How he'd known it was in there was no mystery. Undoubtedly Kie was chipped. It was logical and I think at some point, drunk at some meeting of our circle, he and I had exchanged thoughts on using the sexual part of a woman to mark her.
It would have amused us.
Shame doesn't usually have anything to do with my life, my lifestyle, my choices. When it does, it's met with rage.
The two emotions swept through me, one after the other, and both of them ignited the need and yearning to fuck some submissive within an inch of her life.
Instead I kept moving. Back to communications.
"How many of you can get me into municipal cameras in the cities that are showing up for the tracker?"
There was no hesitation. Every hand went up.
"Do it," I said. "If there's any fallout, I'll handle it."
There were no questions. Annie's photograph graced the top left corner of every station. Now they'd set algorithms to search for her or whatever it was they did. Probably some of them had already done this.
Maybe all of them had already done this. I was out of my depth. That's why I brought them in. That and I was currently too upset to think straight. Because this should have occurred to me hours before.
Pacing made me more anxious. Nervous tension ratcheted through my muscles. I wanted to run again or –
anything –
to burn off the anger and fear and fury at being bested.
I left the communications room, headed in the opposite direction from which I'd come. Moving fast. Moving with purpose.
The compound, as Annie called it, is rural and set in the southern Nevada desert, surrounded by so much land and surveillance that there was no way Vincent should have gotten in. But sometimes balls and guns overcome technology and precautions.
Didn't matter. He'd gotten in.
Now I had to get some of this rage and fear out of me so I could think again and think faster and better.
The compound is made up of wings, boxes of buildings nearly independent from each other but usually connected. Annie's cell wasn't, because I wanted everything self-contained there. It stood at the northeast of the main house, closer to Las Vegas than everything else. The locked doors were programmed to open in the event of actual emergency but otherwise, she was trapped there. Big, beautiful windows looked out onto empty desert, but the view was seen through bars. Annie's room was mostly one big, hard-surfaced white space. In the corner of the room was the bed and even there she couldn't feel secure, there were cameras trained on it and more than once I'd used them to humiliate her there.
There was a method to my madness. She needed to be broken down completely before being put back together free of the drugs she was addicted to. Even with the rainforest naturals, her mind had to be beaten down and her body with it so the idea that I can beat this thing on my own, mind over matter and all that was proven as false as it is.
Flesh is weak.
Mind is weaker.
We tell ourselves the lies we want to hear (she's all right, she's all right, she's still all right).
And I also kept her there, humiliated and hurt and fucked, all of it by me, because it pleased me.
And though she'd never tell me in a million years, it pleased her, too.
"Fuck!"
I was tearing through the corridors now. Past Annie's bedroom section there was a hallway along the north side of her cell, with a luxurious bathroom and beside it, my office to use when I was there, and the computers she'd broken into and hacked her way through to civilization with. Punishing her for that had been a pleasure. Knowing she had the spark to do it was even better.
Further to the west, up the hallway and north so it didn't interfere with her view of the mountains through the west wall window, there was the room where I took her to hurt her. To tie her to a St. Andrews cross. To take her into another room off the main one and tie her to the four poster bed, sometimes suspended by her limbs, and to cane her. To crop her. To strap her. To whip her.
To fuck her.
The main building past the secure communications room became an almost inward spiral. Hallways turned inward to a few central rooms. One was a medical suite. Best way to never need it was to make sure it was ready and discreet medical professionals could be summoned at a moment's notice, the way they had been with Jason.
And there was another room there.
It belonged to Ariel.
She'd been here longer than Annie had. Ariel had been in residence the entire time Annie had. Annie had no idea.
Ariel was thirty-two. I found her in an alley during a business trip to Chicago. She'd been stabbed during a drug deal and left to die. She was just thirty at the time, beautiful and empty. There was nothing in her life but the drug and selling her body for more of it. She had bruises and scars and someone had robbed her instead of giving her heroin.
Ariel was the first person I'd ever met who wanted nothing more than to blot out every essential spark of life. She didn't want to die. She just didn't want to live.
And she was a pain slut. When she could feel, when she wasn't so zoned out and high or low or whatever it was heroin did to her, she wanted pain. Beatings, fists and wood, canes and straps, crops and whips, anything that would make her scream. She wanted a needle in her arm and she wanted other needles in other places and she wanted to be taken roughly wherever anyone wanted to take her while all that was happening.
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.
Whoever had hurt her originally, they'd done far more to her head than anything else.
I wasn't the only person who knew she existed. There were minders who came in weekly to do wellness checks. She had made friends while in captivity because she'd worn out every therapist I threw at her so I just brought in other women I knew from the scene. When it clicked, they kept coming.
Ariel didn't want her life back. Ariel didn't want her life. But we were slowly working toward release, or I was. Her room was large and beautifully appointed, with a skylight for sun and vents she could open and close for fresh air. She had books and streaming services but no email. If she wanted to communicate with the outside world ever again, I wanted to know about it.
So I could celebrate.
And as for her needs? Those pain slut needs? I saw to those.
In a rage, in fury and terror and unbearable stress, I ran to Ariel's room. She must have heard my boots in the corridor because she was on her feet and facing the door when I came in, her face open in delight and fear and surprise.
She's unmarked. It's been weeks since I've taken her. Weeks since I've touched her, marked her, or done the thing that makes her craziest: Dragged her down to the couch with me, turned her over my knee, given her a spanking that blisters her ass and my hand.
Then turned her upright and held her. Pressed against my chest. Her head pushed into the crook of my neck. My breath stirring her hair. Her tears of anger and fury and fear dripping onto my shirt or skin. Holding her while she cries out all the ugliness that was her life and all the ugliness that is her life and everything else she wants to drag into it.
The sight of her makes my cock hard. Unmarked. Clean. Ready.
"On your knees."
Seconds later my cock is in her mouth but it's not enough, there's no way I'll come this way, there has to be pain. There has to be screaming.