AllFreeNovel
Share Us
45
Cole
I kept her close to me as I called in favors. Annie had no way of anticipating my help with her getting onboard with the DEA would be so useful. She didn't know I had contacts everywhere.
It was a best kept secret, and best kept that way.
By the end of the day Claude was in custody. The instant he was led out, Annie went in. I waited in the car, giving them space, and watched as she went directly to Chloe and put her arms around her, asking what she needed, where did she want to go, what could Annie and I do.
I froze when Annie followed Chloe into the house, but she looked back before she disappeared inside and nodded at me one time. Everything was fine.
So I waited.
Three-quarters of an hour and roughly a thousand fantasies of things I wanted to do to Annie, both those that would hurt and those that would pleasure and those that would humiliate her and – maybe a thousand of those later, Annie came out alone.
I started the Porsche and we drove down off the foothills. "What's her decision."
Annie had been looking pensively out the passenger side window. Now she turned and said, "She's going to stay in the house as long as he gets prison time."
"Oh, my dear," I said. "Don't worry about that." Personally I thought Claude would disappear before he got anywhere near trial. Or even a holding cell and arraignment. Those things happen.
"Then she's keeping the house. They're legally married. This is a community property state?" She asked it though Chloe must have told her, and since it was, she went on. "She's going to dismantle the pain room herself. Bit by fucking bit was the way she put it, and keep the misery stick in her bedroom as a reminder. Then she's turning the room into a nursery of sorts."
I swerved. "She's pregnant?" Because I could call and stop wherever Claude was being taken and it could all be settled right now.
"No." She was grinning. She was crying at the same time and she seemed to glow with a kind of inner light. "She's going to open the home to children who need families. To orphans. To foster children, especially the ones who have such black marks against them no one will take them. She'll hire live-in counselors, a nutritionist who can cook, a coach who can work out all that energy. And then while the coaches and counselors and cooks do their thing with the kids, she's going to write."
"Write?"
"Articles. Books. On what kink really is and what it isn't. On staying safe. On getting out."
I thought that last was something Chloe didn't have a lot of experience with. None of what had gotten her out had been her work. But I didn't say so. I didn't ask any of the questions I wanted to ask, either, about what was going to happen now. What Annie would decide. Her contract was up to her now.
I hoped she would stay.
But I wouldn't decide for her.
46
Annie
The July sky over Seattle was hazy. It had taken a little more than a month to set my plans into motion. By the end of May I had an apartment in Las Vegas though I hadn't told Cole where it was. Only that I'd be attending UNLV and I needed some time by myself.
When I checked my bank account, I was completely unsurprised to find the regular payments for my "sick leave" from PD were compounded now with the tuition for four years of university and four years of rent. I shook my head. For one thing, I'd already told him I'd be moving fasttrack, testing out of those classes like basic math and English and those procedure classes my work as a cop superseded. By taking classes over the two short terms and the one mini term every summer, I'd be out in two years.
That was okay. The money could sit and accrue interest. If he didn't want it back when I graduated, I'd donate it to Chloe's cause. Or buy my own Bugatti Veyron.
Mark wasn't home when I got to the apartment. He hadn't changed the locks on the door. That was something, I supposed, but maybe he just hadn't thought of it.
Standing in the apartment, looking around at the hazy light coming in the windows, I was struck at how it felt both familiar and utterly strange, as though I had never lived here in this life.
Maybe that was true in a sense.
I'd expected there was very little I'd need to take with me. There were a few things I'd miss if I left them behind. My great-grandmother's copy of Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking-Glass, a Windermere edition from a hundred years earlier. The paintings were nearly pastel in it from age and the pages soft from many hands turning them. A framed photo of my father, which I'd take but not display, and a framed portrait of my parents on their wedding day. I'd hoped to have one very similar made when Mark and I got married.
Well. Things change.
Other than that and a handful of fat paperback novels I couldn't remember reading, some t-shirts and jeans, some fluttery tops my alter egos wore, a toothbrush that was practically growing cobwebs, there wasn't much of me here. Hadn't Mark and I shared a life? Apparently what we shared didn't add up to material possessions.
