Page 126 of Deep Cover

15

Cole

Rio was like a vacation. The day we left I disappeared from the hotel before Annie woke, went downstairs and used money and privilege to order a whore. Or three. Another room, soundproofed. A variety of implements. Some girls who were beautiful, probably clean, and desperate for the money.

I paid them more than any of them expected.

I hurt them more than they expected, too. One of them liked it.

I'd have been interested in keeping her. I'd have liked to work her long enough to find out where the pleasure stopped and the screaming started.

The good news was, it was a great ending for the vacation. I was upstairs again before Annie woke.

The bad news was, the whole adventure was because of Annie. Because of our trip. Because of how I felt about her.

Because of her covering me while I slept so I woke and realized she'd taken care of me.

I lost Emily to drugs. I wasn't going to lose Annie to drugs. She considered being "in my care" a euphemism for the slave of a sadist. She wasn't wrong.

She was wrong in thinking that's where it ended. There was much more to it than that.

I couldn't afford to go soft on her. Break her, shake her world up, put her back together and she'd be stronger. Safer. And if she decided to stay then, that was her decision.

Provided I agreed in any way to let her go.

If Rio was a vacation, coming home was the opposite. The meetings had left me with massive amounts of work to do, to identify the actual owners of the tracts of land I needed to save in order to have access to the lifesaving plants that grew wild in fire zones and in direct path of the slash and burn behaviors.

Annie was on her own for a while.

As December crawled closer to the holidays, she sank. I had time in the mornings to spank her, to humiliate her to some degree, but even our runs dropped in length and then in frequency. Not that she wasn't running. I just wasn't running with her. There just wasn't enough time in every day. I saw less of her, and because of that, I didn't get an overall impression of her mood day by day.

As the month continued, the little I did see of her felt wrong. Maybe the continued gray skies were getting to her, or being away from her family as the holidays approached, though deep cover would have kept her away anyway and I knew if she hadn't been with me she'd have been working.

I promised myself I'd look into it. And then I went back to work.

On such decisions do lives change. In this case, it was Annie's.

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