
Other times they cried quietly at the drop of a whip and endured to the end because it was what they'd asked for and safe-wording out wasn't going to happen.
It could be a release – emotions set free in those who didn't usually allow themselves to feel or had some block within. When your emotions were mocked in some other life situation, when it was dangerous to have them because it made you a target or made you soft and soft wasn't safe, letting go was cathartic in the extreme.
They were hardly glowing, original insights, but they were all new to me, coming in as I had on a world I'd known nothing of and had learned fast.
But the thing is, there are situations of shame. Of degradation. Of humiliation. There are non-consensual activities that some enjoy and others are horrified by and there's such a thing as extended ongoing assault and that's what Vincent was into.
The other thing I'd never understood – and I had, from time to time, dipped into the literature of BDSM, curious without very much understanding before my fall from grace in Seattle – was that the humiliation could be fresh every single day and that it could be brought to bear by someone on the outside just the same way as society heaped it on.
So society says the sight of certain body parts outside certain places is so wrong that people skip routine medical exams rather than submit to those parts being seen. I wasn't immune to this. I was private about my body and its functioning, my mind and its imaginings. That's why with Jesse in the Brotherhood clubhouse I never stopped thinking that the bedroom where he fucked me was just off the kitchen where his soldiers sometimes parked their bikes to work on. Where they gathered to read mechanics magazines (and one of them, philosophy books I wondered at). Where they drank beer and sometimes talked about their families and sometimes talked about bitches, and where they could easily hear everything going on in the bedroom.
I told myself they didn't care. But sometimes when Jesse and I left the bedroom I'd see them looking at me.
And I cared. That's what Vincent had on me. That he could strip me naked on day one and parade me in front of a roomful of strangers (he hadn't, not yet, only the weird dinner thing with the panties and heels) and I would be mortified, humiliated, and somehow, maybe, way down where I couldn't even admit it to myself, a little thrilled. There was a tiny bit of exhibitionist in me but it was clamped under all the layers that only fantasized and all the layers that didn't even want to admit to that.
And the thing was, if he did it with the same people the next day, I'd be just as humiliated. Trying to cover my body, trying to escape, crying with shame and humiliation.
Maybe that's what attracted Kie and kept her there when he hurt her and maybe that's what kept me from running prematurely, from taking a chance that wasn't a chance just to prove to myself that I would run if I could.
But Vincent wasn't Cole. Cole had exhibited me more than once. Cole had humiliated me. Cole had hurt me.
Cole had never once made me afraid that he would go too far. That he would permanently hurt me.
That he would kill me.
If that's what Kie got off on, that sensation, then judgmental or not, I call that sick.
I didn't get off on it. Vincent was dangerous. Vincent was a psychopath who probably did all kinds of unnecessary tests that exposed his patients. You want the best in your plastic surgery, don't you? Then disrobe and follow my troubling instructions and yes, we have to have the touring medical students here.
Understanding Vincent's psyche wasn't my goal.
Surviving Vincent was. To do that, I'd have to understand his psyche. Just a little.
And to do that, I'd have to bend to his control. Just enough for him to find me a challenge, not enough for him to hurt me for it.
That was the persona I had to invent. Annie but Annie with something extra. Something that would spark his interest. Something that would make him hurt me in exploratory ways and not just Take that, Cole St. Martin ways.
Staying trapped here was deep cover, all over again.
7
Annie
When the idyll ended, it was without warning.
Five days in, I'd mastered making myself up without looking like a clown, and toning down whatever Kie did to me with makeup. I would never trust her. Her kind of crazy was cruel, and she reveled in her cruelty. But it was nice to have a ceasefire.
When I found a chance and ran, I thought she'd be glad to see me go.
Only what she couldn't know was, when I ran, I'd find a way to get back to Vincent Geddes. When I ran, it would be to find Cole or to find someone worse than Cole. Once I found that person, I'd come back for Vincent with them, and I'd come back armed.
My life kept getting rewritten. High school girl and undercover narc. Brotherhood leader's girl. Deep cover operative. Cole's unwilling submissive.
While Cole was holding me at his compound in the Nevada desert, his belief was that a total separation from my real life was important for recovery. Most rehab works that way. It was just that with Cole, there were so many things that normal rehab didn't do – sexual sadism, for example – that it was hard not to fight against everything.
