by Sophia Reed
But the idea that I was a long game between Cole and Vincent was nauseating.
It only lasted for a few seconds, maybe a couple minutes, but during that time the world dropped out from under my feet. What if Cole had done everything he'd done as part of some mad bet? He had all the money in the world. He could be bored and sadistic and playing a game with another bored, rich, sadistic son of a bitch.
The thought persisted for maybe thirty seconds and disappeared with a wave of finality I welcomed. Cole was confusing and confounding. He dealt pain and the occasional pleasure. He was the half seen smile out of one side of his mouth, when he thought I couldn't see him but I'd just said something that made him smile.
He was a triangular smile of mischief when he talked about things that interested him. He was the man who got me all the coursework for the first semester of criminal justice so I could one day leave him and go back into law enforcement, even if it wasn't in Seattle.
Vincent was actually waiting for an answer. I probably could tell him I knew because I was telepathic and he'd go for it. I wasn't sure how crazy he was. And I wasn't brave enough to try it. So I said, "I've been whipped by him." I met Vincent's beady little eyes. "Once you've been beaten by a man, you have his measure."
He met and held my gaze, and showed no emotion.
So I finished. "Once you've been beaten by a man, you know him. No matter what efforts he makes to hide."
Vincent wasn't hiding anything.
I knew that when I said it. I didn't say it for the shock value. I said it to let him know I knew who he was.
Not that I did. Just that he was small – not that tall, not that muscled, nothing compared to Cole. Not that intelligent, not that stupid. Just – small. Unimportant in my life. Probably unimportant in a lot of lives.
He might kill me.
But he'd never own me. He'd never know me.
I found that mattered.
11
Cole
She wasn't here. Not in the house where the hackers said she’d be or the men on the street said.
Not where I thought the limo had gone, the one that showed her in the back seat, Vincent's hands busy on her breasts, then on her ass. Vincent grinning for the feed he was sending.
She wasn't here.
But she was alive. It was enough that I could get back in touch with everyone, everywhere, finding the leaders of each new group – French police, French hackers, the people I'd left back in southern Nevada, the bodyguards I'd brought with me – and making sure everyone was doing everything to find her.
And to find Vincent.
And to end Vincent.
She wasn't where we'd thought. So we'd begin again.
We weren't stopping until we found her.
12
Annie
Vincent would never own me. But he was determined to hurt me.
"Maybe you think you know Cole St. Martin." He was circling me.
I was on the floor again, my hands tied behind me. He'd wrestled me down there by himself, not even calling for security, though I sensed them no further away than the other side of the door.
"You don't know him." He was stripping off his clothes, the expensive as fuck linen shirt, the tie, the trousers made for him by some tailor who deserved every cent he got just for touching Vincent, and for making him look halfway good. Vincent Geddes was muscled, but nothing like Cole. He was medium height and medium build and he would never be anything like Cole St. Martin.
He knew it, too. That was part of what this little pissing contest was about. It was appalling to think how much of my pain was tied up in the ego of a man who wasn't enough for himself.
He'd grabbed my ankles after he got me to the floor and when I started to kick, he slugged me once in the solar plexus, hard enough to knock the wind out of me. Panicked, I started to gasp. Suddenly my hands tied behind me was the most terrifying thing ever. Panic made the loss of air worse. Being constrained made it worse, despite knowing that having my hands free would do little to force the breathing again. I was so scared I hardly noticed him threading the plastic ties through one of the rings on the floor. Now my ankles were bound.
The instant he finished, he used the cord on the shift to drag my waist up, bowing my back in the middle, so my head and feet hung down and the center of my body arched. Exactly right. Exactly what he was supposed to do.
Air flowed back into my lungs and the panic rushed out on a flight of tears I couldn't have stopped if I had to in order to save my own life.
He gave me a couple minutes and then he sat down behind me, my head resting in his lap, the last thing in the world I wanted. He cut away the clothing I was wearing.
When I looked down to see what he was using, I froze. It wasn't just a knife. It was a straight razor, formed so it came to a point at the end, doubly deadly. Having just got my breath back, it was all I could do to not hold it.
His hand moved near my face and my eyes clenched shut, my face trying to hide. All at once I could see again the cuts on Kie's cheeks. They stood out like a blinding neon beacon of inescapable pain. If he did that to me, even if I got free of him, I'd never have another moment of not being marked. Never another anonymous instant in a crowd.
I'd never look in the mirror again without reliving this nightmare.
Vincent was oblivious. It didn't even feel like he was aware of me, not as some living, breathing human being. He was somewhere else. Somewhere the thing in his arms existed for him to do with what he would.
Slow tears started to course down my face. I think it's in The Witches of Eastwick, the movie, not the book, where one of the witches – Cher, maybe, or Susan Sarandon, or even Michelle Pfeiffer – says she's not afraid of growing old or dying, but it's the pain that scares her. She doesn't understand why there has to be pain.
