by Sophia Reed
As with most things like that, the fact of it not happening was more disturbing than if it had.
I had time on the flights to worry about being away from Cole. Not just about Cole himself but about being off the rainforest drug. I'd asked Cole from time to time, when we conversed like two humans rather than Master and slave, if this was something I'd have to do for the rest of my life or something that had a definite ending.
He never answered me.
Having my hands cuffed behind me or to the arms of the seat on the plane, able only to feel the lift and thrust of the thing, it was surprisingly like I’d expected sensory deprivation would feel like. For me, there were no otherworldly visions. No guides showing me the way, no aliens breaking through, no visions of things to come or conversations with long dead relatives.
What there was, was the exact thing I so often filled my days to overflowing with, in order to avoid: Time to think.
I had been surprised initially that Cole was willing to simply yank me from my life. Of course, a man who thinks he's buying a woman probably doesn't give a lot of thought to the consequences of that purchase once he returns her. (The symbolism there, or metaphor or allegory or whatever it is, was too good to pass up during the long flights once the fear of what Vincent might do to me faded into fear of boredom and contemplation.)
Because the thing was, Cole had accepted me (paid for me, to someone who had no right to sell me in the first place, one of those things my mind still refused to let drop once the memory was raised) to help me. Whatever I might think about his unorthodox methods and however much I might fight letting him or me know I liked them – to an extent – I had arrived on his doorstep with a note pinned to my metaphorical collar that I was to be returned. Fixed. Mended. Good to go.
But good to go. Cole St. Martin wasn't the destination. He was the guide, for lack of a better term. I had always intended to go back to my real life and even tried to run away to it more than once, before I was ready. I was a cop. I was needed. There were actually things I could do to help take down some of the ugliness happening in my community. Not ego, not bullshit – I had been undercover long enough, I knew shit.
None of that had mattered. Not my fiancé, not my career, not the drugs. When it did matter, Cole had sent someone to take out the newest gang moving into the neighborhood where the Brotherhood had been deposed. Jesse had been a lot of things, dangerous among them, but he'd at least had a cutoff age under which he wouldn't sell and none of his dealers would either. That age was much too young but at least it was a guideline.
The new dealers, they were deadly. So I'd tried to run back to Seattle because I knew I could help and Cole instead took those men out on my say so.
I owed him now.
Owned wasn't that farfetched anymore.
But the thing that came back to me as the plane sighed across whatever airspace we were in, was that Cole didn't see me going back to my real life. Whether he intended to stop giving me limited communication with Mark and my family, to disappear me for good – he more than had the money to do so, I wasn't deluded about that – or he simply thought I'd find some other path, I wasn't clear on.
Before Vincent had interrupted everything, I'd been studying criminal justice, working to do all the course work so when I left Cole - That was hard to imagine, somehow harder now - When I reached a point where I could leave Cole for limited amounts of time, I could perhaps return. Or did he intend for me to be an online distance learning student? I'd be ready to go through courses and get my degree and apply for DEA. Instead of returning to Seattle where no matter what people had been told about my absence being in-house, out-of-touch rehab, it was bound to leak out at some point that my rehab stint had been anything but normal.
Cole didn't think I was going back to real life.
Vincent wanted to destroy my real life.
Kie, fucking crazy bitch, wanted to destroy my life, period, end of sentence.
And me? I could no longer imagine my life with Mark, visiting with his family at Christmas, waiting for him to come back from a shift at the hospital, the dutiful wife or the dutiful DEA agent who worked investigations from behind a desk because there was no way Mark could deal with me being deep cover.
So what did I see? A life of weirdness and pain with Cole? A life of terror and beatings with Vincent, chained to something because there was no other way he'd keep me? Trying out the whole thing with Mark? He'd waited so long to have me as his. It seemed unfair to go back just to tell him he never would.
Maybe disappearing was the best choice. As long as that choice was mine.
But not with Vincent Geddes.
