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She watched him with those wide, frightened green eyes, her arms crossed over her chest in a defensive pose.
He didn’t speak another word. He’d wanted to intimidate her, threaten her, revel with sadistic glee in her fear, but all he could do was turn around and leave. He berated himself as he went down each flight of stairs all the way to the lowest level—to the dungeons. It was physically the farthest he could get from her, but it was also where he lived.
There were a few small dungeon rooms underneath the west wing of the house that the other trainers used, but this set of rooms was all his.
He stomped down the long, dimly lit hallway, past doors to the cells he used to correct bad girls’ behavior. At the end of the hallway was the door to his suite. He slammed it behind him and peeled off his shirt.
A full-length antique mirror stood on one end of the room. He turned on a nearby lamp and twisted to look at his back, running his fingers over old scars. A few wrapped around his sides. Just like hers. He and Mina were matching macabre portraits of other people’s wrath.
The mirror shattered as Brian’s fist connected with it. He sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his bleeding hands, and cried. Sobbed, really. He was thankful he hadn’t left any of the girls in the dungeon cells tonight, thankful no one could hear him down here.
A memory pushed itself through one of the normally-locked doors in his mind. He kept seeing it, over and over, his stepmother whipping him with the switch, screaming at him for letting the dog pee on the floor, then locking him under the stairs without dinner. It wasn’t as if he could control the old dog’s bladder. She’d thrown the terrified dog in as well. Brian had woken the next morning in a pool of the animal’s urine with flea bites all over him and wounds that got so infected from the filth he’d been left in that he’d almost died. He’d only been nine that time, but it hadn’t been the first beating, nor had it been the last.
He tried to push the images out, tried to remember his mother instead. She’d been so kind. She was taken too early—in a car crash. He remembered her smell, and feeling safe and loved. But what he remembered most about her was the music. She’d played old records of Chopin at night to help him sleep as he fought through the fears small children feel—before he knew the real monster who was coming.
His father remarried too soon—a woman he couldn’t see the truth about because of his grief.
As a young child Brian hadn’t understood why his father didn’t protect him from her. But as he got older, he realized how sick the man had been. He’d been too weak to protect Brian from his stepmother’s bitter anger. And once he was gone, things only got worse.
Somehow Brian knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight, either. Seeing the marks on Mina had created an opposite reaction than he was used to. Knowing Lindsay, the doctor might say that perhaps it was because he wasn’t the one in control of the damage. He’d left marks on women worse than what he’d seen of Mina’s, but her marks weren’t created by his hands. The girls always came to him as blank canvases to paint his sadism across in splashes of bright red.
Those women were his foul stepmother all over again. Not a fucking mark on her. And every time he punished them, he wrote out his revenge across her back. Killing her once hadn’t been enough. In the dungeons he could make her pay over and over, make her scream in pain and beg him for mercy he was no longer capable of giving—mercy he didn’t want to give. Mercy was weakness. Just an opportunity for someone to swoop in and find the cracks in your soul to hurt you.
Except Mina… she wasn’t that perfect unmarked canvas. Mina had arrived already broken, and suddenly, somehow this woman he’d only just met was locked under those stairs with him, huddling in the cold darkness.
3
Mina only worried about five times that her food might be poisoned. When nothing dramatic happened, she let go of the fear. Besides, Brian wouldn’t have put something in it. She’d known the moment she looked into those cold dark eyes that he didn’t do stealth pain.
He wanted to be there to watch you suffer. He wanted to deliver it with his own hands.
Though it was late, Mina doubted everyone was asleep. Night was when the perverts played. And yet, as she descended the endless stairs—stairs that seemed to have multiplied since the time of her arrival—everything was quiet.
Small lights along the base of the walls illuminated her way. Off the entryway on the first floor was a hallway and another set of stairs that were nearly hidden. A basement? In a house with the purpose this one served, it was probably dungeons. That thought alone should have sent her scurrying back up to her tower.
But she felt drawn, like young Aurora on her sixteenth birthday, moving steadily toward her doom.
She shook herself out of the brief sense of hypnotism. It felt as if some force outside herself pulled her, but whatever was down there was unlikely to be anything she wanted to see.
Mina was about to go back upstairs, when she heard someone coming down the hall. Heavy, sure footfalls. Brian? She was blocked in. If whoever it was kept moving closer, they’d find her. The stairs were her only option.
She slipped down the winding steps as quietly as she could. Behind the stairs at the bottom was another door. When she pushed it open, the heat almost knocked her over. There was an incinerator inside. She shut the door quickly and stayed hidden, waiting.
Whoever she’d heard didn’t venture below ground. She felt so stupid now. She moved from behind the staircase to see the rest of what was kept down here.
A long, narrow corridor stretched before her. The floor was concrete, the walls stone. At equal intervals were doors. Five on each side. Straight ahead at the end was another door, this one larger than the rest.
Each door along the passageway had a window with bars, but the door at the end was solid. Mina peeked into one of the rooms—a dungeon, just as she’d suspected. Terrifying implements hung from hooks on the wall. Poles were bolted into the ceiling and floor, meant to tie people to. Shackles hung from one wall. There was a wooden crate filled to the brim with things she wasn’t sure about—most likely more implements of pain. There were spanking horses and Saint Andrew’s Crosses.
But this place didn’t look like a play dungeon. It wasn’t like the BDSM parties she’d been to. It wasn’t naughty games with a thin veneer of pretend danger—danger that didn’t materialize in public, but only later when she’d given her heart to someone.
Mina squinted at a dark spot on the wall and another on the floor. Jesus, were those blood stains?
The door at the end of the hallway opened, and she froze. It was the stupidest and most useless fear response. She was sure that normal people, upon encountering danger and extreme fear, ran. But Mina’s muscles responded by going on lock down. She wasn’t sure she was even breathing—as if she could simply be still and silent enough to go undetected until the danger passed.
Brian closed the door behind him, his stare holding her captive. She glanced down to note one of his hands was bandaged. They hadn’t been when she’d seem him before.
Move. Move! Run run run!
