by Sophia Reed
Did she even know that Vincent was dead? Wherever she'd been while I was being shown a lookalike, some poor girl who had been scarred and then shot, left to take Kie's place, wherever she'd been at that point, she might not know Vincent was dead.
Would it be kinder to tell her? Even if she thought he was alive, right now he was lost to her. If it would be a kindness to tell her, then I’d pass. Kie deserved no kindness from me.
"Get up," I said. I kept my voice neutral. "Get on your knees."
I saw her shudder briefly. At that second I knew that however beaten and however unstable, she wanted to live. That just made me tired. There were already women in my care. Lily in France, brain-injured and cared for in comfort for as long as she lived.
Ariel in the maze under the compound, recently changing. She'd resisted me. She'd argued with me.
When I least expected it, she’d comforted me. For that alone I could have beaten her.
"What are you asking me?" I demanded, leaning down to speak directly into Kie's face.
Behind me, I heard Annie twitch. Her foot skimmed the surface of the floor like she wanted to attack, to rend Kie limb from limb. Probably she did. Probably I couldn't blame her.
"Please. Let me be your slave." Her voice was tiny. She sounded well and truly beaten. That was the problem with Kie. She knew how to work situations. She knew when to beg, when to demand, when to fight, when to submit.
She'd be the perfect sub, screaming on cue even when whatever was being done to her was something she relished. But like having a feral dog in the house, I'd never know when she was about to turn on me. I'd never sleep soundly again.
I hadn't made a fortune with my life's work only to live in fear of a viper in my own house.
"Stay here. I'll come back for you."
From the slump of her shoulders I knew she had given up. It would be something to pity, I suppose. If only I didn't know her true nature. What's the parable about the scorpion that rides a frog or a turtle or something across a flooded river? The creature towing the scorpion has made the logical protests – you're a scorpion; you'll sting me and I'll drown – and the scorpion has made the logical responses – if you die, we both will; why would I do that to myself? But halfway across the river the scorpion does sting the – I suppose it's a frog, and the two begin drowning in the river. Why? The frog asks.
And the answer, of course is - that’s just what I do - It's the nature of the scorpion.
That was the nature of Kie. She was vicious and dangerous and something would have to be done with her. That something would not be making her my sub.
But Annie didn't have to know that right away.
And Annie didn't get to make demands.
5
Cole
"Are you going to keep her?"
Annie asked before the door had closed behind us. Or maybe it was more of a demand. My hand itched to slap her, to take her over my knee and spank her as if she were a willful child.
At the same time I was torn between shouting at her for not running when I told her to, for questioning me when I demanded my questions be answered.
I brought my hand up and saw her close her eyes, waiting for a blow she refused to duck. Instead I relented and touched her face. Her skin was hot, flushed with the fight she'd had with Kie. The fight that had turned her face red and undoubtedly saved my life.
I wanted to make her backside as red and heated as her face. I wanted to crop her from head to toe. Front and back. I wanted to make her stand with her hands behind her head and her eyes forward and say nothing as I worked her over. I wanted to punish her as if it were her fault she'd been taken, and I wanted to punish her for putting herself at risk over Kie's threat to me. I hadn't spent so much time with her, overcoming her addiction, just to let some inadequate sub kill her.
I wanted to punish her because I wanted to punish her. She always fought so well, and broke so beautifully.
Not yet. There were too many things still to do.
6
Annie
"Kill her."
I'd been pacing for a good fifteen minutes at least, back and forth across Cole's office in the main house, unable to sit still.
What I wanted to do, irrational in the extreme, was wrap my arms around him and tell him how afraid I'd been.
Which was stupid. The man had humiliated me in as many ways as he could, both sexually and simply through my own sense of pride. He believed in breaking down an addict to the absolute bottom before building them back up, new and stronger. But in the process he'd stripped me and had me examined, stripped and beaten me, both in front of his guards, those guards who were regulars and would be around to see me at other times. He'd sold me at auction to Vincent Geddes and in a way, that event followed by his refusal to let Vincent take me that night, had led to everything that had just happened.
I could as easily blame Cole for the events that had led to Vincent's death and Kie's attempts on both of us as I could blame Kie herself.
It was April, stormy in Seattle and brutally sunny already in Southern Nevada. Cole took my arm as if I were a flight risk and steered me out of the main house, across the expanse of desert to the cell that was mine. I'd have liked to stay out in the warmth. The dry desert was growing on a Seattle native. But Cole took me back inside, the doors shutting out the day.
Spring in Southern Nevada. It was going on a year since I'd first come into contact with Cole. I'd be turning twenty-five over the course of the summer. That meant I was going on five years as Seattle PD and four years undercover. It wasn't the norm to throw someone into deep cover work that soon but I looked sixteen or seventeen. It would have been idiotic for PD to ignore the benefit of someone who wanted to work undercover narc and looked like I did. Looking so young was a problem if I wanted to buy alcohol and forgot my ID. It was a bonus if I needed to go undercover in a high school.
And during the five years on the force, I had killed a man, in the line of duty, and the shoot was ruled legitimate.
