by Sophia Reed
"It sounds – perfect, Sir. Thank you."
"Good girl," I said. "Now stay silent." I rubbed her toned, taut ass for a minute, still feeling the bruises and welts from the caning though they were mostly gone. Annie's ass seemed to raise up on its own to fill my palm.
Then I raised my hand and slammed it down on the sweet spot, six times in the first volley before I even let her catch her breath.
Annie's soft cries filled the morning.
9
Annie
"Where have you been?"
James pounced on me the minute I stepped into Constitutional Law. I hadn't even taken my seat yet. Not that I was anxious to. The molded plastic wasn't going to feel good on my ass. To compound the punishment, Cole had given me maintenance spankings every morning and evening, and a Have a nice time in class strapping the night before. He was all about greetings and goodbyes. The bastard.
"I've had family obligations I couldn't get out of," I said. Which was true if I really squinted and wanted it to be.
"Don't they know you're in school?" That was Brooke, her long blond hair swept up in an Ariana Grande ponytail.
I made a rueful face. "There really were things I had to take care of. I cleared it with Braunstein," naming my faculty advisor, who also was criminal justice chair. Having him as my advisor was no coincidence. He was interested in the cop who had come to Vegas from the Pacific Northwest to take the criminal justice program. He as a nice enough man, who knew nothing about who he was dealing with. Even if he found a reason to need to contact Seattle PD – which he wouldn't, because I wasn't trying to parlay experience into skipping even the most basic class; I wanted to take the whole program with my peers – there's no way PD would ever release my undercover work. He knew what I'd been.
He had no idea what all I'd done.
"But you missed us," Brooke said in her most languid voice. She looked more the candidate for getting herself in front of a trafficking judge than I did today. Sometimes Brooke dressed like a sluttier version of Britney Spears. She was anything but an airhead, though.
"Of course I missed you," I said. When I had time. In between running and punishments and everything else.
Jenna rolled her eyes at Brooke. "We missed you," she said. "Can't make up the experience. We had one of the DDA's in to talk to the law club." Her eyes were bright at the mention of it and I was happy to hear the story. And a little sad. I'd made arrangements to finish the rest of the semester virtually if I had to. The story of the sick father in Seattle played out. He had been, very, for a while, and if anyone checked, that would show up. I didn't think anyone cared that much. Either I could finish my semester virtually or I couldn't. The administration wasn't going to check with my family over it and Seattle PD would be too busy and impatient to answer questions. Yes, of course he'd had health problems and anything past that wouldn't be the University's business.
My time out of my normal life was accounted for, something I'd never had to do before, since my so-called normal life had been as a police officer. When I was a cop, everyone knew where I was going when I went or, if they weren't of a paygrade to know, probably didn't know who I was and didn't care. The best way to be famous at being undercover is to be unknown.
Which definitely worked in my favor now.
But I really was going to miss being in class.
And being with Cole.
How about that? I'd built myself a life I'd miss if I had to take time away from it. That was more than important enough to remember once I was undercover and the shit was hitting the fan.
Because this time I was going deeper and longer, looking to get as close to the head of the organization as I could.
This time I was all in.
I'd kept my apartment. It had only been a handful of weeks since the raid at Cole's, the one perpetrated by the judge who died. There hadn't been a lot of time to contemplate if I wanted to be back under Cole's thumb most of the time or if I wanted to keep my own place. It was a lot closer to the University and with Vegas traffic, that helped. It was also my little bid at freedom even while living, contract or not, as Cole's sub. And it was a good part of the cover.
Over the next couple days I slept there, divorcing myself from living at Cole's. We texted, but he was working on the project of the day spa he wanted to invest in to put some of his rainforest products to work. One of the other kinky rich men he'd met and partied with and exposed me to – one of them, in other words – had approached him with the idea and now Cole was looking into it in detail.
If he was keeping himself distracted, I wouldn't be surprised. Id keeping himself distracted included bringing in a playmate or two, I got that, too. It was something Mark would never have understood, that sex and love could be so separate in a person's mind that my fucking someone as part of the job didn't bother me and had nothing to do with my feelings for him.
If Cole had somebody else, it wouldn't mean anything about him and me. For that matter, if he did take someone, it would be more likely to hurt them than to take them to bed, or a combination of the two. And as to how I felt about that?
Better their asses than mine.
Which meant I was back in the real world. Because under Cole's roof, my thoughts were different. Once under Cole's actual control, I reacted even more differently. There was the stinging pulse between my legs that begged to be satisfied. There was the ratcheting lust and the gathering fear. There was – all of it.
The weird thing was, when I got out into the world? It stopped. Not always. At the beginning I'd gone searching for him because of it. But now I had a purpose again, now I was on track and on the job? I was me again.
Whether or not I wanted to remain me was something I just didn't know yet.
I was now doing my own research into Grogan at the same time I waited for fake ID to come through. When it finally did and I was finally happy with everything I knew, Halloween had come and gone.
