AllFreeNovel
Share Us
9
Cole
This time I had to wait. This time I couldn't go off half cocked and bring her back too soon.
This would be our last chance at the trafficking ring. There were other avenues to pursue. I could hire mercs and have them try and run down the group. It would certainly take care of any problems with sympathetic cronies letting them off the hook, because mercs wouldn't have any good reason to leave them alive. I could turn the whole thing over to law enforcement and hope there were still some cops who weren't part of the ring. No, that was defeatist bullshit. Most of Metro was good cops. There was just no way of knowing at this point how pervasive the bad ones were.
And the fact that the handful of bad ones existed, that they'd do what they did and be part of what they were? That was frightening.
I stood in the situation room or the control room or the IT room. Whatever anyone called it, it was full of blue screens and anxious techs. They had set up a station for me but it was agony to sit there. The dot that showed where Annie was had been moving really fast. That part made me grin, though there was no real humor behind it. She must have loved that part. She'd talked about all the cars she might jack. I'd talked her down from cars she wouldn't get out of the casino with – or even if she just touched them. She'd settled on a Corvette if she could find one. From the speeds she had been traveling, she had.
Now the dot that was Annie was stopped. Now she was on the side of a highway in the middle of rural nowhere and when we put up a drone, there were lots of cops around. More maybe than necessary to bring down one unarmed girl who looked about eighteen.
"She did it," Scott said behind me.
"Heaven help us," I added, and didn't look away from the screen.
The drone looked on while Annie was frisked in a way that made me grind my teeth. If anyone was going to touch her like that and humiliate her like that, it was supposed to be me. Once again I wanted to stop this. It wasn't too late. I might be the target of "morality judges" who said they wanted to clean up the city when what they wanted to do was clear the field for their trafficking operations. That didn't mean I didn't have friends in high places. You don't get into the stratosphere of tax brackets without making some powerful friends along the way.
There were a host of reasons not to stop this. I had more than one circle of friendly acquaintances who had similar interests, shall we say. In previous decades we might have been called swingers. Now we were something else. A community. A lifestyle. The women brought in were sometimes coerced, sometimes forced, sometimes ordered. But I could count the number who had truly had no choice. They could choose to leave relationships or marriages or employment, however they'd come to the kinky attention of their Dom or Master. When they stayed, whether it was for the money, the love, the position? That was choice.
I'd bullied Annie into it. I'd threatened to withhold the drugs she needed in order to get off fentanyl. I'd gone into medicine to help, though. I'd never have really left her to her addiction.
But she didn't know it. And I did use it to force her. Annie's choice would have been between my sadism and going back to the life she wanted to live clean, no addictions.
In my mind, the difference between what I did and what traffickers did was night and day. The groups I partied with, we humiliated and sometimes hurt women past what they would have agreed to in a safe, sane and consensual BDSM scene.
But there were no permanent injuries. Ever. There were no broken cheekbones, no STDs, no use that didn't carry with it some form of aftercare even if the woman was a contracted slave.
No one died on our watch.
One of the other reasons not to stop this, not to call in favors from a state legislator or even a federal, the reason not to throw the whole operation to the wolves and let internal investigations dig out who they could, was both that we'd tried it before and hadn't gone far enough, and that neither would those investigations and more women would suffer.
The other reason was Annie. The minute we finished our plans and she chose a persona and my people started creating the reality behind Erin Trace, this was Annie's operation. Her undercover. Her obsession. Even if I could, even if I was afraid for her and wanted to keep her safe, I wouldn't take this away from her.
The room had gone silent, a ghostly blue realm where everyone watched their screens. We couldn't hear but we could see. Once Annie was loaded into one of the cars, the patrolmen standing around the car held their own conversations, gesturing, agreeing, calling someone on a phone that looked like just maybe it was a back up. Not the phone the officer used that the Highway Patrol knew about.
"They're going to dump the body cam footage," April said. Her voice was eerily calm. She watched the screen without taking her eyes off it. "Then move the car because she tried to run."
Some of the other techs looked at her like she was nuts to talk to me. They tended to act like I was some kind of usually harmless madman who still paid twice what they could make anywhere else and sometimes had some really freakish requests. I'd never wanted them to be afraid of me but I'd never done anything to persuade them not to. It made it easier in the long run.
Or maybe I'd never even thought of it. They were people I hired. Not friends. I didn't try to make them into friends.
I had coexisted with my fellow very rich very kinky acquaintances. I had sometimes met outside work with people whose work corresponded with mine.
And of course women came and went.
It wasn't until Annie that I realized I was lonely and even then I fought knowing for as long as I could. My sister Emily had been addicted. Our parents had been well off. They hadn't been loving, nurturing or anything approaching fun. Emily had died when either her connection in a back alley or someone who found her there had killed her.
That had changed my course. Instead of finishing medical school, which had never really been my passion, I moved into pharmaceuticals. My interest all along had been in how drugs operated on mind and body and, especially, the crossover. I started St. Martin Pharma and made my first billion and took the company in the direction I wanted to go: Rainforest naturals. Which led to the rainforest cures.
I'd never stopped mourning Emily. People talk about wasted potential when someone young is killed. I don't know that Emily would have had a lot of potential. She was beautiful and brilliant but our childhood had wrung something out of her. Not that just because someone is smart means they have to do something with those smarts. It's possible Emily would have just been Emily.
She never got the chance to do that. I never got to find out which way she'd go.
Now, watching Annie from a distance, helpless to interfere with what was happening, I was starting to regret my blue room crew were afraid of me. "You think so?" I asked April. My voice coiled with tension but none of it was directed at her. I felt several other techs cautiously relax.
"Sure," April said. She gestured at the screens we were all avidly watching. "They chased her down but they didn't stop her until there." The drone moved minutely, not enough to catch the attention of anyone on the ground. Just enough to show a different angle.
