by Sophia Reed
I stuttered. I was standing at parade rest, a kind of spread legged, arms behind back stance. Now I shifted a little. Foot to foot. "A what, sir?"
There was a definite smirk on his face now. A cat who still has telltale evidence of cream on its whiskers. "Maintenance spanking. It's a domestic discipline thing. Keeps you in line."
"I'm already in line, sir," I said.
"Oh, you are, are you? What if I don't think so?" He was advancing. There wasn't much of anywhere I could go.
"As your head of security, sir, I must protest. It seems to me that my behavior has been exemplary and that – yipe!"
Because he had me, his fingers locked around my biceps, and he was hauling me over to the broad, gleaming desk, pressing me down on it and reaching around me to undo the snaps and zipper on my black jeans. "Keep your hands flat on the desk and your arms stretched out in front of you. There you go. Good girl. Good girl."
He yanked my pants and panties down to my knees, made a small mmm sound of appreciation, ran both hands over my ass cheeks, warm and soft and comforting.
Then he started to spank me. Slow at first, and picking up speed. My flesh warmed. All the way through. He spanked me for so long I lost count and so long I lost interest in counting and so long that when he dipped his fingers into me and spread my wetness around, then touched my bud, I came instantly.
And happily.
14
Annie
The rest of the trip, another day and a half in Rio, was pure vacation. I had no desire to run and nowhere to run to. Cole was like a sort of new boyfriend, if I'd ever met one of the high end dealers, maybe, instead of becoming the girlfriend of somebody riding in a gang. It was pleasant but unnerving to be with him and in some ways I wished the trip was already over. Then I could remember with pleasure that everything had gone well.
In the end, it did. With the guards in attendance, we looked like a weird convocation of bodybuilders out for a day and a half on the beaches. We ate and sunned and laughed together and played with a beach ball for a while and took a run as the sun set. Dinner was at a restaurant just off the beach and Cole didn't oversee what I ate so there was no fish, just steak, salad, baked potato and cheesecake for dessert. I was working, so even if I wasn't in recovery I wouldn't have had anything to drink. No one at our table drank, but since we were in a foreign country, we opted for bottled sodas.
When we got back to the hotel that night I wondered if Cole would insist on another maintenance spanking once we got back to the suite of rooms, and part of me that needed to get itself under control throbbed at the idea.
But when we were back he started going through his notes of the meetings he'd taken. He was stretched out on his bed, the laptop on his flat, hard six-pack abs, and incongruous pair of reading glasses on his nose. If I hadn't known eventually my ass would pay the price, I'd have told him he looked cute.
Instead I went back to studying the criminal justice course on my laptop, drinking tea made with bottled water. By the time I finished with half a dozen landmark cases on search and seizure (my favorite was Won Sun and the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree, in part because the name was fabulous and in part because the police kept rushing into the wrong addresses and arresting people who really were committing crimes, but not the people or the crimes they were looking for) he was asleep in the same position. After a moment's consideration I decided I'd rather get in trouble for presuming and being nice and also watching out for him than get in trouble for letting him fall asleep and roll over on a laptop and spear himself on his glasses. I tiptoed in, removed the glasses, took the laptop and put it on the far side of the bed, switched off the bedside lamp and, though it wasn't cold, pulled a light blanket from the closet and covered him with it.
I went to bed and slept as though someone had just pulled the plug on me.
Halfway through the next day we flew back to the States and the vacation was behind us and all the nerves and impatience began building again.Along with a strange new guilt.
Something about what Cole had done to me in the empty office, coupled with my taking care of him in the hotel room, came together to produce a vague, free-floating anxiety and guilt.
Because as soon as I got back, I asked permission to do more YouTube Taekwon-Do without admitting I knew the instructor.
And without admitting I was receiving terse nearly-coded messages from him in the comments to the videos. The gang shootings were escalating and a shitload of meth and China white was flooding the streets.
I knew who this was. An old lieutenant of Jesse's who became a rival. When it had been proven he couldn't take Jesse's turf, he'd gone off to Chicago or somewhere else. At any rate, he'd taken his business elsewhere and some level of drugs on the street reduced.
Now he was back full force, months after Jesse had been killed, apparently feuding with the Brotherhood and other organized groups. I was willing to bet Victor Broka was forming his own gang, and willing to bet there were enough perks for joining and enough downfalls for not joining that he was having no problems building up his forces.
This was a time that no matter how much the guys on the job wanted to give me shit about it, I really could make a difference. I knew what Victor looked like and I knew the Brotherhood guys who were likely to have gone with him.
If I send info, will PD act on it? I wrote, in a slightly coded way. That was the gist of it, anyway.
Tad wrote back what I already knew. They need you. And they need you to prove you're back to you.
Shit. I needed a phone, a better way to contact him. For now, this would have to do. At least Tad believed me and he was checking his channel daily.
