by Sophia Reed
It was a decent routine. One meant to clear out mental and physical barriers to healing.
It wasn't working. Not for her.
Not for me. The rage built every day and the runs I took Annie on at dawn were the second of each day for me – I'd already been up and on the treadmill, unable to sleep whether I kept her chained in my bed or locked in hers.
When nothing else works, information sometimes does. I researched who owned the house, but it remained in the care of the shell corporation Vincent had set up. Eventually it would be sold and the money would settle into his estate. If nobody could prove he was dead, that money would sit uselessly for years while the courts maundered around it.
Past that, even with the reach I had – because money opens doors – all I could find out was the same thing the authorities could find out: Vincent Geddes and his partner had vanished.
Which meant my own men had done a good job. But it left me at loose ends. And again I'd think about endings, full circles, stories finished. And again I'd think of the money that would be wasted sitting in his accounts, waiting for whatever caretakers were given charge of it to decide no one was watching and make it disappear, too.
It could be going to a good cause. Though I now wondered if Vincent had actually made his will to assert that the bulk of his estate go to fighting trafficking. He'd lied about so much and been insane from what I could tell.
Or maybe insane is only a useful term for My kink is fine but yours is frightening and weird.
He would have killed Annie.
That was the truth I spent every day trying not to know. In my pride of putting her up in the auction in the first place – look what I have, a disgraced police officer, so vulnerable and new to the scene, so desperate to make up for what she did undercover even if she doesn't recognize this need in herself; what will you give me for her? – I put her in the position to attract Vincent's malignant attention.
I couldn't forgive myself for that. But I was never the one who was punished.
And so it had to be Annie.
"Eleven, sir, thank you!"
She was on her knees in the room behind her cell, the room where I took her to punish, correct or care for her.
On her stomach on the bed, bent over it, minutes after the dozen cane strikes were over, and I’d told her to be silent while I used the crop on every welt building up from the canes, snapping it down with all the strength I could.
Until she screamed. Until she begged. Until she promised whatever I needed from her, she would do.
There wasn't anything she could do.
"I want to be inside you." My voice was as raw as hers was.
It galvanized her. She shoved herself off the bed and knelt on the floor at my feet. "Please. Not yet. I can still smell him."
Reaching down, I grabbed her chin and forced her head up. "You mean that you need to be cleaner for me. Is that what you mean?"
She kept her gaze down. She nodded, her chin bouncing in my hand. "Yes. Sir." It was a whisper.
I backhanded her and left her sprawled on the floor before I could succumb to something as stupid as compassion.
Compassion would not heal her.
I would.
25
Annie
Something was wrong.
Something was wrong with Cole. That was obvious. Before Vincent had come into the routine in the compound, before he forced his way through that spring morning and took me, I'd rarely paid attention to Cole beyond judging his immediate mood and how that would impact on my own mood, or worse yet, on my anatomy.
Outside our relationship or whatever our arrangement would be called, Cole existed in the world in a big way. I came to understand that Vincent Geddes had as well and that his disappearance was not going unobserved. People were looking for him. In my experience, bodies usually show up sooner or later.
I hoped it would be later.
Insanely, I was concerned about Cole, worried about how he was handling what had happened. Less crazily, I was worried about myself if something happened to Cole. It could be a one-person accident. The kind of thing that makes people shake their heads if they don't understand the concept of suicide by "accident." I needed Cole.
Plain and simple and self-serving if I had to look at it that way, but true. There was no one on the planet who would understand what I had just gone through and the night terrors and intrusive thoughts, the flashbacks, PTSD symptoms were all taking hold with a vengeance.
With everything else I'd gone through in the past, it was the savagery of his sadism that brought me down. The fact that whatever I experienced with Cole, however twisted he was, at the core he was decent.
At the core, he was taking care of me.
Vincent had been inhuman. Sometimes the look on his face right before he'd hurt me was inexplicably awful, so terrible and terrifying I'd honestly wonder if he was possessed. If I believed in devils rather than the evil men do, I would have wondered. Because he taxed my ability to believe that men could do that much evil.
Cole was transparent in what he was doing. Not that he was saying outright he was trying to clean me inside and out, because that would have been very un-Cole-like. But that it seemed as obvious as a shrink asking So how do you feel about that? Or, Can you sit with that for a minute?
I was sitting with it for a lot of minutes, sometimes with my bottom flaming inside and out and so far, no, I couldn't sit with it. I had been damaged.
I needed Cole and I was afraid he wouldn't be there much longer.
Which might have something to do with what happened one morning as April got underway. Cole – no surprise here – liked my body smooth and hairless. Toward that end I had a personal electric thingy like a man's shaver, and it did a much better job of removing hair I'd never really thought about removing before Cole St. Martin entered my confusing life.
But there were some things that just worked better with a disposable razor and not even Cole had stopped to think I could be dangerous with one.
