Page 153 of Deep Cover

Where did I fit? I was being defended by Cole for being laughed at in a moment of extreme pain and panic when Cole himself had allowed that moment to occur and had allowed Jason to exist even after my protests.

It should have been too little too late. But I was looking forward to seeing what Cole was going to do. For a minute it looked like Jason would win. He was big enough to refuse to remove his shirt and to simply leave.

But he wasn't big enough when, responding on their own or to some signal I didn't see, the other, more serious but blank and unfriendly guard appeared at Jason's elbow, accompanied by all the muscle in the room.

Jason looked at each of them with a sick sense of panic.

In the end he opted to take off his own shirt rather than be stripped of it by the other goons. His upper body was impressive, if colorless, with an eight-pack and slabs of pectoral muscles, heaping shoulder caps, bulging bi's and tri's.

He walked to the St. Andrews cross of his own volition and held his hands up to have them buckled into the restraints there.

"Pick a number between 20 and 40," Cole told me.

Oh, fuck, no, don't make me more a part of this.But he had and there seemed to be zero way to win. So I chose 30 as being halfway between – he was definitely going to get 20 and while there was no point in assigning him 40, there was also no reward for requiring only 20.

I stood back and watched as the single-tail whip struck.

He made it to twenty-two before he started to scream.

I'm aware there are different ways to whip someone. There are tutorials online, there are classes in places like the dungeons in San Francisco where I went when I was searching for a way back to Cole. Whipping can be soft and sensual, even with a bull whip, if the person doing the beating knows what they're doing. Or it can flay flesh from bone. I have no doubt but that it's possible to kill with it.

Cole handled the whip like a true sociopath. He was emotionless, cold and directed, and I doubted very much that he'd have whipped Jason himself if he hadn't been. His intention was to beat, to punish and to humiliate. Not to kill.

But blood started up after number twenty-five, and twenty-six through thirty all left cuts behind. Apparently anticipated, because Cole threw the whip into a bucket of disinfectant the instant he finished.

Jason collapsed with the last blow, his legs going boneless. He hung from his wrists, his back bleeding freely, and I wasn't certain he was completely conscious. The other house guard, the one who had never laughed at me but only watched, sometimes interested and sometimes, I thought, disgusted, stepped forward along with the hired muscle.

"Not yet," Cole snapped at them. "You can take him in ten minutes."

I thought the other guards were going to object. Probably it was their job to stop things like this, not stand by idly. But they stood down, hands behind their backs, eyes straight ahead. Cole looked over at me, his face impassive but his eyes asked a question I answered with a nod.

I was all right. The milk had done what it was meant to do. All that was left was the nauseating scent of pepper, and I thought that was probably imagination as much as anything else.

Kie huddled across the room. It wasn't an elegant kneel now, but a bundle of punished, hurting girl. I couldn't summon up any sympathy. I didn't know her story. Maybe she'd been betrayed and bought. Maybe she was underage or maybe she had been. I couldn't tell how old she was by looking at her.

Being a police officer I'm supposed to be just a little more – moral? -han other people. I'm supposed to have the ability to see that everyone is treated to justice, if nothing else.

Fuck that. I wanted to go over and kick her where she held her arms around herself in pain. The only thing stopping me was that I'd be punished if I did.

I'd had enough for now.

At ten minutes Cole released Jason to his comrades. I was watching as they cut him down. There was an ambulance waiting outside, and I wondered if I'd ever have to see him again and if I didn't, whether I would search for him when released from my contract. Then I thought that Jason, with his temper and his obvious delight at the pain of others, very likely was under contract himself. Because how many people out there would take a job like this? They had to at least tolerate, if not enjoy, the sort of sadistic fun and games that went on under St. Martin's roof. They had to be trustworthy, someone who would remain loyal and not report Cole or sell out for money or turn him over to the police. Not that the police could do anything right away.

Or maybe at all. Strangely, there'd been no classes I'd ever taken that taught what to do if consenting adults appeared to be consenting to something so weird as being whipped for sexual pleasure. Or pain.

The attendants didn't come in. I heard the rattle of the stretcher as they came to the door, but the door wasn't opened to them. Instead, Jason was taken down and dragged across the room. His head wasn't lolling, though. His eyes were bright and aware. He was clearly in extreme pain and as they passed me, his eyes locked on mine.

He had done nothing to help me since I'd been brought to the compound the first time. I had no reason to believe he ever would have. Jason clearly had a mix of masochist and sadist, and he'd enjoyed seeing me stripped naked, beaten, examined, strip searched and, for all I knew, he'd seen Cole the few times he fucked me.

But where he'd been an asshole, unrelentingly so, he was now a downright enemy.

The attendants took him from the other guards. They were stony-faced, not giving away a single emotion. They strapped Jason face down on the stretcher and gingerly laid a sheet over his back, probably to keep the wounds as sterile as possible.

I had an idea they would report a call had come in and the man had been found somewhere outside or in some abandoned structure, out of his mind and unable to communicate who had done this to him.

That Jason wouldn't talk I had no doubt.

That the EMTs were paid off was also a given.

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