Page 179 of Deep Cover

I hadn't been afraid to be with him again. That had been Jesse. That had been one time. He wasn't gentle. It was the anger and violence in his fucking that kept me his for as long as it did. It called to something restless and if not broken, then bent, inside me. Stupid or not, I'd had feelings for Jesse.

I had feelings about Vincent and Kie. I was terrified of them. And now they owned me.

That – that was normal.

There was a black SUV waiting for us as we left the plane. Of course there was. I'd been taken at gunpoint from in front of Cole's remote compound, heart hammering as I expected the shot to ring out. All my time as a cop and I'd end up shot in some squabble over sexual submissives.

Vincent and Kie walked ahead, assured that what he had ordered was taking place. That the armed men had surrounded me, two of them taking my arms to walk me out.

My body was still limp, reacting to whatever I'd been injected with when they took me. When I tried to put weight on my legs they buckled but not in the usual way when a limb has fallen asleep. Then they hurt and snap and seem to drop out like they have weight. They don't work, but they feel like they at least exist.

Instead, this was like finding a limb had gone to sleep crossed with something that made the limb go rubbery, unable to hold itself up. There was no strength there for me to command. There didn't seem to be any limb there to command.

That scared me. Not that I could have run even if both legs had been in perfect working order. Even if we were at an airport of any size, we were in a private part where things happen that aren't supposed to happen and that no one ever knows about if they're lucky. Those people who do know about those things happening don't talk about them. I'd become all too adept at understanding such places exist. I'd become all too used to being dependent on men I wanted to kill.

The thought jackknifed through me. Everything seized up and I tried to stop moving but there was no way, they propelled me forward, my feet doing some jerky half-assed version of walking, stumbling me in the wake of the two people I least wanted to go anywhere with. Least wanted to be at the mercy of.

Cole. He was right there inside the idea of wanting to kill the men who had taken me. The idea of who they had taken me from.

My mouth was already forming the words by the time I forced them back and down and inside. Is Cole all right? This was a stupid wife-swapping dinner party auction. Pay your fucking money or don't. Take back your brave and wonderful donation on behalf of stopping sex trafficking. Stop the stupidity of what you're doing. It's one thing to be a big, bad sexual sadist, but this is real. Stop. Please stop.

Just please don't have hurt Cole. Not for something so stupid. If it had come to that, I'd have come willingly.

Not willingly. But I would have gone with them.

I was bargaining as though the past could be changed. I knew better than anyone here that death was final. If Cole had been shot –

Last time I saw him, he was unharmed.

That meant nothing.

I wouldn't let myself think he'd been hurt. Moreover, I wouldn't let myself think that I cared. But we'd been running in the desert, outside the southern Nevada compound he had, miles from Las Vegas in the wastes where there's nothing. Running through the dawn, Cole having rousted me from a full sleep in order to go train for something that was never quite specified. Were we going to run a marathon? Or was it just Cole being Cole?

If the situation I was in were less dire, I'd admit to myself that waking somebody from a warm, comfortable sleep at five in the morning is the very definition of sadist.

It had been a long run, more than twelve miles, which I'd done surprisingly easily when my wall had always been hit at ten. Something about the number made me freeze up, convinced I couldn't run ten miles and I certainly couldn't run more.

Cole had taken me half that far again, in other runs. We'd been playing on the way back, racing each other a little here and there.

On the way back.

I stumbled again and the men dragging me swore and jerked me to my feet.

Cole had kissed me out there in the desert. There had been nothing mocking or malicious about it. He hadn't hurt me afterward, hadn't made me suck him off or get on my knees in the rocky dirt. He hadn't made me run back naked, he hadn't punished me for anything.

There had been a kiss. His mouth brushing mine, his hands splayed across my back to push me closer to him.

And then the run back to the house.

Where the black SUVs had been parked and the men in black fatigues had stood with their guns drawn on Cole's security, one of them already face down in the dirt and bleeding from a shot to the shoulder.

Cole had been standing when Vincent and Kie drove me away in the first of three cars before we reached the airport. Cole had still been standing.

But he was ringed by men with guns.

I wouldn't let them see me cry.

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