by Sophia Reed
As she fell asleep, l lay still, holding her, knowing she'd sensed something changing but not what.
But I knew. Lying there in the dark I could feel another darkness reflected within, coiling up like vines or like woodsmoke on a still night, rising in patterns to hang in the air, unmoving.
The rage had built and had nowhere to go and now I was falling, head first, into the black.
I could count the number of times the rage had been this bad.
A prostitute named Lily, whose pimp had choked her unconscious so many times he caused irreversible brain damage. She was just damaged enough to know she was damaged and could never recover. Not hurt badly enough to be beyond caring. Or dead.
She was cared for in a secret villa in the south of France, all her expenses forever paid for. She delighted in painting, in sunsets but not sunrises, and in puppies, so we set her up with the local version of a Humane Society, fostering puppies. She was excellent with puppies. Her capacity to care was tremendous. Once the puppies became dogs, she was afraid of them, so we made certain her experience was endless puppies. That sounds like a form of heaven, even to me.
And as for the pimp who hurt her, he had been incarcerated but nowhere the authorities knew about. He was possibly going to be forgiven when he died, if indeed there's judgment after this life. Because I'd made certain he was facing hell during his time on earth.
Another time I had simply been left by a sub I had trusted, had thought would stay with me. No one else was harmed during that period of time, but my training – running, lifting, martial arts, yoga, sweat lodges, steam rooms, dry saunas – all of it damn near killed me. My intensity, my drive to make myself perfect, was all consuming.
It was after that, after I started climbing back out of that particular darkness, that I began treating my body as a temple, inviolate and never to be harmed by my own hand.
This darkness felt more absolute. As Annie slept I wrapped myself tighter around her until I admitted to myself I was hoping to wake her by the way I held her, crowding her, holding her too close. That was unfair. This wasn't her fault. This was my darkness.
I was up long before she was. I took a run through Paris and when the urge to keep going, to push until I was on my knees, unable to move, I made myself stop and retreat to a café where I ordered coffee. When the desire to leave Annie wondering became less intense, I returned her texts, letting her know I'd be back soon.
For now, this was controlled and contained.
I needed to get her back to southern Nevada, back to the compound, while it still was.
23
Annie
We flew back to Nevada three days later.
There's something inside me, some kind of control freak, maybe. Or not that. I'm not sure what it is. It's something that comes out and says I'm afraid and then even if I'm not anymore, it still insists I am and that things won't be all right until I get out of that situation.
So the second day in Paris with Cole the thing inside me said that Paris wasn't safe. It was, at least as far as anything ever is safe, because the things that made it unsafe specifically for me were gone. Kie was dead. Vincent was dead. They weren't coming back.
When the bullet had gone into Vincent's brain, I thought it overkill. Of course Cole was reacting the way he should. But I'd already killed Vincent. Or killed him at almost exactly the same minute Cole did.
It wasn't overkill. Even knowing I'd felt the resistance and then snap as Vincent's nose had broken and the end of the bone driven into his brain, it was the outwardly visible bullet hole in his forehead that helped.
I hung on to the idea of Vincent crying when he came after me, in order to believe that Kie was dead too.
But the thing inside me said This isn't safe, get home. If I had to guess, it's a powerlessness that drives that voice. If I knew that I could leave any time I wanted, which probably I could, I'd be fine.
I could leave. I could call my father and refuse to ever tell him a word about what had happened. Probably I could convince him I'd been so deep cover that, even as I came out of it, I couldn't talk about it.
There's that thing again, between fathers and daughters. Because Dad was a cop and because he wasn't always the most straight line kind of cop, I'm sure he'd figured out that if I was working narcotics, from time to time I'd prostituted myself in one way or another to get results.
He'd never said anything about it. And I could probably allude to something like that without ever lying and ask to not only have him bring me home but let me stay at their house and he'd do it. Probably he'd fly over to collect me if that's what I needed.
I couldn't ask that. I didn't want him around me. Not until I magically felt completely clean.
Mark would come. Mark, my incurable romantic. It was time to cut the ties between us. I would, as soon as I was strong enough to go home for any amount of time.
Once I was convinced that this new sobriety would hold. I'd finish my criminal justice work and take the classes I needed to in order to get the degree then apply to the DEA. I thought I'd get in.
And meanwhile for the first day I fretted, still here in France, against my will. Until a different little voice (it was busy in my head) said kind of clearly: Oh, poor you.
One of the most amazing cities in the world. What was I complaining about? When I didn't have an answer, I fought down as much of the anxiousness (and really some of that might have been PTSD getting an early and opportunistic grip) and asked Cole if we could explore.
I expected my Master to reply. Or the Cole who enjoyed such things.
But this Cole barely responded until we were already underway.
I began to wonder if he too needed help to get through this.
We spent the next two days touring Paris. We were tourists. I tried to believe I was getting back at Vincent this way. I was seeing Paris on the arm of one of the most eligible bachelors in the world.
But the truth was, I never escaped the knowledge that Vincent was dead. I'd wanted him dead while he held me, and I was glad he was dead.