It wouldn't do any good if people were already overdosing on the street. I had to get back there or do something to cause change. My having been gone so long was a good thing. All I had to do was fake another jail time record for Lily, maybe find someone to back up that story, and Lily could go in with her knowledge of Jesse's bookkeeping systems.
I could get in where other people couldn't. I still had the Lily persona. I could do fet if I had to and come back to Cole for more treatment. That was a statement I didn't bother looking too closely at. Whatever I'd been through, I was still a cop, and I had to do something about this.
I started making what plans I could.
15
Cole
Rio was like a vacation. The day we left I disappeared from the hotel before Annie woke, went downstairs and used money and privilege to order a whore. Or three. Another room, soundproofed. A variety of implements. Some girls who were beautiful, probably clean, and desperate for the money.
I paid them more than any of them expected.
I hurt them more than they expected, too. One of them liked it.
I'd have been interested in keeping her. I'd have liked to work her long enough to find out where the pleasure stopped and the screaming started.
The good news was, it was a great ending for the vacation. I was upstairs again before Annie woke.
The bad news was, the whole adventure was because of Annie. Because of our trip. Because of how I felt about her.
Because of her covering me while I slept so I woke and realized she'd taken care of me.
I lost Emily to drugs. I wasn't going to lose Annie to drugs. She considered being "in my care" a euphemism for the slave of a sadist. She wasn't wrong.
She was wrong in thinking that's where it ended. There was much more to it than that.
I couldn't afford to go soft on her. Break her, shake her world up, put her back together and she'd be stronger. Safer. And if she decided to stay then, that was her decision.
Provided I agreed in any way to let her go.
If Rio was a vacation, coming home was the opposite. The meetings had left me with massive amounts of work to do, to identify the actual owners of the tracts of land I needed to save in order to have access to the lifesaving plants that grew wild in fire zones and in direct path of the slash and burn behaviors.
As December crawled closer to the holidays, she sank. I had time in the mornings to spank her, to humiliate her to some degree, but even our runs dropped in length and then in frequency. Not that she wasn't running. I just wasn't running with her. There just wasn't enough time in every day. I saw less of her, and because of that, I didn't get an overall impression of her mood day by day.
As the month continued, the little I did see of her felt wrong. Maybe the continued gray skies were getting to her, or being away from her family as the holidays approached, though deep cover would have kept her away anyway and I knew if she hadn't been with me she'd have been working.
I promised myself I'd look into it. And then I went back to work.
On such decisions do lives change. In this case, it was Annie's.
16
Annie
Things sucked on arrival. The private jet touched down in Southern Nevada and all I wanted was to be on vacation again.
That's apparently a normal way that normal people act. Vacations are freeing and precious and when people first return from them, they don't want their real lives back.
But I'd loved what I did for so long that not loving it felt pivotal. Being with Cole wasn't where I belonged. Contrarily, being with Cole in Rio had felt like belonging. Mark and I had had taken two trips during our time together. He'd been finishing up med school when we met, so there hadn't been a lot of time or a lot of money to vacation. I was already a police officer and started undercover work within weeks of getting together with Mark. Which led me to believe he should have known what he was getting into, though that really wasn't my point when I found myself thinking of him as the plane touched down.
My point was that a working trip with Cole felt like more of a vacation than a trip with Mark ever had.
And that working with Cole, I felt like he knew me better after the months of "treatment" than Mark did after years of relationship.
So I was already confused and tired as the plane descended into a stormy gray desert. Southern Nevada gets some 300 or more days of sunshine a year. People shoot car commercials on the wide open empty highways because they can pretty much depend on glorious blue sky and sage brush vistas.
Unless it's December and gray and Christmas is coming and it's going to be spent with a man whose history you don't know but whose dungeon you do.
There was definitely something wrong with my life.
Upon getting back, Cole plunged into work and other than maintenance spankings and the morning routine, he had little time for me. He even forgot about the enemas which had only been instituted right before the trip and though I hated it the one time he did it, the lack now seemed strange.
If Cole could forget about me and leave me on the shelf, what did that mean about me? I needed to have some use in the world. Some place.
I went back to working out to Tad's Taekwon-Do YouTube videos and within a day I'd also returned to Tad's comments section. Rio had only been a total of four days, less than a week. Nothing had changed that radically on the street, but there had been another death from fentanyl.
Tell me what I can do I sent in nearly so many words. His careful reply – carefully protecting my identity – indicated that he thought my information would matter. That my identifying the people dealing would matter.
That I could make a difference.
But he thought I had to come back to do it. The Powers that Be weren't going to take advice or direction from an unknown, unnamed source who wouldn't even communicate with them directly.
I bit my lip and looked out into the cold dark world beyond my cell. It was safe here, where even the dark gray of winter and seasonal affective crap couldn't drive me to destroy myself again because there just wasn't any way to do it. If I truly wanted to kill myself in Cole's custody, I'd have to find a straight out way to do it, not beat around the bush on the five year plan of opioids.
