1
Annie
Pain from the latest beating woke me.
For a few minutes I lay without moving, the old undercover cop trick of feigning sleep until I put together the story I was living under and where the hell I was.
It was obvious I was alone in the big bed. The room was completely silent. All sound was coming from outside where blue jays were arguing over something in what sounded like a calm summer’s day.
When I moved I felt the stiffness in my muscles from having fought the blows that had rained down on me, and the fiery ache in my ass from having been strapped.
What the fuck? Clearly I wasn't in Seattle with Mark Tomlin. The most my sweet, intern-on-rotation fiancé ever did was hold my hands over my head when we made love. Or if I'd been gone long enough on assignment, we might shed our clothes in hurried bursts as we made our way from the front door to the bedroom.
I definitely wasn't "home" with Mark.
So, I'd awakened in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room with sunlight coming through the un-curtained windows. From outside I could hear birds, songbirds as well as the jays, but that didn't help in placing where I was.
Ever since I'd gone undercover, not knowing exactly where I was when I woke was an occupational hazard. Then for a while after I went deep cover, I woke every day in Jesse's bed, whether or not Jesse was in it.
That thought was enough to snap me back to at least some idea of where I was. I was Annie Knox again, not Lily, the deep cover name I used when I’d infiltrated the Brotherhood for Seattle PD's narc squad.
I was Annie because I was taking down time after an assignment ended badly. I wasn't with Jesse because Jesse was dead. That didn't mean the Brotherhood wasn't still dealing China white to younger and younger clients. It didn't mean they weren't responsible for middle schoolers OD-ing on fentanyl. It just meant Jesse was gone and I didn't have much of a reason to go back to that group even if I hadn't been pulled from the assignment.
By now the gang would have drunk themselves silly and fucked every whore they could get their hands on, all in honor of their fallen leader.
I wasn't even with him when he died. Not that I was in love with Jesse. Not quite. But he hadn't turned out to be the cut and drawn gang leader slash drug dealer I'd expected. Jesse lived in a state of perpetual rage and more than once I'd felt the brunt of it. During our few short months together he'd dislocated my jaw and raped me more than once.
The other times weren't rape. There was some weird respect between us, so weird I sometimes wondered if he knew I was a narc. Knew, and had no intention of letting anyone else know. He watched me. He probably would have taken me out if I'd made a move against the Brotherhood, but I was looking for their sellers.
Some part of Jesse wasn't all bad. Not salvageable, but if I'd learned he was making sizeable payments to organizations that helped opiate addicts get clean, it wouldn't have surprised me. He ran his dealing like a business, and a good one. His soldiers were mostly clean. They drank, they smoked, they indulged, but their product was off-limits and if they didn't listen, the best they could hope for was expulsion.
Being expelled from the Brotherhood was as much a death sentence as having Jesse put his .44 to their heads and pull the trigger.
He'd done that, too.
I sat up in bed and looked around the room and remembered. The pain in my backside upon sitting was one of the clues. I had stripes from the belt, still welted, soon to bruise, where Cole had whipped me the day before. I was in an undisclosed location with billionaire Cole St. Martin, a pharma king whose company dealt with rainforest naturals that he was developing into a variety of pharmacological uses.
Including natural remedies for opiate addiction.
Because I'd left Jesse after a buy went really bad and at the same time my family, somewhat estranged just because I was always, always, the stranger in their midst, had called to say my dad was facing open heart surgery and was in cardiac ICU.
Even biker bitches have fathers. Jesse told me to take my time. See my dad through it. I truly believe he would have waited for me if a bullet hadn't put paid to that.
My dad was the only one in my family who got me. Career cop, recently retired at fifty-nine and now facing death in a whole new, much less macho way. He understood what drove me. If I'd been unable to break cover to go to Portland and be with him, he would have understood that, too.
My mother and my three sisters? Absolutely not. The Knox girls were all about marriage and babies and dresses and nails, about all the feminine things that had never meant anything to me. The fallout from totally failing the feminine side of the family would be epic. Worse than Jesse really learning I was a narc.
So I went home.
That was when internal affairs started an investigation into some old cases that involved my dad. And that was when they decided to press charges against him for some not quite right behavior when he still wore the uniform.
My dad wasn't a bad cop. He just walked the line a lot. If he thought something needed doing bad enough to blur the boundaries of the law, he did it. In my eyes, that made him a hero. He’d cleaned up more of the streets than I had.
But there was his health. And the investigation, which I couldn't even testify in because by the time that all came around I'd be back undercover.
At least I thought so. Then Jesse was killed and Mark was at work when I found out. I was doing laundry in our apartment and in the pockets of my jeans I found a roll of money from a buy, more money than I'd see working PD without saving for months and none of it traceable. The gang wouldn't even miss it.
In the other pocket, I found the little glassine baggies of fentanyl. I didn't throw them out. And then the shitstorm of my life got worse and worse instead of better, one time trying it led to two and two led to more, and more led to actually needing to make my own buy and that led –
That led to Mark finding out and walking out on me. Not for good. He lived there, after all. But things became a whole lot more strained than they already were with a fiancée who wouldn't say where she was and rarely even called to check in.
When my handler in PD found out…
He sold me to Cole St. Martin.
Who wasn't just a billionaire pharma king putting together remedies for opiate addicts.
He was a sadist with his own ideas about recovery. And penance. And getting clean.
I stood and felt the pull of skin across my ass. The welts were swollen, a couple of them beaded with blood around the edges. Gingerly I reached back and put both hands on my sore ass.
"If you soak in a hot bath, you'll feel a lot better."
The voice came out of nowhere, scaring the beejezus out of me. I whirled around, already going into fighting stance like I had a clue what was going on. At the same time I recognized Cole's voice.
That really didn't mean I could stand down.
"You really did a number on me last night. What the fu –? " I caught myself. Billionaire, pharmaceutical genius, benefactor of a whole slew of charities.
Control freak, sadist, bastard.
Master.
He had a weird streak of propriety. He did not like hearing me swear and I did not like being corrected.
"What did I do to deserve that?" Just shy of two weeks into my month off, that PD ordered me to take because of my father's impending charges and his health. Part kindness. Part administrative leave because he was a family member being brought up on charges. For those two weeks – twelve days – whatever, it felt like forever the way my skin crawled and everything itched and the impatience drummed in me day and night like fire in my in my veins, making me want to run and run but my conditioning was kind of out the window.