Oh, she didn’t think he loved her. They barely knew each other. She didn’t think they’d have some great romance like in books and movies. But did he care, as one human to another about her pain? It seemed utterly impossible that he had the capacity, given the pain he seemed to so gleefully deliver to others.
“Tell me,” he said.
She wanted to play dumb, to pretend she didn’t know what he wanted her to confess, but she was too afraid of breaking this new intimacy. She’d seen a hint of it the night before when their hands had touched in the shower—and she wanted more. She was starved for it.
“My last master—”
“You’ve never had a real master. You had an abusive asshole that played games with you that were to his advantage and not yours.”
True. And now she had a real master in the sense of someone who wasn’t playing a game with her, and everyone in the house knew how much he liked hurting people.
“Continue.”
“Jason,” she corrected. “He used to share me with his friends, and they’d all go on about what a good little cocksucker I was.”
“Sharing upsets you.”
“Yes.”
“But you know I can’t be exclusive. I’m going to be with others down here. And with your list of limits, exclusivity was never in the cards with any master.”
“No, I mean… being passed around. I-I don’t care about the other.” She cared that he hurt others, but she didn’t care that he fucked them. Though maybe that was because it all existed as something to feed his sadism.
It was obvious that what had taken place between the two of them was a whole other zone of reality. Mina thought that if he were to be tender with someone else, it might pose a problem for her. But shouldn’t she prefer him to be tender with others than to be violent with them?
He guided her hand to circle around his cock. “I’ll let you do it this way for now. When you feel you’ve worked through this, you can come to me and please me with your mouth.”
It only took a few minutes before his breathing deepened and he came. She didn’t wait for an order this time. She licked it up as he petted her hair and pressed a kiss to the top of her head.
“Go shower, have breakfast, do whatever you need to do. At eleven-thirty, I want you to go to room 308 on the main floor in the east wing for a waxing appointment. Then I want you in the gym working out. You need to stay fit for me. After that, you can have the rest of the day for yourself.”
Mina went back to their room, but Brian didn’t follow. She used the bathroom and washed her face and got in the shower. For the first time she noticed the thickness and strength of the shower glass. It could bear weight. The proof was the shackles built into the shower wall.
The spa was tucked away in a far corner of the east wing, nearly deserted.
“Hey!”
Mina turned to find Annette getting a pedicure.
“Most of the girls don’t know about this place,” she said conspiratorially. “Sometimes we send them before they get sold for a bit of grooming, or as a reward for something. But most of the time it’s me hogging all the spa treatments. Does Brian know you’re up here? I can’t believe he’d send you to be pampered.”
“Waxing appointment,” Mina said.
“Oh.” Annette’s oh was like an encyclopedia’s worth of verbiage. They both knew what that oh meant. It was, Oh, of course, a sadist would send you to get waxed.
“Should I even ask what you’re waxing?”
A girl who worked in the salon approached them. “Everything,” she said. Her name tag read, Shannon.
Mina couldn’t stop the gasp. Shannon wore a low-cut tank top. Harsh scars covered her arms and whipped around her chest, a few inching up her neck. One had gotten her cheek. “What happened to you—”
“Mina… don’t,” Annette said.
Shannon smiled, but it wasn’t friendly. “Don’t worry about it. She should know what she’s in bed with. Brian did this to me. Once upon a time I was here to be trained and sold to someone. I was all wrapped up in the fantasy—until the day I was mildly disrespectful to your master. I didn’t realize who I was speaking with, and it was only my third day in the house. He dragged me to the dungeon and he did this. It made me unsaleable. If he’d only marked my back, it might have been different, but he did too much damage in too many places. When they found out I had work experience in a spa, they decided to spare my life and keep me here.”
“I-I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
Shannon sneered. “Of course you didn’t. He favors you, doesn’t he? I could hear it in his voice when he called to make the appointment. How lucky for you to be in the favor of the house monster, protected from the one person who could ever cause you genuine harm. I wouldn’t get too comfortable in that position. Wild animals don’t make good house pets.”
“It’s not as if she picked him. Lay off her!” Annette said.
“It’s okay,” Mina said.
She needed to hear the truth. Brian could make her forget who he was, what he was. She could put it all in a box and never look into it. But the moment she stepped outside of that bubble, she was confronted with one more reason why she had to guard her heart against this man. She couldn’t allow herself to want to be near him. She’d melted too easily into his embrace in the dungeon.
She’d allowed his kind words and gentle touch to soothe and make her forget. How did he know how to be gentle? Where could he have possibly learned such a thing? She had no evidence he’d ever carefully touched another living being in his life. And yet, when his hands were on her, they brought pleasure or comfort, not pain.
“Your room is set up,” Shannon said. “Come on back when you’re ready.” Her eyes seemed to light at the prospect of causing Brian’s slave pain—as if Mina were a proxy for her master, as if somehow it would bypass her nerve endings to reach his instead.
Mina started to follow her back but Annette’s hand on her arm stopped her. “I’m sorry about Shannon. I can’t believe he’d send you to her.”
“I can.” It was obvious he wanted to strip away all her illusions. He didn’t slink in the dark doing what he did. He did it in the open, leaving the evidence spread out proudly for all to see. He hadn’t hidden the girl he’d punished the other day. He hadn’t cared that Mina had seen. It was as if he wanted her to see—as if he dared her to challenge him or cringe from the truth.
Annette shrugged. “The only thing he doesn’t do is lie.”
Small consolation. Because lies were about shame or avoiding consequences. There were no consequences for Brian in this house, and he had no shame. So what was there to be dishonest about? How could it be a virtue when it cost him nothing?
“Mina?” Annette pressed.
“Yeah?”
“If I were you, I would take whatever good I could find in him. You shouldn’t have to recoil even from a gentle touch just because of who delivered it. I’ve never seen him be kind to anyone. If he’s really being that way with you, I’d do whatever I had to do to prolong it.”
Annette had read her mind.