The new dealers, they were deadly. So I'd tried to run back to Seattle because I knew I could help and Cole instead took those men out on my say so.
I owed him now.
Owned wasn't that farfetched anymore.
But the thing that came back to me as the plane sighed across whatever airspace we were in, was that Cole didn't see me going back to my real life. Whether he intended to stop giving me limited communication with Mark and my family, to disappear me for good – he more than had the money to do so, I wasn't deluded about that – or he simply thought I'd find some other path, I wasn't clear on.
Before Vincent had interrupted everything, I'd been studying criminal justice, working to do all the course work so when I left Cole - That was hard to imagine, somehow harder now - When I reached a point where I could leave Cole for limited amounts of time, I could perhaps return. Or did he intend for me to be an online distance learning student? I'd be ready to go through courses and get my degree and apply for DEA. Instead of returning to Seattle where no matter what people had been told about my absence being in-house, out-of-touch rehab, it was bound to leak out at some point that my rehab stint had been anything but normal.
Cole didn't think I was going back to real life.
Vincent wanted to destroy my real life.
Kie, fucking crazy bitch, wanted to destroy my life, period, end of sentence.
And me? I could no longer imagine my life with Mark, visiting with his family at Christmas, waiting for him to come back from a shift at the hospital, the dutiful wife or the dutiful DEA agent who worked investigations from behind a desk because there was no way Mark could deal with me being deep cover.
So what did I see? A life of weirdness and pain with Cole? A life of terror and beatings with Vincent, chained to something because there was no other way he'd keep me? Trying out the whole thing with Mark? He'd waited so long to have me as his. It seemed unfair to go back just to tell him he never would.
Maybe disappearing was the best choice. As long as that choice was mine.
But not with Vincent Geddes.
Eventually the flying stopped. All those flights in two days. Wherever we landed, there was no ocean nearby as far as I could tell from the aroma. The sky was blue, the buildings were tall, and the place that Vincent took us to was out of the city. This time he did restrain and blindfold me, so I had no idea what city we were in or where the grounds of the estate he held me in were located.
The room he showed me to was big and spacious and well-appointed, but as anonymous as a hotel room. Except for the restraints every few feet. Rings drilled into ceiling and floor and walls, with carabiners hanging from them. I would remain cuffed with thick leather around my wrists, ankles, waist and neck, locked in place and the key pocketed by Vincent.
The restraint on my neck almost tipped me over into a panic attack. Vincent, seeing it coming, simply locked me into the room and left me to deal with it. When he came back he did so with a female guard, who held a gun trained on me as he cuffed the wrist restraints to my neck, then cut away my shirt and bra. I was naked to the waist.
Kie was nowhere in evidence. Since he had dragged her back by her hair, away from me as the men held me on the table, I had seen almost nothing of her. Whatever he'd done, it was part of their dynamic, not anything he did for me, but I appreciated it anyway.
Vincent had me sit on the side of the bed. It felt weird to be wearing jeans and no shirt, and weirder still to have my arms up where they blocked his view of me.
He had other things on his mind than humiliation or pain, or rather, it was another kind of humiliation. Coming out of the room's closet, he crossed to where I sat and knelt at my feet. That alone was unusual enough to make me edge back away from him. He made an impatient sound and pulled me to him, then bent and removed my shoes and socks.
That was weird enough. That he might have a foot fetish didn't seem impossible but neither did it seem logical. When he pulled out the shiny black, stiletto-heeled come-fuck-me pumps it didn't clear anything up. He slid knee-high stockings onto me, and I bit my lip because in whatever situation this was, I couldn't imagine anyone having a fetish for knee high nylons. Then the shoes went on, with their four inch heels and the next thing I knew, Vincent was hauling me to my feet.
"You and I are going to be attending a good many formal functions." His eyes were as cold as anything I could imagine and what he'd just said made no sense. "Sometimes Kie will attend with us and other times she will not. Occasionally you will be of use during the events and other times you will simply be on my arm."
Vincent was, I believed, a plastic surgeon of some great renown. I didn't see how he figured he could drag a slave with him to formal events without her true master figuring out where she was and coming for her, but that was his problem, not mine. I was all for Cole spotting us on some red carpet and coming to get me.
Only – only the thing with the flights had shown he could move us from point A to point B at the slightest whim. So best guess, the instant the events were over we'd be doing the Cinderella thing and racing back through the streets, climbing onto a plane and heading somewhere else. So that was a game. Lovely. So nice to be a pawn.
The heels – they were a fresh new hell. For an hour I staggered around the room, the plush carpeting catching the idiot heels, the guard growing so bored I saw her smothering yawns as I fought to keep from giggling. I'd lurch forward and fall back, waver from side to side, and when I caught my balance and "walked," it was in a skulking, half upright, half bent over like Ebenezer Scrooge sort of tack.
Vincent even laughed a few times, though that didn't make me happy, and even as he laughed he reached out with the bamboo cane he held and urged me to try harder.
When I fell, tired and hurting from weirdly used muscles and blisters on both feet, he dragged me up and threw me over the bed, face down, growled, "Don't move."
I heard the door close as the guard exited.
I heard the air displaced as the cane descended.
There was nothing to laugh about.
Wherever we were, it seemed like we were going to be dug in for a while. It didn't seem possible to me that Vincent actually thought he could take me to a society event complete with paparazzi and keep me from knowing what city I was in, so maybe that didn't matter. The other events – the ones where he said I might be "of use" – I thought those likely would be along the lines of the circle of freaks Cole knew in southern Nevada. They probably would be able to keep my very existence to themselves, and that scared me.
When I worked deep cover I was always aware of my mortality if nothing else. What kept me at it was the mortality of everyone else who was getting killed by the dealers and their wares. But it was never far from my mind that if I got killed while so deep undercover my PD didn't even know who or where I was, that I'd be dead and gone forever and my family would never know.
This felt a lot like that. Nobody knew where I was and the people I was with were violent and dangerous. It was a recipe for disaster.
At the end of the training with the shoes, at the end of the caning after the shoes, Vincent pulled me to my feet and ran a hand along my face as if we had only just had a small disagreement and were actually some kind of couple.
Everything in me wanted to spit in his face. He had dragged me from where I had been safe. He had threatened the man keeping me safe. He had drugged me which scared me considerably and he had beaten me. Even now the welts from the beating were sending deep hot pain through my entire body.