Lost in the world of dreams, Mina forgot the deal she’d made with the doctor, the long trip to the house, and Brian. She dreamed of normal things. Going to the bakery. Buying a new coffeemaker. Doing her taxes. The kind of dream so boring, its content—if it could be bottled—would cure the world’s insomnia.
Upon waking and finding herself in the tower, she had a sense of inversion, as if reality had flipped. Weren’t things like this supposed to be the dream while boring monotony was meant to be real life?
She’d read the book of rules cover to cover several times the previous night, trying to calm her heart rate, trying to focus on anything but Brian’s intense dark stare, trying to forget the sound of his voice when he told her to run.
She was no stranger to various BDSM protocols, but Jason had made it all more sinister. Somehow in Dr. Smith’s office, she’d indulged in the fantasy that with the right man Jason could be erased. In therapy she’d tried to get to the root of where her submissive feelings sprang.
They were obviously incompatible with reality. No matter what she said she wanted, no matter what she longed for and tried to articulate, gentleness was never on the menu for long when they realized they couldn’t fix her and make her want sex in the normal way, or the normal way with kink layered on top. Jason had punished her the worst for the infraction of simply not liking something. He might have totally lost his mind had she told him she wasn’t fond of chocolate. Because, like intercourse, everybody liked chocolate. If they weren’t weirdos.
Now, instead of running from that lifestyle like the pestilence it was, she’d run headlong into this extreme version of it. The version where it was real—because it wouldn’t be a game. She’d really belong to someone. Actual money would change hands. The promise from someone she’d foolishly grown to trust of the one thing she hadn’t been able to find on her own had made her brain shut down its rational faculties.
Mina startled when the door opened and dropped to the floor on her knees, her head down. The rulebook had been clear that when morning came on her first day they were operating at full protocol, and disobedience would be punished. After seeing the dungeon downstairs and her close brush with Brian, she’d mentally sworn she wouldn’t break any rules. Whatever it took, she couldn’t be sent to him.
Deep down she knew nothing would keep her safe. It hadn’t with Jason or those before him. Jason had made up fake rules that she’d supposedly broken to justify punishment. Or else he claimed he had needs, and she was the slave, and she was supposed to please him. So if he wanted to spend a couple of hours beating the shit out of her and passing her around to his grubby friends, well, she should just be thrilled for the honor. Because didn’t subs like that shit? And what was wrong with her if she didn’t like it, too?
He’d gone so far once as to accuse her of being a vanilla tease, claiming she had grand fantasies but in the end withheld things. But she hadn’t. She’d given him everything he wanted, and it still hadn’t been enough because what he’d wanted was to rewire her brain as if it were his own personally-written software. She was a broken line of code he couldn’t fix. In the end he was disappointed that she was a real person instead of a fantasy in his head that followed his script to the letter.
She pushed down her revulsion as black shiny boots entered her field of vision. Please don’t be Brian. Please don’t be Brian.
“Good girl. What’s next?”
“Lindsay.” Thank God. She crawled to him and kissed his boots. It wasn’t Brian. That was enough. There was a time when every rule in the binder would have made her wet. Now she wondered if she could get excited at all. A flash of her time with Anton at Dome flitted through her mind, and she felt herself flush.
“Sir,” he barked. “In this house, everyone is Sir, do you understand?”
“Y-yes Sir.” It wasn’t as if she hadn’t read that line sixteen times. She’d just forgotten. This was a bad idea. She couldn’t be here. “Please, I-I want to go home. I-I was wrong. This isn’t for me.”
Warm hands wrapped around hers and pulled her to stand. He lifted her face to his. “You can never be set free. You’ve seen too much, and you know it. You agreed. You can’t go back on it now.”
“Please… I can’t…”
“Don’t speak another word until I give you permission.”
Mina closed her mouth and dropped her gaze. Even if prolonged eye contact weren’t prohibited in the book of rules, it would be far too intimate. She needed the space and privacy to figure out how she’d endure what would likely be a fate orders of magnitude worse than Jason.
Lindsay took her to a large suite on the second floor. When the door shut, she glanced furtively around. Lindsay’s room. It had to be. It was a jungle of plants—many of them green and leafy. Others were exotics, including orchids like in his office. The plants grew under artificial lights with rain coming out of tubes in the ceiling to water them. The water swirled down drains in the floor. The main part of the floor, away from the plants was dark green carpet that made her feel like she was in a jungle. There was a king-sized canopy bed with a dark green duvet and mosquito netting around the outside.
As if that weren’t enough, there were several large bird cages with parakeets as well as one with an African Grey parrot.
“Yes, Sir. Oh harder harder. Just like that… I’m going to coooooooome,” the parrot said.
Mina laughed. She hadn’t laughed in a long time. The sound felt foreign.
“Enough, Ralph,” the doctor said, covering the cage.
“Enough. Enough. Enough. Yes, Sir. Enough.”
“Ignore him,” Lindsay said. “He likes the attention.”
The doctor led Mina to the bed and spun her to face him. He lifted her face again and held her gaze. The smile lines around his eyes weirdly calmed her. He bent and captured her mouth in a kiss, and for perhaps the thousandth time she wanted to belong to him—not some stranger she couldn’t trust.
“Please, can’t I be yours? I don’t care if you don’t have time for me. We’re here now. I’ll take whatever you can give.”
Lindsay’s eyes narrowed. “I took a big chance on you. If you want to live without pain, you have to be able to follow basic instructions. I told you not to speak until I gave you permission. Did I give you permission?”
“No, Sir.”
“You set boundaries that make it impossible to punish you, then you can’t give me the courtesy of basic obedience? It was a simple request. Keep your mouth shut until I tell you to speak. Is that clear?”
From laughter to tears in thirty seconds. “Y-yes, Sir. I-I’m sorry.”
The previous night she’d had no problem not speaking. Brian’s mere presence seemed to shut down her ability to do much of anything.
“Undress.”
She couldn’t imagine with Lindsay’s anger that what was coming would be the sweet gentleness she’d hoped for. He would fuck her. Or beat her. Or some combination of the two. She never should have trusted him.
But here she was, locked away in a monstrous house where no one would help her. She unbuttoned and removed the top, her eyes trained on the floor. The pajama pants and her panties joined the pile.