Page 188 of Deep Cover

4

Annie

Three more cities in two more days. By the time we landed somewhere we were going to stay, I had no idea if we were even in the U.S. anymore. Being blindfolded fucks with your sense of time. And Vincent got in the habit of putting sound-canceling headphones on me. I couldn't see or hear or move from my seat as each plane took off and landed. I kept waiting for the violation, the pain, the punishment or just the general fucking with, but it didn't happen.

As with most things like that, the fact of it not happening was more disturbing than if it had.

I had time on the flights to worry about being away from Cole. Not just about Cole himself but about being off the rainforest drug. I'd asked Cole from time to time, when we conversed like two humans rather than Master and slave, if this was something I'd have to do for the rest of my life or something that had a definite ending.

He never answered me.

Having my hands cuffed behind me or to the arms of the seat on the plane, able only to feel the lift and thrust of the thing, it was surprisingly like I’d expected sensory deprivation would feel like. For me, there were no otherworldly visions. No guides showing me the way, no aliens breaking through, no visions of things to come or conversations with long dead relatives.

What there was, was the exact thing I so often filled my days to overflowing with, in order to avoid: Time to think.

I had been surprised initially that Cole was willing to simply yank me from my life. Of course, a man who thinks he's buying a woman probably doesn't give a lot of thought to the consequences of that purchase once he returns her. (The symbolism there, or metaphor or allegory or whatever it is, was too good to pass up during the long flights once the fear of what Vincent might do to me faded into fear of boredom and contemplation.)

Because the thing was, Cole had accepted me (paid for me, to someone who had no right to sell me in the first place, one of those things my mind still refused to let drop once the memory was raised) to help me. Whatever I might think about his unorthodox methods and however much I might fight letting him or me know I liked them – to an extent – I had arrived on his doorstep with a note pinned to my metaphorical collar that I was to be returned. Fixed. Mended. Good to go.

But good to go. Cole St. Martin wasn't the destination. He was the guide, for lack of a better term. I had always intended to go back to my real life and even tried to run away to it more than once, before I was ready. I was a cop. I was needed. There were actually things I could do to help take down some of the ugliness happening in my community. Not ego, not bullshit – I had been undercover long enough, I knew shit.

None of that had mattered. Not my fiancé, not my career, not the drugs. When it did matter, Cole had sent someone to take out the newest gang moving into the neighborhood where the Brotherhood had been deposed. Jesse had been a lot of things, dangerous among them, but he'd at least had a cutoff age under which he wouldn't sell and none of his dealers would either. That age was much too young but at least it was a guideline.

The new dealers, they were deadly. So I'd tried to run back to Seattle because I knew I could help and Cole instead took those men out on my say so.

I owed him now.

Owned wasn't that farfetched anymore.

But the thing that came back to me as the plane sighed across whatever airspace we were in, was that Cole didn't see me going back to my real life. Whether he intended to stop giving me limited communication with Mark and my family, to disappear me for good – he more than had the money to do so, I wasn't deluded about that – or he simply thought I'd find some other path, I wasn't clear on.

Before Vincent had interrupted everything, I'd been studying criminal justice, working to do all the course work so when I left Cole - That was hard to imagine, somehow harder now - When I reached a point where I could leave Cole for limited amounts of time, I could perhaps return. Or did he intend for me to be an online distance learning student? I'd be ready to go through courses and get my degree and apply for DEA. Instead of returning to Seattle where no matter what people had been told about my absence being in-house, out-of-touch rehab, it was bound to leak out at some point that my rehab stint had been anything but normal.

Cole didn't think I was going back to real life.

Vincent wanted to destroy my real life.

Kie, fucking crazy bitch, wanted to destroy my life, period, end of sentence.

And me? I could no longer imagine my life with Mark, visiting with his family at Christmas, waiting for him to come back from a shift at the hospital, the dutiful wife or the dutiful DEA agent who worked investigations from behind a desk because there was no way Mark could deal with me being deep cover.

So what did I see? A life of weirdness and pain with Cole? A life of terror and beatings with Vincent, chained to something because there was no other way he'd keep me? Trying out the whole thing with Mark? He'd waited so long to have me as his. It seemed unfair to go back just to tell him he never would.

Maybe disappearing was the best choice. As long as that choice was mine.

But not with Vincent Geddes.

Eventually the flying stopped. All those flights in two days. Wherever we landed, there was no ocean nearby as far as I could tell from the aroma. The sky was blue, the buildings were tall, and the place that Vincent took us to was out of the city. This time he did restrain and blindfold me, so I had no idea what city we were in or where the grounds of the estate he held me in were located.

The room he showed me to was big and spacious and well-appointed, but as anonymous as a hotel room. Except for the restraints every few feet. Rings drilled into ceiling and floor and walls, with carabiners hanging from them. I would remain cuffed with thick leather around my wrists, ankles, waist and neck, locked in place and the key pocketed by Vincent.

The restraint on my neck almost tipped me over into a panic attack. Vincent, seeing it coming, simply locked me into the room and left me to deal with it. When he came back he did so with a female guard, who held a gun trained on me as he cuffed the wrist restraints to my neck, then cut away my shirt and bra. I was naked to the waist.

Kie was nowhere in evidence. Since he had dragged her back by her hair, away from me as the men held me on the table, I had seen almost nothing of her. Whatever he'd done, it was part of their dynamic, not anything he did for me, but I appreciated it anyway.

Vincent had me sit on the side of the bed. It felt weird to be wearing jeans and no shirt, and weirder still to have my arms up where they blocked his view of me.

He had other things on his mind than humiliation or pain, or rather, it was another kind of humiliation. Coming out of the room's closet, he crossed to where I sat and knelt at my feet. That alone was unusual enough to make me edge back away from him. He made an impatient sound and pulled me to him, then bent and removed my shoes and socks.

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