Deep Cover: A Dark Billionaire Romance

by Sophia Reed

  For me.

  16

  Annie

  Kie was dead.

  Kie was dead and not by my hand.

  Kie was dead and not by my hand.

  KIE WAS DEAD.

  The first I knew of anything I was asleep, dreaming that parts of me were on fire. Dreaming that someone was running the bristles of a hairbrush between my legs. In the dream I wanted to beg Cole to stop, whatever it was he wanted me to do, I'd do it. Want me to eat spinach and kale? Bring it on. Want me to suck off every guard at the compound? Bring them on.

  He wouldn't. That wasn't his jam.

  And then there was screaming, high pitched but male, a voice shouting no over and over and footsteps running toward the room where I was being held.

  I threw myself off the bed in the seconds I had before the door burst open. Dizziness tried to swamp me and I shook my head against it, bit down on my cheek as hard as I could and tasted blood and when that didn't work, I pulled the lightweight pants up hard into my crotch and almost dropped myself back to the bed with the explosive fiery burn.

  But I was awake and aware when Vincent burst through the doors.

  "She's fucking dead," he roared. "You fucking KILLED HER."

  I hadn't. I didn't. I would have but – "I wanted to," I shouted back. "The little bitch! You know what she did to me and I'm never going to be allowed to forget it." I was shaking, with anger and with fear, because Vincent wasn't fully sane anymore. No, not fully. He hadn't been. But now he was gone completely over the edge and I was scared.

  "What the fuck happened?" I met his shout with my own, certain he wouldn't stop to hear my words.

  "Kie is dead. Kie is dead!" Blond hair everywhere. He'd run his hands through it as he started to scream.

  For the first time ever, those black eyes. The ones that were always watching me. Judging me. Sealing my fate.

  Now within them, there was hurt. They were hurt and devastated and shocked and afraid.

  And more dangerous than ever.

  He came toward me. For a couple seconds, he looked unsure, like he didn't know what he intended to do when he caught up to me.

  And then he was screaming in my face, reaching for me as I backed away and backed away, thankful for the size of the room, for the distance it afforded me, for the bathroom behind me that I was backing toward.

  No. Where I wasn't heading. I wouldn't run from him. Never again.

  17

  Cole

  We found it.

  A simple house on a simple street, lined with flowering trees. There were Fiats parked on the curb. There was an orange cat on the window sill in the house next door.

  There was a girl jumping rope three houses down. I wanted to tell her to go inside and lock the door and stay there but I wasn't going to do a single thing that could tip off Vincent that we were here.

  She got the message anyway. Her deep brown eyes swept over us two times and she packed up her jump rope and went inside. It was very early morning. Maybe it was simply time for breakfast.

  She'd be safer inside. I had no idea what would happen. Only that we were in the right place. I could feel it, like a bell ringing somewhere inside me. Annie was here.

  Vincent was here. In the hours before we found the place he'd sent videos, blowing up my phone with images of Annie screaming in pain as Kie finally got the chance to do what I'd stopped her doing back in Las Vegas. Videos of Vincent and Annie in the limo, in the house, things he was doing to her.

  There was no way of knowing. We could enter and find him laughing, game well played, here she is, I probably owe you for the extra time, all for a good cause, right? Charity and all.

  Or he might meet us with his own guns. He might try to kill Annie.

  My intention was not to leave Vincent Geddes alive when we left this place. My intention was to take Annie and go, leaving Vincent dead on the floor. This was the sort of thing police didn't talk about often, the fact that even if they knew who did this, there was more than enough money to make certain there were no ramifications.

  Or the fact that likely there would be no trail. No investigation. No dead billionaire. There might be a house fire, unfortunate in the historic district. There might be bodies carted out, squatters maybe. Whatever the story was made up to be, it wouldn't come back to my doorstep.

  Except.

  If he hurt Annie more than could be corrected, more than medical care or psychiatric care, more than rainforest cure, could handle?

  Then I wouldn't kill him. Not outright. And neither of us would leave this place for a very long, painful time.

  The little girl had gone into the house, safely behind walls. There was no one else on the street this early. Maybe they'd seen us and decided it was better to be indoors despite the beautiful spring morning.

  Then we were all moving forward. The team leader made a sound, something like a bird call if you'd never heard a real bird, and gestured with a clenched fist. Two of the six men ran for the corners of the house and disappeared into the backyard.

  The leader made different gestures at the other men and they went up the sides of the house, spikes on their hands and feet allowing them to scale like squirrels.

  The last two were with us. We took the front door, going through it silently when it turned out to be unlocked. Me, Jefferson, Joules who was one of the guys from SWAT and team leader. Three men I didn't know but trusted those who had hired them.

  We were armed. We carried lightweight automatic assault rifles. There were knives holstered to our belts. We wore jeans and boots and black t-shirts only so we could identify each other quickly in the event of a firefight.

  In. Across a silent entryway and to the right, what had been a drawing room was filled with a metal exam table. Less than a minute inside the house and I wanted to find Vincent and rip him limb from limb. The table was ugly and exposed and the thing I'd done to Annie that hurt her the most. There was no question that he'd used it on her. There were coverlets on it, dressings around it, like someone had been hurt and then tended to.

