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I bit my lip and didn't smile.
He saw it anyway. "Kneel while we talk."
I looked at the floor, considering and then deliberately, I looked at him. "I don't think so."
Cole's eyebrows went up. "You don't think so?"
"I didn't come back," I said. "I was sent for. I was brought." And then, because his expression was something I couldn't read and because I didn't want to have just ruined something that had mattered to me, too, "I would have come anyway. Because of her. Because of you. I wouldn't have just left you, C – sir."
He looked almost amused. At least there was no hurt in his eyes. "I know that." And then, softening, "I do know that, Annie. But I have ordered you to kneel."
"And I'm refusing. I'm not certain I'm back yet. I don't know that I'll come back."
He did look hurt then, and a little lost. "What else would you do?"
I looked down. Not demure. Just afraid to meet his eyes. "Go to school. Get a job. Try out for the DEA."
"What we talked about."
His voice was so quiet I looked up and his face was sad, as if I'd gone off to do something we'd planned to do together and I was doing alone. Only it had always been something I was going to do alone, hadn't it?
"What we talked about, yes."
"I see." The silence stretched out between us. I watched the floor, his shadow as he now paced, into the sun from the southwest windows and back out of it again. I shivered when he left the sun, as if I could feel the cool shadows on my own body. "I asked if you knew about Ariel."
"I don't think I do. Sir. You said she lives here?"
Abruptly he pulled the straight-back chair from inside his office into the main cell and straddled it, facing me. "She's been here longer than you have."
The flash of jealousy was totally out of place. Whatever our relationship was, it wasn't anything where I could get jealous of anyone else.
"I – " I stopped to think what I wanted to say. "Haven't ever seen her. Have I?" Maybe she was a guest at one of the parties. Maybe she had a different name. Maybe it was part of the whole weird game that she’d lived here all along when I thought she went home with a different bad mad billionaire.
"She's in the maze," Cole said.
For an instant I couldn't understand what he'd said. Then my first question was, "There's a maze here?"
He smiled, an honest one this time, and said, "Not technically, but the way the hallways run, it's like a maze, like the super simple ones kids get on their menus at Denny's."
"Under the compound?" I asked but even as I did, I saw the compound again from the air, the way I'd identified the section that housed my cell, connected through the room of pain behind my quarters. There were other buildings connected by thin covered walkways, at least it looked that way from the air. The entire compound looked a little like a hopscotch grid from above, with each additional unit behind the main house to the north, and juxtaposed to each other to prevent blocking each other's sunlight.
"No. Not under. If you continued through our playroom – "
"That's a playroom?"
The look he gave me wasn't playful at all and I shut up.
"You'd find a passage that could take you into her quarters."
Too many questions. Too much growing fear. "She's been here all along? But I've been here almost a year. How is that possible? I've never seen her." I backed up, sat down unexpectedly on the bed, covers bunched in both hands. My breathing was ragged and the walls had started closing in. The walls to the locked cell I'd willingly entered with Cole St. Martin.
Had I been wrong all along? Had he disappeared her? Would he disappear me? Had I left somewhere I was safe, if angry and humiliated and ready to divorce a man I hadn't married yet, to go somewhere I wasn't safe, somewhere someone could effectively make me not be?
Abruptly Cole was in front of me, crouching at my feet, his hands on my arms. "Breathe," he said. "Annie, breathe. You're hyperventilating. I started at the wrong place. I was thinking about Kie. Annie, please listen."
Please. He so rarely said it.
I nodded.
