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Clearly she’s decided to stop being afraid of me. Maybe it’s the new shiny scars on my back. Maybe they’ve reclassified me again as a victim of Brian’s psychopathy, someone to be pitied. She can save her pity.
She wraps me up and leads me away to a more private area. She glances briefly at my bare wrist but makes no comment. I wear Brian’s collar, but I no longer wear the security bracelet the others do.
Brian announced to the house that I’m a free-range kitty now. He actually used those words. He said I’d killed for the house and so I was free to come and go as I liked. And I guess in a way itwasa kill for the house, after all I brought the house enforcer back. Their criminal empire burns without Brian.
This Free-Range Kitty thing didn’t go well with… well Lindsay mostly. The other trainers didn’t care that much.
The girls in the house were pissed, but the murderous rage coming off Brian at the time stopped the complaints they surely would have otherwise made. I could tell Annette was jealous, but she didn’t make a fuss. And Anton does take her out of the house to all sorts of fancy functions: Galas and the ballet. Art auctions.
The fact that she still wears a security bracelet is the issue—like she’s been with Anton all these years but he either doesn’t trust her to let her run free or doesn’t want her to. I think it chafes her that in his own way, Brian takes better care of me and my needs than Anton takes of hers. Or Anton doesn’t have the pull with the other owners to insist upon it like Brian does.
Of course, Brian is likely to kill you if you go against him on even something as trivial as this, so there’s that. I’ve come to see my lover as the secret kingpin at the house since nobody’s going against the guy who kills people for fun. Both Anton and Lindsay jockey back and forth for the “appearance” of who’s in charge. A small consolation prize for the throne. But could anybody really be more in charge than the guy who would gut you without blinking and hang you from the rafters by your own intestines? I’m thinking no.
I can only imagine what Brian’s dating profile would look like. “Enjoys screams… yours, blood… also yours, and body disposal… depends on your behavior.” Not exactly long strolls on the beach and candlelit dinners.
Once Annette has gotten me far enough from the rest of the group, she whispers, “Are you okay? When did he…?”
I know she’s talking about my back. A twisted part of me wants to make her explicitly spell out the words. I’m still a little hurt about the way she cowered from me, like I was a monster she needed to be afraid of. But now that she’s seen what she perceives as new violence against me… she’s what? Letting me back into her super special slave girl sisterhood?
Will there be slumber parties and a secret hand shake?
“It was my punishment for rescuing him,” I say.
Her mouth hangs open like a fish. I can see the wheels turning in her head, like she’s making unlikely and impossible plans to rescue me from Brian. It annoys me as much as it amuses me. But it also makes me feel alone. Nobody here really gets me but Brian. At least when I first got here, I wasn’t a complete alien. I was already pretty different, but I was different in a way that made sense to the others.
I stop Annette’s hamster brain right here. “It’s fine. Ilikeit. I’m happy he marked me like this.”
“You’ve... changed,” is all she’ll say. Understatement of the decade. It’s like she thinks there should be some sort of intervention. Someone needs to save me from myself. I love how everybodywantsto save me, but only Brian ever manages to successfully do anything useful. He’s the one who bought me initially and brought me back from the brink, and he’s the one who saved me from Matsumoto in Japan. Everyone else has only had good intentions that hurt me in the end.
I’m pretty sure Annette thinks I have some form of Stockholm Syndrome—as if she doesn’t—like I’ve gone all Patty Hearst on her. I mean, maybe. I do want to run around and do crime with Brian, now. But it isn’t because I’veidentified with my captor and am only trying to survive. It’s because my needs are beginning to mirror his. But if I spoke these words to Annette, she’d be horrified.
She’d never understand.
2
BRIAN
It sets my teeth on edge that Mina stormed out of here like that. I need to think about this job, but instead all I can think about now is punishing her. I’ve never been the biggest fan of brat subs, and more than one girl has a permanent scar somewhere on her body as a reminder of that.
Hell, Mina has a permanent scar from me now.
I don’t know what got into me when we returned to the house that day after she’d blazed in and taken out Matsumoto’s son. I felt possessed as I stripped her bare in the dungeon and tied her to the pole in the middle of the cell. I contemplated whipping her. I cracked the single-tailed whip a few times. It had the appropriate psychological effect. But it wasn’t enough.
I felt myself losing control, so I turned on the Chopin. I knew it would soothe her, but I also needed it to ground me so I wouldn’t cross lines I couldn’t uncross because it wasn’t about punishing her to harm her.
I just needed to mark her, to brand her. I needed her to have a vivid, solid reminder of who the fuck she belonged to and what that meant. But really, somewhere inside my lizard brain I felt like marking her this way could somehow protect her from ever coming so close to that kind of danger again.
But Iamthat kind of danger.
In my care she’s already been put at risk by two sadistic bastards who weren’t even me. Three if you count the shrink. I can’t stand the thought that I make her unsafe, that my very existence somehow puts her at risk. I need to make her safe. I need to keep her with me forever. I need to mark her as my territory so that when the other dogs sniff around her, they keep moving.
But I know carving the wordMineinto her back with my knife isn’t going to protect her from the monsters in the world. It’s just me being another monster hurting her and making sure she never forgets that I should probably be put down—just a giant fucking reminder of everything I am and all the things I can’t give her.
I was afraid she’d look at me with fear and revulsion, that I might have killed the new spark that ignited within her, but I saw the flush of pleasure on her face when she looked at the word in the mirror. And I see how every time she gets out of the shower, after she dries off, she turns and looks at it, reaching back to trace the scar with her fingertips as though she can make it remain that way forever just by showing it attention, as though it’s a plant she’s caring for.
Mina always lets out a contented sigh after she’s done this. I don’t think she realizes she does it. It’s only one of the many signals that she’s not the scared, broken woman who first came to me. And yet, despite my initial uncertainty, I like this version even better. Though now I have new fears with her.
She can handle more now. I can let the beast out a little with her. But what if I push her too far? What if I harm her and can’t bring her back? What if I’m the one who breaks her this time? What if I become just another man who hurts her? I’ve already broken promises to her. But wasn’t she the one who initiated the changes?
