One last reason snuck up as we pulled onto the grounds. Maybe we weren't going to stay here long enough for it to matter if I knew where here was. If I was right about the timeline, they'd taken me at about eight fifteen and it wasn't much past eleven a.m.
Vincent had money. He could move as fast as he needed to.
No one took my arms to drag me from the car and up the stairs. I missed the support, however meanly provided. At the urging of the guns behind me, I made my way up the drive and the curved front stairs, through the entryway and into the cool of the marble floors and airy ceilings.
The place would be impressive if I were there willingly. Maybe spending the weekend with a beautiful movie star. The guy who played Thor, maybe. Just for a second the fantasy was seductive. The whole thing wrapped around me, the idea of being the wife of some guy and living just somewhere, a rental house maybe, saving up to buy our first, and he'd come home from work and have a beer and take me to bed and partway through my mind would wander, maybe imagining Chris Hemsworth while he imagined I was - who? Scarlett Johansson? Halle Berry?
A young Winona Ryder if we wanted somebody I actually resembled.
And then after we had sex –
"In here."
Vincent had come out of a room off to the side of the entrance and I realized I hadn't even noticed him leaving. Usually in a new place, all my senses are on high alert. Paranoia. It's part of the undercover job. So the drug was still working on me, softening all my usual instincts.
Going in the room was a bad idea. Mostly because he wanted it. Not going in there meant dealing with the guys with guns. Or Kie and her taser. Or more drugs. Not going in wasn't an option because I had zero control and fighting would just be delaying whatever was going to happen.
For now, it was watch and learn and hope I'd learn enough before all the bad shit started coming down.
That there was bad shit in the offing was inescapable. It wasn't even a question.
I shrugged and went along and the instant I stood in front of him, he slapped me. Not hard, but it was enough to rattle the drug a little more out of my system.
"You say yes, sir to me, the same as you would to that idiot St. Martin. You don't look me in the face, you look at the ground. You do not shrug; you obey."
I dropped my gaze without speaking. Not looking at him would be a pleasure. Vincent wasn't bad looking. A woman seeing him on the street might notice him if she liked very clean cut, very blond, tall and semi-muscled men.
But hopefully any woman with an ounce of self preservation would run the fuck the other way because his eyes – they were stones. Small and hard and dark, indeterminate in color and full of a slow, cold anger and the will to hurt.
Not looking at him was just fine.
But right before I dropped my gaze I saw what else was in the room. I was running before I'd made the conscious decision to move. The drug was out of my system. My newly developed runner's legs were doing just fine.
I was in flight.
Kie's taser dropped me and Vincent nodded to the men with guns who picked me up and put me on the exam table.
Kie stripped me. She enjoyed the hell out of it. She cut my clothes off, in no hurry, letting me sense the men around me, the lights overhead, the huge empty room the table was in and Vincent standing there waiting.
My heart pounded so hard she saw it.
"Look, sir," she said, stroking one sharp nail down my breast. "She's scared shitless." Then she giggled. "We could make her shit."
Vincent grunted. "Some other time. Get on with it."
In pique, she dug a nail in and a thin line of blood ran from my nipple onto the table.
Vincent pulled her off me by a handful of long dark hair. "Are you too stupid to realize this has to be fast?"
I didn't miss the hate that raged across her face. He couldn't see her face, because he was standing directly behind her, but she was right above me.
The hate wasn't all for me.
After that, Vincent dragged off my running tights. I kicked, screamed, fought and twisted on the table. It was impossible not to. Kie had been sent away, but there were guards there and Vincent simply nodded to them.
No restraints. Just a man on each limb. My face flamed with heat, humiliation as awful as the fear, and Vincent there, someone I hated, no one I would ever have hooked up with, been with, no one I'd have let touch me –
With his tools.
His light.
"Hold her!"
And he was inside me. At least something of his was. But though Kie had pleasured herself by stripping me halfway and Vincent had enabled whatever he was doing by cutting off the rest of my clothes, apparently that wasn't the intent.
Instead there was a sharp, agonizing pinch deep inside me that made me scream and he said in an almost human voice, "It's over, never mind, that was it," before he dropped something from the forceps into a metal pan. It didn't bang like a bullet in a television show.
It made a plastic and wire sound of something maybe tech-like, something small, something plastic, with bits of something harder. My brain scrambled and I struggled with the men holding me down, wanting to get my head up far enough to see but they did an admirable job of stopping me from moving, from being able to lift my head or kick my feet, still shod in running shoes.
I couldn't even get my head around far enough to bite one of them.
They were utterly, eerily, uninterested in my nakedness. That maybe more than anything else scared me. It was of paramount importance to me. Being forced into being naked with everyone else around me was humiliating. It could go on happening forever and it would never be anything but humiliating, leaving me frantic to cover up, to get away, to never be seen by those who had seen too much of me – ever again.
Being naked is being vulnerable, not just in a new relationship, the first time with someone new, but because the paranoia of being human screams of the need to be able to move fast, to protect the skin, the feet, the hands, to run without the pain of body parts bouncing, to protect against the elements.
To be able to go out the door and save yourself because even an open path and your own gun at that moment would have made you at least hesitate. The need to be clothed is too ingrained.
They didn't give me the chance anyway. Not to run. Not to see.
Vincent handed the metal dish off to someone and said, "Clone it and disperse it." Then he threw a stack of sweats onto my belly and said, "Get dressed."
Five minutes later we left Hollywood.
3
Cole
"I don't fucking care what it takes, just get it done!"
I disconnected and shoved the phone in the pocket of my trousers, pulling it out again seconds later. Pacing over and over through Annie's room, heart pounding, forehead wet with sweat. All I could think about was what she must be going through. If that sadist let Kie touch her, I'd tear them both limb from limb.
Annie was a cop. Annie was a black belt. Annie was a badass. All that should mean that Annie was uniquely suited to take care of herself, even in the situation that had unfolded.
She wasn't. She was not. How could she be? Vincent was deranged and dangerous and his wife was a borderline personality or a sociopath or a psychopath. She wasn't normal. She was dangerous. What she'd done to Annie at the dinner party haunted me.