Grogan seemed to have pushed what the other judges were doing. The girls who disappeared under his watch were dealing meth and stealing cars and doing B&E rather than the petty shit. Maybe because girls doing the petty shit were still more tied into a life where people would not only miss them but have the wherewithal to contact the police about it. Maybe Grogan had drawn his own conclusions about what had happened to his peers.
And to Samuels. Samuels had been caught in the last operation Cole had shared with law enforcement. He'd gotten me out before the police got to know anything about me. I'd been afraid Samuels would talk. I didn't want to be associated with the ring, with Samuels, or with Cole, for that matter. I'd never expressed those thoughts.
Cole had known, though. And Samuels had just – vanished. Cole did a lot of work in South America, what with the raw materials he needed from the rainforest. I didn't think every transaction he made there was legal – he was dead set on keeping the rainforest as healthy as possible and not everyone he dealt with could feel the same, right? I didn't think he was above using force as deadly as necessary to accomplish things he felt needed accomplishing. Apparently some of those connections were – useful.
The day before I was going to get myself arrested was a quiet day. One where I took a walk, and then a run, where I did weight and came as close to meditating as my squirrely brain would put up with. One where I looked for every mistake I could possibly make and tried to find a way that I could circumvent it before it even came close to happening. At the end of the day I ordered a huge pizza – pepperoni, no fish! – and texted Cole, and tested my new phone, the one belonging to Erin Trace, a bad girl who stole cars and hearts and meth and probably didn't have a heart of gold.
The next day I went out and stole a Corvette out of a hotel casino parking garage. I wanted to steal a McLaren, but probably best not to be too showy…
…and suddenly I understood just why some people choose a life of crime and why people steal cars and for that matter, why people buy cars that cost more than their damn house.
&nb
sp; The Corvette was fun. I liberated it out of one of the big Strip casinos and floored it onto Las Vegas Boulevard and everybody got out of my way. The car didn't bother with zero to 60, it more was after zero into orbit.
"Yeah!" First signal I figured out the radio. Second radio I found some Jessie J and some Nicki Minaj and that was followed by some classic KISS because fuck! How do you go wrong with Paul Stanley?
I was doing 75 on the highway out of town, heading south, no destination in mind when the lights and sirens showed up behind me. Too bad. I'd had a great fifteen minutes out of town, opening up that car and letting her run and I could have happily had another couple hours before they caught me, though I might have been in Tijuana by then. Or Canada. My sense of direction sucks.
I sat with hands on the wheel, trying not to grin. Actually the incipient grin was fading fast. The car was fun but what came after wouldn't be. It wasn't like I didn't understand what I was here for. Or maybe in for. But Cole's endorphins had taken over. Stealing a Corvette and driving insanely fast? It was a lot of fun. Maybe, considering what was coming next, I could be forgiven for forgetting what I was doing and enjoying myself.
NHP took its time. They called in the plates and since the car was stolen – had the owner reported it already? Probably; if it were my car, I'd check on it frequently – called for backup. And then we waited ,me in the sun in the desert, music still playing. Three times the cop shouted at me to turn it off but considering he was going to end up turning me over to cops who etc., etc., or taking me in himself? I thought I deserved some Imagine Dragons and then, icing on the cake, Metallica.
By the time the backup showed up, they were more than happy to order me out of the vehicle with their hands on their weapons. I got out with my hands up, which is trickier than it sounds from behind the wheel, and stayed that way until they grabbed me and forced me down on the car. Whatever happened to their body cams, I don't know, but their frisking me was – thorough.
All the laughter died out of me as the hands went up under the skirt I was wearing and into my underwear, as the hands made very damn good and sure there was nothing in my bra.
"This car has been reported stolen. Do you know the registered driver?"
It seemed a bit late in the game to be asking a question they should already know the answer to. It was on the very edge of possibility that I did know the owner and had borrowed the car and he – or she – forgot I was going to.
Yeah, I wouldn't buy that either.
There were four cops around me, all male, all kind of looking like cutouts from some anonymous yearbook. Mirrored sunglasses, short hair, average features, semi-muscled. They were in shape but they weren't going overboard. Without having them take off the shades I didn't think I'd be able to identify them if I saw them again.
The fun time – theirs – was over. I was cuffed and put into an air conditioned NHP car. The men stood outside talking, waiting for something to come back over their radios. The longer the time ticked by, the more I understood I'd already found the people I needed to be found by. So to speak. I was in the clutches of the right people. Any other arrest, even for grand theft auto, I'd already be on my way to Metro.
It was hard to know whether to shout or smile. Thing that people don't know and movies don't show is that the people going undercover, the people doing the things that keep other people safe, the people who risk their lives on the side of the law, we're no different than anyone else. Okay, little different, because ordinary people don't try to get caught by drug runners or human traffickers. Ordinary, sensible people steer the fuck clear of those worlds. Even those who, shall we say, "benefit" from the trafficking are watching themselves and not involved in any other way.
They know better.
We used to say back on my squad that it takes a special kind of idiot to purposefully go find someone to bring them nicely into the underworld.
I'd done it. I was on my way.
