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There were tears in her voice, and it enraged him. He gripped her tighter, and she gasped before he realized he’d done it.
“Go now before I say or do something I’ll regret.”
She looked on him with that fear again, the same fear from the first day after he’d bought her. The same fear from the night she’d met him. It would never go away. She would never trust him because he couldn’t trust himself. The shared intimacy of only moments before seemed like a dream. Every time they inched toward something good, it shattered again when reality came crashing back.
* * *
Mina moved quickly down the dungeon corridor, but not quickly enough. The new girl was already being brought downstairs by Gabe. She struggled in his arms and cursed at him. She was too defiant. Brian would love breaking her.
Don’t look at her. Don’t think about her. Just go upstairs. It’s not happening. It’s not real.
If she could only narrow everything down to the small world in which she and Brian inhabited, everything would be fine. She darted past the girl and up the stairs, forcing herself not to look back.
She wished she could go to the spa with Annette and get a massage or a manicure, but Shannon had looked on her with too much accusation. Everywhere Mina turned, evidence of Brian’s brutality stared her in the face. The women in the house were all waiting for her to fall, for Brian to lose it, for her to be reduced to the same status with him that the rest of them lived in.
Besides her, only Annette was protected. And that was because she belonged to Anton. The collar protected Anton’s slave in the same way Mina’s collar protected her. Her fingers strayed to touch the metal at her throat.
Mina felt herself pulled back toward the dungeon. She didn’t want to go down there. She didn’t want to see or hear what Brian was doing. She wanted to stay upstairs where it was safe, where she could pretend that he didn’t do these things.
Brian had been nothing but protective toward her. Even when he seemed angry or scary or intense, he always found another outlet. Never her. But it was in him—deeper and darker than it had been with Jason or any of the others.
He was a bomb that could go off at any moment. Any time Mina got too close, she heard the ticking. She crept down the stairs, knowing she’d regret it. But the darkness inside Brian pulled her like wispy black smoke, embracing her and calling her to him. It demanded that she watch, that she couldn’t hide from what he was.
She was barely down the stairs when she heard the new girl’s screams and begging. Mina had been sure the second the blindfold had come off on the day Brian bought her, that the rest ofherlife would be nothing but screaming and begging and cringing and cowering in corners. And more scars. So far she’d been shown mercy.
But the rooms underground smelled like pain and fear. And she couldn’t quite convince herself that it was any better when she was spared and it was someone else taking the beatings.
Mina flinched as the whip cracked. Sometimes he was more methodical. He took his time. He mentally tortured them and worked them into a state to burn off the worst of whatever was inside him that needed sated. She knew why. If he went full out from the beginning, he might make too many of them unsaleable like Shannon in the spa. He had to ease his way in.
But today, he’d moved straight to the whip. Mina edged closer and peered through the window to find the new girl tied with her hands over her head against the pole in the center of the room.
“Please, please I swear I’ll be good,” she screamed. And she meant it. It had taken only a few minutes with Brian for her to realize the folly of whatever stupid thing she’d done.
“Will you?” Brian asked. “Because from what I heard you were making all sorts of demands as if you were queen of the castle. Tell me, sweetheart, do you think you’re the queen, now? We had one of those once. It didn’t end well for her.”
“N-no, Sir!”
Crack.
“What are you, then?”
“J-just a slave.”
He laughed. “Oh, you’re not even fit for that yet. Right now you’re just a dumb whore that might amuse me enough to let you live to be trained and sold. Do you know how many people I’ve killed?”
She shook her head vigorously.
“A. Lot. And I don’t feel a thing except relief when another life slips away. If I spare you today, think about that when you’re upstairs with one of the others—one of the gentle souls who can barely stand to venture down here because they aren’t dark or hard enough for it.”
“Y-yes, Sir.”
The whip cracked against her skin again, and a few drops of blood hit the floor.
“I can fuck you or I can beat you some more. Which would you prefer?”
“F-fuck. Please fuck.”
He laughed. “Good girl. Your smart mouth has no purpose here except to worship my cock. Do you understand?”