  Fury burned brighter.

  Until the beginning of March, there'd been no one renting this house. Then a multinational shell corporation had taken it on, theoretically for team building exercises.

  It had taken too long to find this. I didn't know what condition An – my sub - would be in. She was my responsibility and the pain and rage I felt was because she was vulnerable, because she was mine to protect just as she was mine to hurt.

  Because Vincent Geddes should never have been able to beat me at any game.

  Conflicting feelings, out of place when I didn't have time to deal with them:

  Shame, a rarity for me;

  Desire, a constant. I wanted to do it again. I wanted to turn her inside out. I wanted to clean her out, more than just physically and medically. I wanted to hurt her until every other pain vanished from memory.

  Then I wanted to sit with her while she cried. Because I wanted her to come into my arms of her own accord. I wanted to be where she turned for relief.

  Past the drawing room. The house felt empty. If they were wrong, if she wasn't here, I'd lose my mind.

  And they'd lose their lives. I was more than lost enough and the violence was rising more than high enough to take out even these trained killers.

  My sanity was teetering. I would not lose two girls in my lifetime.

  Emily. And now Annie.

  Not happening.

  We were on the stairs, a broad staircase that doubled back in the middle. We fanned out and took the two sides of the house, built as it was around a central internal courtyard. The second floor was clear. I hated leaving the third floor unexplored for that amount of time. The house was too big. Any minute we could be heard.

  There were voices coming from the upstairs rooms. Nausea on my skin before I finished identifying one of the voices as Vincent's.

  And the scream as Annie's.

  18

  Annie

  He ru
shed at me.

  I'd backed away from him, trying to give myself room. Time slowed, just a little, enough for me to remind myself I'd been in situations worse than this because I'd been up against entire gangs, and we'd been outnumbered, so even if there was a gang with me, there was still more than one on one.

  I'd once been outed while undercover, had one of the girls walk in and point at me and say, "She's a narc," and everything stopped and everyone stared and then everyone converged – they had ways of finding out whether or not that was true that would have been as awful as what they did after – except there was a drive-by right then and those who survived were me and another narc who I didn't know was a narc and he didn't know I was. He was transferred and that didn't matter now.

  What mattered was I'd faced worse and lived and I was going to face this and live. I wanted to know what Kie had done. I wanted to know if she'd done it or if some sympathetic guard—or medic? – had helped.

  But mostly I wanted out. Out and away, out of France and home, wherever the fuck that happened to be.

  Backing up, backing up, until my foot caught the edge of something, some protrusion into space where I didn't expect to encounter something

  Then I was falling.

  At the same time Vincent was lunging.

  I rolled and he went flying, not tripping but out of control. He hit a wall and fell.

  Damned straight razor in his hand again. Fuck, I hated blades but his wasn't even a surprise. Even as I thought that, peeling off the stupid too-small house shift, jog bra no one had ever collected underneath it.

  I wrapped the shift around my blocking hand, around my forearm. It wasn't much but it would help.

  The other hand I'd need to use to strike. To grab. To do my damnedest to get the blade away from him.

  Before Vincent had a chance to get creative with it. Eyes, nipples, wrists – I didn't know which would be worse. If he just buried it in my throat or in my chest, or if he went slow.

  I wasn't going to find out.

  From outside the room, in the early morning, I kept hearing sounds. Guards, of course, on the premises, but not responding. Had he killed them? In the horrible moments between sleep and startling into wakefulness, I thought I'd heard gunshots.

  He said Kie had killed herself.

  Or did he?

  Vincent scrambled to his feet.

  There hadn't been enough time to go after him when he was down. He held the knife and rose more gracefully than I expected.

  There hadn't been enough time to run while he was down because there was stuff in my way, knocked helter skelter while I was backing away from him and because there were guards in the house and I didn't know how corrupt they were, how loyal to Vincent, and what they'd do if they saw me running, given the screaming, given Kie, given his loss of anything resembling sanity.

  And I didn't want him behind me. Not anymore than I'd wanted to barricade myself in the bathroom and hope he couldn't get through the door.

  At the moment he got to his feet, I ran at him. He was just off kilter enough I had time to knock his right hand back and away, the blade in it rising up and up, but he didn't lose hold.

  There were sounds again, voices shouting, sounding wrong, not the voices I was used to. I almost called out for help but Vincent lunged again, the knocked back hand now striking down at me, hard and fast. I put my arm up against it, the left arm with its helpless little house shift wrapped around it and I felt the blade slice through my skin with the hot pain of a cut and then snag just long enough to trouble him, catching on the cloth.

  I came around with my right hand, forcing myself to ignore the blade for that one instant, knowing it was driving downward, that the strength and speed he'd used on that strike would keep it going before he could yank it back. Just for a second.

  I doubled my fist and hit him three times in the throat before he could bring the blade back up to bear.

