by Sophia Reed
I knew what I was going to do when I got free. I knew that Vincent wouldn't die quickly. I'd beat him to death with his own tools.
Knowing as I said it to myself that it would never happen that way. The cop in me knew better. If I got free and got the drop on him, I'd shoot instantly. Anything else is movies and stupidity. Never give them a chance to come back.
8
Annie
The next night, the reason for the beating became clear.
Late afternoon I received word that I was to shower and get ready to go out to an event with Vincent. He'd told me from the beginning that sometimes I'd appear on his arm. Now it looked like he meant it.
I was bothered by the idea of anyone knowing exactly when I was going to be in the shower. The bathroom in my room had a lock but I knew about how much good that would do and how long it would stand in the way of someone who wanted to get to me.
I was further bothered by the idea that if this event was public, and possibly even if it wasn't, we'd be leaving tonight or tomorrow morning. I thought that would be the pattern: Vincent would take me somewhere there was a chance we'd be photographed, that word would get out, whatever – he'd make sure Cole found out. And then before anyone could get to us, we'd be airborne and headed somewhere else.
I didn't want to head somewhere else. The routines of this house we were in had only just started to become clear after a week. I was testing myself on the comings and goings and shifts of security, on where Kie was and when, on where I thought the cameras were. To leave this place meant starting over and every delay in getting free of Vincent was potentially deadly.
It wasn't just Vincent I was afraid of – and afraid was the word. Something I'd been when undercover, but never like this.
I was also afraid of my addiction. If being kept became too intolerable, it was possible I'd take whatever I could get my hands on to get out of my head and into somewhere else. That would be a waste of all the work I'd done with Cole. It might mean negative consequences to my health.
And I was afraid of my own fraying temper. The Lily persona could take a lot of abuse from the men around her and go on holding her head up in a goofy sort of way. I wasn't Lily here. As much as the abuse rankled, the enforced nothingness of the days was worse. There were things I could be doing. Drug deals I could be stopping. I could be visiting with my father and living my real life, though more and more I thought planning my wedding – at least to Mark – was unlikely, no matter when I returned to being Annie Knox, Seattle PD or DEA or wherever I ended up.
When my temper frayed from enforced nothingness, I lost control. If I lost control with Vincent or Kie, the results could be catastrophic.
I no longer thought that killing me was the worst thing they could do.
The day before in the room on the St. Andrews Cross, Vincent had hurt me but nothing like I might have anticipated. The man who had scarred Kie's cheeks might have flayed open my back but instead he'd left red welts as big around as my fingers and long – each one maybe a foot or more. There was only one place he'd split the skin; the rest of them were welts. When the one blow had brought welts, that's when I'd heard him swear.
He was good at what he did. I had no doubt he'd selected the tool he wanted and achieved the results he was looking for.
When I got out of the shower and into the garter and stockings laid out for me, I found the dress had been hung inside the closet. What was it with these men and their passion for dressing women like we were going to The Oscars? Cole had more than one custom dress sewn for me. I wasn't a dressy kind of girl.
But this was stunning and I instantly understood what Vincent had done and what kind of event we'd be attending. Because the dress had an almost conservative front: Scoop neck and actual fabric going up and over my shoulders – not spaghetti straps, but not sleeves either. Just wide straps. The whole thing was a shimmering deep midnight blue, like looking up into a starry sky.
There was no back to the dress until it reached my waist.
He'd only worked over my upper back.
Hot tears threatened and I blinked against them, holding the dress up in front of me as if near-sightedly inspecting it. I wanted to block any cameras from seeing me tear up. It wasn't the dress. It was the planning. The cold-hearted well thought out plan so that he would have the results he wanted.
I hadn't slept the night before except fitfully toward dawn. All day I'd been feeling the marks, a burning pain when I moved.
The word freak wanted to exit my mouth and I kept it firmly back. There was no way to show no emotion to the cameras but at least I could avoid more trouble.
Moving into the dressing area, I carefully did my makeup, remembering the tips Kie had given me. Some of what she'd told me was specific to Vincent's tastes. I believed her only because I didn't think she'd want to risk further punishment from him for the time being.
Makeup. Hair. Nails and skin. Then I took off the sweats I'd been wearing over the garter and stockings and dropped the dress over my head. It clung to my boobs, like its own shelf bra, followed the line of my waist, hung from my hips straight down with no flare. I checked the back in the multiple mirrors: The dress neatly framed Vincent's handiwork.
Gingerly, I sat on the edge of the makeup table chair, waiting for his footsteps in the hall outside my prison. Only when I heard him did I slip into the shoes and stand, waiting and ready and as expressionless as I could manage.
As if he couldn't wring any expression from me he pleased.
"And how did you two meet, dear?"
The woman asking me the question looked like her last sane thought had been during the Bush administration, probably the reign of Bush the first. Her hair was tortured into an unnatural pink and set in the kind of permanent my great-grandmother favored in the last decade of her life.