Especially hard was not finding a way to be in touch with parts of my real life. Like the job. And I didn't stay out of touch. Repeatedly I found ways to be in contact with PD, or my father, or my fiancé. Finally when Cole was really cutting me off I found a way to communicate by using the public comments that appear after YouTube videos to get in touch with a Seattle cop I knew. Tad Charles was a taekwon-do instructor and he made videos for YouTube as well, showing different martial arts training and workouts. I started by using the videos for workouts and graduated to using them as communications.
Commen
ting on the videos after workouts put me back in touch with somebody from my old life. And after that he led me to a dark site where we could communicate. Right up until Cole found out. But after that, Cole let me be in touch with someone from PD, because it stopped some of the restlessness in me and I was still with him, not trying to run, getting treatment for the fentanyl addiction.
During that time, in the wake of Jesse's death, new dealers moved in. That's when Cole stepped up.
That's when Cole called in favors and changed some outcomes and my submission, my having been bought by Cole St. Martin, became remarkably real.
Now there was Vincent. Most of the time when a police officer is involved in a fatal shooting or some other form of violence, it's the result of reacting to a situation that's suddenly gone wrong. The violence breaks out around the officer, whether she's undercover or not, and she has no choice but to respond.
I was making a cold, calculated choice here. When the new dealers moved into Seattle, Cole wouldn't let me go back to try and deal with it but he was willing to make a cold and probably well thought out plan to take care of them.
I was doing the same. I'd never killed anyone in cold blood or planned to carry out a killing but I was now. Vincent Geddes and Kie were dangerous and I didn't think therapy or incarceration in prison or a mental hospital would make them any less dangerous.
So I waited. The one thing I had at that point was time.
When Vincent came for me, on the sixth day, it was without warning. I was doing a workout of sorts, because there were no machines or weights where we were.
Where we were. My best guess was France, because of the strange, boxy three story house and the people who went by outside and because what I could see of the city looked old and because I thought I'd heard French being spoken outside those windows as we moved through the first week of March.
One minute I was doing my second set of pushups and the next, two guards were hauling me to my feet, dragging me bodily from the room. There was no question of whether I'd come with them voluntarily. No one cared. The point was to do it like this. Honestly it should have gotten old but I was the right kind of person to be affected by the treatment: I was never going to submit to someone telling me what to do, especially what to do in every aspect of my life. Drag me up from my workout and I was going to fight. Very, very rarely, if I really worked at it, there were situations in which I could figure out that my lack of response to outright provocation from someone would gall them more than reacting and striking back would.
That had been the case often when I was starting off in PD and, to a lesser extent, in taekwon-do. Both were male oriented and in both situations, the men weren't particularly glad to see me.
But I stuck. I worked. I didn't act like a girl. I acted like a woman doing whatever that situation called for. Being a cop. Being a martial artist. I fumed about comments and slights and outright nattiness on my own time. To their faces, I didn't react.
But when faced with something like Vincent? It didn't work. The behavior, designed to get a response, usually did.
Vincent Geddes didn't want a sub who was truly submissive. He wanted one who would actually fight back, or at least brat. He wanted a sub who would give him any excuse to punish.
It seemed more about that than it did about sex.
Which made little sense. He had me in his control. I was a prisoner. He definitely wasn't working under any kind of Geneva Convention, if that's what that's all about. He wasn't treating me right and waiting for Cole to show up. He was doing whatever he could to stay within the No permanent damage guideline and still hurt me enough that Cole would have no choice but to react.
It was weird to be a pawn, but that's what I was.
And a little more. Because he truly liked that he was breaking a police officer and one with the background I had. It made him feel powerful.
But maybe hurting me because he could didn't have the same titillation for him as making me live in constant near-panic, wondering if my simplest move, most basic choice, would result in a caning, a cropping, a spanking, or a fucking.
I didn't want him to touch me in any way.
He'd given me a shift to wear around the house, something cut low that nearly exposed my breasts, something cut high that almost exposed my ass. But no one was messing with me. Only Kie and me, doing makeup and hair and me practicing in my heels until midday when Kie had to goo off to some assignation with Vincent and I'd work out.
"Where are you taking me!" It came out a demand to the guards, not a question. They couldn't hurt me, because Vincent would break them in half for doing so without his commanding it. So I had a hard time taking them seriously, which was stupid of me, but they weren't some actual force. Not police, not the part of some dictatorship, just thugs who got off on being ugly (or maybe just on being paid) and worked for a crazy billionaire.