  When he did, the B movie overhand strike he'd been attacking with meant his fist came up but the blade was still facing downward, useless until he could change his grip or slash sideways at me, or raise it again to strike,.

  I wasn't giving him that opportunity.

  "Annie! Annie Knox!"

  I sucked in a breath and just for a second I was distracted. Vincent struck, and I jumped backwards, catching my foot on a pair of heels left out, starting to fall. This time Vincent did slash sideways and the blade raked across my ribs even as I sucked in my breath, sucked in my entire body, trying to become a C shape, the middle of me drawn away from him.

  The pain was brilliant and blinding and hot.

  His hand kept going but he was already trying to turn it back, this time jabbing with the end of the blade, probably meaning to punch before reversing the swing to stab.

  I stepped into that move because the punch would be nothing compared to a stab or another slide from the straight razor, like one to my face. My throat. The artery running through my thighs.

  He was gagging on the punches to his throat, spit running from his mouth, but he wasn't stopping.

  Neither was I.

  I stepped into his swing, barely feeling the blow to my ribs with the end of the knife, the side of his fist where thumb and forefinger wrapped.

  I was focused on slamming my fist into his throat again and when he tried to shake me off, I used the heel of my hand and drove it upward, putting as much strength as I could behind the blow, hitting him under the nose and driving it up and back into his brain.

  He screamed, a keening sound, started toward me as if his brain didn't realize yet that it was mortally wounded.

  "Annie! Down!"

  I flattened myself on the floor and one shot rang out. From where I was, I jacked my head up and stared up at Vincent.

  A red flower bloomed on his forehead, neatly between his eyes, about the place where the cartilage from his nose should have ripped into the tissue of his brain.

  Finally his body and mind got the message. The stone cold eyes rolled up.

  He fell, twitching, and went still.

  He didn't get back up.

  I pushed myself to my feet. He was too close to me. Too many absurd horror movie scenarios were playing through my mind. He'd get back up. He'd come after me. He'd never stop coming.

  "Annie."

  I shook my head, getting to my feet without looking at anything or anyone else. Just in case. Everything else in the room – everything else that was saying my name – had to be safe. Or at least benign. Because –

  "Annie."

  "Cole?"

  I turned my head away from Vincent Geddes' body and stared in disbelief at Cole St. Martin, holding the gun that had put the hole in Vincent's head. I looked back at Vincent. Then I looked at Cole. His eyes were unblinking, unflinching. He watched me.

  I stepped away from Vincent Geddes and walked directly into Cole's arms.

  19

  Annie

  It's one of those things that I can handle but don't want to.

  The instant Cole arrived, the minute I was in his arms, I was done. Or I wanted to be done. The shaking started until I couldn't stand but when he tried to lead me somewhere to sit, out of the room I'd been trapped in but still in the house, I refused to be separated from him.

  I wanted out of the house. I wanted out of Paris. I wanted to be back in the United States to bury myself under the covers in my Seattle bed. Only I wasn't up to meeting with Mark. I needed time first. I'd missed a couple calls and my father and my fiancé had both gotten used to them in short order, to hearing from me on a semi-regular basis since I was in "rehab" and not deep cover.

  Those I thought I could do.

  Face to face? Not so much.

  Seeing my father when he knew (and I didn't yet know he did) that I was using, that had been hard. Seeing my father once I was with Cole and what was being used was me? That was harder, even if he didn't know. It's perfectly possible to be an undercover narc for several years, a respected cop responsible for
a lot of Class 1 felony arrests and killing a man.

  It's another seeing your father when you've been the submissive of a billionaire who uses you the way he wants, who humiliates you and knows you intimately. Knows what makes you scream. And probably has a good idea when that screaming is pleasurable, no matter how hard you try to hide it.

  I didn't want him to know any of that. I didn't want to see him with it hanging over me.

  Daughters never stop being daughters.

  I wanted to be in Vegas. It was late March. The equinox had come and gone. It would be getting hot there. I wanted all of that.

  But even without police, there was no leaving the crime scene right away. There was coordination between Vincent's security and the men Cole brought with him. I was surprised they were all ex-SWAT and the like, his head of security and so on. I'd have expected Cole to run to mercenaries and maybe he would have if he hadn't found me.

  He didn't want to let go. Other than trying to wrap me in a blanket on the couch, when that didn't work he held on to me. Wrapped himself around me even as he gave orders to the men and listened to security talk about the way things had been going downhill since Vincent brought me here.

  "I want every detail," Cole told the head of Vincent's security.

  He was one of the guards who had been halfway human to me. He dragged me around and he did Vincent's bidding, but he'd been –

  I broke off even to myself. He'd been useless. He'd allowed what happened to happen. He'd heard the screams and he hadn't stepped in. He was responsible.

  "Cole," I said, and when he didn't react to me using his name, "Sir." Because it felt right. "Please. Geddes is dead. Don't – "

  He stopped me, though more gently than he might have. He simply took my arm in an unmistakable gesture of control. "I will want to hear every detail." His eyes bore into mine, though the tilt of his head toward the guards indicated he was speaking for their benefit.