by Sophia Reed
That wasn't where I was and that frightened me. Not just for Annie. Forget Annie! Take her out of the equation. Any sub, Marilyn, her friends, a prostitute off The Strip, Ariel, even Kie - I wasn't there to hurt them, not seriously, not permanently. Control was one of the key facets of my life.
Control led to the physique I was proud of. Control led to being able to run two hours into the desert because something was bothering me that I needed to think through. Control dictated my schedule, my work, the fortune I had amassed. Control kept the subs in my care safe because I knew how to wield each of the tools and weapons, the punishments and threats, how to treat, how to cure, how to cause extreme pain without inflicting extreme injury.
Control. Because Emily hadn't had it, maybe. Or deeper and less deep, both, maybe that was just my make up. Who I was.
Maybe it was nothing more than that I wasn't a monster and didn't want to become one. Yes, I had the money and the power to get my hands on a sub who was suicidal. I'd had the ability before Kie ever came into my life and definitely before she arrived in my maze. Kie was desperate to belong and almost completely suicidal. It was the control that stopped me from harming her when I knew she would not only allow it, but possibly welcome it.
With Kie I could probably go all the way. Use her until she died. Fuck her until she suffocated. Hang her up, tie her down, do all the things she’d listed while she prostrated herself.
I would never have taken her on as a sub. There's a base core of hatred inside Kie. The suicidal ideation is only a facet of that. She's dangerous. I would never have kept her because I didn't want her.
I would never have kept her because Annie didn't want me to.
And I would never have kept her because the temptation would be too great to give in and let myself run wild on her.
As she wanted.
As I didn't want to ever want.
And now with Annie. Annie who wanted to be punished, as if she also blamed herself for what had happened with Vincent. Or maybe it was only guilt. Or humiliation. Maybe she was getting back at herself or, obscurely, at me. But she was hurt and vulnerable and trying something new and I was in a rage that seemed incapable of ending.
While I beat her tonight, she'd accepted every thing I did to her and then let me take her.
That wasn't the Annie I knew.
That wasn't the Cole St. Martin I knew either.
It was a bad combination of things.
I needed to get Annie out of here.
17
Annie
I came to, and panicked.
My wrists were still tied to the bed and I still hung from them. My shoulders felt torqued. My mouth tasted old and dry and used.
I wanted to feel better. Like something had changed. Like even if I couldn't forgive myself, Cole could.
I didn't feel any of that.
What I felt, and what I felt was a problem, was that I wanted to be with Cole. I wanted him to come find me, to apologize and to rub lotion on my abused backside and the places on my thighs where he'd struck hard enough to bruise or to cut the skin.
What I didn't want to feel was any of that. I wanted to be free of the past and look forward to the future. That strange, flying sensation I occasionally got when he did those things to me.
I wanted him to come back. I was still tied, still strung up, still positioned for his use.
I wanted him to come back and do more to me.
And for that reason I needed him not to come back.
And me not to be here.
18
Cole
"Annie."
She looked up bleary-eyed, obviously in subspace. Her shoulders were torqued back and her hands were probably asleep from the position but she seemed unaware of it.
Her ass was bruising. There were places the canes had drawn blood. There was stippling on her calves from the switches.
I'd gone too hard on her. She hadn't said a word. She hadn't fought back or used her safe word. She did have one, even if she was warned to only use it in actual emergency.
"I'm going to untie you and then we need to talk."
She nodded at that. Didn't move. And when I had her untied, she sank into my arms like I was a safe haven. I accepted her weight – she felt feather light – and carried her to the couch on the far side of the room, away from the bed.
"Do you need medical attention?"
For an instant I didn't think she understood the question. Then she smiled and touched my face. I frowned and snatched her hand away as if I'd burned her. Before I could ask, she said, "May I touch your face, sir?"
It was said with such a perfect blend of over the top submissiveness and absolute glee that I laughed. "Retroactively, no, you may not."
She bit her lip, struggling to think clearly when her mind was distracted by her body.
"Oh. Well, sir, I am probably going to touch you without permission."
"Permission granted," I said.
For just a second, we were both smiling,
Then I dressed her – she put up no resistance – and carried her through the main house to the kitchen, deposited her on the counter out of my way and made two omelets. While we ate I contacted security and checked every detail of the compound, the grounds, and Kie.
Everything was calm, quiet, and safe.
I fed Annie bites of egg so she'd eat. After dinner we played Scrabble like some weird old married couple.
She cheated.
I know, because I always cheat. I'm just better at it.
After Scrabble Liars Edition, we went back to my room in the main house.
"Shouldn't I – " she started.
I shushed her. I took off her new shift and took her into the shower with me, standing in the hot water, the mist and the spray, I soaped and rubbed her back, feeling her arch kittenish against my hands. When she was completely soaped up, I tried to pull her against me, but she kept slipping out of my grip.