I'm not sure if that's the point where Jack Nicholson – aka, The Devil – says, "Yeah, well, we don't deal the deck down here, we just play the percentages. Have another cherry." He then feeds the witches cherries and for every one they eat, their nemesis in town vomits up a cherry stone.
My mind was wandering.
To why there has to be pain.
To why there have to be people who inflict it, and why I can't deal my own deck.
The knife dug in. Just far enough to dimple the flesh on the inner curl of my hip. Just a dip, no more than I might get if I tried to force a staple out of a document and it jabbed my finger. A little point of pressure. No blood. Not yet.
My breathing was frantic. Uneven and harsh. Vincent didn't notice. Vincent was in his own little world, his eyes distant. Did I want him to concentrate on me or not? I wanted him to be aware of a live person here.
But not the fact that she had yet to scream.
The point of the knife slid up my body. Up over my ribs. A long white scratch followed it, nothing worse than running a fingernail over dry skin. But up. Up and up. Until he was running the blade directly under my right breast.
I couldn't still my breathing. Each breath started coming and going with great whooping drags of air. It made my ribcage rise and fall too dramatically. I was going to end up digging the knife into myself.
"Shh." Vincent said. "Shh, shh, you can't do anything anyway. Calm down."
I couldn't. I wanted to struggle but there was no way with my hands behind me and my ankles bound in hard plastic. My breath started to catch.
"Stop it." He said, coming back into himself, just a little. There was more of him present behind his eyes. "Stop it."
And the knife dug in. Just enough. Just enough to send white hot pain and a line of blood that rolled down and splashed onto the floor.
He watched it, impassive, then met my eyes. To me, his face was upside down. "See?" he asked.
The knife traveled up. The tip of it traced around and around my nipple. Around. And then.
It dug in. Just a little. A nick, nothing more. A tiny divot of flesh. No bigger than what a kitten might do while playing. No more than
a mosquito bite.
I screamed. I screamed over and over until my throat was raw and Vincent sat over me and laughed, the bloody knife in his hand and a look on his face that said he'd won.
That said this was being recorded.
That said Cole was going to see this.
I wanted to scream at Cole and demand to know where he was. He had so much at his disposal, so many resources, why was I still here? Why hadn't he come to get me? Where was he?
13
Annie
"Come on. We're going for a run."
From the couch where I'd spent the last two days, I looked up to see Kie in the doorway. It was shut tight behind her. I hadn't heard her come in, not the key in the lock or the key once security let her in.
Possibly there'd been no key either before or after she entered. I hadn't tried the door once in the time I'd been here. It could have been open the whole time. I had no interest in trying it.
Cole hadn't come.
I had no interest in much of anything.
Cole hadn't come, and Vincent had played his edgy knife games with me. I had bled and he had cleaned the wounds, his antiseptic ideas as harsh as the initial cuts. Now they throbbed with my heartbeat, little suns pulsing under my skin, reminding me he had been here and here and here.
But not there. Not yet. For whatever reason, Vincent hadn't raped me.
He was having Kie two or three times a night though, her screams ripping through the rooms, ringing in the walls.
And now she stood in my doorway.
"We're what?" I asked.
"Going for a run." She said this like it was perfectly reasonable. Like she was one of my sisters, the way they would insist I was going to do something they considered normal and girly and that if they just said it as a fait accompli, then their permanently un-girly sister would come along.
Nothing had interested me in days. But this did.
I stirred on the couch. "Outside?"
Kie snorted. She was tiny and fiery and batshit crazy, burning with it. The cuts on her face kept breaking open – or Vincent kept breaking them open – and they made her as horrific as something out of a horror movie. "Of course outside. I don't do treadmills."
I tried to figure out how this would work. "Vincent's going to just let us go outside?"
Kie actually looked horrified as she looked back over her shoulder. "Don't let him hear you call him that!"
As if she gave a damn about what happened to me.
More as if she might share in the punishment if she didn't correct me when I sinned.
I sighed. "Fine. Our Lord and Master is going to let us out of the house?"
"Yes. With guards."
And guns. How delightful.
14
Cole
"We've got it."
They'd said that before. This time it was a team, arrived on one of the Pharma company's private jets because private jets are the way to get big guns into other countries.
Jason, making up for his dereliction of duty when Annie was hurt at the dinner party. Jefferson, head of security. Launder, newly recruited from a SWAT team.
This time they had the address, surveillance, photos from city cameras, from satellite images, from phones in the hands of people called in from across the city. This time there was positive identification of Vincent, more than 90 percent certainty, backed up by someone seeing an Asian woman with cuts on her face jogging through the neighborhood.
For the past several days I'd been numb. The cameras had caught Vincent in a limo and Annie with him. Not just the leaked photos from the event he'd thrown. Because that could be classic diversion, Vincent letting them be leaked as a red herring.