10
Cole
This time I had to wait. This time I couldn't go off half cocked and bring her back too soon.
This would be our last chance at the trafficking ring. There were other avenues to pursue. I could hire mercs and have them try and run down the group. It would certainly take care of any problems with sympathetic cronies letting them off the hook, because mercs wouldn't have any good reason to leave them alive. I could turn the whole thing over to law enforcement and hope there were still some cops who weren't part of the ring. No, that was defeatist bullshit. Most of Metro was good cops. There was just no way of knowing at this point how pervasive the bad ones were.
And the fact that the handful of bad ones existed, that they'd do what they did and be part of what they were? That was frightening.
I stood in the situation room or the control room or the IT room. Whatever anyone called it, it was full of blue screens and anxious techs. They had set up a station for me but it was agony to sit there. The dot that showed where Annie was had been moving really fast. That part made me grin, though there was no real humor behind it. She must have loved that part. She'd talked about all the cars she might jack. I'd talked her down from cars she wouldn't get out of the casino with – or even if she just touched them. She'd settled on a Corvette if she could find one. From the speeds she had been traveling, she had.
Now the dot that was Annie was stopped. Now she was on the side of a highway in the middle of rural nowhere and when we put up a drone, there were lots of cops around. More maybe than necessary to bring down one unarmed girl who looked about eighteen.
"She did it," Scott said behind me.
"Heaven help us," I added, and didn't look away from the screen.
* * *
The drone looked on while Annie was frisked in a way that made me grind my teeth. If anyone was going to touch her like that and humiliate her like that, it was supposed to be me. Once again I wanted to stop this. It wasn't too late. I might be the target of "morality judges" who said they wanted to clean up the city when what they wanted to do was clear the field for their trafficking operations. That didn't mean I didn't have friends in high places. You don't get into the stratosphere of tax brackets without making some powerful friends along the way.
There were a host of reasons not to stop this. I had more than one circle of friendly acquaintances who had similar interests, shall we say. In previous decades we might have been called swingers. Now we were something else. A community. A lifestyle. The women brought in were sometimes coerced, sometimes forced, sometimes ordered. But I could count the number who had truly had no choice. They could choose to leave relationships or marriages or employment, however they'd come to the kinky attention of their Dom or Master. When they stayed, whether it was for the money, the love, the position? That was choice.
I'd bullied Annie into it. I'd threatened to withhold the drugs she needed in order to get off fentanyl. I'd gone into medicine to help, though. I'd never have really left her to her addiction.
But she didn't know it. And I did use it to force her. Annie's choice would have been between my sadism and going back to the life she wanted to live clean, no addictions.
In my mind, the difference between what I did and what traffickers did was night and day. The groups I partied with, we humiliated and sometimes hurt women past what they would have agreed to in a safe, sane and consensual BDSM scene.
But there were no permanent injuries. Ever. There were no broken cheekbones, no STDs, no use that didn't carry with it some form of aftercare even if the woman was a contracted slave.
No one died on our watch.
One of the other reasons not to stop this, not to call in favors from a state legislator or even a federal, the reason not to throw the whole operation to the wolves and let internal investigations dig out who they could, was both that we'd tried it before and hadn't gone far enough, and that neither would those investigations and more women would suffer.
The other reason was Annie. The minute we finished our plans and she ch
ose a persona and my people started creating the reality behind Erin Trace, this was Annie's operation. Her undercover. Her obsession. Even if I could, even if I was afraid for her and wanted to keep her safe, I wouldn't take this away from her.
The room had gone silent, a ghostly blue realm where everyone watched their screens. We couldn't hear but we could see. Once Annie was loaded into one of the cars, the patrolmen standing around the car held their own conversations, gesturing, agreeing, calling someone on a phone that looked like just maybe it was a back up. Not the phone the officer used that the Highway Patrol knew about.
"They're going to dump the body cam footage," April said. Her voice was eerily calm. She watched the screen without taking her eyes off it. "Then move the car because she tried to run."
Some of the other techs looked at her like she was nuts to talk to me. They tended to act like I was some kind of usually harmless madman who still paid twice what they could make anywhere else and sometimes had some really freakish requests. I'd never wanted them to be afraid of me but I'd never done anything to persuade them not to. It made it easier in the long run.
Or maybe I'd never even thought of it. They were people I hired. Not friends. I didn't try to make them into friends.
I had coexisted with my fellow very rich very kinky acquaintances. I had sometimes met outside work with people whose work corresponded with mine.
And of course women came and went.
It wasn't until Annie that I realized I was lonely and even then I fought knowing for as long as I could. My sister Emily had been addicted. Our parents had been well off. They hadn't been loving, nurturing or anything approaching fun. Emily had died when either her connection in a back alley or someone who found her there had killed her.
That had changed my course. Instead of finishing medical school, which had never really been my passion, I moved into pharmaceuticals. My interest all along had been in how drugs operated on mind and body and, especially, the crossover. I started St. Martin Pharma and made my first billion and took the company in the direction I wanted to go: Rainforest naturals. Which led to the rainforest cures.