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Annie
The first time I met Claude and Chloe was at one of St. Martin's dinner parties, though now I couldn't say which one. While I'd been with him, enduring morning cleansings and afternoon beatings, running in the desert and getting past my addiction, there had been multiple get togethers, some of which he insisted I attend, and others which I was excluded from, allowed some treat in my cell, like a teenager bribed with staying in her room with extra online and her own pizza.
The first of the events had been the group of billionaires with more money than sense who raised funds for fighting human trafficking by fucking and beating each other's wives and girlfriends. During that one, at the auction Vincent Geddes had bid $5.5 million for me and won. But Cole St. Martin wouldn't let him take me because I was too new and Vincent too crazy.
That had ended well.
The second one that stood out in memory was the one in which Kie assaulted me with a broken open jalapeno pepper, leading to everything else that Vincent "winning" me hadn't already been leading to.
During those and other dinners I met Claude and Chloe. She was ethereal and blond, delicate and funny and bright. She had a degree in art history or museums or something to do with art that I couldn't keep straight but was impressed by. She had two children, which made me wonder how she had a BDSM lifestyle until I realized they were grown. Chloe was older than she looked, and had started younger.
After the horrible scene with Kie at the dinner party and after she'd been punished in response, I'd spent the night with Claude and Chloe under St. Martin's roof. It was weird, not my scene. In my real life I'd been apt to use sex when I wanted or needed it. I'd had sex when undercover, something Mark had never acknowledged but must have suspected. It's nearly impossible to get close to someone when you're pretending to be a person you're not and despite all the other things you say you do – use and sell drugs, ride with an outlaw gang – you won't have sex with the guy you're supposedly with.
If Mark suspected, he kept the suspicion to himself. Or possibly from himself.
And though in many instances I found I was having a really good time as long as I could remember my cover, unfortunately most of those experiences had taught me that Mark was tame. Or, I guess, boring.
And when I'd sometimes ask Mark to spice it up, he'd tie me up or use my cuffs, only to be furious with me or sickened or something afterwards.
I'm not sure what it meant that when I went home with someone from a martial arts tournament or a bartender from the after-hours drink, I never wanted anything kinky. Just unusual and new was enough. Or rough. Rough was good.
Sex had been a fact of life and because I was PD, my life tended more toward the male ideal. Sex didn't have to be about emotions. I didn't have to care. I could just fuck. I didn't have regrets later. I was safe, clean, careful, discreet.
St. Martin's world had been a revelation. Chloe and Claude had been outside my comfort zone, except that during that night, they’d actually provided comfort.
But now I was in a car with them, blackout windows, blindfold ready to be slipped on when I was told to. I was wearing a GPS tracker attached to my leg as if I were a felon out on bail between arraignment and trial.
Chloe was talking about shopping and about what her twin boys were doing at college and about the house, and Claude was driving silently until abruptly he said, "Chlo, give it a rest."
It was the first indication I had that being with the two of them might not be the vacation I was hoping for.
St. Martin wanted me out of the compound for a while. I got that. He had Kie and her transfer to deal with. Apparently some of Kie's men were in the maze, in cells, and something had to be done about them.
I didn't think he was going to kill them. For whatever posturing he did, I didn't think that was him. Though I supposed they might inexplicably find themselves in a trackless desert, or just as easily somewhere with a shit ton of money in their accounts but explosives surgically implanted in their bodies that would go off if they tried to tell anyone or blackmail him.
Or maybe I'd watched too many torture porn movies in my time.
"It's going to be all right, Annie," Chloe said. "You'll see. Mr. St. Martin must have said a dozen times that we don't get to keep you." She laughed a little at that and I turned to stare at her.
"Why would you even want to?" I asked, horrified at the thought. The idea of keeping people and owning them was never going to compute for me.
Chloe missed my point. "You'll see. You'll feel better in no time."
She was wrong.
The first few days with Claude and Chloe were like a dream. Not a good one and not a nightmare. Just unfamiliar and surreal.
It had been long enough, and I had been strung out enough at the time, that I could no longer remember what it was like when I first ended up with St. Martin. Probably there was some disconnect.
But at that time I had a full family I was actually running from, and PD as well, which was also like a family. For that matter, I had the fucking Brotherhood which I was a part of. Being Jesse's old lady meant something, even if Jesse was dead, and I could have gone back there. But for better or worse, with Jesse dead, it was a matter of time before the new players took over the China White trade in that part of Seattle. At that point being with the Brotherhood would have just meant me being part of a gang.
This time, though, being sent to stay with Claude and Chloe whether I wanted to or not felt like being sent away from what I was hanging on to as home.
Maybe it was what I needed. Maybe I needed to realize that Cole St. Martin wasn't home and wasn't likely to ever be. As much time as I spent hating the rituals of the scene he was creating, I liked the trappings. I didn't want to admit that but something in me wanted the discipline for certain. Discipline had always been in my life, whether that meant getting my black belt or staying in shape, or passing the exams to become an active police officer, or whatever. I was on time when I was PD and I was damned good at what I did when I was undercover.
Thing is, what I wanted to do, Chloe told me, was top from below.
We were sitting in her backyard, watching hummingbirds at a feeder. Her mansion was as rural as St. Martin's desert compound, but his was across the desert in the middle of fucking nowhere, which is a direction Nevada has a lot of. Hers was in a high end gated community which she personally hated because it was tied into what had been federal land and therefore open for desert animals and human recreation and now was owned by rich people who had no right to it. Also the commune of huge acreages and offensively huge houses backed up to a national park that was full of petroglyphs and shouldn't have people living next door.
