Page 208 of Deep Cover

13

Annie

"Come on. We're going for a run."

From the couch where I'd spent the last two days, I looked up to see Kie in the doorway. It was shut tight behind her. I hadn't heard her come in, not the key in the lock or the key once security let her in.

Possibly there'd been no key either before or after she entered. I hadn't tried the door once in the time I'd been here. It could have been open the whole time. I had no interest in trying it.

Cole hadn't come.

I had no interest in much of anything.

Cole hadn't come, and Vincent had played his edgy knife games with me. I had bled and he had cleaned the wounds, his antiseptic ideas as harsh as the initial cuts. Now they throbbed with my heartbeat, little suns pulsing under my skin, reminding me he had been here and here and here.

But not there. Not yet. For whatever reason, Vincent hadn't raped me.

He was having Kie two or three times a night though, her screams ripping through the rooms, ringing in the walls.

And now she stood in my doorway.

"We're what?" I asked.

"Going for a run." She said this like it was perfectly reasonable. Like she was one of my sisters, the way they would insist I was going to do something they considered normal and girly and that if they just said it as a fait accompli, then their permanently un-girly sister would come along.

Nothing had interested me in days. But this did.

I stirred on the couch. "Outside?"

Kie snorted. She was tiny and fiery and batshit crazy, burning with it. The cuts on her face kept breaking open – or Vincent kept breaking them open – and they made her as horrific as something out of a horror movie. "Of course outside. I don't do treadmills."

I tried to figure out how this would work. "Vincent's going to just let us go outside?"

Kie actually looked horrified as she looked back over her shoulder. "Don't let him hear you call him that!"

As if she gave a damn about what happened to me.

More as if she might share in the punishment if she didn't correct me when I sinned.

I sighed. "Fine. Our Lord and Master is going to let us out of the house?"

"Yes. With guards."

And guns. How delightful.

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