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3
Annie
The cell where Cole kept me for my recovery and for his pleasure was behind the main compound and detached.
I called his rural escape hatch in the Southern Nevada desert a compound because it fit. It was enormous, with hallways leading maze-like through the main house. I hadn't even come close to seeing all of it. The first house in the compound was deceiving – there was actually no difference between it and the main house. Follow the hallway long enough and the house opened into something much bigger. Follow that far enough and you'd come to the exits that led over a short distance to my cell.
Which was a building bigger than a normal one-story single family home. It was mostly one room, sterile and white, dominated by a bed and, once I determined to take criminal justice classes when Cole finally let me, a desk against an interior wall where I could study.
On the far side of the big room was Cole's office with its locked down phones and computers keeping me from the world and the world from me. On that same wall there was a bathroom, big enough to constitute a luxury and the only place cameras didn't watch everything. There were windows in Cole's office, and along the southwest and southern walls, huge windows looking out onto empty desert with all its blues and browns. There was wire woven through the windows, making them escape-proof.
Follow the other exit from the cell and I'd end up in an alternate headspace room where Cole took me to punish me or to enjoy himself with me. It held a huge four poster bed with restraints at the ready, and a closet full of every conceivable whip, chain, crop, slapper, paddle, belt, and every other kind of restraint and control, including hoods and ball gags.
That there were places in the middle of that building I'd never seen I was sure. That there were places in the main house I'd never come close to seeing either was also logical. And given where the windows were and the fact that I knew the place to be more huge than what I'd seen, the weirdly segmented shape of it I'd seen from the air made sense. There were chunks of building juxtaposed to allow individual rooms to have light. I thought there were probably parts of the maze-like compound underground, too.
When Cole saw what was coming, he indicated a place. Resigned. Against it. But still he told the guards to untie him and he'd take them there and when the men with guns told Kie to simply beat the information out of him since some of the passages were padlocked, she snapped at them to untie him and follow.
That made a procession through the house, down hallways I'd seen and into those I hadn't. Cole and I at the head of the parade, not touching, not doing anything to show we were together or might mean anything to each other. Giving nothing more away that Kie could use against us.
In truth, I didn't know what we meant to each other. But if nothing else, we were united against Kie, and that she'd already know.
The room Cole took us to was a workout room, probably for yoga as well as martial arts. It was an interior room, but light and sunny with a sun roof of the kind that indoor pools have in swanky hotels in Nevada. There were pads stacked up against the wall, a couple of inches thick and covered with fake leather, used for gymnastics training and the kind of martial arts where people throw and other people do the falling. There were some chairs along the edges.
Otherwise, it was empty.
I nodded, half to myself. The whole setup had a very two enter, one leaves feeling to it, which I was pretty sure was a paraphrased motto from a Chuck Norris movie. Fitting.
Turning back to Kie, I said, "Stakes? Rules?"
She laughed. "Rules: Fight till one of us is dead. Stakes: The lives of everybody else."
If I weren't imagining things, two of her four guards looked at each other. Made sense. Kie had been considered dead in Paris. Vincent really was. So maybe whatever guards these were, they'd been hired since she surfaced again in the States.
I hoped so. Because fresh hires wouldn't feel any kind of loyalty to more than a paycheck. If she started acting like their stake in it was to die for their mistress, maybe they'd turn. If we were all locked in here together, maybe they'd change in our favor.
And whatever else happened, as long as Cole's men weren't dead, they'd be recovering and finding a way to get to us. Not that I thought all the shooting between the two groups of guards would be beneficial to anybody's health.
But it would be nice to have our guards in charge again.
Our! … Cole's.
"Not good enough." From peripheral vision I could see Cole watching me, shaking his head. Did he want me to fight to the death?
Sounding bored, Kie asked what my terms were.
"That no one here is killed. Not Cole, not his guards, not me."
Her lip rose as if she were snarling. "You want me to believe you won't try to kill me?"
"I didn't before."
"You thought I was dead before."
It would have been simpler if she didn't know that.
I just repeated, "No one here gets killed. Not Cole, not his guards, not me. If you win. If I win, I'm not killing anybody who doesn't do something that warrants killing. For my safety and the safety of the people who belong here."
She nodded. "If I win, you come with me."
