Page 134 of Deep Cover

Not like the two men I had just sentenced. Not like the two men Cole had just put a contract on.

That was more nightmarish for the fact of it being the wrong way to go about it than in thinking those men were going to be taken out. They weren't Jesse. They weren't at the very least a few people removed from the horrors. They were in the thick of it. And they weren't taking care of their own men, no matter how brutal that caring was or how absurd it might be to consider that a mitigating factor; I did consider it something that set Jesse apart. He cared for the men who rode with him.

If that made me a hypocrite, so be it. Jesse was one step above the monsters I'd just sentenced to death.

That didn't mean I slept well but in truth, my sleep was more fractured by waiting for whatever came next with Cole. I'd just agreed to something outside the parameters of police work. Outside anything I'd have done in my undercover work.

I believed he'd do it.

That meant I was his. With the contract I'd signed, and Samuels selling me to Cole St. Martin in the first place, all that had led to a place where I was so far out of the loop, the changes had occurred that put two men in positions of power they needed to be removed from.

By agreeing to what Cole proposed, I not only sealed their fate.

But my own.

He left me to my own devices. The cell I was held in was the size of a small house. It held the room he punished me in and a room in which he sometimes fucked other people. Both were soundproofed. I only sometimes saw him coming in a back door I never approached because the alarm sounding would bring the guards I wanted to avoid. He had taken me there once or twice. Our sexual encounters were few. He had other interests with me, and that was fine with me. My own slavery, my unconscionable contract, my unspeakable circumstances, and my most recent decision were enough to keep me functioning at a weird level of sexual excitement mixed with the decision not to be touched by the man who had "bought" me and the man who had auctioned me off to the highest bidder while I was tied naked to a post.

Being with Cole St. Martin, depending on him for anything, was very similar to being with Jesse.

I should have been questioning my very life, the tides that had washed me to this place, but instead I was moving fast, working out, thinking fast, panicking even more than I had been in the days after my arrangement with Cole.

I wanted it over. I wanted to know I no longer had any chance at all of rescinding my decision. That I wouldn't put my own moral comfort ahead of other lives.

And I wanted it never to happen.

My suite of rooms became much too small and confining and Cole must have given the order that I could come and go within reason without being stopped. I began running several times a day, short runs of a mile or two, but pushing myself to run faster than was comfortable. Punishments of a sort. Definite distractions.

When he came for me on the second day, I was neither surprised nor unhappy about it.

He didn't speak. When he came into my bedroom, so much more cavernous and not private than such a word sounds, I didn't have time to sink to my knees before he grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me to the chamber up the hall, the mostly soundproofed room where he took the others.

Not the room where he punished me or played with me.

The bed was huge. A four poster and probably a California king size if not something custom made. The posts were reinforced despite their aesthetic beauty, and sticky where duct tape had been wrapped around them and cut free. They were marked where handcuffs and chains and ropes and leather restraints had all rubbed on the wood while a captive squirmed and cried out under Cole's ministrations.

He wasn't speaking. His eyes were dark, so dark blue they were nearly black. His breathing was rough and he was nearly white, a shocking pallor. In case I thought he felt no moral qualms about what he had sworn to do, here was proof he was, perhaps, even more human than I was in his horror at what he'd set out to do.

He dragged me to the bed and I thought I wouldn't fight him. This felt right, somehow. But when he started to tape my wrists, thick gauntlets of tape and pulled it tight to the headboard posts, throwing me face down and pulling the tape so tight my upper body rose from the bed, I began to thrash, wordless or at least senseless shouting. It was completely automatic, this very human need to protect myself and live.

He swore and lashed out at me but the blow didn't land. Cole didn't strike in anger like that. Everything he did was controlled, no matter how frenzied it looked. The blow went wide and struck the pillows and he launched himself off the bed and returned with the black leather mask I'd seen.

I went wild then, screaming and thrashing, my legs churning the bedclothes, upper body threatening to wrench my shoulders from their sockets. Cole fought above me, grimly determined, and pulled the hood over my face, opening the zippers at the nose but sealing my screaming mouth behind the thick black leather. My eyes were behind padded folds of leather, completely blind, and my ears stopped up until I could only just hear him.

"If you can hear me, nod one time."

There was an eternal heartbeat during which I considered not answering. Because the terror driving me insisted he remove the hood.

Then I slackened just enough to nod one time.

"Can you breathe through your nose?"

Whatever was coming, it was going to be ugly, but he wasn't going to kill me. Had I ever thought he was going to? The fear was primal but it wasn't that he was going to kill me.

Only that I couldn't take whatever he was going to do.

I nodded one time.

He told me what to do for a safe word. I thought of all the people lost in the insanity that had led to this and gritted my teeth and determined I would not use that word.

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