This was intel. This was a sighting.
This felt right.
For the first time in days, I could feel again. Now anxiety and apprehension and anticipation all warred inside me. I felt jittery and keyed up, several cups of espresso ready for the break in and the rescue.
And the takedown of Vincent Geddes and if she was there, probably Kie.
I'd take Annie and we'd fade. We could go anywhere in the world. Or we could go back to Vegas. She could get therapy for whatever he'd done to her and whatever opiate addiction still lingered or – and I'd kill him slow if this happened – if it had been reawakened by the kidnapping and whatever he’d put her through.
If she was marked.
If –
Head in the game, St. Martin. I'd been too late with Emily. I'd known she was turning tricks, my sister, the one my father exiled from the family because she dared to have feelings. She'd fallen down and broken apart when the family started going through shit and our Grandmother died. That spread to her running away and running away led to my father disciplining her over and over, a little too much, a little too long, and a lot too often.
Emily ran. By the time I found her again, the opiates she'd been taking sporadically to survive in our household had become a full blown addiction. She was in Los Angeles, and she was a prostitute, supporting her habit more than she supported anything else.
I was not going to be too late with Annie. That was it. That was all. What I needed to do was rescue her. I'd rescued Ariel, to an extent. In the long run, perhaps the very long run, I thought Ariel might return to some kind of life.
If I thought it would take, I'd bring Kie out. But the little bitch was as cruel as her master. He'd have driven her mad if she hadn't been a psychopath to start with. There was no way to save her.
But Annie.
Only because she was my responsibility. Only because no more addicted girls were dying on my watch.
That was all.
Cole St. Martin doesn't get involved. If she thought differently when I showed up, she'd figure it out when the cleansing started.
But I had to get to her.
Before it was too late.
Because everything else aside - This was Annie.
15
Annie
The run had been everything I thought it couldn't be. The jog bra wasn't right. It was too small, which should be impossible. I never weighed much, never had much, and had lost weight in captivity.
The shoes were okay. The shorts. The company? Not so much. Neither Kie, who was an okay runner, or the men with guns, who acted like they were doing us a favor.
What Vincent was thinking was beyond me. Maybe he wanted one or more of us to take a chance and try to actually run. As in run away.
Neither of us did. Kie was a bitch and a half. She wasn't someone I could ever trust enough to ally with. But she wasn't stupid.
Beautiful spring day. Beautiful route past flowering trees and into a park. Beautiful fantasies in my head, that we'd come around a corner and there'd be Cole. Or the world's most sympathetic and fast-to-get-it cop.
That didn't happen. We ran past patisseries and boulangeries and coffee shops and bookstores and into the green and pink and white of the park and out again. We ran past a cop and he didn't even blink at the men following us on foot or the car cruising a bit too slowly in our general direction.
Some of the cuts split open, the deeper ones Vincent had made and I arrived back at the house feeling hopeless and covered in little blooms of blood, my sweat mixing into it like salt in a wound.
Insult to injury.
The run was like a taunt. Maybe it was. I didn't know enough about how a true sadist's mind worked. Cole wasn't anyone I could use as a yardstick to measure Vincent against. Vincent was in a class by himself.
I just knew that the day after the run I didn't want to eat or drink or shower or stand up. I didn't want to get off the couch which was as close as I'd come to going to bed.
Cole wasn't coming. For the first time maybe ever, no one knew where I was. There was no handler in PD who could be trusted to know my deep cover whereabouts. There was no Cole, tracking me through a device he'd implanted in me.
Not Mark. Not my father. Not anyone.
I didn't bother to get off the couch.
"I brought you tea. With cream, the way you like it."
I just looked at her. The run hadn't been bad and since apparently she hadn't hoped for a white knight on a big white horse carrying us to safety, she was still functioning. Or maybe she was that fucked up she thought she was happy here.
Maybe she was so fucked up she really was.
Now she rolled her eyes at me. "There's nothing in it but tea. Do you want me to drink some?"
If she was remotely human, I'd ask her to stay and have a cup with me. If I thought that I wanted a cup.
I said thank you, which seemed to shock her as much as it did me.
She came back with lunch and took away the unconsumed tea.
She came back with dinner and took away lunch.
She came back after dinner and sat down and stared at me. "Are you going to starve yourself?"
It wasn't worth rousing myself to reply. "Of course not. I'm just not hungry."
It wasn't even worth wondering what had gone wrong in the world that Kie seemed concerned about my welfare.
I was just grateful when she went away.
And not at all thrilled when she came back.
She didn't look happy, either. She was carrying an assortment of things I didn't bother to look at closely. The shoes I'd worn to run in. A leash. A small brown paper bag.
"Mr. Geddes says I'm not to leave until I can get you out of this room," she said, sounding like throwing me out a window might be an option.
I lay on the couch, looking at her. "Security can do that for you."
Her glare was epic. "You know better."
