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Aside from the adrenaline, which calms more with each cracker sandwich I eat, I’m not a shaking hot mess. I’m not crying. I didn’t have some meltdown. Despite how destroyed I’d be if I lost Brian, I didn’t lose him, and so I can’t seem to call up the emotions that the potential of losing him should cause.
Brian leaves again and comes back, happy this time to have found a giant blue tarp that had been covering a boat on the property. Honestly this is the happiest I think I’ve ever seen him, and I’m not sure if it’s because I’m safe or because he gets to cut up some bodies. Maybe it’s a bit of both.
“I-I think I’m broken. For real this time,” I say, as he unshackles Matsumoto and lays his body out on the tarp for disassembly.
He turns to me and levels me with a long hard stare. “Well, I think you’re a glorious badass.”
This draws a small smile out of me. Then I do feel something, a little warmth in my belly, a flush of pride that despite his determination to punish me and reclaim control of our dynamic, that he’s proud of me and sees something good in what I’ve become.
I’ve finished my crackers by the time he drags the guard inside, and without a word I go follow Brian’s directive about the shower. I grab my black bag which I hid behind a plant when I saw the guard. I knew it was foolish to think I could bring obvious weapons here, but I didn’t think Matsumoto would expect me to come packing heat anyway. So maybe he wouldn’t even have a security detail. There was only one guard, which in some ways proved my point. His father was always surrounded by bodyguards, and I know he was no different. But my weapons were in my bag and the lone guard was already pointing his gun at me.
So I’d gone with seduction, and while he was distracted, I’d pulled the capped syringe from the place I’d sewn into the back of my corset to hold it. I felt proud of myself for figuring out a way to alter the inner lining of the corset so that when I pulled the syringe, the cap stayed behind. If I’d had to fumble with it, the temporary distraction never would have worked.
And I couldn’t conceal the syringe on my body without the cap or else I risked injecting myself with the drug and being rendered completely helpless against whatever they decided to do with me.
I take the bag upstairs to the main floor and the master bathroom. I wonder absently if this is a secondary vacation home or if he rented it or borrowed it from a friend. I drop the bag on top of the bed and step into the shower. I’m only now realizing that when I’d finished my crackers, I just walked out of the room completely naked.
Old Mina never would have wandered anywhere, even alone, totally naked like that. She would have put some kind of clothes on, even the corset. Or she would have stayed wrapped in the comforting cocoon of the blanket. But I’d shed that without a thought like the new darker butterfly I’m becoming.
I barely feel the shower spray. There’s a sort of muted dullness that has overtaken all my senses. It started in Japan and had crystallized by the time we got back to the house. And today, with Matsumoto’s death, another layer of whatever this is, has wound itself around me. I feel like I’m falling down a dark well with no way to climb back out. And a part of me doesn’t care. I’m dimly aware that this part that doesn’t care is the pretty poison of the numbing.
I’m not sure if this is better or worse than the pain and fear I lived in as Mina version 1.0. I can see the protection of it, the utility of it. Had I been that Mina, no way could I have just walked in here like a badass, used the promise of my body to incapacitate a guard, and taken Matsumoto out without blinking. But there is a price, that thick cocoon wrapped around me. The way everything mutes into dull gray.
The way food tastes… less. Smells go unnoticed. The water falling on me feels as though it’s falling on a layer of plastic wrapping that stands between me and the pure experience of it and the rest of life as I knew it. I stare down at the blood running in watered-down rivulets down my skin, swirling and finally going down the drain. If only I could wash all my damage off so easily.
