Cole reneged. Cole said ‘not yet’. She's not ready yet. Cole didn't want the sadistic son of a bitch to get his hands on me and so he said Vincent would have to wait and Vincent didn't like the idea of waiting. Vincent let Kie hurt me and Kie was punished.
Kie already hated me.
Vincent already hated Cole and saw me as a way to get back at him.
Now I was between them as the plane landed. Between Vincent and Kie physically. Between Vincent and Cole figuratively. And I didn't know where the plane was landing or where they were taking me.
And there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it even if I had.
I am no longer completely certain what normal is.
Normal people don't play sexual games, right? I was raised to believe that. Well, no, I wasn't, I was raised to be vanilla in a household that didn't acknowledge even knowing that vanilla was anything other than a spice to bake with. I was raised by parents who had three other daughters who grew up and got married and started having babies or trying to have babies and cooking and cleaning, and if they accidentally got divorced, they got married again quick as quick can be. They had careers that could be abandoned at a moment's notice, the instant the first inkling of those babies showed up.
I was the daughter who wanted to be what her father was: A police officer, preferably in Seattle. Preferably doing something that utilized the fact that I looked so much younger than I was. Even with a smattering of college behind me and enough time on the force to be allowed to go deep cover into drug cases, I could still pass for seventeen or eighteen and infiltrate high schools and bring down the dealers inside those schools and outside.
When one of the girls who had actually become a friend, a beautiful, smart, college-bound girl who really was seventeen, died in my arms of an overdose of fentanyl, that's when I went deep cover enough to hook up with a biker gang selling fet all over the Pacific Northwest. And when, after months in the bed and on the bike of the leader, Jesse, my hero cop father fell ill with heart attacks, I took the time to go be with him and that didn't break my cover.
Even biker babes have fathers.
While I was gone Jesse was shot and killed. And me? I found out there were charges against my father. Some of his cases had not just toed the line between good cop and bad, not just walked it, but maybe nudged it hard. Maybe even played jump rope with the line.
In spending time with my father, I was staying again in my own apartment, with my fiancé, an intern at a local hospital. Mark and I – we didn't always see eye to eye.
Normal people don't want to be handcuffed to the headboard with their work handcuffs. Do they? Or if they do, it's a game. It's not a real hit me, please, hit me - it's a tease.
It wasn't a tease. When everything with Mark and my father and Jesse's death and more deaths of teenage kids and I hadn't brought down the Brotherhood yet, and not being undercover felt more stressful than being undercover, and my sisters both wanted me to be a normal member of the family and there for them 24/7 - by which they seemed to mean there for them because they all had husbands and families to deal with during Dad's illness, so it wasn't there for my father but for my sisters who didn't usually want me there at all – when everything sped up like that, one thing after another after another and then it all came crashing down on me...
That's when I broke.
That's when I found the glassine baggies of fet in my jeans as I went through the pockets before starting a load of laundry.
That's when I fell.
Normal is not being kidnapped by the billionaire who believes he bought you body and – not soul – for two weeks – and who now intends to keep you because he's angry the billionaire who believes he owns you wouldn't share.
Normal is not Kie, her Asian features pulled into a masque of great beauty and rage. The cuts on her cheeks seep clear fluid. She hurt me badly at the last dinner party, one Cole insanely gave even after the auction had gone so poorly. Kie had been given permission to play with me but she'd used a jalapeno, scraped the skin back and stuck it inside me.
The remembered pain is enough to make me want to panic.
Once, when a deal had gone sour, when he thought he'd been betrayed, Jesse nearly broke my jaw when he hit me during rage sex.
I hadn't been afraid to be with him again. That had been Jesse. That had been one time. He wasn't gentle. It was the anger and violence in his fucking that kept me his for as long as it did. It called to something restless and if not broken, then bent, inside me. Stupid or not, I'd had feelings for Jesse.
I had feelings about Vincent and Kie. I was terrified of them. And now they owned me.
That – that was normal.
There was a black SUV waiting for us as we left the plane. Of course there was. I'd been taken at gunpoint from in front of Cole's remote compound, heart hammering as I expected the shot to ring out. All my time as a cop and I'd end up shot in some squabble over sexual submissives.
Vincent and Kie walked ahead, assured that what he had ordered was taking place. That the armed men had surrounded me, two of them taking my arms to walk me out.
My body was still limp, reacting to whatever I'd been injected with when they took me. When I tried to put weight on my legs they buckled but not in the usual way when a limb has fallen asleep. Then they hurt and snap and seem to drop out like they have weight. They don't work, but they feel like they at least exist.
Instead, this was like finding a limb had gone to sleep crossed with something that made the limb go rubbery, unable to hold itself up. There was no strength there for me to command. There didn't seem to be any limb there to command.
That scared me. Not that I could have run even if both legs had been in perfect working order. Even if we were at an airport of any size, we were in a private part where things happen that aren't supposed to happen and that no one ever knows about if they're lucky. Those people who do know about those things happening don't talk about them. I'd become all too adept at understanding such places exist. I'd become all too used to being dependent on men I wanted to kill.
The thought jackknifed through me. Everything seized up and I tried to stop moving but there was no way, they propelled me forward, my feet doing some jerky half-assed version of walking, stumbling me in the wake of the two people I least wanted to go anywhere with. Least wanted to be at the mercy of.
Cole. He was right there inside the idea of wanting to kill the men who had taken me. The idea of who they had taken me from.
My mouth was already forming the words by the time I forced them back and down and inside. Is Cole all right? This was a stupid wife-swapping dinner party auction. Pay your fucking money or don't. Take back your brave and wonderful donation on behalf of stopping sex trafficking. Stop the stupidity of what you're doing. It's one thing to be a big, bad sexual sadist, but this is real. Stop. Please stop.
Just please don't have hurt Cole. Not for something so stupid. If it had come to that, I'd have come willingly.
Not willingly. But I would have gone with them.
I was bargaining as though the past could be changed. I knew better than anyone here that death was final. If Cole had been shot –
Last time I saw him, he was unharmed.
That meant nothing.
I wouldn't let myself think he'd been hurt. Moreover, I wouldn't let myself think that I cared. But we'd been running in the desert, outside the southern Nevada compound he had, miles from Las Vegas in the wastes where there's nothing. Running through the dawn, Cole having rousted me from a full sleep in order to go train for something that was never quite specified. Were we going to run a marathon? Or was it just Cole being Cole?