Tad's comments also referred to the belt system of martial arts, the TKD system ranging from white to black. I read his meaning as If you're not ready, stay where you are. He seemed to think if I came back too soon, fet would claim another life: Mine.
He was probably right. But agreeing with him was tantamount to putting my life above those of others. I could do it if I thought in the long run I'd save more people by saving myself now.
I wasn't sure.
17
Cole
Christmas came and went. I bought Annie a watch, precision and analog rather than digital. It was beautiful, slim and encrusted with diamonds and sapphires. In a way, it indicated the time she'd spent with me so far. It was the first way I gave her to track time, though of course when she did the YouTube video TKD workouts, she saw the time. Otherwise, her world was an endless now.
As the season came and went, that now consisted of daily opioid cure, of her workouts, of maintenance spankings I had a hard time making time for.
And yet my world consisted of fucking Marilyn and usually another woman with her. It consisted of my own workouts and meals. Not so much that I was punishing her, but maybe I was distancing myself.
Having emotions has never been easy and I've never enjoyed it. Losing Emily had seen to that if nothing else.
But Christmas drew me back. Because Annie found a way to give me something and that startled me out of my distance. I knew she still had the remainder of the cash she 'borrowed’ from the Vegas cops when she ran. There had been no reason to take it from her, anymore than there was to take her badge. If she was determined to run, and if she managed to get past the guards, then I wanted her safe in the world until I could find her and drag her back.
I wasn't so punitive in my thoughts and actions that I'd let anyone else hurt her.
And besides, she was my property.
The gift wasn't huge. I'd made an offhand comment at some point about wanting to keep a written journal of some of my experiments. I hadn't even told her if I meant experiments with the rainforest drugs or experiments with her or something else entirely.
She'd found a way to talk to the cook without me being present – possibly not that hard, given that I didn't share most meals with her during that stretch of time – who took the cash and came back with a leather bound journal from Barnes & Noble and a fountain pen and wrapping paper.
The journal made a resounding thwack on her naked ass when I slapped her with it and she giggled, but after that I kept it safe and cared for, and used the fountain pen when I wrote in it, keeping track of opioid experiments on one side of the pages and Seattle overdoses on the facing pages.
In January we started a new year together.
The first day of it I roused her from bed before the sun came up.
"It's still dark outside, sir," she said, though she instantly sat up when I shook her awake. Her skin prickled in the cool of the bedroom where she slept in a long t-shirt.
"I don't believe I asked for the weather report," I said. "You're getting soft, sleeping until all hours and running when you feel like it."
I saw the ghost of a smile cross her face. She was wise enough to stifle it. The all hours she was sleeping to was six-thirty because the sun was coming up around seven. I had no doubt she knew the exact time and was on the trail one half hour before it rose, as instructed. It was light enough then, but cold and the ground was hard. Her runs were marked through a trail, no less than five miles and longer if she wanted strawberries with her breakfast.
I knew from the guards she was usually running seven.
She liked strawberries.
Running when you feel like it was a definite misnomer. Maybe she did. But she ran because I wanted her to.
I'd been neglectful of my slave since we came back from Brazil. That was all going to change.
That morning I took her on the morning run, leading her twelve miles instead of her usual five or seven. She was dripping sweat in the low forty degrees weather when we returned. We were short of the compound when I ordere
d her to stop and remove her hooded sweatshirt, t-shirt and jog bra.
As expected, she balked. That was beautiful to see. Her refusal. And her acceptance.
The guards watched from a distance as Annie pulled off each item of clothing, hesitating just long enough at the jog bra to both prove to herself I really meant it, and give me grounds for punishing her further.
I took the clothes from her and nodded at her to walk to the compound. The two guards watched her. Whatever names she knew them by, I knew them by their actual names, Arron Gold and Tim Shay. I knew for a fact that Annie disliked Aaron. He was big and crude and very strong. He was the guard who had drugged her when she tried to run at the last dinner party, and he was the guard who had watched with close attention when she was strip-searched by a nurse her first morning in my custody.
Despite the fact that he'd seen her naked before, every instance made her color and made her feel vulnerable and controlled.
Owned.
Arron watched her walk toward him. His eyes never moved from her breasts. Annie moved smoothly and confidently until she was required to stop at the gates.
"Open the gate," she said angrily, but I could hear tears somewhere in her voice. She came back every morning from her run and was allowed inside.
"Ma'am, you've been outside the compound."
She was angry enough to put hands on hips. "Open the gates. Mr. St. Martin is with me. It must be clear that I'm – "
"She's been in the world," I said. "Search her. When you're finished, bring her to me." I entered the compound and went to her cell block, leaving her to Arron.
18
Annie
