by Sophia Reed
Nothing else was. There were armed guards in the house. There was the living dead girl who had hurt me.
There was Cole who looked like everything was lost because I'd come.
I wrenched my gaze away from him before I made myself weak and looked at Kie. "You were supposed to be dead."
Kie shrugged. "Thought you'd miss me."
I didn't bother to answer. "What happens now? You got me here. You must want something."
The smile she sent my way was ugly. "Right. I heard you were really enjoying your stay in the asylum."
I almost laughed. I was giddy with relief to see Cole and terrified at the same time that Kie had brought me here only to watch him die.
But Kie thought she could get to me by hurting my feelings. That was almost funny.
It would be much funnier when Kie was dead and Cole and I were remembering it.
2
Annie
"I didn't think you'd have the balls to come."
Kie looked the same. It had only been weeks since I'd left France with Cole, convinced that Kie was as dead as her Master. The slashes on her face had started to heal. That was something Vincent had done to her after she apparently embarrassed him by hurting me at the orgy dinner.
Kie was a beautiful woman if you didn't know the monster under her skin. The cuts on her face did nothing to take away from her beauty, they just made her strange and unrecognizable. I understood why she hated me. But her actions had started everything and I hated her as much as I was honestly afraid of her.
Once in Paris, she had come to me and dragged me out of my depression and out of my cell, forcing me into running clothes and out on the street and even though we were tailed by Vincent's goons driving a vehicle and carrying their guns in case either one of us got any ideas, it had been a sort of freedom and I had needed it.
Undoubtedly Vincent's idea had been to let me get my feet under me just long enough to knock them out again.
I didn't care. Being out had been a blessing. And he had ended up dead.
"What do you want, Kie? Why did you drag me out of my nice, safe looney bin?" Might as well take her first weapon away. I wasn't ashamed of the time I'd spent involuntarily committed, in part because of the "involuntary" clause. My father and Mark had me put there. Not because I was crazy. But because I was tangled up with Cole St. Martin in a BDSM relationship as well as in his experimental opiate program.
Clearly I couldn't be involved with anyone other than nice safe Mark without being labeled crazy.
"We have unfinished business," Kie said. But she didn't move the razor any closer to Cole, so maybe this wasn't about revenge for killing Vincent.
"And that would be?" My heart was jackhammering against my ribs. Undercover narc work taught me to hide my emotions and present a smooth, cool front.
That didn't mean I wasn't scared shitless, and all the more so when someone else's welfare was in my hands.
"For one thing, my peaches and cream complexion," she said and drew the razor over the healing cuts on her cheeks hard enough that a trickle of blood followed the blade.
I swallowed convulsively. I don't like knives or blades. It's too easy to get hurt, too hard to defend yourself against them without getting hurt.
Especially if you happen to be faced with a psychopath and you yourself are tied to a chair. I could see the panic in Cole's eyes.
But if what Kie intended to do was mark Cole, that was better than what she could do to a bound man when she had a razor and I had guns held on me and was across the room.
It would be a shame. Cole is beautiful. Marvel's Loki kind of beautiful. But he'd be Cole with or without scars.
"Are you all right?" I asked and didn't add Sir because it felt like the wrong place for it and dangerous.
Instead of answering that, he said, "If I ordered you to go away? To run?"
There was a temptation there. To snort. Master or not. For fuck's sake, did he think she was going to let me? "I don't think that's an option," I said, and this time I added it: "Sir."
"Oh, how touching," Kie said.
"What do you want, Kie?" Ignoring Cole because I didn't know how to reach him. Over the years how many untenable situations had I gotten myself into when I was deep cover? But this one scared me. Cole St. Martin saved my life. He saved my career with Seattle PD if I wanted it back and he'd offered me a way to the next step instead of returning to PD if I wanted to take it: School and a career with the DEA or another alphabet soup agency. I was up for it. I could do junior college and then university and come out the other side with a BA at twenty-seven, ten years under the cutoff.
He'd saved my life. I would save his. All the feelings past that, past beating Kie and saving Cole, would have to wait.
"You," Kie said. The one word fell into the room.
A shiver. The group of billionaires into which I'd fallen, the strange charity fundraising group of sadists who raised money to fight trafficking by beating each other's women and fucking them, the very group that had allowed Kie to start this horror story – all of it was wrapped around sexual encounters, around sex so strange I hadn't known it existed when Cole first had me brought here.
If that's what Kie meant? That she wanted me in one more game of pain and desire? That was almost impossible to believe and I looked around at each of the guards, trying to judge my chances. How far would I get trying to free Cole and find out what had happened to his own guards? Nowhere.
I couldn't allow Kie to ever touch me again.
And if she meant something else?
"I'm right here," I said. Daring her. Pushing her. Waiting to see what would happen.
The blade rattled on the floor where she'd thrown it. She moved across the room like rage wrapped up in a tiny Asian girl, the cuts on her face glowing red like stigmata. "You think you're so tough. So you used to be a cop."
Up in my face now, her breath somehow rank. She was terrifying, all the more so because waves of insanity rolled off her. I had been wrong back in Paris when I thought we were both survivors of Vincent Geddes.
