Brian stayed very still as she took him fully into her mouth. He inhaled sharply as took him in deeper and sucked.
He didn’t make demands or orders, afraid to break the bravery she’d found. He could barely focus on the physical pleasure, instead consumed with the fact that she’d come to him on her own, that she must have worked up to this to push all the images of other sadistic men before him out of her head. Their taunts. Their cruelty. All the things Brian unapologetically was—with everyone he’d ever touched but her.
He refused to break the spell or give her another flashback. He let out a hiss when he came and stroked her throat as it worked to swallow his release.
When he was spent, he pulled her to him so that her head rested on his chest. He ran his fingertips over the scars on her back, pausing over each one as if his fingers pressing against them enough times could erase them. He wanted to make them go away. He wanted to make her history go away.
“Y-you can fuck me if you want to. I-I mean, I know you need to recover, but… then after that… if… if you want,” she said.
“No.”
“Why? Do you not want me?”
“Not like that.”
Brian continued trailing his fingertips over her skin while he tried to figure out how to express the thoughts in his head. “I don’t want to fuck you, Mina. Fucking is not a compliment. Maybe others can do it and call it making love, but for me it’s an act of aggression. I’m afraid if I dominate you in that way that nothing will hold me back from the other ways I could hurt you. I can’t separate it from how I am with other women down here. I can’t go there with you. I didn’t think you wanted me to.”
She released a sigh. He was sure it wasn’t meant to be heard or discerned by him, but it was relief. What could have gotten into her head to make her think that the contract had changed? Or that he wanted it to?
“I thought maybe you were getting bored with me, or maybe it made you angry… the limits in the contract… and that you would just… take it.”
Oh. She wanted to feel like she had some control.
The contract held no power over him. There was no one to enforce it. Brian was the only enforcer at the house. He had no one to answer to. It was just a piece of paper with words that he could choose to follow or not. The only reason he chose to follow them was because he couldn’t be his own tormentor. And whatever evil crawled beneath his skin demanding satisfaction, passed over her when it saw her as if sacrifices had already bled to spare her his wrath.
The intercom came on, breaking the moment.
“We’re sending someone down to you,” Lindsay said over the speaker. “She’s new and too rebellious. She’s causing chaos up here with her demands. Where do you want her?”
“Put her in cell A. I’ll deal with her in a few minutes.”
Mina tensed beneath him. He knew she hated what he was. He wished that just being with her could soften his edges and make him good—for her. He wished he wasn’t so broken and damaged. If she could understand what a miracle it was that he could be gentle with her—just one person in the entire world—maybe she would accept what he had to do. What he wanted to do and could muster no guilt for.
She should count herself lucky that she didn’t ping his radar as someone it would be fun to harm.
He eased out of the bed. “Go upstairs for a while.”
He’d been open with her. She had to accept it. Period. And yet, lately he found himself trying to shield her, to hide it. Each time, he grew more irrationally angry. As if it were her fault he was turning so soft. She was making him a liar.
“Yes, Master.”
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 of her life 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.