"Under the compound?" I asked but even as I did, I saw the compound again from the air, the way I'd identified the section that housed my cell, connected through the room of pain behind my quarters. There were other buildings connected by thin covered walkways, at least it looked that way from the air. The entire compound looked a little like a hopscotch grid from above, with each additional unit behind the main house to the north, and juxtaposed to each other to prevent blocking each other's sunlight.
"No. Not under. If you continued through our playroom – "
"That's a playroom?"
The look he gave me wasn't playful at all and I shut up.
"You'd find a passage that could take you into her quarters."
Too many questions. Too much growing fear. "She's been here all along? But I've been here almost a year. How is that possible? I've never seen her." I backed up, sat down unexpectedly on the bed, covers bunched in both hands. My breathing was ragged and the walls had started closing in. The walls to the locked cell I'd willingly entered with Cole St. Martin.
Had I been wrong all along? Had he disappeared her? Would he disappear me? Had I left somewhere I was safe, if angry and humiliated and ready to divorce a man I hadn't married yet, to go somewhere I wasn't safe, somewhere someone could effectively make me not be?
Abruptly Cole was in front of me, crouching at my feet, his hands on my arms. "Breathe," he said. "Annie, breathe. You're hyperventilating. I started at the wrong place. I was thinking about Kie. Annie, please listen."
Please. He so rarely said it.
I nodded.
"Ariel is suicidal." He rubbed a hand over his face and looked briefly confused. "Or maybe was suicidal. I don't know. She's been changing, which isn't something I thought she could do."
I shook my head. "I don't understand."
"I found Ariel in an alley in Chicago. I was there on a business trip, and she was in an alley not far from my hotel. It was stupid but I was running. It was late, I was antsy, I went for a run. If I hadn't, she would have died in that alley. She was just thirty and she'd been stabbed and left for dead."
My chin came up. This sounded like too many other stories. "Prostitute?"
"To pay for her drugs, yes. Annie, she wasn't like anyone I'd ever met. There wasn't anything else she wanted. Except heroin. Or fet. Or morphine. Or anything else she could get but mostly heroin. She was empty. She'd been beaten probably before the event in the alley. She'd gone there to meet a contact but someone else was there and instead of giving her drugs, they took her money, beat her, raped her, and stabbed her."
I just breathed, feeling nausea curl inside me.
"She was the first person I ever met who didn't want anything except to not be. Her only happy times were when she was completely stoned on opiates, the world no more than a bad story she couldn't quite forget."
"Damn."
"I said she was suicidal but really she just didn't care. Kill her, don't kill her, feed her, don't, as long as she had her heroin. But she was a pain slut."
I blinked at the term, and then at him. He'd taken the woman in that condition off the street and hurt her?
If he noticed my expression, he chose to ignore it. "She wanted pain. She wanted to be beaten with fists and implements. She wanted canes and straps and crops and whips and my hands and anything at all that would make her scream. So I guess I can't say she wanted nothing. And past that she wanted a needle in her arm and if she had to have sex, she wanted it as debasing and painful as possible."
I turned my face away, wishing he'd stop. "You took her prisoner?" It actually came out without accusation.
"No."
He didn't say anything else.
"Did you treat her like you treated me? I mean, with the rainforest drug."
"Naturals. Yes. It changed the course of her addiction, but it couldn't change her … spirit, I guess."
"Do you believe you saved her life?"
He considered that. "I do, but she helped."
"You just said she didn't want to live."
"She didn't. Maybe she still doesn't. But buried under the will not to live, there were those other things."
"What other things?" I hadn't heard anything to live for.
So he recounted. Pain. Sexual suffering. Being beaten. And her drugs. I already knew that Cole could cure an addiction, though I didn't think he could cure the need for the addiction. The physical part is only part.
"I didn't touch her for the first year other than to meet her needs. Blood tests, medical tests, a regimen of nutrition so she wouldn't die."
"She's still alive?" I asked. Of course she was. He said she lived here, had lived here longer than I had. He wouldn't keep a body. In the back of my mind, I knew we were still approaching the topic of Kie, though in a very roundabout manner.
"She's alive. And only recently started to change."
I was on my feet in an instant. "You think Kie is ever going to change? Because that's insane. You're insane if you think that."
"You're on thin ice whether or not you chose to come back here. I still have a signed contract and you will not speak to me like that."
I stared at him. "I don't care."
"You will."
I shook my head. "What does Ariel have to do with Kie?"
He rubbed his face. "I honestly don't know why I told you about her except to prove that she's been here and you've never known it and I can do the same with Kie."
I started to say he couldn't just throw her into a makeshift prison, there were rules in the world, justice and a court system that at least at our level wasn't too corrupt, and then realized I'd been arguing for her to be killed so maybe I didn't have an argument to make.
And I started to say he couldn't just lock her up like he did the girl who said she wanted to die, because Kie wasn't saying that.
Except she was. Or she had. More than once she'd begged to be killed.
And I was back to thinking that was a good idea. Because keeping something deadly is stupid. Rattlesnakes are not good pets. Ticking bombs should be disarmed or detonated, not stuck in the back room. Cole was considering keeping Kie. Not as a sub, not as a slave, but keeping her where he lived nonetheless.
"Forever?" Because my skin crawled with claustrophobia at the idea.
"No. She wants to belong to someone, maybe more than she did to Vincent."
On my feet and pacing, I wanted to turn back to him and say he couldn't take her on as a sub. I couldn't be expected to share him with someone so loathsome.
But I didn't. Because he could and I couldn't. He could do that and I couldn't tell him not to. The only thing I could do in that case was leave.
Only he said, "I would never take her on for a sub. She's a snake. She's mean and she's a liar and she's deadly. But I can find a home for her."
I wanted to say she wasn't a feral dog either.
Except she kind of was. Except that I had already exhausted the limits of my desire to fight for Kie. Truth was, I didn't want her to have anything she wanted. Reassured she wouldn't get Cole, I wanted to stop her from having any Master. Why should she? After everything she'd done.