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I stood in the too bright living room, gagging on memory.
My heart rate slowed as I woke fully but the shivering, shaking with chills, and the nausea, none of those abated.
I paced fast, back and forth across the floor, kicked the glass out of the way, gagged on the smell of bourbon at the same time I found another glass and poured another, swallowing it down like it was cheap whisky.
It did nothing to stop the fear that had set in.
It was a dream. You know that. Emily is dead. You can't save her now.
I couldn't save her then. I'd done everything I could to get her off drugs. I'd done everything I could to find her every time she vanished, to bring her back. Our parents were dicks but at the time they had the money. They wouldn't have let Emily die the way she did.
In the dream, Emily came to me. Ragged and worn, her hair in stringy strands, her eyes sunken. In reality she had looked almost as healthy and whole as the last time I'd seen her, but the drugs had still taken her.
In the dream, Emily was a wraith. A ghost. A thing of intent and anger, a darkness stalking my every step.
My sister had never been any of those things. She'd been lost and hurt and running when she found her way to the cotton padding of addiction and fell in headfirst. The only way she had scared me was through her own pain and my inability to save her.
The nightmare left me scared. There was sweat on my forehead. I wanted Annie back in the house because I didn't want to sleep alone.
I laughed at myself for that. Not only because I was more than adult enough and rich enough to have any company I wanted but because I didn't have to sleep. I could wait for daylight. My business was reliant on me, not the other way around.
But walking the floors of the compound was eerie. The HVAC system was advanced, almost noiseless, but at night in the rural desert, anything that makes any noise is instantly audible. I could hear the air in the ducting and it sounded like voices talking, disembodied and weird.
My mind racing, I wondered what Annie was enduring and if it would change her enough that I could bring her back.
My feet carried me where my mind hadn't gone yet, downstairs to the cells, past Kie's cell where she slept in obvious discomfort. She was bunched up on the bed, her hands in fists, her face screwed up as if she faced down her own sleep demons.
I had no sympathy. There was a momentary urge to shout her awake, banging on the plexiglass behind which she slept, rouse her in heart pounding terror and confusion. She deserved it.
The most I'd actually done was not tell her that Norcross was coming. She didn't know what I meant to do with her yet. Knowing Kie's twisted mind, the little I knew of it which was more than anyone would want to know, she probably liked that.
If I wanted to torture her, I could tell her she was being sent to a convent to become a nun. That I was her Master and that was my wish. No more sex ever. No more beatings of the kind she liked and probably there were lots of convents where they didn't scourge themselves. If there were any where they did. I had fuck all knowledge of nuns except that for some reason, young women were apparently going to them again.
The world was a strange place.
I didn't wake Kie. I kept going, winding through the maze, until I came to Ariel's door.
37
Annie
Chloe led me up the hall to a locked door, stood before it and let her eyes be scanned before she entered a code on a keypad. I was shaking, my stomach in knots, trying to work out why I'd gone to dungeons in San Francisco voluntarily, submitted to St. Martin and returned to him, but here I was a wreck of terror.
No answers. Other than by now I hated Claude. His fussy mannerisms. His arrogance.
His air of being dangerous.
Jesse was dangerous. But Jesse, despite his rages, actually liked me.
The room didn't surprise me, except to wonder if all billionaires had a secret pain room fitted with spreader bars and spanking benches, with the ubiquitous St. Andrew’s cross. His had a few more. There was a shower stall that scared me, a three-sided thing with a shower head, no, a long hose. Probably for cold water showers. Or enemas. Or something. Not waterboarding. I'd heard of people who took their play that far.
I was not among them.
"There's no point," Chloe said.
I looked at her, surprised. Claude hadn't hurt me before. But Chloe hadn't talked to me before, either. Not a word. When we got to this point, she went into herself. What I had perceived as cold, I thought now was a sort of protection.
No way to know how much time we had before Claude would come after us. I followed her lead and sank to the floor and, assuming there were cameras, assumed the position, waiting for him.