But the fact is if you stick a table knife under the double blades and leverage it up, the thin cheap strips of what I think is aluminum pop free easily. They're tricky to hold, because they're omnidirectional – every fucking thing about them is sharp. And weirdly they're sharper than, say, the single-edged razor blades sold in hardware stores. Maybe because those have a beveled edge and the strips from disposable razors really are just strips: No hand grip because you're not expected to handle them.
One week after Cole brought me back to the southern Nevada desert, he left me to clean up after the morning routine and the breakfast hell of fucking fish and fruit. If I ever graduated from Cole's care, I was going to live on a diet of pizza and cheesecake.
Except what with all the running and lifting and eating right I'd be in such good shape I'd be loathe to give it up.
Life sucks.
I smiled to myself at that and then contemplated the metal strips. Just having them in my hand I was taking deeper breaths than I had since Paris. There's something about giving up control that Cole believes is cathartic and important to healing and certainly is important to him because that's his whole thing.
But to me, holding a blade against my skin and deciding how deep to cut, how fast, how much pressure, how much pain if any - because usually there was none - deciding where on my body and how long to bleed before I staunched the flow. Even sometimes cutting in the exact same channel, following the line of a previous cut and seeing the new blood and feeling no pain. Only power. Only control over myself. That was freeing. That was relief. That was a long, deep breath after something strenuous and awful.
Because I had no desire to permanently injure myself. My friends who knew I sometimes cut thought it hurt.
It didn't. I could never feel it. Instead it just redirected my thoughts and emotions and above anything else, I had to be there. It was the cult of mindfulness carried to the extreme. When I was cutting, I had to be present in the body I didn't always like and th
e mind I didn't always think was completely sane.
* * *
It had to be somewhere he wouldn't notice it. Very inner thigh at the top, maybe. Though that carried a risk of infection no matter how clean I remained. Inner ankle was my second choice. It often bled like a son of a bitch but it wouldn't stop me from running.
Even at that moment I didn't want to give up our morning runs. It was one of the few times I saw bits of Cole surface.
I sat down on the edge of the tub in the spacious bathroom, a roll of paper towel beside me. I'd go straight from my own version of self-care into the shower. Twenty minutes from now I'd be taking plenty of deep, far less anxious breaths and all the evidence would be washed away.
I don't know why it works. Other than the control, the mindfulness, but there are other areas of control and mindfulness in my life and they don't have the release cutting does.
I brought my left foot up across my right knee, exposing the underside of my ankle where some thin white scars already existed. For a second I just considered it, waiting to see if I really needed to do this or if there was an alternative. Left alone I'd opt instantly to cut. Left alone somewhere others couldn’t come any time without asking and I was a little more sacrosanct.
In the end, I drew the blade over the skin just above the ankle bone where calf meets ankle. The first pass was thin, beading up with thick fat drops of purple blood, but not the smooth, solid line I wanted.
Concentrating, I drew the blade down again, feeling only the sharp bite at the beginning before pain disappeared and there was only whatever it was that made this work. Endorphins maybe. Or just that this was a version of self-care. Some kind of therapy, played out on the canvas of my skin. As in: Yes, things are bad. I acknowledge that. But here as opposed to whatever violence I could do myself, I will focus on being safe, on only opening up this much for this long.
Some days, it was longer than others. This second cut welled up with deep purple blood before I finished the two inch cut. I sat watching the blood fill in the grooves in the flesh, then carefully put my foot out over the paper towel, letting the blood stream down in rivulets, seven or eight streams of it curling down across my foot, dropping into the paper towel and staining them a heavily wet purplish red.
It was a good cut. Not deep enough to damage. Not shallow enough I only got dots. But deep enough to bleed copiously. Enough to focus all my concentration on me and not on my circumstances, or my fear at having not seen Kie's body, or at having killed a powerful billionaire, which could clearly have complications.
The blood was starting to turn sticky, the streams of it drying on my skin even as thicker blood ran over top. The blood was tacky, no longer running. Time to blot my foot so I could stand and get into the shower, then clean up the paper towel and bandage what would, in reality, be a small cut of no consequence.
Or it would have been.
If just then Cole hadn't said from the doorway, "Annie. Oh my god."
26
Annie
He stood in the doorway, still wearing what he'd worn for our run, a pair of old and worn out shorts, his running shoes. He'd taken off his shirt and his beautiful chest was bare.
The expression on his face in that split second when I looked up and our eyes locked was shock. He wasn't even angry yet. He was processing what he saw, probably determining in that instant whether or not I was in immediate medical danger.
In his eyes, I saw Cole rise up against the dark man who had taken his place in Paris. If I had expected anything, it would have been to get caught when he disciplined me or cleansed me or if he decided that it wasn't up to me and fucked me.
I had never thought of him walking in on me.
