I told myself they didn't care. But sometimes when Jesse and I left the bedroom I'd see them looking at me.
And I cared. That's what Vincent had on me. That he could strip me naked on day one and parade me in front of a roomful of strangers (he hadn't, not yet, only the weird dinner thing with the panties and heels) and I would be mortified, humiliated, and somehow, maybe, way down where I couldn't even admit it to myself, a little thrilled. There was a tiny bit of exhibitionist in me but it was clamped under all the layers that only fantasized and all the layers that didn't even want to admit to that.
And the thing was, if he did it with the same people the next day, I'd be just as humiliated. Trying to cover my body, trying to escape, crying with shame and humiliation.
Maybe that's what attracted Kie and kept her there when he hurt her and maybe that's what kept me from running prematurely, from taking a chance that wasn't a chance just to prove to myself that I would run if I could.
But Vincent wasn't Cole. Cole had exhibited me more than once. Cole had humiliated me. Cole had hurt me.
Cole had never once made me afraid that he would go too far. That he would permanently hurt me.
That he would kill me.
If that's what Kie got off on, that sensation, then judgmental or not, I call that sick.
I didn't get off on it. Vincent was dangerous. Vincent was a psychopath who probably did all kinds of unnecessary tests that exposed his patients. You want the best in your plastic surgery, don't you? Then disrobe and follow my troubling instructions and yes, we have to have the touring medical students here.
Understanding Vincent's psyche wasn't my goal.
Surviving Vincent was. To do that, I'd have to understand his psyche. Just a little.
And to do that, I'd have to bend to his control. Just enough for him to find me a challenge, not enough for him to hurt me for it.
That was the persona I had to invent. Annie but Annie with something extra. Something that would spark his interest. Something that would make him hurt me in exploratory ways and not just Take that, Cole St. Martin ways.
Staying trapped here was deep cover, all over again.
7
Annie
When the idyll ended, it was without warning.
Five days in, I'd mastered making myself up without looking like a clown, and toning down whatever Kie did to me with makeup. I would never trust her. Her kind of crazy was cruel, and she reveled in her cruelty. But it was nice to have a ceasefire.
When I found a chance and ran, I thought she'd be glad to see me go.
Only what she couldn't know was, when I ran, I'd find a way to get back to Vincent Geddes. When I ran, it would be to find Cole or to find someone worse than Cole. Once I found that person, I'd come back for Vincent with them, and I'd come back armed.
My life kept getting rewritten. High school girl and undercover narc. Brotherhood leader's girl. Deep cover operative. Cole's unwilling submissive.
While Cole was holding me at his compound in the Nevada desert, his belief was that a total separation from my real life was important for recovery. Most rehab works that way. It was just that with Cole, there were so many things that normal rehab didn't do – sexual sadism, for example – that it was hard not to fight against everything.
Especially hard was not finding a way to be in touch with parts of my real life. Like the job. And I didn't stay out of touch. Repeatedly I found ways to be in contact with PD, or my father, or my fiancé. Finally when Cole was really cutting me off I found a way to communicate by using the public comments that appear after YouTube videos to get in touch with a Seattle cop I knew. Tad Charles was a taekwon-do instructor and he made videos for YouTube as well, showing different martial arts training and workouts. I started by using the videos for workouts and graduated to using them as communications.
Commenting on the videos after workouts put me back in touch with somebody from my old life. And after that he led me to a dark site where we could communicate. Right up until Cole found out. But after that, Cole let me be in touch with someone from PD, because it stopped some of the restlessness in me and I was still with him, not trying to run, getting treatment for the fentanyl addiction.
During that time, in the wake of Jesse's death, new dealers moved in. That's when Cole stepped up.
That's when Cole called in favors and changed some outcomes and my submission, my having been bought by Cole St. Martin, became remarkably real.
Now there was Vincent. Most of the time when a police officer is involved in a fatal shooting or some other form of violence, it's the result of reacting to a situation that's suddenly gone wrong. The violence breaks out around the officer, whether she's undercover or not, and she has no choice but to respond.
I was making a cold, calculated choice here. When the new dealers moved into Seattle, Cole wouldn't let me go back to try and deal with it but he was willing to make a cold and probably well thought out plan to take care of them.
I was doing the same. I'd never killed anyone in cold blood or planned to carry out a killing but I was now. Vincent Geddes and Kie were dangerous and I didn't think therapy or incarceration in prison or a mental hospital would make them any less dangerous.
So I waited. The one thing I had at that point was time.
When Vincent came for me, on the sixth day, it was without warning. I was doing a workout of sorts, because there were no machines or weights where we were.
Where we were. My best guess was France, because of the strange, boxy three story house and the people who went by outside and because what I could see of the city looked old and because I thought I'd heard French being spoken outside those windows as we moved through the first week of March.
One minute I was doing my second set of pushups and the next, two guards were hauling me to my feet, dragging me bodily from the room. There was no question of whether I'd come with them voluntarily. No one cared. The point was to do it like this. Honestly it should have gotten old but I was the right kind of person to be affected by the treatment: I was never going to submit to someone telling me what to do, especially what to do in every aspect of my life. Drag me up from my workout and I was going to fight. Very, very rarely, if I really worked at it, there were situations in which I could figure out that my lack of response to outright provocation from someone would gall them more than reacting and striking back would.
That had been the case often when I was starting off in PD and, to a lesser extent, in taekwon-do. Both were male oriented and in both situations, the men weren't particularly glad to see me.
But I stuck. I worked. I didn't act like a girl. I acted like a woman doing whatever that situation called for. Being a cop. Being a martial artist. I fumed about comments and slights and outright nattiness on my own time. To their faces, I didn't react.
But when faced with something like Vincent? It didn't work. The behavior, designed to get a response, usually did.
Vincent Geddes didn't want a sub who was truly submissive. He wanted one who would actually fight back, or at least brat. He wanted a sub who would give him any excuse to punish.
It seemed more about that than it did about sex.
Which made little sense. He had me in his control. I was a prisoner. He definitely wasn't working under any kind of Geneva Convention, if that's what that's all about. He wasn't treating me right and waiting for Cole to show up. He was doing whatever he could to stay within the No permanent damage guideline and still hurt me enough that Cole would have no choice but to react.