Eventually the flying stopped. All those flights in two days. Wherever we landed, there was no ocean nearby as far as I could tell from the aroma. The sky was blue, the buildings were tall, and the place that Vincent took us to was out of the city. This time he did restrain and blindfold me, so I had no idea what city we were in or where the grounds of the estate he held me in were located.
The room he showed me to was big and spacious and well-appointed, but as anonymous as a hotel room. Except for the restraints every few feet. Rings drilled into ceiling and floor and walls, with carabiners hanging from them. I would remain cuffed with thick leather around my wrists, ankles, waist and neck, locked in place and the key pocketed by Vincent.
The restraint on my neck almost tipped me over into a panic attack. Vincent, seeing it coming, simply locked me into the room and left me to deal with it. When he came back he did so with a female guard, who held a gun trained on me as he cuffed the wrist restraints to my neck, then cut away my shirt and bra. I was naked to the waist.
Kie was nowhere in evidence. Since he had dragged her back by her hair, away from me as the men held me on the table, I had seen almost nothing of her. Whatever he'd done, it was part of their dynamic, not anything he did for me, but I appreciated it anyway.
Vincent had me sit on the side of the bed. It felt weird to be wearing jeans and no shirt, and weirder still to have my arms up where they blocked his view of me.
He had other things on his mind than humiliation or pain, or rather, it was another kind of humiliation. Coming out of the room's closet, he crossed to where I sat and knelt at my feet. That alone was unusual enough to make me edge back away from him. He made an impatient sound and pulled me to him, then bent and removed my shoes and socks.
That was weird enough. That he might have a foot fetish didn't seem impossible but neither did it seem logical. When he pulled out the shiny black, stiletto-heeled come-fuck-me pumps it didn't clear anything up. He slid knee-high stockings onto me, and I bit my lip because in whatever situation this was, I couldn't imagine anyone having a fetish for knee high nylons. Then the shoes went on, with their four inch heels and the next thing I knew, Vincent was hauling me to my feet.
"You and I are going to be attending a good many formal functions." His eyes were as cold as anything I could imagine and what he'd just said made no sense. "Sometimes Kie will attend with us and other times she will not. Occasionally you will be of use during the events and other times you will simply be on my arm."
Vincent was, I believed, a plastic surgeon of some great renown. I didn't see how he figured he could drag a slave with him to formal events without her true master figuring out where she was and coming for her, but that was his problem, not mine. I was all for Cole spotting us on some red carpet and coming to get me.
Only – only the thing with the flights had shown he could move us from point A to point B at the slightest whim. So best guess, the instant the events were over we'd be doing the Cinderella thing and racing back through the streets, climbing onto a plane and heading somewhere else. So that was a game. Lovely. So nice to be a pawn.
The heels – they were a fresh new hell. For an hour I staggered around the room, the plush carpeting catching the idiot heels, the guard growing so bored I saw her smothering yawns as I fought to keep from giggling. I'd lurch forward and fall back,
waver from side to side, and when I caught my balance and "walked," it was in a skulking, half upright, half bent over like Ebenezer Scrooge sort of tack.
Vincent even laughed a few times, though that didn't make me happy, and even as he laughed he reached out with the bamboo cane he held and urged me to try harder.
When I fell, tired and hurting from weirdly used muscles and blisters on both feet, he dragged me up and threw me over the bed, face down, growled, "Don't move."
I heard the door close as the guard exited.
I heard the air displaced as the cane descended.
There was nothing to laugh about.
Wherever we were, it seemed like we were going to be dug in for a while. It didn't seem possible to me that Vincent actually thought he could take me to a society event complete with paparazzi and keep me from knowing what city I was in, so maybe that didn't matter. The other events – the ones where he said I might be "of use" – I thought those likely would be along the lines of the circle of freaks Cole knew in southern Nevada. They probably would be able to keep my very existence to themselves, and that scared me.