Kie hadn't survived at all.
She was away from Cole. That was important. She no longer held the razor. That was important too.
After that, I wasn't sure I cared. Mark and I were finished; he just didn't know it yet and I hadn't had the time to tell him. Being locked in a mental hospital does that.
My father was – wasn't – I didn't know – he was no longer the man I'd thought he was. How about that? I was confused and hurt and angry. All my life my mother and my three sisters had been at odds. I was the girl who couldn't be made girly.
If any of them had done something like this to me, I would have understood. I wouldn't even have panicked. I would have just found my way back, out of the hospital and confronted them. The fact that it was my father, the man I loved growing up. The man who always took my side?
My life had turned upside down. I'd come to crave the security of the compound. No longer trying to escape. Actually, before Kie had come back from the dead like some zombie bitch, I'd been working on healing mentally and physically along with kicking the addiction.
With Cole's help.
With Cole.
I shoved her hard away from me and heard the rifles make a muttered clack as they were brought to bear on me again. Or more to bear. The attention of the guns had really never left me.
"Whatever you have in mind, let's get to it." So many years since any undercover mission had made me this afraid. Maybe confronting Kie was good for me in some way.
Or maybe, not on the positive side, I now cared more than I had in years.
"You and me, right here, right now." Kie's voice shook but I thought it was with anger and not fear.
I shook my head. "You and me it won't end up being." I didn't waste my breath asking about Cole's guards. They were incapacitated or dead. I just said, "You're the one with the armed guards."
Kie shrugged, not bothering to look at them. "I can send them outside."
&n
bsp; "They'll still be monitoring," I said.
She'd recovered her balance and threw herself back into my face. "I don't need them. They won't interfere unless I demand it."
"Which you'll do when I win."
"You won't win. But no, I won't." Her gaze was direct and steady and insane. I thought she'd keep her word. I also didn't think I'd get a much better offer.
So what were the rules going to be? Swords? Pistols?
But Kie was across the living room taking her shoes off, neatly putting them aside with her socks.
That was crazy.
We were going to fight.
3
Annie
The cell where Cole kept me for my recovery and for his pleasure was behind the main compound and detached.
I called his rural escape hatch in the Southern Nevada desert a compound because it fit. It was enormous, with hallways leading maze-like through the main house. I hadn't even come close to seeing all of it. The first house in the compound was deceiving – there was actually no difference between it and the main house. Follow the hallway long enough and the house opened into something much bigger. Follow that far enough and you'd come to the exits that led over a short distance to my cell.
Which was a building bigger than a normal one-story single family home. It was mostly one room, sterile and white, dominated by a bed and, once I determined to take criminal justice classes when Cole finally let me, a desk against an interior wall where I could study.
On the far side of the big room was Cole's office with its locked down phones and computers keeping me from the world and the world from me. On that same wall there was a bathroom, big enough to constitute a luxury and the only place cameras didn't watch everything. There were windows in Cole's office, and along the southwest and southern walls, huge windows looking out onto empty desert with all its blues and browns. There was wire woven through the windows, making them escape-proof.
Follow the other exit from the cell and I'd end up in an alternate headspace room where Cole took me to punish me or to enjoy himself with me. It held a huge four poster bed with restraints at the ready, and a closet full of every conceivable whip, chain, crop, slapper, paddle, belt, and every other kind of restraint and control, including hoods and ball gags.
That there were places in the middle of that building I'd never seen I was sure. That there were places in the main house I'd never come close to seeing either was also logical. And given where the windows were and the fact that I knew the place to be more huge than what I'd seen, the weirdly segmented shape of it I'd seen from the air made sense. There were chunks of building juxtaposed to allow individual rooms to have light. I thought there were probably parts of the maze-like compound underground, too.
When Cole saw what was coming, he indicated a place. Resigned. Against it. But still he told the guards to untie him and he'd take them there and when the men with guns told Kie to simply beat the information out of him since some of the passages were padlocked, she snapped at them to untie him and follow.
That made a procession through the house, down hallways I'd seen and into those I hadn't. Cole and I at the head of the parade, not touching, not doing anything to show we were together or might mean anything to each other. Giving nothing more away that Kie could use against us.
In truth, I didn't know what we meant to each other. But if nothing else, we were united against Kie, and that she'd already know.
The room Cole took us to was a workout room, probably for yoga as well as martial arts. It was an interior room, but light and sunny with a sun roof of the kind that indoor pools have in swanky hotels in Nevada. There were pads stacked up against the wall, a couple of inches thick and covered with fake leather, used for gymnastics training and the kind of martial arts where people throw and other people do the falling. There were some chairs along the edges.
Otherwise, it was empty.
I nodded, half to myself. The whole setup had a very two enter, one leaves feeling to it, which I was pretty sure was a paraphrased motto from a Chuck Norris movie. Fitting.
Turning back to Kie, I said, "Stakes? Rules?"
She laughed. "Rules: Fight till one of us is dead. Stakes: The lives of everybody else."
