Page 230 of Deep Cover

24

Cole

When I looked at her, I saw him. Vincent. And Kie. That little nitwit that set him off.

Once upon a time, Vincent and I were friends. We worked our way up in our respective vocations. Mine was pharmaceuticals. His had been in the auto industry and a lot of the money he controlled had been left by his father and grandfather.

Of the circle who met and played for money, earned to help out the charities that combat sex trafficking, he was the one I first considered a friend.

At one of our annual dinners where we auctioned off the slave, sub, mistress, girlfriend or wife we'd brought, he bought Annie for two weeks for the sum of $5.5 million. That money could have gone to good use helping free victims being trafficked or get them help once they were pulled out of that life.

But that night I couldn't let Annie go. She wasn't a part of the same world I was. Her relationships had been vanilla and if there was a darkness within her, something that called to her until she learned about BDSM and Master/slave and the rest of it, the whips and canes and chains and spanking benches, punishments and very few rewards, that something was new and triggered by her proximity to me.

That didn't mean I was going to free her. Maybe not even after the rainforest cure did its work on her opiate addiction. But she was too new and too raw and looked far too young to let Vincent Geddes go off with her.

Which was why he took her.

I could mourn the loss of a friend, even if I was responsible for pulling the trigger.

None of it was Annie's fault. Not even her original addiction, caused by circumstance and the people who put fentanyl on the street in the first place. But she was the one here. She was the reason Vincent was dead. She was the reason she had been taken.

She was the one here to pay for that.

Since we’d returned I'd carefully schooled my emotions. The rage. Of course the rage. There was no other emotion for me except simple human decency and the need to see the damaged made whole again.

It had been that way with my sister Emily, only I'd been too late. It was that way with Ariel, trying to instill in her some desire to live. To make her want to fight back and until that day, to give her the solace she craved by taking her body down to its essential systems. By hurting her so badly that no remembered hurt could compete.

By letting her know someone cared enough about her to do such things.

And Lily. Damaged beyond even what could be salvaged. All there was for Lily was keeping her safe and giving her what pleasure she could take from what she had left to her.

That was my way. I didn't love these women. I didn't love Marilyn or any of the subs I took into the room where I was free to do anything I pleased.

I didn't love Annie.

This was what I did. What I did wasn't enough now. Annie had slipped somewhere beyond what I was used to. Maybe it was her being complicit in Vincent's death.

That fed my own dark. It seemed that she was trying to keep it from me but I was positive that by the time I shot Vincent Geddes, he was already effectively removed from this world.

And Annie had done that.

I couldn't forgive losing the chance to punish him for what he had done.

Annie was afraid of Kie as well. Some deep, superstitious dread had settled into her, the need to go back somehow and see for herself the bitch was dead.

I wasn't going to do it. Kie was dead. Vincent was dead.

Now it was cleansing the filth from Annie. So there were the morning runs and the rest of the rituals and the breakfasts of glasses of water and clean fruit and vegetables and fish or organic chicken breast and a good spanking over my knee, her white ass reddening under my palm. Forcing her to count because it kept her attention focused, away from brooding over things that could never now be changed, or things she still felt ashamed had happened to her.

It was a decent routine. One meant to clear out mental and physical barriers to healing.

It wasn't working. Not for her.

Not for me. The rage built every day and the runs I took Annie on at dawn were the second of each day for me – I'd already been up and on the treadmill, unable to sleep whether I kept her chained in my bed or locked in hers.

When nothing else works, information sometimes does. I researched who owned the house, but it remained in the care of the shell corporation Vincent had set up. Eventually it would be sold and the money would settle into his estate. If nobody could prove he was dead, that money would sit uselessly for years while the courts maundered around it.

Past that, even with the reach I had – because money opens doors – all I could find out was the same thing the authorities could find out: Vincent Geddes and his partner had vanished.

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