When I worked deep cover I was always aware of my mortality if nothing else. What kept me at it was the mortality of everyone else who was getting killed by the dealers and their wares. But it was never far from my mind that if I got killed while so deep undercover my PD didn't even know who or where I was, that I'd be dead and gone forever and my family would never know.
This felt a lot like that. Nobody knew where I was and the people I was with were violent and dangerous. It was a recipe for disaster.
At the end of the training with the shoes, at the end of the caning after the shoes, Vincent pulled me to my feet and ran a hand along my face as if we had only just had a small disagreement and were actually some kind of couple.
Everything in me wanted to spit in his face. He had dragged me from where I had been safe. He had threatened the man keeping me safe. He had drugged me which scared me considerably and he had beaten me. Even now the welts from the beating were sending deep hot pain through my entire body.
Cole had hurt me. Cole would be hurting me if I were still with him.
Why was this different?
Obviously, the threat of being killed, the fact that Vincent was a psychopath and maybe Kie was something that made psychopathy look benign.
I meant, the actual fact of being beaten. There had been times Cole hadn't held back at all. Times that I had felt the strength behind his blows. Usually when he was afraid for me. Usually when he thought I had done something stupid.
I wasn't arrogant enough or angry enough at his "corrections" to not recognize that.
But even when Cole hurt me far beyond anything sexual, there was a sexual component to it. Even if I was so furious at him I couldn't countenance his touching me. Even then, in the privacy of my own mind and the space between my legs, I could feel the ache and need growing.
There was nothing but pain from Vincent.
When he finished stroking my face and turned away I risked one question. "Sir?"
He turned back. I could see that because his feet turned back toward me. I kept my eyes resolutely on the ground, reminding myself that not seeing his angry bitter face and stony eyes was no loss.
"Yes?"
I hesitated. If I asked if I could ask a question, I would have just done so. If I asked anyway – oh, fuck it, I thought. How do you reason with crazy?
"I'd like to ask a question if I may, sir."
There was humor in his voice when he responded, "You may," but it wasn't pleasant and it was aimed at me, not for me. Not with me.
"Am I to be held for longer than the two weeks that was the agreed upon time at the auction?"
His feet moved and he hadn't said anything. As he moved behind me, I flinched. Next instant he had taken a handful of my too-long hair and wrapped it tight in his fist, dragging my head back and forcing me down to my knees in one movement.
"You don't like my hospitality?"
There was no way to answer that. No response was safe. I simply gasped, "Sir!" and hoped he would loosen his hold or let me lift my head back up. When I swallowed it was loud.
Vincent pulled my hair harder. "I haven't decided if I will ever release you, little girl. Imagine the great Cole St. Martin sitting in his remote hideaway, pining for the girl who was taken from him. It's only because he owns you, you understand, my dear." He gave a particularly vicious tug to my hair and tears started to course down my cheeks. Without meaning to, I reached up, wanting to relieve the pressure on my hair. "I wouldn't," he said, "Or I might rip it out by the roots. Then you'd be ugly and I'd have to punish you for that. You would not enjoy what I would do."
I haven't enjoyed anything you've done!
I only swallowed, hard and loud, and waited until he relaxed his grip. "Kneel up!" he commanded and I straightened at once, high on my knees as he circled around in front of me and put his hand on my throat.
"Imagine Cole there. Knowing I have you. Knowing I can do whatever I want to you. That I am hurting you day by day by day by night by day. Imagine when he sees photos of you in the press and the occasional leaked photo seen through a limo window as the car pulls away and you're already naked, your bare breasts being beaten by a crop."
And then he knelt beside me, his eyes a cold flame. I looked because he forced my head up to meet his.
"Imagine him imagining all the things I'm going to do to your body in front of audiences and when we're alone deep in the night and when Kie has served her penance and is with us. Imagine all the things I can do that aren't permanent but will. Make. You. Scream."
And then I didn't have to imagine.
Because he began to tell me.
I slept.
After all the horrible things that Vincent whispered in my ear, and after knowing that somewhere in the house was Kie, even if I wasn't seeing her, I slept. The body can only go so long in shock and on high alert before it gives up and demands sleep.
