"We need to talk. Come with me." I turned to leave the room. The guards would watch Kie. For now, I needed Annie's mind while she was still acting as if we were equals.
No one was prepared for how fast Kie moved. The guards in the room broke formation instantly, surrounding her, holding her in their sights. No one fired.
She had moved like lightning, flashing across the space between us. Annie had nearly been as fast, winding up between only one gunman and Kie, her hand poised to deliver a punch to the back of Kie's neck.
She didn't strike. The guards didn't fire. And the target was the back of Kie's head, the back of Kie's neck, because Kie knelt at my feet, her hands balled in the leg of my sweatpants.
I looked down at her and felt desire race through me. I was hard a second after she landed, unarmed, at my feet. So submissive. So already primed for someone to beat her. Whatever I wanted to give her, she'd take and ask for more. She'd beg for it.
I wanted nothing of her. But my cock didn't know the difference between friend and foe. It saw a woman on her knees and was stiff as steel.
"Let go of me."
She did. Instantly. Without argument. She simply slid lower to the floor, on her face, her hands out in front of her, beseeching.
"Let me stay. Please, please, sir, please let me stay. Let me be your slave. I'll sign anything. I'll do anything. You know what my Master did to me. Please. Don't send me away."
Maybe it shouldn't have been a surprise. But then, I hadn't been thinking in terms of what Kie wanted other than to suspect she was suicidal. She'd walked into my home – my compound, as Annie called it - without enough gunmen to guard her. She'd come to take down one of the richest men in the world.
Her actions were desperate and ill-planned and the idea of dying had to have crossed her mind. All I'd been thinking was what to do with her.
Kie Geddes was too dangerous to turn loose on the world. Keeping her, though? I wanted no part of her.
Killing her would be the best and safest thing. For Annie. For me. There was no thrill in the idea. Killing was abhorrent. For Annie, for the job she couldn't do after someone's glassine baggies of sample changed her life, for Annie I had taken down the newest scumbags dealing in her neighborhoods in Seattle, the ones she could have taken care of if she was still undercover there and not, at that point, my prisoner.
This was different. Kie's death might even be better for Kie.
I wasn't the man to do it.
She reached for me again. This time I simply moved out of range.
She deflated, lying on her face. When I thought she had gone into herself, however, she spoke. "All I've ever wanted was to belong. I wanted a place. I gave myself to Vincent and in the end, he didn't care enough." She didn't finish that sentence. My guess was it would have ended he didn't care enough to keep me.
Did she even know that Vincent was dead? Wherever she'd been while I was being shown a lookalike, some poor girl who had been scarred and then shot, left to take Kie's place, wherever she'd been at that point, she might not know Vincent was dead.
Would it be kinder to tell her? Even if she thought he was alive, right now he was lost to her. If it would be a kindness to tell her, then I’d pass. Kie deserved no kindness from me.
"Get up," I said. I kept my voice neutral. "Get on your knees."
I saw her shudder briefly. At that second I knew that however beaten and however unstable, she wanted to live. That just made me tired. There were already women in my care. Lily in France, brain-injured and cared for in comfort for as long as she lived.
Ariel in the maze under the compound, recently changing. She'd resisted me. She'd argued with me.
When I least expected it, she’d comforted me. For that alone I could have beaten her.
"What are you asking me?" I demanded, leaning down to speak directly into Kie's face.
Behind me, I heard Annie twitch. Her foot skimmed the surface of the floor like she wanted to attack, to rend Kie limb from limb. Probably she did. Probably I couldn't blame her.
"Please. Let me be your slave." Her voice was tiny. She sounded well and truly beaten. That was the problem with Kie. She knew how to work situations. She knew when to beg, when to demand, when to fight, when to submit.
She'd be the perfect sub, screaming on cue even when whatever was being done to her was something she relished. But like having a feral dog in the house, I'd never know when she was about to turn on me. I'd never sleep soundly again.
I hadn't made a fortune with my life's work only to live in fear of a viper in my own house.
"Stay here. I'll come back for you."
From the slump of her shoulders I knew she had given up. It would be something to pity, I suppose. If only I didn't know her true nature. What's the parable about the scorpion that rides a frog or a turtle or something across a flooded river? The creature towing the scorpion has made the logical protests – you're a scorpion; you'll sting me and I'll drown – and the scorpion has made the logical responses – if you die, we both will; why would I do that to myself? But halfway across the river the scorpion does sting the – I suppose it's a frog, and the two begin drowning in the river. Why? The frog asks.
And the answer, of course is - that’s just what I do - It's the nature of the scorpion.
That was the nature of Kie. She was vicious and dangerous and something would have to be done with her. That something would not be making her my sub.
But Annie didn't have to know that right away.
And Annie didn't get to make demands.
5
Cole
"Are you going to keep her?"
Annie asked before the door had closed behind us. Or maybe it was more of a demand. My hand itched to slap her, to take her over my knee and spank her as if she were a willful child.
At the same time I was torn between shouting at her for not running when I told her to, for questioning me when I demanded my questions be answered.
I brought my hand up and saw her close her eyes, waiting for a blow she refused to duck. Instead I relented and touched her face. Her skin was hot, flushed with the fight she'd had with Kie. The fight that had turned her face red and undoubtedly saved my life.
I wanted to make her backside as red and heated as her face. I wanted to crop her from head to toe. Front and back. I wanted to make her stand with her hands behind her head and her eyes forward and say nothing as I worked her over. I wanted to punish her as if it were her fault she'd been taken, and I wanted to punish her for putting herself at risk over Kie's threat to me. I hadn't spent so much time with her, overcoming her addiction, just to let some inadequate sub kill her.
I wanted to punish her because I wanted to punish her. She always fought so well, and broke so beautifully.
Not yet. There were too many things still to do.
6
Annie
"Kill her."
I'd been pacing for a good fifteen minutes at least, back and forth across Cole's office in the main house, unable to sit still.
What I wanted to do, irrational in the extreme, was wrap my arms around him and tell him how afraid I'd been.