That didn't mean there weren't things I'd never get closure on. Things I'd never feel I'd won.
There was also an unpleasant probability that eventually Cole would understand that Vincent couldn't be reached and that I was the reason. Because I'd killed Vincent at the same time he did.
And because I'd been snatched, taken, and he'd come to rescue me and killed Vincent in the process.
Cole would never know for certain that Vincent knew who had shot him.
Unless I told him. Because I was pretty sure that the second the bullet lodged in his brain, it was one second after the lights went out. He might have lived through what I did to him – might have – but even then I doubt he'd have known Cole was responsible for his death even if Cole stood over him with a pillow held in both hands and coming down slowly over Vincent's face.
I didn't like that it mattered to me that Vincent hadn't known.
I didn't like even more that when this finally occurred to Cole or when he allowed himself to dwell on it, that I'd be the only one left that he could blame.
And the only one left who could be punished for taking away his chance for revenge. Twisted, yes, but likely.
But I enjoyed the touring. Our last night there we sat across from each other at an incredibly beautiful, five star restaurant. The night was mild and the stars out, as best we could see them over the city.
We sat outside, the wines changing as the dinner progressed. Everything came in small amounts, a taste of this, a taste of that, nothing to ruin the appetite for the next thing to come along.
There was a salad that was exquisite, even to someone who prefers her salad spelled p-i-z-z-a.
There was asparagus, so perfectly prepared, the mouth felt almost as important as the buttery lemony taste.
"You've never had this before," Cole said. He was resplendent in nothing more outrageous than a crisp button-down white shirt, open at the neck to show just a tou
ch of that incredible chest.
When I dragged my attention away from him, I took in what the waiter had just served us and nearly gagged. "Sir, no, please, I can't."
Sir was an interesting development. As if Vincent had beaten it into me. Or as if Cole coming to my rescue had made him my literal Master. Or something else entirely. Whatever it was the word was still galling – but not as much as it had been.
Not, say, as much as the fact that there was a plate of snails in front of us.
"You can." He looked at me seriously. "You will."
There was something there in his face, something I wasn't sure I could understand. It was past his usual command, past his being my Master. It was anger, yes, I'd been expecting it, though maybe not yet. Of course who was to say how it would make itself known? It could show up in a dozen different ways and at various times and it might not all show up at once.
That I understood. That I expected.
Whatever I was sensing here, it was something else that I didn't understand. More that the game wasn't a game – he really expected me to submit to him, he really would punish me if I didn't – but really was a game. Because in his heart I think even Cole St. Martin understood he didn't own me.
This was something past that. This was a black pit of reaction he had fallen into, possibly more than losing the one-upmanship game that the billionaires in that bizarre unwholesome circle played.
This was an anger so deep it had to be predicated on something other than what had happened. This was something beyond what had been done to me, and instead of feeling my own pain was being belittled, I was glad not to be in the eye of this storm.
Except that right now, I was.
I looked at the things on the plate and felt my gorge rise repeatedly, a feeling that all the food that had come before this was going to make a quick exit.
But I was learning. I could eat them here or I could eat them stone cold and maybe worse, later. Who knew how much later. Or whether they'd all go into my mouth. Or whether this was like a mother and child thing where I'd only have to try one bite and then it was all over and I could just eat my salad.
I could eat them, or he might force them into my mouth right here at a sidewalk café and the truth was, no one would do anything about it once they knew he was Cole St. Martin.
I watched how he unshelled them or whatever it was called. I watched how he pulled out the loathsome flesh and I followed along and put some into my mouth.
It tasted of butter and garlic, which I was coming to believe the French overused quite a bit. It was – like eating butter and garlic and a flip flop. It was utterly vile if I thought about it and horribly pointless if I didn't.
Right. I'd eaten a snail. I looked at him to see if he was going to push the issue or if I'd find him laughing, pleased with his control and honestly amused at my reaction.
Neither. He was calm and in control and he nodded. I'd tried them. I was done. I felt like a small child wanting to run now, off to my room, having eaten everything the adults said I had to.
"Was that so bad?" he asked, offering me a glass of white wine.
"Yes."
I very intentionally hadn't said Sir that time. Cole just laughed.
But the darkness continued in our room. As if reverting to form, reminding himself who he was and who he thought I was, or who he wanted me to be, he ordered me to strip and to kneel when we returned to the room.
That was after an evening of viewing the city from the Eiffel Tower, and taking a carriage ride through the streets and along rivers. We didn't do all the tourist stuff. Neither of us much cared about museums, no matter how famous they were.
I knelt, waiting for what would happen after he finished his shower and was ready for bed, but the only thing that did happen was that Cole told me the bathroom was mine, and gave me a hand to climb to my feet.
As I walked away from him, naked, I thought I heard him draw in a heavy breath, but when I turned back and said, "Sir?" he said nothing, only pointed me to the bath.
And then, about the time the strangeness of going from prisoner to sightseer was beginning to overwhelm me, we flew back to the desert.
Something was wrong. Something more than what I'd expected. I had anticipated perhaps being caned, or whipped. I had thought he would be angry once the immediate reactions had a chance to settle.
