Page 133 of Deep Cover

"To be honest? It doesn't matter. Even if they're not behind the most recent activity, they're bad and immoral men. They're killers."

Cole nodded. Then he repeated, "You can name them? Describe them?"

"And give you descriptions of their cars and bikes and their addresses. Yes. I know who they are."

"You're certain."

"Yes." I was no longer answering as a submissive. My head was back in cop space.

"You're absolutely certain they're not what you are?" His gaze didn't waver.

"Again, ninety-nine percent. There's no way to be one hundred percent."

"If you had a gun in your hand." His eyes were level with mine, unblinking.

I pictured the men who I thought were likely Jesse's killers. Men who I knew without a doubt had sold China white right into the hands of children.

"I would pull the trigger." That had always been a possibility, even if I didn't come out of deep cover.

He looked at me for a very long minute and said, "I know people."

I breathed in sharply. "That's what you're saying?" I didn't spell it out. Not even here in what was probably a more secure room than the ones in which my undercover assignments were made and my teams assembled.

"Yes."

Oh, my god.

"But you have to decide."

Shit. I breathed out. And then I thought of the high school girl who’d died in my arms, a friend, even if I wasn't who she thought I was. I thought of all the other kids losing futures and their parents losing children.

"Do it, sir," I said.

That was when he punished me. After he asked me if I was certain. After he gave me an hour by myself, to think it through. And I still said yes.

He took me in the room and he laddered my legs and ass and breasts with his canes, two of them, one thin and whippy, one thick and inflexible. I sobbed, I screamed.

I never backed down.

After another shower. After the after care. After he held me as I cried and he put salve on my cuts.

He took me back into the dining room where the kale still sat on the plate and the coffee was cold and ordered me to request my cure, to crawl across his lap and lay there as he administered it, and to kneel at his feet and thank him after, my face still burning with humiliation.

But my mind and heart were at ease, my decisions made.

Nowhere in my mind did I ever question what I'd done. Not once the decision was made for those men. There were two of them, the leaders of a splinter group. The ones who wanted the business Jesse had built.

Jesse's business was illegal and immoral and unthinkable. For all that I had felt things for him, I had never lost sight of that.

It was part of the reason I lost myself so totally when he was killed: Because I'd already lost a huge part of myself to him, and I knew the whole time what he was. If he hadn't died, I would eventually have betrayed him.

There would have been no other choice.

Jesse himself had never handed drugs to a child, as far as I knew. It came down to the same thing. There were deaths that tracked back to him with very few other people in the way.

I shared the responsibility. In order to get to the people bringing such horrors down on the communities in which meth and China white thrived, I had to let it through. I had to get past the part of me that knew the bubbly, giggly girl in her senior year who was dying strung out was in part my fault. I'd done everything I could to help her while remaining her apparent seventeen year old friend, but I shared in her death.

So did Jesse.

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