During the night, no one came in and chained me to the bed. I wasn't attacked or assaulted, I wasn't kept awake or rubbed with jalapenos.
I just slept.
At dawn, I woke in a total panic. The sun was just coming up when I startled upright in the bed, my head swimming with vertigo because I had no idea what city I was in. The instant I established the room around me, curtains pulled against the day, I was on my feet, racing to the window, determined to figure out at the very least the cardinal directions and which way the layout of the room faced.
That was easy enough. The sun was coming up when I leaned onto the sill of the window directly opposite the bed. I'd slept with my head pointing north, and now I knew where the sun was and the approximate time.
I felt surprisingly not at all better. That made me smile a little to myself, grimly, but it was a smile. Sometimes when he didn't know I could see him, Cole would smile with half his mouth at something I said or did. Usually it was over something I felt strongly about, like knowing what the directions were, where north was. He always asked why I cared and I could never answer him.
I just needed to know. I had to be oriented in space. Now, for example, if I had the slightest idea what country I was in, I'd know where he was.
Instead, I was adrift. So I turned to the important matters. A bathroom, for one, because of all the weird games being played around me and to me, that was one I wasn't going to go along with. Elimination wasn't a game.
With relief I discovered a private bathroom inside the room where I was captive. Once I came out of it I went to the door and checked that I actually was a captive because I'd feel really stupid if I just stayed in the room and assumed.
The door was locked and not on my side. I wondered what people told locksmiths when they had doors installed this way. That they had dangerous relatives? Then again, with enough money, I was learning, explanations were unnecessary. Offer someone a $500 tip and they don't care why you want your doors reversed, especially if there
was no one screaming behind the one they were working on.
Right. I turned back to the room, scanned the ceiling and found nothing in the way of cameras. Which didn't mean they weren't there. They could be tiny. They could be anywhere. I hoped I wouldn't be here long enough to find out where. Ditto for bugs. Though what would anyone be listening to? Me talking to myself? I had no phone.
That was the next thing I automatically looked for. There was no phone on me. Cole wasn't in the habit of letting me have unlimited access to a phone and I hardly needed one when running through the desert with him.
But on the bedside table there was a phone, a normal old fashioned phone with a cord. It was baby blue. Princess style or Trimline or whatever they were called.
I stared at it as if it were a hallucination. For one wild minute I thought about how many hoops I'd have to jump through to get a call in to Cole. Billionaires weren't listed, surely, but there had to be an office somewhere. St. Martin Pharma was a real company. I'd even heard of it before I ended up the prisoner of its CEO. If I called the offices and insisted they take my crazy message and get it to him, if I spoke of something – anything – I couldn't know without knowing Cole...
And immediately following those thoughts the crushing reality: this would be a house phone. For Vincent to call in his threats, I supposed, or order me down for dinner wearing those godawful heels. Or for Kie to call up and whisper vile nothings in my ear. Where I'd been ready to run to it, I now turned away from it to continue exploring the room. Undoubtedly when I did pick up the blue phone I'd find myself summoning demons to my room – or at least availing myself of the company of my captors.
I was in no hurry for that.
An hour later the sun was fully up and the room fully explored. It was a room, normal except for restraints at various intervals and one rather horrible chifforobe full of canes and switches and birches and whips, crops and tawses and things I'd never known existed in the days before Cole. Once upon a time I had wished that Mark might occasionally put me over his knee and give me a spanking. Never in response to anything. I didn't need my fiancé to "correct my behavior." I'd probably have bitten his head off if he'd ever tried. But just because it might spice things up. Something to struggle against. Sensation that was different. I might even have liked the mild pain. I didn't think it had anything to do with ideas like leaving behind the Annie Knox who was so in control at her job, never letting her guard down, especially when she was undercover and had to be drugged-out Annie or Lily the stoner, Jesse's old lady. Always in control even if no one knew it.
