1
Annie
"What are you doing here?"
Ahh, that was the loving question my fiancé greeted me with. My third day back in Seattle and I'd forced myself to go by the apartment. There were things there I wanted. My great-grandmother's copy of Alice in Wonderland. Some clothes. Photographs.
Not the fiancé. Or the apartment. Not the car I sometimes drove. That could be hauled off to charity. I wasn't totally certain they'd want it; the damn thing was an early model POS. Despite having been a fully fledged Seattle PD officer before a string of events led me to Southern Nevada, I suffered from the usual fate that befalls public servants: I'd been poor.
I'd also been undercover a lot, which seems like it should pay more, maybe because of the extreme danger and enhanced possibility of dying, but apparently you make the decision to do it, they figure you're crazy enough not to notice you're not making more money. I noticed. I'd been undercover enough to notice. Undercover so much I kind of got mixed up between my pseudonymous life and my real life and got hooked on opiates. Long story.
The short version was I went from coming "home" to the apartment and spending time with my betrothed, Mark Taylor, once every few months…
…to not at all.
More than that, I'd fallen into the hands of (the man who saved my life, actually) a sexual sadist who had me signing contracts that made me his submissive. In return, the sadist – CEO of a pharmaceuticals company – got me off fentanyl using rainforest cures.
Win-win-win, all the way around.
Except for with Mark. Who was standing in the doorway to our apartment, hands on his hips, looking way more buff than he had the last time I saw him.
And plenty pissed.
Okay, maybe I didn't blame him for not being overjoyed to see me. Truth was I wasn't overjoyed to see him, either. I'd put off coming back here for so many months I couldn't remember when I'd last seen him. I'd also been trying to figure out what to do about our relationship for more than a year, since before the run-in with fentanyl and moving to southern Nevada, seeking that rainforest cure. More than one fight between me and Mark ended with my suggestion that he stop waiting for me. It was hard enough for the significant others of regular beat cops or traffic cops. I was undercover. Undercover isn't a nine to five job. I was gone for months at a time, and I wasn't myself, and I wasn't being Mark's fiancée during that time. Undercover for me meant the drug trade and it meant embracing – often literally – the men who plied that trade. That kind of police work is a special kind of hell that takes a special kind of person to deal with it.
I never said so to his face but I didn't think Mark was the right kind of special.
Then too there was the little matter of him working with my father to have me committed.
When I'd returned to PD my last time in Seattle, they'd made me talk to their shrink. One thing led to another in the sessions and the shrink ended up being the first person who asked if I was in the habit of just going on assignment and letting Mark stew while I was undercover.
The question had kind of surprised me. Of course I just took off. It was my job. Mark was training to be a surgeon. He didn't ask me if he could go on hospital rotations for hours upon hours.
The shrink hadn't seemed to believe those things were equal.
My lieutenant hadn't either.
They'd both suggested I either marry Mark or cut him loose. There hadn't been much to say at that time because I still thought I wanted to come home and be Seattle PD again, preferably undercover. So I'd said as politely as I could I'd take it under advisement but it still was my life and Mark wasn't their employee or concern.
They hadn't liked that. They wouldn't have liked Fuck you and the high horse you rode in on any better. Some people are picky.
This time I didn't suppose they'd bother talking about Mark. But this time I was in town to quit Seattle PD. I'd been on administrative leave for nearly a year, recovering from my addiction and making a mess of my life. More or less I'd been living with Cole St. Martin in his weird and reclusive compound in the southern Nevada desert, pretty far way from much of anything. That was when I wasn't being kidnapped from my Master and taken by psychos to Paris.
And during that time, when my ex-gang from a Washington assignment had been assassinated and new drug lords took the streets, I'd begged St. Martin to let me leave. I knew how to handle them. I really did have a solution. I really was needed. It wasn't just ego and it wasn't anything about drugs, meaning procuring them for myself. I needed to get back to Seattle. I had to be able to help.
He refused. The thing with Cole St. Martin was, I could walk out. But I couldn't just walk back. I didn't know exactly where his compound was and if a billionaire doesn't want to be found, he isn't.
That time, St. Martin took care of the problem. Instead of giving me some slack in the leash to go back to Washington and take care of the problem in Seattle as I knew I could and as was my job, he took care of it from southern Nevada to make sure I didn't get hurt.
Took care of it to make sure nobody else got hurt either.
Took care of it, the two men who had sprung up out of nowhere to push more chemical death on people.
St. Martin took care of it permanently with zero questions or confusion as to what permanently meant. And so because he'd done that, because I'd identified them and pointed him at them and was an accomplice, and maybe for a couple other reasons I wasn't willing or able to identify myself yet, I'd become his submissive.
So now I was here not just to quit my job – that would come as no surprise I was pretty sure – but to quit my engagement, too. I was here to see Mark and end our relationship, this time in a way that wouldn't leave either of us uncertain about the fact that it was over.
Once I got done dealing with one of the sons of bitches that had me committed, I'd go see my father. The other son of a bitch. My one-time hero. My hero my whole life until he came up on charges for being a dirty cop. Even then I defended him, until he teamed up with Mark. So I'd go see him and tell him his last stunt – having me committed to a mental institution because I was in a BDSM relationship and he didn't understand it – had cost him. I wouldn't be visiting. Past telling him that, I meant.
I was ending a lot of things. I was also ending it with St. Martin for the time being, because events had caused him to turn vicious. As a sexual sadist he gloried in control. Not just controlling his submissive.
Exercising iron self-control so he knew he could hurt me and not hurt me. He'd lost that due to a series of events. When the couple he sent me to stay with proved even more violent and dangerous, I'd called off the whole thing, contract and all.
There's something highly not legal about a contract that bonds one into sexual submission. He didn't press me.
Now I was here to make sure Mark didn't press me anymore either.
"I told you I was in town."
Mark continued to glower at me. He also hadn't come into the apartment. He stood in the doorway watching me. That was probably a bad sign.
"I told you I'd be here when you got back from work." I'd been guessing work was where he was because that's pretty much all he'd done when we were together: Med school. Rotations. Or in the apartment trying one more time to convince me I needed to give him my emergency contact number before I left for undercover work.