She was seriously asking how the man who did what Vincent did to my back and then displayed it had gotten together with me?
Well, let's see, he bought me in an auction for $5.5 million dollars and when my Master wouldn't let him take me home with him like some sort of life size door prize, he came back with armed men and took me. How did you and your husband meet?
Then I thought again about the dress and the shoes, about the place we were. I looked up at the centerpiece on the dining table. She was young and blonde and obviously stoned, lashed to a pole that went up through the table, naked and pink and perfect. What would happen to her after dinner, I didn't want to know. The only way I'd want to know that was if someone came along and put my badge and gun in my hand. I wouldn't even care that I was out of my jurisdiction, possibly by an entire continent.
No one was going to do that but given where I was and who was around me, it was probably just fine to respond like that. But when I turned back to pink hair to answer her, she'd gotten tired of waiting for an answer from me and moved across the room to a corner where a woman dressed as a nun except her wimple ended over a black bikini was going through a line of people, smacking their palms with a ruler.
I felt like I'd done acid. Or like I assumed that would feel. Or fallen into a funhouse that wasn't really any fun at all.
We'd arrived two hours earlier and Vincent had paraded me around the room letting people get a good look at my back. I had been expecting to be stripped, to be fondled and groped, I'd halfway expected to be where the girl on the table was, despite Vincent saying this wasn't my night to serve, if that's what serving was, and I thought it probably was.
None of that had happened. Instead I'd been numbed by the boredom of listening to people who were probably well informed in the subjects they were talking about but who were talking about stocks and bonds, and about the art world, and about classical music.
All of which was crazy. They were carrying on as if this were a normal event.
Crazier still: Maybe for them, it was.
Nothing happened as I’d anticipated and now, after the pink-haired woman gave up on me as a conversational target, I started look
ing around as unobtrusively as I could to see if there was a phone in evidence.
Probably it wouldn't do me any good. The accents around me pretty much proved I was in France and if not, somewhere in the European Union. Getting through to anyone quickly via landline was laughable. If operators even existed anymore, I wouldn't speak the language and the back and forth communication would take forever. I had no money. I had no idea what time it was at "home."
There was also Vincent's unrelenting eye on me. No matter how far away he was, he watched. The skin crawling along the back of my neck suggested he wasn't the only one watching me.
Eventually I found a chair in the corner where another tired looking girl – wearing only a very fitted tuxedo jacket which covered most of her charms if she held very still – was sitting. Two seconds of attempted and unwilling conversation convinced us we had no languages in common. I thought she looked as relieved as I felt.
We sat silently and decorously and watched the crowd.
Vincent took us back to the house at one a.m. There was no sign of Kie or anyone but security when we entered. Vincent had been quiet on the way back as if he had something on his mind and when we were in the house, he took my arm and said, "Come with me," and led me into a room where a metal examination table stood.
No pause. Zero to sixty. I clawed my way free of him and started to run, getting only a couple feet before I went headfirst into a huge man's chest. He simply steadied me, but he didn't let go.
Behind me I heard Vincent swearing. "I should have thought of that. Annie, it's not what you think. For your back. I brought someone in."
I stopped struggling. It wouldn't do me any good anyway. I wasn't prepared to call him sir, so I didn't ask for reassurances. Probably they wouldn't have been forthcoming and if they were, they could be lies. I simply let the security guard scoop me up and deposit me face down on the table.
A blanket and thin pad had been laid on it, making the surface softer.
He hadn't lied. Vincent nodded to someone who came in and exchanged a few words with him and then came to me and asked if he could touch me.
That surprised me so much I gave blanket permission.
"Are you worried about the dress?" he asked in perfect, accented English.
If Vincent wasn't, why should I be? He hadn't said anything about changing. "No. Thanks."
He didn't bother to respond. He simply started working on my back, gentle fingers spreading some kind of medicated cream, smoothing it into the welts. That hurt, but his gentleness and maybe more importantly, the fact that he wasn't Vincent, made me want that pain for the first time since I'd been taken. There was, of course, none of that. He cleaned, medicated and dressed the welts and never touched me in any way that wasn't directly involved with taking care of me. I sighed and almost fell asleep but the gentle touch was too good to waste. What was it about me that Mark's gentle touches made me mad with foreboding that I couldn't spend my life with nothing more intense, but the painful treatment of masochists sent me running back for soft?
But there were worse thoughts waiting for me when I was escorted – not harshly, for a change; not dragged but guided – to my suite of rooms.
Lying on my stomach in a wash of moonlight, the evening drifted back. The stone cold preparation Vincent had indulged in the night before. The dress, made to exactly frame my back and his inflicted marks. The medical team, though truly only one man, there to meet us when we returned. My back felt almost normal now. My pulse no longer pounded in each of the welts. I thought I could sleep.
Except. The evening. The beating. The dress. The people at the party, talking about world religions and artwork, about politics and finance, while a girl stood naked and displayed on the table and I wore a dress that exhibited my beating as if it were art.
