Which was stupid. The man had humiliated me in as many ways as he could, both sexually and simply through my own sense of pride. He believed in breaking down an addict to the absolute bottom before building them back up, new and stronger. But in the process he'd stripped me and had me examined, stripped and beaten me, both in front of his guards, those guards who were regulars and would be around to see me at other times. He'd sold me at auction to Vincent Geddes and in a way, that event followed by his refusal to let Vincent take me that night, had led to everything that had just happened.
I could as easily blame Cole for the events that had led to Vincent's death and Kie's attempts on both of us as I could blame Kie herself.
It was April, stormy in Seattle and brutally sunny already in Southern Nevada. Cole took my arm as if I were a flight risk and steered me out of the main house, across the expanse of desert to the cell that was mine. I'd have liked to stay out in the warmth. The dry desert was growing on a Seattle native. But Cole took me back inside, the doors shutting out the day.
Spring in Southern Nevada. It was going on a year since I'd first come into contact with Cole. I'd be turning twenty-five over the course of the summer. That meant I was going on five years as Seattle PD and four years undercover. It wasn't the norm to throw someone into deep cover work that soon but I looked sixteen or seventeen. It would have been idiotic for PD to ignore the benefit of someone who wanted to work undercover narc and looked like I did. Looking so young was a problem if I wanted to buy alcohol and forgot my ID. It was a bonus if I needed to go undercover in a high school.
And during the five years on the force, I had killed a man, in the line of duty, and the shoot was ruled legitimate.
During the course of my acquaintance with Cole, I'd ordered two men dead when Cole wouldn't release me back to Washington and my efforts to bring down the Brotherhood and their meth dealership and fentanyl market had resulted in a better city until I ended up Cole's unwilling guest. When he wouldn't let me go and I knew it wasn't ego but fact that said I could make a difference with this batch of dealers, he ordered a hit.
Unless he was playing some complicated long range game to keep me under his thumb, that hit had been carried out. Certainly I knew from my contacts in the police department that those two were dead. No one knew who’d killed them and probably no one was looking real hard. So I had no proof that it was Cole. Just belief.
Those deaths had been at a distance. I hadn't cared. I would have done it myself if he'd freed me and that had been the only way. Those deaths were necessary to keep the streets from flooding with more fet as other, newer, less ethical (a word I didn't use lightly but still applied to Jesse, leader of the Brotherhood) dealers took the place of the recently diminished Brotherhood.
Killing Kie would be up close and personal. I wanted no part of that. I wasn't a stone cold killer. I wanted to keep people alive. That's why I chose a profession that, no matter the chosen motto in any given city, is still To Protect and Serve.
But Kie was deadly and she had no morals, no ethical code and no hope of redemption. I couldn't even see a hope for the future.
"It's not that easy," Cole said.
I stopped pacing, hands fists at my sides. "After what happened today?"
He smiled at that, which made me stare at him. "I haven't said thank you yet."
"Jeez," I said, breathing out, and caught his eye. My time for being Annie Knox was rapidly running out. I was back on his turf. He was going to make certain I was back on his turf. And under his control. He was taking me back from Annie Knox to Annie. Or maybe annie, small a. "Jeez, sir."
That made him smile, one of the patented Cole smiles that's very small and very quiet and if you're not looking you miss it.
Next second he confused me totally.
"Do you know about Ariel?"
My first thought was something to do with Shakespeare. My second was I was totally lost. "No, sir."
"She lives here." He had stopped pacing. We were in my cell now, which felt like home, enough that I wanted to just sit down on my bed. Or maybe crawl into it and sleep. Fuck Kie. And fuck Cole. He could figure it out on his own.
Then what he said trickled through. Even the guards didn't live here. The only people who lived here full time were me and him, me because I was locked up. As far as I knew, the cook went home at night and probably collected hazard pay when it was Cole's turn to host the kinky billionaires club.
"Is she the cook?"
He blinked at me like he'd forgotten the cook's existence. "I don't think so. Her name is..." long pause "...Something else."
I bit my lip and didn't smile.
He saw it anyway. "Kneel while we talk."
I looked at the floor, considering and then deliberately, I looked at him. "I don't think so."
Cole's eyebrows went up. "You don't think so?"
"I didn't come back," I said. "I was sent for. I was brought." And then, because his expression was something I couldn't read and because I didn't want to have just ruined something that had mattered to me, too, "I would have come anyway. Because of her. Because of you. I wouldn't have just left you, C – sir."
He looked almost amused. At least there was no hurt in his eyes. "I know that." And then, softening, "I do know that, Annie. But I have ordered you to kneel."
"And I'm refusing. I'm not certain I'm back yet. I don't know that I'll come back."
He did look hurt then, and a little lost. "What else would you do?"
I looked down. Not demure. Just afraid to meet his eyes. "Go to school. Get a job. Try out for the DEA."
"What we talked about."
His voice was so quiet I looked up and his face was sad, as if I'd gone off to do something we'd planned to do together and I was doing alone. Only it had always been something I was going to do alone, hadn't it?
"What we talked about, yes."
"I see." The silence stretched out between us. I watched the floor, his shadow as he now paced, into the sun from the southwest windows and back out of it again. I shivered when he left the sun, as if I could feel the cool shadows on my own body. "I asked if you knew about Ariel."
"I don't think I do. Sir. You said she lives here?"
Abruptly he pulled the straight-back chair from inside his office into the main cell and straddled it, facing me. "She's been here longer than you have."
The flash of jealousy was totally out of place. Whatever our relationship was, it wasn't anything where I could get jealous of anyone else.
"I – " I stopped to think what I wanted to say. "Haven't ever seen her. Have I?" Maybe she was a guest at one of the parties. Maybe she had a different name. Maybe it was part of the whole weird game that she’d lived here all along when I thought she went home with a different bad mad billionaire.
"She's in the maze," Cole said.
For an instant I couldn't understand what he'd said. Then my first question was, "There's a maze here?"
He smiled, an honest one this time, and said, "Not technically, but the way the hallways run, it's like a maze, like the super simple ones kids get on their menus at Denny's."