by Sophia Reed
Then there was the unfortunate thought that someone had set this up. Someone had gone to the DA's office with enough fake information that this seemed like an illegal gathering. Drugs or underage girls or prostitutes hired within Vegas City limits. There'd been that moment of thinking the pony girl might be what tripped us all up.
There'd been a moment of wondering if Annie had put her career on the line to warn me.
It didn't have to be about me. There was one state senator and another who was running for state senate among our group. Politics loves to find strange bedfellows and use the proof of them against the candidates they don't want to see in office.
And there had been Annie. While all the conversation raged around me I'd talked with her and with Scott in a corner of the kitchen. The other guests were either too excited about the raid to interrupt us or aware I'd need to talk to my chief of security.
No one questioned who Annie was or where she'd come from. Probably at first they simply assumed I had a female security. Why not? Be handy for other appetites.
I got the same story from her I'd gotten when she burst in. She was part of a study group with a kid named James who was interning at the DA's office.
Only it sounded like James was a little older than the average student. I didn't quite like how she said his name.
It only hit me on the second pass through her story that she was going to school here in Las Vegas. She had enrolled at UNLV.
I had let her go with as much good grace and as full a heart as I could manage. Letting her go with a full bank account was easy. Letting her go with that full heart and grace had been more difficult.
Annie Knox wasn't my usual sub. If I had such a thing. Over the years I'd had contractually bound women at my service and I'd had those I'd forced into situations they couldn't hope to win, only to serve out their time with me. The challenge of making someone face up to their most secret desires appealed. If at first it was non consensual – it actually never was. There was always the moment when they could stand up and refuse. The moment when they could make the decision to demand to be released.
They rarely did. I was good at choosing from those who hadn't yet acknowledged very real desires.
Not once had one of those women been one who didn't have the underlying requisite – the love of pain, the craving to be controlled, the longing to be punished and owned and used. And in some cases objectified.
Except with Annie. She hadn't yet accepted her nature and my surprise was that I loved her fight. I loved that I said kneel and eight times out of ten she knelt and the ninth time she argued and the tenth she might shout. It made me angry. It made me wonderfully furious and ready to punish, to turn her ass a nasty red and humiliate her in a number of different ways.
Watching all the while as something inside Annie bloomed from that behavior.
I'd bought her because I wanted to test the opiate rainforest cure.
I'd kept her before she fascinated me. And only for that reason, I told myself on a regular basis. Whether or not I believed that anymore was open to speculation.
Annie Knox. Came back to Vegas to go to school. I had no doubt during her absence she'd been alpha as ever. She'd probably ended her engagement, which couldn't have been hanging on by much, and if she was smart, she'd told her father she needed a break from being his closest daughter and friend, because having someone committed is even more controlling than anything I'd do.
Letting her go was hard.
Letting her go again would be almost impossible. It wasn't something I was planning to do.
17
Annie
I came, I warned, we conquered - together.
Time to go.
I went back into the room that had been mine – my cell, anyway – and reclaimed my t-shirt and socks and running shoes. The socks were soaked from my run through the desert. They were the magic kind of athletic socks made out of recycled milk cartons that wick the sweat away from your skin. That doesn't mean the sweat doesn't soak in. They were clammy damp and I didn't want to put them back on. I didn't want to run in just my shoes with no socks. I couldn't run barefoot through the desert because the desert floor is made up of sharp: thorns, stickers, small rocks, dried branches.
I didn't seem to be able to make a decision about the very things that would help me leave. Maybe I'd ask for a ride. One of the security guards could take me back into Vegas.
Cole would know now I was going to one of the colleges. There were three where I could get a degree in criminal justice, though one would be a two year and the other two were four year degrees and – and what the hell, he'd find out fast enough. Anyone could. For me to have heard about a raid that was happening in southern Nevada, from someone interning for the DA's office, I had to be in Nevada, not the convenient, population-heavy cover of Los Angeles. There were rural community colleges and branches of universities in Nevada's vast rural areas, but I'd heard about the raid and come on foot.
He wouldn't even have to look anything up online.
Not that I'd tried to hide where I was living and learning or even considered it.
So why was I lying on my old bed, staring up at the ceiling and feeling a familiar, anxious, speedy pulse between my legs?
That thought was enough to make me sit up. From the living room, I could hear Cole's guests. I dressed slowly, hanging the dress back up and putting it back in the closet that had been mine. I sat on the bed to put on my shoes and found I was sitting with one shoe in my hand, still wondering about what to do with socks. Or without socks. And finally it occurred to me there was an entire drawer of running socks. When he wasn't stripping me naked and punishing me in the open desert, Cole St. Martin was outfitting me and training me to run endurance-style miles. He'd reinvigorated my love of running. Or love-hate relationship.
Which was perilously close to my relationship with him.
Don't think 'love' and 'Cole' in the same sentence.