Once out of the shower I wrapped her in a bath sheet and dried her, then myself. Whatever she was expecting, it clearly wasn't for me to pick her up again, cradling her in my arms and carrying her to my bed.
Once there she tried to slip to the floor, to land on her knees. I pulled her up and stood her beside the bed, crawled in myself and held up the covers until she took the hint and followed the command and crawled in with me.
I turned her on her side, slid my body in to fit hers, and we went to sleep.
19
Cole
The next day was a hot, nearly summer's day. St. Martin woke me at dawn to go for a run that kept going and going. I hadn't been able to work out at the hospital. The most I could do was walk endlessly through the halls, so long as no doctor or nurse or technician thought that my behavior was troublesome and that I needed extra therapy.
The kind of therapy they did there in the place they housed crazy people was, for someone who wasn't crazy, time-consuming and patience-testing.
I failed a lot of those tests.
And so I should have welcomed the run, but before the hospital there'd been Paris and very few workouts (the one run I had was with Kie and had its own problems inherent in that).
I was out of shape. And St. Martin, it seemed, had been keeping himself sane while he searched for me by running and training and turning himself into a bodybuilder ultra marathoner and other things that don't go together.
Because he was St. Martin and things that didn't work for other people worked for him.
I ran in front for a while. Then I ran behind him for a while. Then I trailed behind him for a long, long while, the breath burning in and out of my lungs and the air full of his commands to "Keep up! Run faster!"
The one time I flipped him off he was facing forward and our shadows were fleeing out behind us.
After another twenty minutes I was walking behind him when he turned and ordered me to my knees.
I went down. I knelt in the sage and dirt, but unwillingly. Grudgingly. He probably knew that.
"You're out of shape."
I considered all the reasons I'd just been detailing to myself why I was out of shape and added that he knew all these things or could extrapolate them for himself. Also, kneeling was hard on the knees but nice on the lungs and I had no desire to waste the rest.
I just said, "Yes, Sir."
Next instant he had me around the waist, my running tights pulled down and my body jackknifed over his bent leg. His hand over top of the caning and strapping, the cropping and the use of his belt, made me cry out.
"Then run harder," he said to my noise.
I ran harder and it hurt more and after a while I was walking and he couldn't make me run again.
The new Cole St. Martin was in control this morning. Not the one who had undressed me and put me in his bed the night before. Not even the one who rubbed arnica lotion onto my bruised skin.
This one ordered me into the kitchen after the shower, after the cleansing, after the dressing in the shift. He made breakfast and ordered me into a hard chair at the table. Arnica or not, my ass recoiled at the hard and cold of the chair. I rose halfway out of it before remembering the contract, my submission.
The new St. Martin.
His response was instant. He fetched ropes from the kitchen pantry – a staple I thought was probably never covered in home ec classes – and bound me to the chair, my heels up against the legs, my ass tied firmly to the seat, my arms behind me, strained again, my sore shoulders protesting quietly.
He then fed me, patiently, at the speed that I could eat, but he kept going after I was finished, feeding me three eggs with cheese and tomatoes, a half bagel with cream cheese, and two full glasses of water.
A tiny part of me wondered what came after breakfast, but our days were to progress the way they once had. I studied for the criminal justice classes I'd be taking at community college come fall, and worked out, doing weights silently in the home gym, followed by TaeKwon-Do videos a friend of mine with Seattle PD made. For a while I'd communicated with him through the comments at the end of the videos, until Cole had found out and punished me.
That was when I found out that taking down the Brotherhood hadn't kept my city safe from chinawhite for even a full month. More gangbangers had come in to take Jesse's place and I knew them, knew who they were, and was desperate to get back to the city, even if only for a week or two. Because that time I knew it wasn't ego. I could make a difference.
Cole – back then I'd always thought of him as Cole – had punished me for my arrogance, for my assumption that I could come and go as I needed to.
But he'd punished them more. For moving on unsuspecting middle school children. For spreading their filth and death on the streets.
They were gone and I was accessory to murder because I'd told him to.
Even without the new contract, his hold on me was complete.
He had another hold, too. But I wasn't ready to discuss it. Let alone admit it.
"Sir."
Midmorning. The sun through the windows was making me sleepy. I'd need to get up and do another video, maybe a yoga video showing plenty of plank position.
But Jason had come into the room, the guard who was hospitalized after being whipped because when Kie hurt me he laughed rather than instantly coming to my aid. Not that I'd wanted him hanging over my naked body as I writhed and screamed. He was one of those who always watched me when Cole undressed me and humiliated me. Watched and delighted in it.
We should have been even. He'd seen me punished enough times, I'd seen him beaten until he needed an ambulance.
But I saw when he came in, the look he gave me was dark and angry and my own mirrored it.
"What is it?" St. Martin was reading through findings from his lab, some specialized rainforest derivative cure he was looking into. I didn't even know what that one was for.
"It's Ms. Geddes, sir. She tried to kill herself last night. There's blood all over her cell and she won't let anyone near her."
