The guards shifted all the time. They were loyal to the money more than to me and that was fine. They were soldiers in my opinion, mercenaries on the front line keeping me and the compound and any subs I had safe.
They'd been overtaken twice and maybe I should have fired them for that, or something even more drastic considering that firing men who knew about the - proclivities of the CEO of St. Martin Pharma - could be considered stupid.
Thing was, they weren't stupid. They already knew the odds and they weren't going to talk. I trusted that. Enough that one of them had left to get married. Strangely, while looking for a good job that would pay for him and his new wife, he found the perfect job in rural Alaska.
Now I had Kie's guards. I thought there were eight total, who'd been inside and out when everything went down. They'd held rifles on me. They'd controlled Annie and held guns on her.
But if, like my men, they were loyal to their bank accounts rather than anything else, then maybe I could use them.
"They're in the maze, sir." Jason stood at a kind of parade rest. I didn't tell him not to.
"And Ms. Geddes?" I watched him.
He still had the tiniest problem with keeping his own feelings inside. There was the slightest hint of a lifted lip in scorn before he checked himself.
I said nothing. I felt that way about Kie myself.
"She's in a white room."
Those were rooms in the maze with no skylights, no alcove for a toilet, nothing but a bed bolted to the floor and a prison toilet and sink coming out of the wall. I wasn't sure what I was building them for when I started except that in a sense, I was in the drug trade.
And in a different sense, I was interrupting the drug trade. I was making cures. Sometimes I was traveling south of the U.S. border in order to get more of what I needed to make the cures. Why wouldn't – certain parties – be upset about that?
But I'd gotten more use out of the underground cells, with and without skylights, from subs who needed specialized discipline. From Ariel who needed safety more than anything else (that's what I was coming to realize, anyway) and from people like Kie who were too dangerous not to put on ice while I determined what else to do with them.
"You have men posted down there?"
He didn't quite look at me like I was crazy or laugh. He just said, "Yes, sir. Every exit and a couple in the maze."
For the next couple minutes we talked about how much it would cost to buy out the less loyal and what to do with the more loyal, and we talked about Kie and he asked a couple respectful questions about Annie, mostly ascertaining if she was back and what that would mean for protocol.
By the time we finished, the hour was three-quarters over. Another ten minutes and I'd probably let myself admit how keyed up I was over Annie's choice.
I let Jason go and locked the door behind him. I pulled double shades over the window, then crossed to a safe, spun the dial and took out a key from inside. That key was used to open another safe, the one that was built into the wall behind the one with the combination.
From that safe I took a secure phone and called a billionaire who went by the name of Red and who I thought just might make a home for Kie.
By the time I finished, it was minutes to the hour. I shut down everything in my office and went to find Annie.
10
Annie
He left me with a countdown.
But he left me. I had time to myself to think. I hadn't realized what a luxury that was until I started to have it again. I hadn't in recent years. There was always something. If I wasn't undercover with an assignment then I was being asked to decide whether or not to go under on the next. If I was undercover, then 24/7 I was considering who I was supposed to be and how I was supposed to act. There was never a time it came so naturally that I didn't have to think about it.
With Mark, it was on and off. Sometimes he talked non-stop and others he was deep into his studies, so far into his own deep cover world it was like he wasn't even there.
The hospital had been a whole other world, one in which no one ever shut up.
But when Cole left me in solitude, he left me with less than an hour to decide.
What I had with Mark was over. My career with PD honestly couldn't have gone on that much longer. If I hadn't gotten hooked on fentanyl it might have been another year, another 18 months at the outside before somebody figured out who I was.
It wouldn't even take a mistake. All it would take was one too many times a deal went belly up and I was present. Or everybody went down but one person on the street saw me walking around loose too soon after. Yeah, I spent my nights in jail, but face it, I didn't spend anywhere near as much time as everybody else.
There are perks to not really being a bad guy.
The sex I had with Mark was middle class and middle of the road. If we stayed together, we'd have to spice things up, but the few times he'd tried tying me up I'd been iffy about it. Sometimes I was all for it and other times I nearly bit his head off.
Which meant to me that it was him and not the act. Or at least how I reacted to him on any given day.
There should never be a day when I wanted to bite his head off.
The sex I'd had with Jesse had usually been fast, loud, painful and dangerous and I'd loved it. I might have loved him. Damn, my father would have skipped the mental hospital and sent me straight to an old-fashioned, honest to God (pun intended) convent if he ever knew about Jesse.
And Cole?
Best not to think about that while I was trying to make a somewhat less well informed decision.
Or maybe that was exactly what I needed to consider.
There were all the other details. I'd chafed under Vincent's control but that was Vincent – he was violent, stupid, dangerous, horrible, and another list of words that wouldn't go far enough to stating how much I hated him.
But Cole. Cole –
Wasn't different at all, I admitted, nearly laughing at myself in surprise. Cole was controlling. He was a sexual sadist. The way he played his games, he always won. But then, he was the billionaire. Of course he always won.
There had only been a few times we’d had sex. Mostly it was him disciplining me, correcting me, punishing me … the words were causing a chain reaction in me as one part of my body after the next lit up and started to burn.
He was physically attractive, his hair usually long and swept back, his cheekbones and jaw prominent. His eyes were deep and very dark, his nose a straight arrow, and his mouth – it wasn't just that smile, the one that said Oh, I could fuck you up and you'd love it – wanna see? It was also the muscle, the chest, the intellect, the mouth on him, not the kissing one but the way he talked.
He was hot and he fucked like a dream and there was no time, not even once, not even after the first time he did a double ladder on my ass and thighs, going up to a count of fifty and back down again with two canes. I hadn't thought it possible to take so much pain and I had hated him the entire time it happened.
But.
But I'd stayed.
My father thought I was insane, if he didn't simply see the hospital as a great dumping ground for the daughter who no longer made him proud.
But my father didn't matter. My father had sold me out. Back up and look at me for a change, outside all the males in my life: Jesse, Mark, my father, Cole.