1
Annie
The helicopter kicked up dust and stones as it settled onto the desert floor. April winds rocked the craft for the second half of the flight from Seattle, making me tremble with nausea and fear. Las Vegas appearing in the distance was a welcome sight.
I spent the flight hunched forward, every part of my anatomy straining in the direction we were headed. As if I could make everything move faster if I jutted my chin forward, strained my neck. We'd arrive what, two seconds faster? It's only a two hour flight between the cities, but two hours is forever when lives hang in the balance. It had taken forever to reach the airport. It felt like forever once at the airport, transferred from hiding in the back of an ambulance, sure at any second a cry would go up and security guards and Seattle PD would race in to apprehend me.
As if anyone cared about one twenty-four year old escaping a mental hospital where she'd been involuntarily committed only because two men in her life found it expedient.
As the chopper landed it was only four hours earlier that I'd been an in-patient in a mental hospital, involuntarily committed by my father and the man who would soon officially be my ex-fiancé. Logically they might have wanted to have me committed for opiate addiction, though a reputable hospital would have redirected them to a treatment facility.
Where I would not have gotten any better. Or at least not permanently better. The return rate and the number of people addicted again is insanely high.
But I had been getting help while committed. Not the help they thought I needed. The hospital dealt with an addiction I no longer had. And while my father was concerned with that opiate addiction, temporarily beaten or not, it wasn't his main concern once he found out the circumstances surrounding my stay in Vegas, and it had never been Mark's first priority.
Because when the addiction first took hold, I'd been "sold" to a billionaire CEO of a pharmaceuticals company by a fellow Seattle cop who had as much right to sell me as I did to sell the helicopter I'd just bailed out of.
Now my feet hit the desert floor, instantly finding the first of the rocks and stickers that would sink into my bare flesh. I'd left the hospital with no shoes, only the shapeless sweats the staff dressed us in. The EMT driver who smuggled me out, someone I'd gone to high school with who believed me when I said I was undercover in the hospital and things had gone wrong with the assignment, had brought me Walmart jeans and t-shirt but he hadn't brought me shoes.
I couldn't blame him. He thought I was Seattle PD, not a – what? - junkie returning to her "Owner" in a rural desert compound outside las Vegas.
Not that the latter sounded any more convincing. It would have been less convincing to anyone why I had remained in the desert if the addiction was cured and the contract binding me to the man who cured it was something I considered illegal and unenforceable.
I didn't believe I'd really been sold to Cole St. Martin. CEO, philanthropist, beautiful long-limbed, tall man with a smile that looked like an inverted triangle, all devilish glee.
Sexual sadist.
His investigations into using rainforest naturals to craft cures for opiate addiction were working. He'd bought me from a crooked cop because he wanted someone who would be indebted to him, someone who could disappear for a long period of time the same way an undercover, deep cover cop could, or someone going into rehab.
I was all those things, in danger of losing the career I loved and possibly my life. He'd honestly helped me. I was clean, off fet, because of him.
He'd honestly hurt me. His sadism wasn't make believe. His Master/slave, Owner/slave, Dominant/submissive or any other Control/controlled relationship that could be described wasn't a game.
It was serious.
But for a cop who cut her teeth in narcotics and then went undercover by the age of 24, but who looked 17 and sometimes still felt it, maybe a little control didn't hurt.
Insane I'd think that. I was the least likely person ever to bend her will to another's.
Then again, I was feeling panic for him, running as fast as I could because the helicopter hadn't used the helipad on the roof of the compound.
No. It had followed the directions of the psycho bitch who was holding Cole hostage in his own home, threatening to kill him if I didn't come back to Southern Nevada, didn't answer her demands.
Kie. If she had a last name, I didn't know it. If she'd been married to the other man who'd hurt me but who, having kidnapped me, meant for that hurt to end in death, then her last name was Geddes.
I wasn't convinced they'd been married. More likely bound in some bond of blood – hers and that of the people they hurt together. Kie was a masochist, that was certain, and had given herself or been given to Vincent. But she was also a sadist, both sexually and otherwise. What she had done to me during a gathering under Cole's roof had caused massive pain. When she'd been punished for it, a punishment even the masochist in her didn't enjoy, I had no doubt she had become fully invested in Vincent kidnapping me from Cole.
Then once Vincent had me prisoner in Paris, Kie hurt me again, but this time, not held back by any other person, she herself panicked at the amount of pain she put me in and ran for a way to neutralize it.
That one act would have been the only reason I showed her any mercy when Cole rescued me and together we killed Kie's Master. I would have let her live as a fellow survivor of Vincent Geddes.
But Vincent had supposedly left her for us to find. Kie was supposed to be dead.
She wasn't. Just as Cole discovered where I was and was preparing to do something to get me out of the hospital and back to Southern Nevada with him, Kie who was supposed to be a dead body in Paris, showed up as a live bitch in Nevada.
For two hours between Seattle and Vegas I've been picturing all sorts of scenarios. Because it was supposed to be Cole who called the hospital pretending to be my fiancé, relaying a plan to free me and take me back to Vegas via helicopter. If it had worked that way, I'd have been taken out directly and not hidden in a series of ambulances that smuggled me to the airport. Likely I'd have been flown directly from the roof of the hospital to the compound itself. Cole had money and money had a way of getting Cole the results he wanted.
I wouldn't have been dropped barefoot in the desert two miles from my destination.
The Nevada desert is full of ram's head thorns that feel like thick needles when stepped on, full of foxtails which are like the tops of wheat when it's growing, but all hard and sharp and designed to catch on things.
Every growing thing wants to spread itself around, get planted somewhere new where it can thrive, and so every growing thing develops ways of transporting its seeds. In the high desert, that usually involves becoming a thorn.
So running barefoot over the desert floor, everything hurts. But Cole has hurt me more than this and I'm desperate to get to him. The only time I succumb to the pain in my feet is for one thorn too big to run with.
Then I cover two miles of trail-running in just over twenty minutes. I'm flying by the time I come around to the front entrance of the compound where it faces southeast, and the only reason I stop is the guards who draw down on me instantly, assault rifles at the ready, as if one slim, five-five female could fuck them up.
I could. Black belt Survival-trained. Hand to hand combat. And having ridden with the Brotherhood in Seattle when I was undercover with Jesse, the leader of the gang. It was that assignment that led directly to my opiate addiction, after Jesse was killed and I was out from under the assignment, back with my fiancé (ex- fiancé, he has no idea how much it's ex). That was when I found the roll of bills in one pocket of my jeans as home, theoretically, and safe and sound, I started to do laundry. One roll of bills from the pocket of a pair of jeans, and the first sample free, everybody! Baggies of fentanyl.