They were insane. Maybe not all the people at the dinner but definitely those within this house. Vincent Geddes was insane. That was something of a surprise.
That Kie was insane wasn't even the slightest bit of a surprise.
Their insanity could easily turn deadly. Their insanity may have already turned deadly for all I knew, I thought with a sudden sickening clarity.
The crazier they were the slimmer my chances of walking out of this house alive.
I lay in the moonlight for hours, chasing ideas through my mind and when I slept, I still didn't have a plan.
9
Cole
"We've got a lead."
I jerked aware. My head had been down, not on my chest, but tilted down, the blue lights of the communications room not shining in my eyes. I hadn't been asleep, but deep in a meditative state. Now my head whipped back and I stood, toppling over the chair I'd been using.
"Sir. I didn't realize you were here."
I ignored that completely. The speaker was one of the corporate hackers, a button-down who worked for some paycheck during the day and stayed up half the night getting into places he wasn't supposed to for the thrill of it.
I scanned the information he'd found at the same time he read it, at the same time the others around us started into a flurry of activity, linking to his link and from there out and out until they'd cast a net.
Only hours earlier she'd been in Paris at a party, the kind written up in underground magazines distributed through dodgy porn sites. Some kind of malware kept nudging his machine and he kept beating it back.
Paris. In some kind of hotel. Money can buy you a big room to host your freakshow and no one will interfere with your kink while you're there. I should know.
Photos of a girl tied to a pole standing on the table looking a hundred kinds of stoned. Usually that alone would distract me.
Today I just kept looking.
Diners, dressed for opera or cocktail hour, springtime in Paris, all elegance and pearls and maybe a cigarette in a foot-long holder, the owner languid and –
Interested in the dark haired girl in the blue dress, her face wary, watching, clearly uninterested in anything the woman next to her was saying. The woman herself looked like the kind who never needs to get stoned because she has no idea how boring she is or how much everyone wishes she'd go away.
"That's her."
There was one exhalation of breath from everyone in the room. Just as fast, there was a trebling of tension as everyone returned to their machines, determined to pick up the trail.
Everyone leaves a trail. Yes, money paves the way. I know that. I've done that. I've made people disappear. I've made problems disappear. I've made myself disappear. But I've done all those things at once and I have the advantage over Vincent Geddes in that I'm more sane than he is.
His idea clearly was that he could taunt me with her. Because he could get them airborne again in less time than it took most people to call for delivery pizza.
They could be anywhere.
Which was exactly what I was supposed to think. I'd lay odds on it. They could be anywhere. Chances were, his private jet, whichever one he was using – because they'd all been scrambled – had flown out of Paris.
But I didn't think Vincent had. I thought he was still wherever he was staying. He'd have Annie with him.
"Surveillance cameras on the street?" They weren't called that when they were part of whatever the EU considered to be their take on SmartCities but it was still spying on people without their consent.
Tonight I was glad for it.
"Got it," two people said at the same time, and then, "Jinx!" before looking guiltily at me as if they shouldn't have.
But they could say any damned thing they liked. We had a link to a camera on the street and in minutes we could hook up to all the cameras along the street and trace the progression of the car all the way back to the three-story house on the corner of a perfectly normal street in Paris.
"Jet." I was already starting to run.
"Waiting," called back security. I didn't know who.
"Sir!"
"Yes." But he had to catch up. That was Jefferson, head of security now.
Meaning he was going to drive me.
I said yes because I wanted to make it to the airport in one piece and without a ticket. Jefferson would use the chopper.
Unauthorized landing of a bird at McCarran International - Small price to pay.
We were airborne in the jet, heading for Paris, thirty minutes after ‘jinx’.
France in the spring. Beautiful. As if I gave a fuck. I'd spent the too long flight thinking what I meant to do to him and what I meant to do to her. Because no mistake, she'd let herself be taken and she was in for it when I got her back.
Maybe the reaction was childish, and maybe the reaction was like that of a parent frightened by a child's temporary disappearance.
Either way, I'd want to punish her. I'd want to punish him out of her system. Purify. Cleanse.
I wanted her back. Damn it, I wanted her back for more reasons than teaching her never to let that happen again. I wanted her back.
10
Annie
We didn't run. The morning after the insane dinner and we were still in what I now knew was Paris.
Still in the same house.
Vincent was pleased with everything. He liked how the evening had gone. He liked the compliments he'd received on me. He liked the people who had chosen to speak to me.
That made one of us.
For me the evening had been like something out of American Horror Story. Everything was just off. Just canted the wrong way so everything felt uncomfortable.
For me, the people were like caricatures of real people, like something someone had made up. I had hated every minute of it. Even being out of the house hadn't been worth sporting a back full of bruises.
The fact that Vincent was happy and we hadn't run - That was just good news.
In the car Vincent had been very handsy, his fingers in the neckline of my dress, making me moan in unwilling pleasure as he stroked my nipples and then scream in not unexpected pain but definitely unbearable. He had a grip that was amazing.