During the course of my acquaintance with Cole, I'd ordered two men dead when Cole wouldn't release me back to Washington and my efforts to bring down the Brotherhood and their meth dealership and fentanyl market had resulted in a better city until I ended up Cole's unwilling guest. When he wouldn't let me go and I knew it wasn't ego but fact that said I could make a difference with this batch of dealers, he ordered a hit.
Unless he was playing some complicated long range game to keep me under his thumb, that hit had been carried out. Certainly I knew from my contacts in the police department that those two were dead. No one knew who’d killed them and probably no one was looking real hard. So I had no proof that it was Cole. Just belief.
Those deaths had been at a distance. I hadn't cared. I would have done it myself if he'd freed me and that had been the only way. Those deaths were necessary to keep the streets from flooding with more fet as other, newer, less ethical (a word I didn't use lightly but still applied to Jesse, leader of the Brotherhood) dealers took the place of the recently diminished Brotherhood.
Killing Kie would be up close and personal. I wanted no part of that. I wasn't a stone cold killer. I wanted to keep people alive. That's why I chose a profession that, no matter the chosen motto in any given city, is still To Protect and Serve.
But Kie was deadly and she had no morals, no ethical code and no hope of redemption. I couldn't even see a hope for the future.
"It's not that easy," Cole said.
I stopped pacing, hands fists at my sides. "After what happened today?"
He smiled at that, which made me stare at him. "I haven't said thank you yet."
"Jeez," I said, breathing out, and caught his eye. My time for being Annie Knox was rapidly running out. I was back on his turf. He was going to make certain I was back on his turf. And under his control. He was taking me back from Annie Knox to Annie. Or maybe annie, small a. "Jeez, sir."
That made him smile, one of the patented Cole smiles that's very
small and very quiet and if you're not looking you miss it.
Next second he confused me totally.
"Do you know about Ariel?"
My first thought was something to do with Shakespeare. My second was I was totally lost. "No, sir."
"She lives here." He had stopped pacing. We were in my cell now, which felt like home, enough that I wanted to just sit down on my bed. Or maybe crawl into it and sleep. Fuck Kie. And fuck Cole. He could figure it out on his own.
Then what he said trickled through. Even the guards didn't live here. The only people who lived here full time were me and him, me because I was locked up. As far as I knew, the cook went home at night and probably collected hazard pay when it was Cole's turn to host the kinky billionaires club.
"Is she the cook?"
He blinked at me like he'd forgotten the cook's existence. "I don't think so. Her name is..." long pause "...Something else."
I bit my lip and didn't smile.
He saw it anyway. "Kneel while we talk."
I looked at the floor, considering and then deliberately, I looked at him. "I don't think so."
Cole's eyebrows went up. "You don't think so?"
"I didn't come back," I said. "I was sent for. I was brought." And then, because his expression was something I couldn't read and because I didn't want to have just ruined something that had mattered to me, too, "I would have come anyway. Because of her. Because of you. I wouldn't have just left you, C – sir."
He looked almost amused. At least there was no hurt in his eyes. "I know that." And then, softening, "I do know that, Annie. But I have ordered you to kneel."
"And I'm refusing. I'm not certain I'm back yet. I don't know that I'll come back."
He did look hurt then, and a little lost. "What else would you do?"
I looked down. Not demure. Just afraid to meet his eyes. "Go to school. Get a job. Try out for the DEA."
"What we talked about."
His voice was so quiet I looked up and his face was sad, as if I'd gone off to do something we'd planned to do together and I was doing alone. Only it had always been something I was going to do alone, hadn't it?
"What we talked about, yes."
"I see." The silence stretched out between us. I watched the floor, his shadow as he now paced, into the sun from the southwest windows and back out of it again. I shivered when he left the sun, as if I could feel the cool shadows on my own body. "I asked if you knew about Ariel."
"I don't think I do. Sir. You said she lives here?"
Abruptly he pulled the straight-back chair from inside his office into the main cell and straddled it, facing me. "She's been here longer than you have."
The flash of jealousy was totally out of place. Whatever our relationship was, it wasn't anything where I could get jealous of anyone else.
"I – " I stopped to think what I wanted to say. "Haven't ever seen her. Have I?" Maybe she was a guest at one of the parties. Maybe she had a different name. Maybe it was part of the whole weird game that she’d lived here all along when I thought she went home with a different bad mad billionaire.
"She's in the maze," Cole said.
For an instant I couldn't understand what he'd said. Then my first question was, "There's a maze here?"
He smiled, an honest one this time, and said, "Not technically, but the way the hallways run, it's like a maze, like the super simple ones kids get on their menus at Denny's."
"Under the compound?" I asked but even as I did, I saw the compound again from the air, the way I'd identified the section that housed my cell, connected through the room of pain behind my quarters. There were other buildings connected by thin covered walkways, at least it looked that way from the air. The entire compound looked a little like a hopscotch grid from above, with each additional unit behind the main house to the north, and juxtaposed to each other to prevent blocking each other's sunlight.