St. Martin swore and was on his feet. "Stay here," he snarled in my direction.
I chose to believe he meant Jason and I followed instantly, aware that Jason wasn't obeying the dictate.
That was Jason's problem.
This was the first time I'd been in the maze. It wasn't actually a maze. It was a series of hallways that led around the edges of the compound, and then inward. The outer edges of the maze halls had skylights, light coming in from the outside world because they weren't under the compound directly.
The underground facility had to be massive.
Whatever St. Martin had intended it for, he now used it to house the occasional unwelcome guest, it seemed. I shivered as I followed him deeper inside, aware that he could at any minute put me in one of these cells. No one would know and after what had gone down with my father and Mark, no one would come for me.
Down here somewhere, a woman named Ariel had literally gone to ground, choosing a sort of anti-life over anything anyone else could offer her. Even at my worst, had I ever been that far gone? I didn't think so. My run in with fet had never been about death. I hadn't wanted to die. I'd wanted not to be in pain.
I didn't understand either Kie or the unknown Ariel.
We began to run, like a strange parade of sorts. Through the halls, the slick tile floor that wouldn't stain or mark from blood. St. Martin called back over his shoulder, "Holy shit, you came to get me? Have you called for an ambulance yet?"
The ambulance, it turned out. One on call for the billionaire freak circle, which led me to wonder how often their games resulted in injury.
Two other guards on the outside of the cell stepped back as we approached. St. Martin had seen past them but I had to catch up in order to see.
The cell was fronted by a glass door, undoubtedly shatter-proof, stretching six feet across the opening to the cell. The room itself was bare bones. Prison-like features, the toilet, the sink. There was a bed but the covers looked like they were largely plastic – not enough to suffocate, and too hard to ever shred into a noose.
St. Martin punched in a code and ripped open the door to Kie's cell. My warning came seconds too late.
The cell was liberally painted with blood. The scene was horrifying, the covers ripped from the bed, the mattress on the floor, what looked like a figure wrapped in the blanket, fallen to the far side of the bed, hard to see because the jacked-up mattress, half off the boxspring, interfered with the view.
And the blood. Painted, yes. But painted. It wasn't arterial spray. It wasn't thick or clotted or running down the walls. It wasn't the result of a gunshot and hadn't Jason said just minutes earlier that Kie refused to let anyone near her? If she was stopping them from touching her, then only that much earlier she'd been awake and aware, responding to words said to her, warning the guards to get away from her.
With the door open I could smell the blood. I understood their need to back off and run for help.
"Sir!" It came out almost automatically. "Be careful! I don't think – "
But St. Martin turned to look back at me, fury showing in his expression that I was there, that I hadn't remained behind as ordered to do.
All of which distracted him. He wasn't paying attention to what I was saying. He was paying attention to my ignoring his dictate.
The door slid open when the code was entered. The blood on the walls shimmered in the light because the walls were slick, white, featureless and caught the light, not because the blood on them was so thick or running. It was such a thin layer it had already dried.
The body on the mattress twitched because it was sliding away, down to the floor, unrolling as it went.
She hadn't had much to work with but she'd made the most of what she did have.
Kie came up from behind the bed, from crouching to on her feet almost faster than I could follow. Her mouth was a swatch of darkness and that's where she'd gotten the majority of her blood – a bitten tongue, a bitten cheek, maybe she'd managed the nearly impossible and made h
er own teeth sink into the skin of her hands or arms.
The blood on the wall was thin because it was mixed with spit or water, thinned out to cover more.
Kie grabbed St. Martin by his shirtfront and threw him into the wall across the hallway, moving past the guards and past me like a blur. She pinned him there, her forearm on his throat, her knee pressed into his groin, her face a study of insanity.
"I don't think anybody should move," she said.
But everyone did.
The guards rushed her and St. Martin. I grabbed at one of them and asked fast if there was a way to seal off the maze.
All I got in response was a blank stare before he shoved me back and closed in on Kie.
I was prepared to see something idiotic and impossible, that she'd made a weapon of bed springs when why would there even be bedsprings anymore, or that she'd somehow gotten her hands on another razor, that maybe after the thing with the gun still no one had searched her.
None of that. None of it. None.
She had her teeth. Set on his junk, because she was too short to reach his neck.
St. Martin breathed fitfully.
The guards, male every one and no doubt wincing to themselves, backed off.
It took another girl, someone without balls or cock, to step forward and tap Kie on the shoulder, assuming she'd be so surprised she'd let go.
It didn't quite play out that way. She let go, but only because she turned on me, hissing, growling, gone feral and animal, her face a mask of panic and anger.
I slugged her in the mouth. Her teeth grazed my knuckles but she dropped, fell straight down and lay on the floor, mewling. Mostly unconscious.
My own breathing sounded harsh in the hallway.
20
Cole
Now, we had a problem.
Not just what to do with Kie.