For a while, hurting others had been enough, but then Mina was required. Without her, the dreams might never go away again. Without her, how could he make them stop?
28
A week had passed since Brian released her. The dreams wouldn’t stop. Every night they grew darker, more punishing, revealing everything he’d tried to keep buried deep within his psyche. Every night he reached out to hold Mina for her protection or his comfort he couldn’t be sure. Maybe both. He became more erratic, punishing girls for looking at him the wrong way rather than waiting for them to be sent to him.
“Shut the door,” Lindsay said, when he stepped into the shrink’s office after being summoned like a child.
“Look, I know I’m more out of control than normal. It’ll settle down in a few weeks.” He had no idea what his fucked-up mind would do or how long it might take to settle down. “But you all need me. You can’t run this operation without me, and you know it. And you can’t exactly fire me.”
“That’s not why you’re here,” Lindsay said. He was drinking that pansy-ass camomile tea he always had brewing as if it somehow made him sophisticated and refined. As if he didn’t have his own sadistic streak. Just because it wasn’t brought on by damage and trauma didn’t mean it wasn’t there.
“Then what do you want? I have bad sluts to punish.”
“I need you to deal with Mina.”
Brian’s eyes narrowed. “What exactly do you mean by ‘deal with Mina’?” He had better not mean what Brian thought he meant.
“I mean deal with her. Vivian and Michael aren’t keeping her locked up. They’re just letting her wander around free. She has access to phones. She can leave them at any time. Once she gets her bearings she will go to the police and report all of us. I don’t know if she could lead them directly here to the house, but she knows where my office is in the city. She knows where Dome is. We’re trapped rats here if we don’t handle her.”
“No.”
“Brian, I know you think you had some attachment to this girl, but she’s dangerous to our survival.”
“So much for all your fucking promises to her. You all think I’m the biggest monster here, but I don’t lie about shit. Between my word and your word, anybody is safer with me and my word than with you and yours.”
“If she hadn’t come here and I thought she was a real threat and I’d sent you out to take care of the problem, you would have done it.”
Brian remained stoic. He would neither confirm nor deny, but his gut said that no he wouldn’t have. He had a vanishingly small circle of empathy, but somehow Mina had worked her way into it. She’d been protected the moment he’d seen her. If he’d been sent to kill her, no matter his original intention, something in her would have made him pause long enough to find the scars and the damage in her eyes that so mirrored his own. Then she would have gone immediately on the protect and defend list.
He ignored the voice in his head that accused him of destroying her anyway. Punishing others for her misbehavior to feed his ego and protect his reputation—even while he saw that it was damaging her. If he could go back… if he could undo that…
It was startling to feel regret.
It was such a foreign and uncomfortable emotion, he could barely stand to hold it in his mind. Everything he touched broke apart in his hands, even Mina. And if he tried to say anything different, he’d be a liar.
“If you won’t do it…”
Brian stood and leaned over the desk. Lindsay visibly shrank back.
“Listen to me very carefully, asshole. I may have let her go, but Mina will always be under my protection. If you harm her in any way, if you send anyone else after her… If anything happens to her, I’m going to assume it was you, and then you will be on a very special, very short list of people whose body parts get lost in multiple states.”
Before Lindsay could respond with anything intelligible—assuming he had anything intelligible to say—the phone rang.
The doctor picked it up, and Brian sat back down. He wasn’t done here. Not by a long shot. He’d kill Lindsay right now if he couldn’t reach some reasonable assurance that his threat would be heeded and Mina would remain safe.
There was frantic yelling on the other end of the phone with barely a breath between sentences.
“Vivian, I can’t understand anything you’re saying. You have to slow down.”
Brian rolled his eyes, still wishing he’d truly gotten his hands on the precious princess Michael collared. Just once.
“What about Mina?” Lindsay said.
Brian lurched out of the chair and ripped the phone out of Lindsay’s hand. “Vivian. Shut up.”
The line sounded as if it had gone dead, but he knew better. “Tell me slowly and calmly what about Mina?”
“I—I—I…”
“I—I—I…” he mocked. “Spit it out or so help me I will drive to your house and drag the information out of you. And if your husband thinks he’s got the balls to stop me, he can come right on ahead.” He was spoiling for a fight. Any fight.
“How are you helping her to be more calm?” Lindsay asked.
Brian just glared.
A couple of minutes passed as Vivian collected herself. “M-Mina and I were shopping at an outdoor market. It was a safe area of town. I stepped away to another booth, and when I turned around, a black sedan had pulled up and some Asian men were shoving her into the back of the car. I-I couldn’t get a license plate.”
Brian hung up on her and turned to Lindsay. “Matsumoto has her. I told you there was something fucking wrong with him. Call the pilot and fuel up the jet.”
“How did he know she was out? How could he have known where to find her?”
“I don’t give a shit how he knew.” He left the doctor gawking after him and went straight to the dungeons. He sorted through keys on a keyring until he found the one for the door inside his room. He slammed the lights on and smiled as he took in the rows and rows of guns, ammunition, knives, flashlights, body armor, grenades, and more interesting specialized toys for special circumstances.
Lindsay rushed in, out of breath, as Brian started dropping magazines, checking chambers, and packing a large black bag.
“What are you doing?”
Brian glared at the doctor as if he were the stupidest human being to ever walk the earth. “You know what I’m doing.”
Mina felt like her head was stuffed with cotton as the room came into focus.
“There she is. You Americans are so delicate. You’ve been in and out for the past day.”
She had the vaguest recollection of waking in the presence of strange men a couple of times. Voices had faded back out as soon as they’d faded in, and then everything had gone away again. It had felt like tendrils of odd dreams trying to string themselves together. She’d heard sounds in those brief moments that she now knew had been a plane. She was only now awake enough to realize things had gotten very bad for her.
Just when she’d thought she was free.
She was far outside the hope of safety or freedom now. Even without a collar around her throat or an electronic leash or any type of binding, she knew she’d never been more truly bound than she was at this moment.