Don't think relationship. It's not a relationship and it's over anyway.
Don't think.
But I was still sitting there with one trail running shoe in my hand, no socks, no idea what I thought I was doing. Sooner or later Cole would realize I hadn't come back out of the cell.
That wouldn't be good. I wasn't sure which reason would make it not good. Because I was acting like it was still my space and it wasn't anymore because I'd left it behind?
Because I was acting like I wanted to stay?
Because I was acting like I wanted him to come get me?
Or maybe nothing that he'd notice. Just my own fear about going back to a life I'd just started creating for myself and one I was both proud of and liked. I was suddenly a single twenty-five year old ex-cop heading for a career in federal law enforcement. I was a second degree black belt. I had my own place. I was living on my own earnings from Seattle PD. I didn't have to depend on anyone.
I was going to school and I wasn't that much older than the other students. Except I was. I was seven years older than a lot of the other freshmen. That made me a "nontraditional" student and wanting to push the glass ceiling and be a DEA agent made me a woman with a nontraditional career.
In terms of life experience, the good and the bad, I wasn't just five years older than a lot of the students, I was more like decades older. I'd done shit and had shit done to me. I'd been shot at. I'd been shot. I'd been to the rainforest with a sexual sadist, which sounded like the title for a very strange memoir.
I laughed quietly to myself. Maybe when this was all over – whatever "all this" was and whatever constituted "all over" – I would write that memoir. In the meantime, I liked the new life I'd created for myself. Liking it put me at risk of losing it. Not because I liked it. But because I might take steps to protect it. That was the superstitious side. The logical side said things can always change and I would be sad if the new life changed. So many of the lives I'd already led had been somehow less than full.
Undercover meant hiding who I was
.
Being PD meant working with men who didn't always want to accept me for who I was.
Being a cop, working undercover, meant being a leader and living autonomously, both of which I'd been really good at.
So it hadn't been a huge surprise that being a sub had been terrifyingly addictive. I didn't want that. (I didn't. Did I?)
And being my father's daughter had meant always trying to obtain an ideal I was unlikely to manage.
Couple all those sad half lives with the fact that I could feel the various implements on the other side of the wall, the ones hanging off hooks in the pain room, and I was nontraditional all over the place.
Somehow or other my eyes had closed. I was lying on the bed, both shoes discarded, my feet bare.
"Are you all right?"
I pogoed up like the bed had just been electrocuted. "I'm fine! I'm sorry, I was just – " I trailed off because I had no idea what I was just…
"Thinking?"
But Cole's first question – Are you all right? – had been asked in the tone of voice you use when you're on the same level and you like each other.
The second question, all of one word, felt ominous. Like he knew what I was thinking. And wanted to do something about it.
Harder than you think, St. Martin. Because I wasn't sure what part of what I was thinking mattered.
"Get up," he said.
Un uh. Not doing it. Not falling back into this. Not playing this game. I got out. I got out and I'm someone else now.
My eyes flew open when he leaned over and picked me up bodily, grabbing me by the biceps just under the caps of my shoulders and depositing me on my feet.
His eyes found mine and I saw a scary combination of the raging Cole St. Martin who had frightened me into going – and the playful one, who knows every damn thing is a game he can win. Either because he's a billionaire, or because he's a sexual sadist who doesn't have to take no for an answer because if a girl is there, she knows the score – or because it's his house, his rules, and what he wants.
"What were you thinking, Annie?"
His eyes were on mine.
Mine weren't the same. I had changed.
"None of your business, Cole."
But this time I'd gone too far. This time, his gaze darkened and the playful left, and there was only the sadist, only the Master.
Only a whole lot of trouble.
"Get on your knees." He still had hold of my arms.
How was I supposed to kneel if he was holding me up? But the next second he was using that grip to shove me down toward the floor.
I fought back. I raised my arms and broke his grip on my shoulders and arms by swinging my arms together in a windmill motion from being clasped by my groin, to up and over and through.
He let go. His face was instantly full of fury.
He grabbed my hair, and I realized how long it had grown because he had a good handful of it now. We were still face to face, but his hand was behind my head, snarled in my hair.
"Kneel."
Fuck you! "No."
He pulled harder. My eyes filled with tears. They weren't completely down to the pain. I wanted and didn't want and didn't want to want. I think I said Please.
I know I said Sir.
I was on the floor. I was at his feet. I was pressing my lips to his feet, to his shoes, I was letting my forehead rest on the floor, feeling the pain throb through my skull where he'd pulled my hair.
Feeling an answering throb between my legs that I was never, ever going to admit to.
18
Cole
I reached down and took her chin in my hands, wrenching her head up so she looked at me again.
"Did you like that, sub?"
"No, sir."
"Don't lie to me." Moving fast, I sat on the edge of the bed, grabbed her and spun her, putting her over my knee in an instant. She cried out, but from the sound of things, the music was playing again and my guests were entertaining themselves well enough.