But even for Cole he was acting strange. More rigid than ever, and as if the results didn't matter.
Not everything for a sexual sadist is sexual, for all the sense that makes, but Cole had taught me that. A good deal of what he did to me gave him satisfaction of some sort, but it wasn't sexual gratification from what I could see. He'd hang me from the cross or tie me to the things that still looked like monkey bars, and he'd hurt me in ways I had never imagined (and a few I had) and when he cut me loose, he would go back to work. Or sit down and talk. Or go to a meeting. So he wasn't going off to masturbate.
He simply enjoyed the control and the pain. Both were important to him, maybe equally so. I thought he got as much pleasure out of forcing me to kneel and stare fixedly at a spot on the floor as playing the ladder game up and down my ass and thighs with a set of canes, while making me count.
Suddenly everything he did felt rigid. Like a partner who has suddenly gone off sex. Like someone who knows this is something they've always enjoyed but now they don't.
It wasn't just that the joy had gone out of it for him. Everything had. He wasn't there.
He began rigid morning routines. He'd wake me at dawn and we'd run through the desert, returning for a complicated regimen I was never less humiliated by. After weights, after yoga, after marital arts, he'd gone back to the morning enemas, followed by a flush of water that had me peeing half the morning away. I think if he could have forced me to vomit every morning he would have but somehow he drew the line there.
There were saunas and showers and steam rooms. He cut my hair so short I sobbed, feeling he had all but shaved it. At his command I used mouthwash four times a day, until my gums hurt to look at the bottle.
He was cleaning me out, eliminating any trace of Vincent in me or on me. I wasn't against it. It mirrored the reaction of wanting to shower after having been groped in a club or used by someone in an undercover operation when I needed to stay deep cover and couldn't say no, not without tipping my hand. I wasn't against getting Vincent off me any way we could.
I just hoped whatever there was of Annie in me would still be there when he was finished.
24
Cole
When I looked at her, I saw him. Vincent. And Kie. That little nitwit that set him off.
Once upon a time, Vincent and I were friends. We worked our way up in our respective vocations. Mine was pharmaceuticals. His had been in the auto industry and a lot of the money he controlled had been left by his father and grandfather.
Of the circle who met and played for money, earned to help out the charities that combat sex trafficking, he was the one I first considered a friend.
At one of our annual dinners where we auctioned off the slave, sub, mistress, girlfriend or wife we'd brought, he bought Annie for two weeks for the sum of $5.5 million. That money could have gone to good use helping free victims being trafficked or get them help once they were pulled out of that life.
But that night I couldn't let Annie go. She wasn't a part of the same world I was. Her relationships had been vanilla and if there was a darkness within her, something that called to her until she learned about BDSM and Master/slave and the rest of it, the whips and canes and chains and spanking benches, punishments and very few rewards, that something was new and triggered by her proximity to me.
That didn't mean I was going to free her. Maybe not even after the rainforest cure did its work on her opiate addiction. But she was too new and too raw and looked far too young to let Vincent Geddes go off with her.
Which was why he took her.
I could mourn the loss of a friend, even if I was responsible fo
r pulling the trigger.
None of it was Annie's fault. Not even her original addiction, caused by circumstance and the people who put fentanyl on the street in the first place. But she was the one here. She was the reason Vincent was dead. She was the reason she had been taken.
She was the one here to pay for that.
Since we’d returned I'd carefully schooled my emotions. The rage. Of course the rage. There was no other emotion for me except simple human decency and the need to see the damaged made whole again.
It had been that way with my sister Emily, only I'd been too late. It was that way with Ariel, trying to instill in her some desire to live. To make her want to fight back and until that day, to give her the solace she craved by taking her body down to its essential systems. By hurting her so badly that no remembered hurt could compete.
By letting her know someone cared enough about her to do such things.
And Lily. Damaged beyond even what could be salvaged. All there was for Lily was keeping her safe and giving her what pleasure she could take from what she had left to her.
That was my way. I didn't love these women. I didn't love Marilyn or any of the subs I took into the room where I was free to do anything I pleased.
I didn't love Annie.
This was what I did. What I did wasn't enough now. Annie had slipped somewhere beyond what I was used to. Maybe it was her being complicit in Vincent's death.
That fed my own dark. It seemed that she was trying to keep it from me but I was positive that by the time I shot Vincent Geddes, he was already effectively removed from this world.
And Annie had done that.
I couldn't forgive losing the chance to punish him for what he had done.
Annie was afraid of Kie as well. Some deep, superstitious dread had settled into her, the need to go back somehow and see for herself the bitch was dead.
I wasn't going to do it. Kie was dead. Vincent was dead.
Now it was cleansing the filth from Annie. So there were the morning runs and the rest of the rituals and the breakfasts of glasses of water and clean fruit and vegetables and fish or organic chicken breast and a good spanking over my knee, her white ass reddening under my palm. Forcing her to count because it kept her attention focused, away from brooding over things that could never now be changed, or things she still felt ashamed had happened to her.