Page 181 of Deep Cover

My heart still pounded and I was still waiting. Just because they hadn't touched me didn't mean they wouldn't.

The house was huge. No wonder the property was so extensive. Huge and white with columns and a weirdly flattened roof. It made it look like a bank from the 1930s or something equally improbable.

Locked iron gates swung open to let the cars through. They were operated by a remote inside the car. Probably Vincent had one also. Kie, not so much.

I ran an eye over the gates. Iron bars, nearly impossible to scale. The fence went up a good eight feet. Some counties prohibit such high fences but you can see right through one that's just iron bars so why not? If I was going to run from here, I'd have to have a way to get over the gate.

The drug was wearing off. The headache was receding. The cottony confusion was exiting and my thoughts were more clear. The fact that they didn't care that I knew where we were could be a bad thing or mean nothing at all. It could mean they were never going to let me go or were even planning to kill me.

Or it could mean that nobody was going to believe a thing I said if I got out of here, either because they would have returned me to being a junkie or because Vincent had shitloads of money.

One last reason snuck up as we pulled onto the grounds. Maybe we weren't going to stay here long enough for it to matter if I knew where here was. If I was right about the timeline, they'd taken me at about eight fifteen and it wasn't much past eleven a.m.

Vincent had money. He could move as fast as he needed to.

No one took my arms to drag me from the car and up the stairs. I missed the support, however meanly provided. At the urging of the guns behind me, I made my way up the drive and the curved front stairs, through the entryway and into the cool of the marble floors and airy ceilings.

The place would be impressive if I were there willingly. Maybe spending the weekend with a beautiful movie star. The guy who played Thor, maybe. Just for a second the fantasy was seductive. The whole thing wrapped around me, the idea of being the wife of some guy and living just somewhere, a rental house maybe, saving up to buy our first, and he'd come home from work and have a beer and take me to bed and partway through my mind would wander, maybe imagining Chris Hemsworth while he imagined I was - who? Scarlett Johansson? Halle Berry?

A young Winona Ryder if we wanted somebody I actually resembled.

And then after we had sex –

"In here."

Vincent had come out of a room off to the side of the entrance and I realized I hadn't even noticed him leaving. Usually in a new place, all my senses are on high alert. Paranoia. It's part of the undercover job. So the drug was still working on me, softening all my usual instincts.

Going in the room was a bad idea. Mostly because he wanted it. Not going in there meant dealing with the guys with guns. Or Kie and her taser. Or more drugs. Not going in wasn't an option because I had zero control and fighting would just be delaying whatever was going to happen.

For now, it was watch and learn and hope I'd learn enough before all the bad shit started coming down.

That there was bad shit in the offing was inescapable. It wasn't even a question.

I shrugged and went along and the instant I stood in front of him, he slapped me. Not hard, but it was enough to rattle the drug a little more out of my system.

"You say yes, sir to me, the same as you would to that idiot St. Martin. You don't look me in the face, you look at the ground. You do not shrug; you obey."

I dropped my gaze without speaking. Not looking at him would be a pleasure. Vincent wasn't bad looking. A woman seeing him on the street might notice him if she liked very clean cut, very blond, tall and semi-muscled men.

But hopefully any woman with an ounce of self preservation would run the fuck the other way because his eyes – they were stones. Small and hard and dark, indeterminate in color and full of a slow, cold anger and the will to hurt.

Not looking at him was just fine.

But right before I dropped my gaze I saw what else was in the room. I was running before I'd made the conscious decision to move. The drug was out of my system. My newly developed runner's legs were doing just fine.

I was in flight.

Kie's taser dropped me and Vincent nodded to the men with guns who picked me up and put me on the exam table.

Kie stripped me. She enjoyed the hell out of it. She cut my clothes off, in no hurry, letting me sense the men around me, the lights overhead, the huge empty room the table was in and Vincent standing there waiting.

My heart pounded so hard she saw it.

"Look, sir," she said, stroking one sharp nail down my breast. "She's scared shitless." Then she giggled. "We could make her shit."

Vincent grunted. "Some other time. Get on with it."

In pique, she dug a nail in and a thin line of blood ran from my nipple onto the table.

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