When I caught myself just starting, I moved away from her and stood with my feet evenly aligned with my shoulders, my hands loosely clasped behind my back. But instead of the usual thousand yard stare that someone in my class had adopted from troops being trained by a drill sergeant, I watched as Cole stood over Kie.
She sat up slowly, started to speak, then stopped and looked around the room.
For the first time, I did too. Her men still ringed us from the corners of the room, but they no longer held their guns at the ready. Because Cole's men had recovered from whatever had been done to them and stood now behind Kie's guards, guns trained unerringly at her men.
And at her.
4
Cole
"And if I'd told you to run?"
She was standing there for the first time as if we were equals. For the first time since I'd known her, she was in a position of power. Not an addict. Not, for the moment, my submissive. My slave.
It took everything I had not to knock her to her knees. But Kie was still in the room, standing sullen and in pain, surrounded by my guards.
It was also the first thing I had been able to say to Annie since the tables turned. She looked mutinous.
When Kie put the call through to her, a knife to my throat, I'd panicked. In my position, I'm used to holding all the cards. Private security. My own helicopter. All the money I could ever need to do anything I'd ever want to do.
But a knife at my throat changed everything. Because without getting word to Annie, she'd be at risk. I don't know how Kie found out where she was. Maybe she bugged my communications. Vincent had enough money and until he was discovered dead, she'd still have whatever access to it she'd had while he was alive.
It wouldn't go on forever, but what I could tell about Kie Geddes, she wasn't looking for forever. She was looking for revenge and then, I thought, a way out.
Annie had just pissed all over that revenge. This moment might actually be more dangerous than any so far. Because if Kie's men were loyal enough to take on mine, there'd be guns firing in this room and I thought Kie was fully dangerous enough to put both Annie and myself at risk.
I looked to where Annie stood, having not yet answered my question, and she looked back, meeting my eyes, not kneeling, not bowing her head. I wouldn't require any of that until Kie was dealt with.
It still took everything I had not to beat her down to her knees for not obeying even my partial command earlier, and for not answering my question now.
And it took everything else I had not to put my arms around her and tell her I'd been scared for her.
The last time I could remember being scared was right before I lost Emily. My sister, lost to drugs and alcohol, and whoever provided those things or had fucked her and paid her so she could buy those things.
Emily. She was brilliant and creative and beautiful and she should have had a life that was full of everything. We might not have been the kind of rich I am now, but we grew up children of privilege.
Sometimes the best and the brightest are also the most brittle. Life got to Emily and then someone got to Emily, some friend or maybe some friendly enemy, who’d put drugs in her hands and said, “Look, see? Everything is so much more manageable now, so much softer and gentler.” And Emily agreed and within a year, she wasn't golden or glowing or even brilliant.
That wasn't going to happen to Annie. I'd determined it when Samuels from Seattle PD contacted me. He was scum, a lowlife who skirted around the edges of trafficking. I'd kept him on the hook for years because he was a good contact for the group of us, Southern Nevada billionaires with … special interests. Not in trafficking. We found wives and girlfriends, slaves and submissives, and the occasional masochist who just wanted to be beaten from time to time or strung up and whipped and fucked or whatever it was. We had our own contacts. Our interest when it came to trafficking was in raising money by exploiting our individual kinks and turning the money over to law enforcement or private interests that could combat human sex trafficking.
To date we’d had a better success rate than most metro police departments or the government.
Samuels never quite knew what my interest was and it didn't matter that he knew I had an interest, because of the extensive files I had on what he got up to. He wouldn't have stayed a cop for long and cops in prison don't stay much of anything for long.
Samuels was Annie Knox's handler when she was deep cover. He was good at what he did. He never put her in danger.
But when she slipped up and stress and grief and rage drove her to sample the product she was helping bring down the dealers of, he offered her to me.
She was angry. She was furious and hurt and scared and unwilling to show it. She ran more than once, striking out over miles of desert with no idea where she was or which way Vegas was, or any other town or city.
When she was under my control though, and every time I dragged her back, I was able to institute more control over her. I was able to trip her up when she thought she'd found loopholes. I kept her second guessing and off-balance. I put her in situations she wasn't used to and I exposed her equally to things she loved and things she hated. I exploited her own masochistic tendencies and I kept her bored enough to want to explore them.
I liked her fire.
I'd known other damaged women without it. Like Kie. Already vicious, already lost because her Master was Vincent Geddes. His cruelty was enormous. All I had to do was look at the scars on her cheeks where he'd marked her after she hurt Annie at one of our dinners.
She'd deserved punishment.
She hadn't deserved that.
Kie was lost. Whatever she'd chosen to do would have ended her life. By coming here, she'd meant to either have her revenge on me and on Annie, or end everything in a hail of bullets.
Instead, she now stood angry, twitching, looking to see what weakness in the room she could exploit.
There were none.
I would not make Annie kneel in front of this woman. Later, when we were together, I would teach her to never take so long to answer me, and to not police her own behavior in the presence of Kie.
"Annie?"
Her chin came up and she glared. "How did you think I was going to run? Past all the hired muscle? Past her – " an indignant and murderous look at Kie – "Holding a razor to your throat? Did you think I would abandon you to that?"
"Did you think you could fix it?" Arguing with her made me look weak. I was too angry not to.
"I did fix it," she said. "What do we do with her?"
There was no we. It was all up to me. There was no common ground. No cooperation. We were not partners. She was mine. My property.
"What do I do with her?" She needed to sense my tone.
She gave me a look that said she had and she didn't care. "Fine. What do you do with her now? You think I want her on my hands?" She threw a venomous look at Kie.
Who spat.
I expected Annie to leap at her.
Instead, she just laughed.
Good. We'd worry about her behavior later. For now, I was glad to see her unbroken in the face of the woman who had given her nightmares and night terrors in the days after we returned from France.
Later, after Kie was taken care of, after Annie and I had time alone together, I'd show her what submission really meant.