If I weren't imagining things, two of her four guards looked at each other. Made sense. Kie had been considered dead in Paris. Vincent really was. So maybe whatever guards these were, they'd been hired since she surfaced again in the States.
I hoped so. Because fresh hires wouldn't feel any kind of loyalty to more than a paycheck. If she started acting like their stake in it was to die for their mistress, maybe they'd turn. If we were all locked in here together, maybe they'd change in our favor.
And whatever else happened, as long as Cole's men weren't dead, they'd be recovering and finding a way to get to us. Not that I thought all the shooting between the two groups of guards would be beneficial to anybody's health.
But it would be nice to have our guards in charge again.
Our! … Cole's.
"Not good enough." From peripheral vision I could see Cole watching me, shaking his head. Did he want me to fight to the death?
Sounding bored, Kie asked what my terms were.
"That no one here is killed. Not Cole, not his guards, not me."
Her lip rose as if she were snarling. "You want me to believe you won't try to kill me?"
"I didn't before."
"You thought I was dead before."
It would have been simpler if she didn't know that.
I just repeated, "No one here gets killed. Not Cole, not his guards, not me. If you win. If I win, I'm not killing anybody who doesn't do something that warrants killing. For my safety and the safety of the people who belong here."
She nodded. "If I win, you come with me."
"I thought the whole point was that you won."
"And you upped the stakes. In or out?"
"You'd leave everyone who belongs here, Cole and his men, untouched, unharmed, still alive?"
"Yes."
"And I go with you where?"
"I refuse to tell you that. Please remember we have all the guns. I don't have to meet any rules. I don't have to have a contest. I don't have to leave anybody alive. But I won't kill you here."
Didn't mean she wouldn't kill me somewhere else. But I was running out of time and options.
We were agreed.
We stood in the center of the room, flanked by her guards standing watch from the walls, backs to plaster, holding up their guns at some kind of military parade rest. There were no referees and no judges. Only the two of us, facing off.
It was Cole who called out the commands. Facing each other, we both bowed deeply, eyes to the floor, showing the respect that said the other person wouldn't start fighting ahead of time, wouldn't take the moment of diverted vision to strike first.
I was surprised when Kie didn't take that chance. I hadn't thought she possessed honor.
Neither Cole nor I knew what style of martial art Kie had studied. TaeKwon-Do is Korean, so the commands Cole would ordinarily give would be in that idiom. Likewise, I had no idea what nationality Kie was or if she'd been born in the States. Maybe she spoke an Asian language. Maybe like me, she only spoke English. If her martial art wasn't Korean, the Korean commands would make no sense. Cole chose to give directions in English.
Attention.
Ready stance.
Begin.
We were both instantly in motion, circling each other, looking for an opening. I hadn't been to class in a while but everything came back at once as if I'd never left. I remembered how to split and widen my vision so I could take in the room around me, scanning for potential hazards, things that could trip me up or block my path, people who might get in the way or actively interfere.
At the same time, the majority of my attention was on her, watching as we began circling each other like alley cats about to break into a full-on cat fight. My feet were still bare, which was natural for TKD. The f
loor under them was sun warmed.
Fighting was natural too. Sparring. Even with someone I didn't like.
There was nothing natural about what was going on here today, though.
I threw a punch, a feint, testing her reaction time and her response. She moved away from it like she was Gumby, her limbs made of something insubstantial that didn't need to take up space in the real world.
I frowned, tried a kick. She just wasn't there again.
Shit. She flowed out of nowhere and made first contact, tagging me with the back of her hand, a little slap to the temple, just her fingers like a mother might tag a child who wasn't listening.
It was a brag. She touched me first.
It was also a bad thing. I watched as she moved. Best guess, she was trained in one of the "soft" Chinese styles, Kung Fu or the like. I'd fought a visiting student at my school several years ago in Seattle. He'd been a guest, come to class for the hell of it, and I thought he’d studied a Shaolin style of Kung Fu. Whatever it was, he actually said the point of some moves was to "flow like seaweed." Which sounded absurd and like a quote from a badly dubbed Bruce Lee movie.
But it was nearly impossible to make contact with seaweed as ii flowed. He’d definitely won our sparring match. His name was Dan and he didn't appear to be unbeatable at the outset. He had curly brown hair and a slim, unimpressive body.
He won a lot.
Dan hadn't been trying to kill me.
I let Kie come close to me. Watching how she moved, I looked for tells. She didn't have many of them, but she did look where she wanted to hit before she did so. That would help. For now all I wanted to do was dance and watch her.
We kept circling. I slowed my automatic dance, the forward and back movement that kept my weight from resting too long on one foot and made me less likely to be on it when someone tried to hit me.
The second time Kie struck, it wasn't a backhanded finger tap. I saw her eyes lock at the last possible second and when she punched at my solar plexus, I had enough time to deflect but not completely block. The blow landed on my ribs and it hurt but it didn't slow me down or knock the air out of me. I was slightly turned, as if brushing past her in a crowded hallway, and I let my momentum carry me farther, snapping out the arm I'd blocked her punch with and connecting a backhanded punch to her temple.
