Page 160 of Deep Cover

"Is there any of that you don't have or can't get?"

"Background checks," I said, and I was looking them up before he waved his hand. "Criminal record check, credit score check, interviews with former employers, neighbors and friends."

I had a criminal record, but every bit of it was obviously fake to anyone who could do a law enforcement background check. So far, I had no criminal record that was real for Annie and not for Lily. Credit score? I didn't think I had one. Former employers might be a problem, but Cole didn't seem to think so.

"Sir? You're sure about the former employers?"

He smiled a triangular mischievous and angry smile so alarming I wondered what he had up his sleeve. I'd take that response as a yes.

At night, when Cole wasn't with me, and wasn't punishing me, or playing with me just because he felt like it, I had a lot of time out in the holding cell to think. Now that things had changed to an extent, I had criminal justice course work to do and I had martial arts classes through Tad Charles’s YouTube and through Tad just calling up? and watching me on the laptop camera, telling me what to do next, what to practice, how to improve. I was a first degree black belt, but Tad was a third.

That all felt good and it all took up time and so did kneeling on the floor and servicing Cole when he demanded it, so did eating the healthy god-awful breakfasts he forced on me and the morning routine that still made me anxious just thinking about it.

Even so, I had time to think and it hadn't occurred to me that my life could change when I finished my year and a day with Cole. I'd been so focused on getting back to what I loved – what I had always loved and still professed to love – it hadn't ever hit me that I might not love it anymore and that I might want to change.

It definitely hadn't hit me that I could change and that the change could come from me rather than being something external.

I'd never played in my sisters' worlds. I'd never wanted the husband and babies and part time job or work from home or have a career and then a child so I could look back and say I'd done it all. Hell, I was still proud of that day I was talking to my instructor after Taekwon-Do class and he casually took his do-bak off and changed into his street clothes because the men's locker rooms were closed for refurbishment that week. We'd been the only two in the do-chang and it had just been so natural, I don't know that he ever was aware of it and I wasn't until later.

I'd worked hard at being one of the guys and making sure there was no glass ceiling because I was, after all, one of them.

I'd gotten engaged to a man who due to his own career and his own aspirations and the amount of years it took to be what he wanted to be would never be around. I groused about his rotations but I would be gone for months at a time and when I came back and he was actually home, actually present in the apartment, I felt smothered.

For all that I was undercover, not who I said I was, and doing a job that eventually brought down a part of the Brotherhood (though not in time to save Jesse), I still liked riding with them. I liked having rage sex with Jesse. It wasn't just that I could, that I could separate out my feelings, whatever they were, for my fiancé, and have sex with the leader of the gang, but that I actually enjoyed it. For all of that freedom to consider myself who I thought I was – free, independent, brave, in control, able to take care of herself.

All along I'd been doing what men wanted. My father the cop who had no sons and who I adored and hero worshipped and loved. I thought he'd been an awesome cop and if he bent the law a few times to make sure that something that needed to happen actually happened, I'd be on his side every time. He knew what the neighborhood needed. He understood community.

I'd had a male handler who sent me into harm's way because that was my job, but he sat back and watched and when I fucked up too completely for everyone to overlook, he was the one who sold me to Cole St. Martin. And I acted like it was some kind of inside joke, as inside as it can get because I was the only one – other than Cole, other than Samuels – who knew.

My fiancé, guilting me into behavior after behavior that I'd have never participated in without him. You're home, let's have sex. When I wanted to be home drinking a beer and watching a Seahawks game. He made demands. He made requests. He told me things like I was my mother's rock and she'd need to depend on me when my father was ill but I hadn't seen that for myself and I wasn't sure even now it was true.

Cole. Dominating. Expecting to dominate. For all that I said I was free-thinking, I hadn't even tried to challenge the contract. I hadn't done anything to Jason until Kie did something to me and Cole took care of Jason. Then all I'd done was make an enemy.

Cole St. Martin. Acting as if my body wasn't my own.

Acting as if he knew what was right for me.

It hadn't occurred to me to come out of this trial and out of this contract and go do something else on my own. Even now it was Cole who suggested DEA.

I liked the idea. The war on drugs was a sham, a lie told the American people and a lot of money pissed away. But the DEA were the ones who could bring down the people selling into schools. I could do more with them than I could at this point with Seattle PD. Especially since the DEA could relocate me.

I almost smiled to myself. Letting them relocate me. Bunch of men deciding where I was going to live.

So what did I even want to do?

That would take some thinking.

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