Not that it mattered if they heard her protest. Or if they heard what I was about to do.
"Cole, don't!"
"Don't. Call. Me. That!" Each word underscored by three hard slaps on her ass, still covered in spandex running shorts. She cried out and I stripped them from her, fast and easily, letting them hang off her lower legs the way she hated. Something about being forced to keep her pants half on made her feel more naked, more out of control. It was such a humiliating posture.
Then I started spanking her again, letting her feet kick and her head come up, letting her try to get her hands back to stop me, but it only took one hand on the flat of her back to keep her held down and off balance. The other hand slapped her reddening ass over and over until she was wailing, and then until she was crying.
It was an angry cry, not at all a sob of submission, and when I stopped because my hand stung almost as bad as her ass must, I ran my fingers down between her legs and got the answer I had asked myself.
She was soaking wet, slippery, and so, so hot.
The next step was almost too easy. I spanked her again until she was crying for real, then leaned down and said into her ear, "You want this." I ran my hand through her wetness again and shoved my fingers into her face, letting her see and smell her own arousal.
I didn't give her time to process. I pulled her to her feet and pulled off her t-shirt and jog bra, which wasn't easy. I pulled off her panties, all the way off, and I slapped her boobs, felt between her legs again, laughed at her, and I took her by the hand.
And walked her out to join the party.
19
Annie
He handcuffed me to a leash attached to an O ring set into the ceiling. Ordinarily a plant hung there, or at least it had before I left his house. I wondered in a moment of dazed thought why the police hadn't seen it.
My hands were cuffed together at the wrist, the leash wrapped around the cuffs. My breasts jutted out from the pose and I was naked and blushing and spitting and trying to get at him even as he walked away.
Even as he put his arm around Chloe and I found myself distracted enough to wonder what she was doing here, and to hate myself for wondering.
Any other time I'd have expected the advent of a naked woman in handcuffs to be a conversation stopper. That attention would rivet – me, actually. This was no theoretical scenario.
But only one woman broke off from her conversation in the first few minutes and came over to watch me. She walked around me, looking but not touching, then went back to the man she'd been with and knelt at his feet. When he noticed her, he leaned in close, listening to her, his eyes flicking up to run over me.
He nodded, and stepped away from her, crossing over to Cole to ask a question.
To which Cole answered with an affirmative.
No. No, I wasn't back. No, I'd only taken a few minutes for myself in a room that had been mine after having done what I did for Cole's benefit. That didn't mean – they couldn't think – he couldn't think –
Because I wasn't back.
But no one asked me if this was okay when the girl moved to the corner of the living room and pulled a fresh batch of brine-soaked branches from a bucket. They were a combination of thick as my little finger branches and thin, thin, whippy new, green branches.
She was standing behind me. The curtains were closed. There were no mirrors, nothing reflective in the living room. I twisted around and around, trying to see her.
"Hold still," she hissed, and then, calmly, as if we were truly getting acquainted at a dinner party, "I'm Sarah."
And then she started to birch my back and ass and thighs.
I've been a student of human nature for a long time. Something about the things that drive me also makes me someone who feels deeply about humanity but separate from it. Not separate in a better than kind of way. But also not less than. I simply feel apart a lot.
When I'm undercover, I'm often closer to fitting in and being a part of whatever's going on than at any oth
er time and a lot of that's because I have to. I have to act as if of course I feel I'm a part of things. I've watched the gangbanger girls and the og boys, the young adults so determined to make a mark in the world no matter what it is and most of the time it doesn't feel forced to me, their belonging. They are part of a group.
My experience was more often with the motorcycle clubs, the men with leather vests and huge engines that vibrate between their legs. Men who classify their women, it seems, from girlfriend to whore to sister who rides with (and those women are not my peers, not trusted confidantes. They are the flip side of the men only in gender. They're rough and cold.)
Being in the Brotherhood and the other clubs before that, I found myself fitting in and sometimes forgetting for minutes at a time that it was a charade.
The same thing growing up. It didn't make me sad, it was simply who I was. I was raised by a strict, determined, controlling father. At the time there was no reason to believe he was anything but the good cop he appeared to be, and I was closer to him than anyone else in my family but my mother. Even then, her relationship with him was as a wife in love and his with her was as a man in love and able to bring to bear whatever was necessary to keep her safe.
My three sisters resented our father and his control. The distance between us didn't come from my closeness to my father or actively following in his footsteps, but because as girly girls, we were different enough to be from separate species.
So I grew up on the outside, watching.
Now I was doing that again. I watched throughout the rest of the party. Watched the female subs grow bored with me when they were allowed a hand in whatever it was Cole was playing at. Putting me back in my place? Welcoming me home? Letting me know he'd just taken my servitude back in his hands, perhaps.
