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I should know. Being undercover, being deep cover, those were all games of make believe. Dangerous, deadly games with outcomes upon which lives mattered.
The same could be said now. When a dangerous person needed to be controlled and I could control her, I was going to do so. When there needed to be a decision made and I had input, I was going to give it.
St. Martin felt I shouldn't. How far did that extend? If I noticed the compound really had caught on fire, what did St. Martin think? Did he imagine I would kneel at his feet and hoped he would express his desire to hear what I obviously urgently needed to tell him? Because that wasn't going to happen. It wasn't just that I had too much of a sense of self-preservation, but that for whatever reason, I cared too much to let him be hurt.
"You may leave the table," St. Martin said.
Once in a rare while, I really see red. I stood, and smacked my hand down on the table the same way he had. My eyes took in all the guards there. "Talk some sense into him," I said. "Before he gets all of us killed."
They looked like I'd just thrown a live grenade into their midst. I snorted at them and left the table, a ringing silence in my wake.
For the rest of the afternoon I paced and worried and waited for the summons. When it didn't come I worked on the heavy bag for a while, then lifted, then even tried some yoga, and when that didn't work, I changed into running clothes and went looking for the guard who would open the cell door and let me out into the desert. Not like there was much of anywhere I could go out there. Or like there weren't cameras capable of following nearly the entire run.
There was no one at the controls. That made me swallow hard over a dry throat, a ratcheting sound. If there was nobody at that camera, there was no one to open the cell from the outside and no one inside to open it from within. What if I needed help?
I tried the door.
It was unlocked.
This is a bad idea.
Yeah. But the son of a bitch sent me away, devalued everything I'd said in front of the guards.
I stood for about three seconds of indecision.
Then I went for a run.
22
Cole
I was waiting for her when she got back.
The anger that was always with me now kept building the longer she was gone. In the security office, the guards could monitor her, track her every move, see where she was running, whether she was following trails or heading for Las Vegas as she had once before.
They'd been told not to track her. The only cameras on were the ones directly outside the compound. Just in case Kie, who seemed somehow magical, had contacted yet more men and somehow found yet more of Vincent's money to pay them with.
At two hours I stopped waiting for Annie. Having only sat waiting, watching the clock, I rose stiffly and contacted Hennings' people.
"You're still looking for that collectible?" The world has laughed at some ultra rich men who claim they're being surveilled, but it happens, with surprising regularity. When you have more money than almost anyone else, the urge to take you down – or just take away the money – through real or imagined crimes, is almost irresistible, even to people who otherwise are decent.
Hennings listened to the fact that I'd located a collectible that might be like what he was looking for, and that the condition was at best delicate. He said he'd get back to me and named a date and time, which I knew meant he'd be here then.
At three hours, Annie came back. No doubt she'd walked a good part of the run. The last few weeks of activity had left her out of shape. The fact that she'd used her rebellion to try and mitigate that was at least something in her favor.
She came through the door into her cell with her head down, breathing hard. The camera at the door was on, scanning just the immediate perimeter. Paranoia was high enough with forces arraying themselves in my own compound. At the very least I wanted to know what was going on right outside my own front door, even if for now, I wanted to know very little more.
I watched her approach on the monitor that hung there. She was halfway across the room before she looked up and saw me. Her expression changed. I hadn't been able to read the look on her face when she entered. But it was maybe one of profound concentration. Annie said her work gave her time to be alone. Even when she infiltrated a gang and was as accepted into the fold as anyone else, she was quiet because quiet was safer than loud. Loud could lead to a mistake and a mistake could lead to her death. She'd said it as if the problem would then be that the people she was trying to take down wouldn't necessarily be taken down.
I'd thought the problem would have been her death.
Probably the expression on her face had been one of Annie turning over pros and cons. It was obvious now that she believed the contract to be something other than a legally binding document. She thought of it as a negotiation, perhaps, the kind of thing players in a dungeon agree upon before they start a scene.
I thought of it quite seriously. If she didn't like something, she could safe word. If the thing I was doing that she didn't like wasn't among her hard limits, however, and wasn't physically harmful to her, I didn't agree to stop.
Basically, Annie thought she could still walk if she didn't like what was happening.
I thought she'd just signed away that right. Along with owning her, along with controlling her and doing what I wanted to her and enjoying it, I now had added responsibility to her.