The different Coles in his eyes battled it out. He wanted to hurt me far more than I had managed to hurt myself. That's what I expected. That he would punish me if for no other reason than I had dared to act as if this body was mine to control.
His medical training won out. He knelt gracefully at my feet, taking my bloody left foot in both hands and gently turning it outward so he could look at it. Gingerly he pressed the skin around the cut, making fresh runners of blood flow. At a guess, he was making sure the cut was fresh as it looked.
My hands fluttered uselessly in my lap. I wanted to reach out to him but I wasn't sure what I wanted. To stop him from looking at it? I couldn't. To stop the blood?
To hide, really. If I could have gotten away with it I'd have buried my face in my hands. There's something deeply embarrassing about getting caught cutting. It's partly that the person who walks in on it has no frame of reference and no way to understand.
It's partly that it's a completely personal and intimate act. Though why doing something to help my mental health should feel that way, I didn't know. It had always felt silly to me to be caught. Maybe because the person looking at me, no matter who they were, always looked so horrified and I know it's nothing.
Nothing at all.
It doesn't hurt. It totally helps.
And it wouldn't matter if it all went wrong. Because I'm nothing.
Nothing at all.
Kneeling at my feet, Cole cradled the one foot in his hand. I had an urge to pull free of him, as if he meant to wrench the foot right off my body, a kind of You don't deserve this if this is how you're going to treat it thing.
Though if that were true, he'd have to remove my whole body. I've never gotten along that well with the meat puppet. Best we've ever done is an uneasy alliance or a truce.
"Is there rubbing alcohol in this bathroom?"
Cole's voice seemed to come from a long way away. Unfair that it should feel like I was the one going into shock instead of him. Plus the question made me want to giggle. Shouldn't he know what was in his bathrooms?
"In the medicine cabinet." I'd only noticed it because I thought it a strange thing to leave with someone battling addiction. I think it can kill if you lose your mind and drink it. I'd never been tempted. Alcohol wasn't my thing.
He rose as easily as he had knelt and I appreciated his grace as well as the amount of his body I could see.
The world did some kind of folding up flashing thing and then Cole was at my feet again. That was a good trick.
"You have to keep this clean," he said, as if I were a neophyte. As if this were the first time I'd ever cut. "Otherwise you could end up losing your foot."
I know, I said, but it didn't end up coming out aloud.
That was interesting.
"Annie?"
I heard you, Sir.
Oh. That didn't come out either. I put a hand to my mouth. It was closed. Okay.
"Annie!"
Had he already been crouched with my foot in his hands the last time he spoke? He looked terrible. Like he hadn't slept in a month.
"Annie. Stay with me."
And he didn't use the gauze in his hand. He just upended the alcohol over my ankle.
27
Cole
She screamed.
At least that was something.
She screamed and then I was pouring water over her ankle, neutralizing the sting of the alcohol.
She was there behind her eyes again.
"Can you hear me?"
"Yes, sir."
"Annie, look at me. What happened?"
It felt like a very long time that she looked at me before she said, "Everything."
I'm not a psychologist. I'm not even a doctor. I stopped before going down that road. I'm a pharmacist.
There was no way for me to know if it was a good thing that it all came rushing out of her, everything, the drugs they'd knocked her out with, the flight, the blindfold, the SUVs, the different countries she thought she was in before realizing Vincent wasn't really moving them, just making her think that. Because everyone would think that. It was completely logical to think anyone with his ego would display her where I could see her and then run again.
He'd been right about that.
She told me about the weird party
he took her to, parading her whip marks in the backless dress. Then she told me that the exam table I'd seen, the second he'd had her on, this time had been for a medic to work on her back.
Strangely, that felt like the Vincent I knew. It didn't make me care that he was dead, except to wish I'd been more responsible for it. But for Annie herself, I was glad. That touch of kindness or caring or just logic when it came to dealing with a piece of property may have been significant in her staying sane through her ordeal. She'd been knocked down by the addition to fentanyl. She'd been further taken down by my systematic destruction of her ego, breaking her down to build her back up, different and stronger along the sites of the breaks.
The kidnapping would have stressed all those places. Like putting too much pressure on a bone that hasn't healed all the way from a break.
She told me about Kie coming to take her for a run and her terror at it but that was all it was.
"Not like we bonded," she snarled. "Because then she did it again."
I didn't close my eyes when she told me about the jalapeno and the torture, about the milk and the neutralizing and the pain and Kie, later, screaming as Vincent did whatever he did to her.
"I never saw her again," Annie said, her voice shaking. "That was it. I don't know what he did to her, the son of a bitch, he hurt her too, we were both victims, it – god, Cole, the way she screamed. I hated her so much. But the way she screamed."
She buried her face against me and I wished I had a shirt on or even a towel across my shoulders, something for her to breathe into, to hide her eyes in.