In the long run, that alone was something to be afraid of.
"Shut your mouth," one of them growled at me.
I didn't. My shift was riding up, my heart was pounding hard enough to escape the confines of my chest, my ears were ringing with fear as my blood pressure and heart rate soared.
They dragged me into a room I'd never seen before on a different floor of the house. They dropped me in the room, no more words, no more instructions because there was no need. They locked the doors behind them. The room was all interior, no windows, no natural light.
Spotlights lit up the things I didn't want to see. The St. Andrews Cross. The spanking benches. The suspension bars. The spreader bars. The rack after rack of striking tools and impact tools and sharp tools, a whole world of things I'd learned of in the last year or so. This was an education I hadn't gone looking for.
I was on my feet and running for the sharpest, heaviest tools I could see before the lock finished clicking shut.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you."
Vincent's voice stopped me in my tracks. The room was lit with spotlights. Why hadn't it occurred to me that with specific areas lit, there were specific areas left dark?
Instead of cringing or apologizing or going submissive, even for pretend, I whirled toward the sound of his voice, searching the shadows without seeing him. "What would you do, hmm? Would you just let a chance to defend yourself go by?"
No answer. I couldn't see into the dark. The spotlights blazed hot and too bright. They were blinding me to whatever was in the shadows.
"Vincent! What would you do? Answer me!"
"I'd be afraid," he said, and his voice was in my ear, his breath on my neck. Something cold touched me on the back of my neck, something metal that might have been nothing more than a table knife.
And might have been the straight razor he had on the plane.
Or any other thing.
He leaned in and licked the rim of my ear. "Take the dress off."
"Let me go! I'm not here voluntarily. I don't consent. There are laws!"
He sounded surprised, like I'd actually managed to surprise him, and delighted, as well. "Of course there are laws, you stupid little quim. They don't apply to people like me any more than they applied to Cole St. Martin. You're here because I want you here. There isn't anything else."
"You can't do this." My voice was calmer than I expected. "You can't hurt me. You can't keep me here. People will be looking for me. My father will be looking for me." I turned, his ugly stone-eyed face coming out of the shadows. "You know who he is. What he is." My father. There had been charges against him but I thought by now they were dropped. He was a hero cop. Nobody wanted to know the inside story or the things that happened along the way to the things that made him a hero.
"Your father." Vincent's voice was scathing. "Did you think I wouldn't already know that, just like I know who you are and how you came to be a guest of my friend Cole?"
Ice coursed through my blood. If you've hurt him… this time, I meant my father. Probably that was too far outside even the reach of a mad billionaire. Probably, past the
ability to scare me the way he just had, Vincent had no interest in my father. After all, he already had me in his control. But the fear remained.
And a little bit of determination that had been starting to grow. When I heard about the deaths in Seattle, deaths of teenagers I might have saved if I hadn't gone off the rails with the drugs and gotten myself holed up in Vegas, when I'd let Cole do his magic and take out that threat to innocent lives, knowing as I did what my father might have done, that was when a slow, steady slide started.
When I started thinking that sometimes the best solutions are permanent.
When I started thinking that judgement calls like Kie is never going to be a useful, contributing member of society, never going to be sane, never going to find anyone who fits her needs like Vincent once he's gone and maybe it's better if…
Because I knew it would be better if Vincent was gone. Once I was free, whether through my own efforts or Cole's, I was going to kill Vincent Geddes.
And then he gave me all the more reason.
On the cross, in the glaring light. Facing into the thing, my hands buckled so far above my head I had to go on tiptoe to avoid just hanging there. Spread-eagled. Because he wouldn't leave me hanging. He actually suspended me. By wrists. By waist. My ankles were lashed to the thing.
It didn't feel sexual. It didn't even feel like he was somehow enjoying it. It felt – purposeful. Like there was intent. Like he wanted something.
If it was me screaming, he got it.
He marked my back. A dozen strikes of some short, horrible whip, something that made a noise like gale winds and lit into me like bursts of white hot acid or fire.
I hung limp when he finished and he left me there, no idea for how long and he didn't say anything, just walked away and left me hanging. This time, the sensory dep worked. This time I saw things in the darkness.
Visions of violence.
Memories of Cole.
Memories of Mark, laughing at something in a rare moment when he was relaxed.