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Kie shrugged. "Thought you'd miss me."
I didn't bother to answer. "What happens now? You got me here. You must want something."
The smile she sent my way was ugly. "Right. I heard you were really enjoying your stay in the asylum."
I almost laughed. I was giddy with relief to see Cole and terrified at the same time that Kie had brought me here only to watch him die.
But Kie thought she could get to me by hurting my feelings. That was almost funny.
It would be much funnier when Kie was dead and Cole and I were remembering it.
2
Annie
"I didn't think you'd have the balls to come."
Kie looked the same. It had only been weeks since I'd left France with Cole, convinced that Kie was as dead as her Master. The slashes on her face had started to heal. That was something Vincent had done to her after she apparently embarrassed him by hurting me at the orgy dinner.
Kie was a beautiful woman if you didn't know the monster under her skin. The cuts on her face did nothing to take away from her beauty, they just made her strange and unrecognizable. I understood why she hated me. But her actions had started everything and I hated her as much as I was honestly afraid of her.
Once in Paris, she had come to me and dragged me out of my depression and out of my cell, forcing me into running clothes and out on the street and even though we were tailed by Vincent's goons driving a vehicle and carrying their guns in case either one of us got any ideas, it had been a sort of freedom and I had needed it.
Undoubtedly Vincent's idea had been to let me get my feet under me just long enough to knock them out again.
I didn't care. Being out had been a blessing. And he had ended up dead.
"What do you want, Kie? Why did you drag me out of my nice, safe looney bin?" Might as well take her first weapon away. I wasn't ashamed of the time I'd spent involuntarily committed, in part because of the "involuntary" clause. My father and Mark had me put there. Not because I was crazy. But because I was tangled up with Cole St. Martin in a BDSM relationship as well as in his experimental opiate program.
Clearly I couldn't be involved with anyone other than nice safe Mark without being labeled crazy.
"We have unfinished business," Kie said. But she didn't move the razor any closer to Cole, so maybe this wasn't about revenge for killing Vincent.
"And that would be?" My heart was jackhammering against my ribs. Undercover narc work taught me to hide my emotions and present a smooth, cool front.
That didn't mean I wasn't scared shitless, and all the more so when someone else's welfare was in my hands.
"For one thing, my peaches and cream complexion," she said and drew the razor over the healing cuts on her cheeks hard enough that a trickle of blood followed the blade.
I swallowed convulsively. I don't like knives or blades. It's too easy to get hurt, too hard to defend yourself against them without getting hurt.
Especially if you happen to be faced with a psychopath and you yourself are tied to a chair. I could see the panic in Cole's eyes.
But if what Kie intended to do was mark Cole, that was better than what she could do to a bound man when she had a razor and I had guns held on me and was across the room.
It would be a shame. Cole is beautiful. Marvel's Loki kind of beautiful. But he'd be Cole with or without scars.
"Are you all right?" I asked and didn't add Sir because it felt like the wrong place for it and dangerous.
Instead of answering that, he said, "If I ordered you to go away? To run?"
There was a temptation there. To snort. Master or not. For fuck's sake, did he think she was going to let me? "I don't think that's an option," I said, and this time I added it: "Sir."
"Oh, how touching," Kie said.
"What do you want, Kie?" Ignoring Cole because I didn't know how to reach him. Over the years how many untenable situations had I gotten myself into when I was deep cover? But this one scared me. Cole St. Martin saved my life. He saved my career with Seattle PD if I wanted it back and he'd offered me a way to the next step instead of returning to PD if I wanted to take it: School and a career with the DEA or another alphabet soup agency. I was up for it. I could do junior college and then university and come out the other side with a BA at twenty-seven, ten years under the cutoff.
He'd saved my life. I would save his. All the feelings past that, past beating Kie and saving Cole, would have to wait.
