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Annie had gone in to find proof that Judge Conway was against the kind community because he so much wanted to be in the kind community. I wasn't sure if it was better or worse or just different that instead he'd tried to rape her, than if he'd just wanted to play kinky games. But in the end the incident had been more than enough. Sexual assault followed by sex trafficking beat all to hell anything we might have used against him with the kink factor.
The end was brutal. Confinement and the fact that we were going to use him as a guinea pig with some new drugs to try and change who he was.
Brutal.
And right.
And where was Annie?
31
Annie
I only had a single class today and I was going to skip. The professor was a deputy district attorney who dressed so beautifully I assumed his wife picked out all his clothes. The idea that a straight man dressed that well was impossible, no matter how prejudiced that made me. His stories were interesting but the class info came straight out of the book, and I'd already read the book. Julie from my study group was in the class. If I needed notes, I'd get them from her.
In the meantime, I enjoyed my bacon and eggs at a greasy diner, complete with a lot of coffee and a side of more bacon. While I ate and watched the people around me I had time to think about everything that had just happened.
I wasn't completely happy with how everything had gone down but it had gone down and it was over. Even if I wasn't the one who put Cole St. Martin back to safe, I'd been part of it. At least I'd played a part in my own rescue.
Last thing I wanted was to be the damsel in distress.
Barry had impressed me. I thought he was ex-Special Forces or ex-law enforcement or ex- something and with a clean record. He'd just decided to do something else and that something else today had saved my – bacon, I thought, smiling at my plate. A couple arriving in the diner gave me a curious look. Most people don't smile at their food.
You would if you had to eat what Cole St. Martin serves you, I thought at them. Clean, white fish for breakfast. Ugh.
I was enjoying my time enough that I had half a mind to head to the bookstore after breakfast. There was a Barnes & Noble I could hit, or a couple indies, though I was never as enamored of indie bookstores as the world thought I should be. I liked a big selection and I didn't want to wait for it to be delivered from either Amazon or from an indie that didn't have everything in stock.
I was getting ready to go pay my check and decide once I hit the beautiful day outside if I needed a book for the weekend or if I should just do my homework, when my phone buzzed. I realized then that I hadn't made arrangements for whether I'd spend the weekend at St. Martin's compound or at my own place.
Or if I'd even have a choice.
When I'd left the compound to head to the judge's chambers, I'd known absolutely I was going home afterwards. Big brave me with my big new life. Like I could tell Cole St. Martin what I was going to do next.
It bothered me that I was thinking that way but at the same time, there'd been something almost freeing about being back there.
But if that was what I was thinking and what I was planning, not only was I in deep trouble, I also needed to decide if I was going to submit. It was obvious Cole liked a fight. He enjoyed bantering with me, especially because he always, always won.
But my own behavior was so uncertain, the way I kept jumping from one thing to the next, I had to wonder what I actually wanted. Was I going to submit? Or run?
I wasn't going to run. It was time to stop pushing my own doubts onto Cole St. Martin. His anger after the events with Vincent Geddes and Kie and my being abducted to France had made me afraid and sent me running. There's a difference for me between being undercover, which is something like playacting in your own life, and actually being Annie Knox and facing that maybe I wanted some of what Cole was dishing out.
More than that, what I didn't want, I didn't want to stop. I wanted him to push my boundaries. That's why I kept coming back. It had been so easy when Mark was waiting for me in Seattle, to tell myself that what I was doing and what I was allowing to be done, those things were only temporary. Eventually I'd go back and pick up the raveled pieces of my life, be Seattle PD again, marry Mark. I was only doing this because.
Because Cole had saved my life, getting me un-addicted.
Because Cole had allowed me to come back when I'd run from him and then found him again, uncertain – and not without reason – that I could safely navigate the outside world without returning to opiates.
Because it was ultimately a safe place. Jesse, the leader of the Brotherhood before he was gunned down, had been an unsafe place to explore my need to be –
My thoughts broke off. Was I really ready to admit this?
Apparently I was.
To explore my need to be dominated. Hurt. Punished. Controlled. Maybe because everything else in my life was up to me. Maybe because I was an undercover narc, because I did have a man's job, because I could take care of myself.
That didn't mean every protest I'd made to Cole had been me pretending I didn't want it. That much, at least, I'd figured out considerably earlier. That I could dream day and night about Cole's room of pain, about the implements he had there and his hard, hard hand, about his hand on my throat or between my legs, about the things he used on my body and the people he allowed to do whatever they wanted to me.
About not being able to say no to the pain.