"No. Not under. If you continued through our playroom – "
"That's a playroom?"
The look he gave me wasn't playful at all and I shut up.
"You'd find a passage that could take you into her quarters."
Too many questions. Too much growing fear. "She's been here all along? But I've been here almost a year. How is that possible? I've never seen her." I backed up, sat down unexpectedly on the bed, covers bunched in both hands. My breathing was ragged and the walls had started closing in. The walls to the locked cell I'd willingly entered with Cole St. Martin.
Had I been wrong all along? Had he disappeared her? Would he disappear me? Had I left somewhere I was safe, if angry and humiliated and ready to divorce a man I hadn't married yet, to go somewhere I wasn't safe, somewhere someone could effectively make me not be?
Abruptly Cole was in front of me, crouching at my feet, his hands on my arms. "Breathe," he said. "Annie, breathe. You're hyperventilating. I started at the wrong place. I was thinking about Kie. Annie, please listen."
Please. He so rarely said it.
I nodded.
"Ariel is suicidal." He rubbed a hand over his face and looked briefly confused. "Or maybe was suicidal. I don't know. She's been changing, which isn't something I thought she could do."
I shook my head. "I don't understand."
"I found Ariel in an alley in Chicago. I was there on a business trip, and she was in an alley not far from my hotel. It was stupid but I was running. It was late, I was antsy, I went for a run. If I hadn't, she would have died in that alley. She was just thirty and she'd been stabbed and left for dead."
My chin came up. This sounded like too many other stories. "Prostitute?"
"To pay for her drugs, yes. Annie, she wasn't like anyone I'd ever met. There wasn't anything else she wanted. Except heroin. Or fet. Or morphine. Or anything else she could get but mostly heroin. She was empty. She'd been beaten probably before the event in the alley. She'd gone there to meet a contact but someone else was there and instead of giving her drugs, they took her money, beat her, raped her, and stabbed her."
I just breathed, feeling nausea curl inside me.
"She was the first person I ever met who didn't want anything except to not be. Her only happy times were when she was completely stoned on opiates, the world no more than a bad story she couldn't quite forget."
"Damn."
"I said she was suicidal but really she just didn't care. Kill her, don't kill her, feed her, don't, as long as she had her heroin. But she was a pain slut."
I blinked at the term, and then at him. He'd taken the woman in that condition off the street and hurt her?
If he noticed my expression, he chose to ignore it. "She wanted pain. She wanted to be beaten with fists and implements. She wanted canes and straps and crops and whips and my hands and anything at all that would make her scream. So I guess I can't say she wanted nothing. And past that she wanted a needle in her arm and if she had to have sex, she wanted it as debasing and painful as possible."
I turned my face away, wishing he'd stop. "You took her prisoner?" It actually came out without accusation.
"No."
He didn't say anything else.
"Did you treat her like you treated me? I mean, with the rainforest drug."
"Naturals. Yes. It changed the course of her addiction, but it couldn't change her … spirit, I guess."
"Do you believe you saved her life?"
He considered that. "I do, but she helped."
"You just said she didn't want to live."
"She didn't. Maybe she still doesn't. But buried under the will not to live, there were those other things."
"What other things?" I hadn't heard anything to live for.
So he recounted. Pain. Sexual suffering. Being beaten. And her drugs. I already knew that Cole could cure an addiction, though I didn't think he could cure the need for the addiction. The physical part is only part.
"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 wou
ldn't die."
"She's still alive?" I asked. Of course she was. He said she lived here, had lived here longer than I had. He wouldn't keep a body. In the back of my mind, I knew we were still approaching the topic of Kie, though in a very roundabout manner.
"She's alive. And only recently started to change."
I was on my feet in an instant. "You think Kie is ever going to change? Because that's insane. You're insane if you think that."
"You're on thin ice whether or not you chose to come back here. I still have a signed contract and you will not speak to me like that."
I stared at him. "I don't care."
"You will."
I shook my head. "What does Ariel have to do with Kie?"
He rubbed his face. "I honestly don't know why I told you about her except to prove that she's been here and you've never known it and I can do the same with Kie."
I started to say he couldn't just throw her into a makeshift prison, there were rules in the world, justice and a court system that at least at our level wasn't too corrupt, and then realized I'd been arguing for her to be killed so maybe I didn't have an argument to make.
And I started to say he couldn't just lock her up like he did the girl who said she wanted to die, because Kie wasn't saying that.
Except she was. Or she had. More than once she'd begged to be killed.
And I was back to thinking that was a good idea. Because keeping something deadly is stupid. Rattlesnakes are not good pets. Ticking bombs should be disarmed or detonated, not stuck in the back room. Cole was considering keeping Kie. Not as a sub, not as a slave, but keeping her where he lived nonetheless.
"Forever?" Because my skin crawled with claustrophobia at the idea.
"No. She wants to belong to someone, maybe more than she did to Vincent."
On my feet and pacing, I wanted to turn back to him and say he couldn't take her on as a sub. I couldn't be expected to share him with someone so loathsome.