That didn't mean I wasn't scared shitless, and all the more so when someone else's welfare was in my hands.
"For one thing, my peaches and cream complexion," she said and drew the razor over the healing cuts on her cheeks hard enough that a trickle of blood followed the blade.
I swallowed convulsively. I don't like knives or blades. It's too easy to get hurt, too hard to defend yourself against them without getting hurt.
Especially if you happen to be faced with a psychopath and you yourself are tied to a chair. I could see the panic in Cole's eyes.
But if what Kie intended to do was mark Cole, that was better than what she could do to a bound man when she had a razor and I had guns held on me and was across the room.
It would be a shame. Cole is beautiful. Marvel's Loki kind of beautiful. But he'd be Cole with or without scars.
"Are you all right?" I asked and didn't add Sir because it felt like the wrong place for it and dangerous.
Instead of answering that, he said, "If I ordered you to go away? To run?"
There was a temptation there. To snort. Master or not. For fuck's sake, did he think she was going to let me? "I don't think that's an option," I said, and this time I added it: "Sir."
"Oh, how touching," Kie said.
"What do you want, Kie?" Ignoring Cole because I didn't know how to reach him. Over the years how many untenable situations had I gotten myself into when I was deep cover? But this one scared me. Cole St. Martin saved my life. He saved my career with Seattle PD if I wanted it back and he'd offered me a way to the next step instead of returning to PD if I wanted to take it: School and a career with the DEA or another alphabet soup agency. I was up for it. I could do junior college and then university and come out the other side with a BA at twenty-seven, ten years under the cutoff.
He'd saved my life. I would save his. All the feelings past that, past beating Kie and saving Cole, would have to wait.
"You," Kie said. The one word fell into the room.
A shiver. The group of billionaires into which I'd fallen, the strange charity fundraising group of sadists who raised money to fight trafficking by beating each other's women and fucking them, the very group that had allowed Kie to start this horror story – all of it was wrapped around sexual encounters, around sex so strange I hadn't known it existed when Cole first had me brought here.
If that's what Kie meant? That she wanted me in one more game of pain and desire? That was almost impossible to believe and I looked around at each of the guards, trying to judge my chances. How far would I get trying to free Cole and find out what had happened to his own guards? Nowhere.
I couldn't allow Kie to ever touch me again.
And if she meant something else?
"I'm right here," I said. Daring her. Pushing her. Waiting to see what would happen.
The blade rattled on the floor where she'd thrown it. She moved across the room like rage wrapped up in a tiny Asian girl, the cuts on her face glowing red like stigmata. "You think you're so tough. So you used to be a cop."
Up in my face now, her breath somehow rank. She was terrifying, all the more so because waves of insanity rolled off her. I had been wrong back in Paris when I thought we were both survivors of Vincent Geddes.
Kie hadn't survived at all.
She was away from Cole. That was important. She no longer held the razor. That was important too.
After that, I wasn't sure I cared. Mark and I were finished; he just didn't know it yet and I hadn't had the time to tell him. Being locked in a mental hospital does that.
My father was – wasn't – I didn't know – he was no longer the man I'd thought he was. How about that? I was confused and hurt and angry. All my life my mother and my three sisters had been at odds. I was the girl who couldn't be made girly.
If any of them had done something like this to me, I would have understood. I wouldn't even have panicked. I would have just found my way back, out of the hospital and confronted them. The fact that it was my father, the man I loved growing up. The man who always took my side?
My life had turned upside down. I'd come to crave the security of the compound. No longer trying to escape. Actually, before Kie had come back from the dead like some zombie bitch, I'd been working on healing mentally and physically along with kicking the addiction.
With Cole's help.
With Cole.
I shoved her hard away from me and heard the rifles make a muttered clack as they were brought to bear on me again. Or more to bear. The attention of the guns had really never left me.
"Whatever you have in mind, let's get to it." So many years since any undercover mission had made me this afraid. Maybe confronting Kie was good for me in some way.
Or maybe, not on the positive side, I now cared more than I had in years.
"You and me, right here, right now." Kie's voice shook but I thought it was with anger and not fear.
I shook my head. "You and me it won't end up being." I didn't waste my breath asking about Cole's guards. They were incapacitated or dead. I just said, "You're the one with the armed guards."
Kie shrugged, not bothering to look at them. "I can send them outside."
"They'll still be monitoring," I said.
She'd recovered her balance and threw herself back into my face. "I don't need them. They won't interfere unless I demand it."
"Which you'll do when I win."
"You won't win. But no, I won't." Her gaze was direct and steady and insane. I thought she'd keep her word. I also didn't think I'd get a much better offer.
So what were the rules going to be? Swords? Pistols?
But Kie was across the living room taking her shoes off, neatly putting them aside with her socks.
That was crazy.
We were going to fight.
3
Annie
The cell where Cole kept me for my recovery and for his pleasure was behind the main compound and detached.
I called his rural escape hatch in the Southern Nevada desert a compound because it fit. It was enormous, with hallways leading maze-like through the main house. I hadn't even come close to seeing all of it. The first house in the compound was deceiving – there was actually no difference between it and the main house. Follow the hallway long enough and the house opened into something much bigger. Follow that far enough and you'd come to the exits that led over a short distance to my cell.
Which was a building bigger than a normal one-story single family home. It was mostly one room, sterile and white, dominated by a bed and, once I determined to take criminal justice classes when Cole finally let me, a desk against an interior wall where I could study.
On the far side of the big room was Cole's office with its locked down phones and computers keeping me from the world and the world from me. On that same wall there was a bathroom, big enough to constitute a luxury and the only place cameras didn't watch everything. There were windows in Cole's office, and along the southwest and southern walls, huge windows looking out onto empty desert with all its blues and browns. There was wire woven through the windows, making them escape-proof.
Follow the other exit from the cell and I'd end up in an alternate headspace room where Cole took me to punish me or to enjoy himself with me. It held a huge four poster bed with restraints at the ready, and a closet full of every conceivable whip, chain, crop, slapper, paddle, belt, and every other kind of restraint and control, including hoods and ball gags.