10. Mina

TEN

mina

When I walk into the downstairs dungeon room Brian and I share at the Pleasure House, he’s got a ton of papers splayed out on the bed. I’m half certain he’s about to start setting up one of those walls with photos and newspaper clippings and thumbtacks and inexplicable red strings connecting things all over the place, like he’s engaged in some major investigation.

He looks up, distracted. “Hey.”

“Hey.” I take a deep breath because there are so many things I want to say, but I won’t. “Another job?”

He nods, still studying the piles of disconnected threads that must mean something to him. Maybe he does need to put this all up on a wall. He’s got Chopin playing in the background, and that’s never a good sign.

“I don’t want you to go,” I blurt out. So much for that amazing self-control.

He looks up sharply and just stares at me for a long time. I’m not even sure if he fully sees me right now.

“Mina... you know I have to.” He pauses like he’s going to say something else, but he stops instead and just sighs and repeats, “I have to.”

“I want to go with you.”

“Absofuckinglutely not. I can’t risk you.”

I know he says it in this totally dead, cold way, but from Brian, that’s practically a sonnet.

“I SAVED your ass!” I practically shriek.

“Dumb luck. You almost got yourself killed. You never should have come for me.”

So this is how it’s going to be. I’m feeling super appreciated right now.

“Then teach me. Train me with the weapons. I don’t want you to go on these jobs without me anymore. You can’t make me sit at home like a military wife wringing my hands all day. You know I have this inside me, too. You know I have needs, things I have to get out of me.”

He and I both know there is no going back to the sweet damaged girl I once was. Once the switch flipped it was only a matter of time before I rose from the ashes to become something dark and new.

“No.”

I think about arguing some more, but I storm out of the room instead. He’s not leaving for a while—probably weeks yet. He’s still in the early planning stages. I’m not sure if this is something for the house, but it smells like a personal job. It’s got that feel to it, where it takes up too much space in his brain, and it’s clearly not just business for him.

When I first came to the house he was almost never gone out on personal jobs. It’s much more frequent now, like he’s running from something and it requires more than a treadmill to soothe.

It’s odd to me that he’d go on another personal job this soon, but I know he still feels antsy after the events at Easter. I think deep down he knows killing can’t solve this, but it’s the only tool he’s got.

I’ll just have to convince him he needs me. It shouldn’t be too hard, considering I saved his ass last time.

I’m already upstairs on the main level when I realize what I really need right now is a swim. I often run on the treadmill with Brian, but the pool is my personal treadmill. Also, you don’t burn the fuck up and sweat in the pool.

I’m too pissed off to go back and change into a swimsuit. I could borrow one from Annette, we’re about the same size, but I just don’t care. I’m going naked. Everybody in this house thinks I’ve lost my mind anyway, and it’s not like public nudity is some foreign concept around here—maybe from me. But they’ll get over it. I think it’s clear I’ve shifted into something just a little bit psycho. I’m sure they think it’s Brian’s influence, but Brian is just a permission slip.

And of course when I get to the pool and strip my clothes off there are wide-eyed stares. Seriously? These women are all crawling around on the floor giving blow jobs half the day, and me stripping down to skinny dip is a thing? I take an elastic hair band from the pocket of the pants I just dropped on the ground and put my hair up.

There are audible gasps.

Oh. That. They’re looking at the word Brian carved into my back a few weeks ago. Mine . It’s healed, and it’s not deep, but the scars are dark and will be for quite some time. I try not to think too hard about years into the future when it will fade to white and barely be visible. I like it dark and visible.

Let them look.

I dive into the pool and do a few laps. The water is refreshing and helps cool some of my fury. It’s still such a relatively new emotion to me—this anger. Sometimes I think I’m more angry than Brian. But maybe he’s had more time to sit with it. He runs from his demons on the treadmill. I drown the little fuckers.

It feels now almost as if I’m made of fire, but the world I live in can’t handle it, I can’t handle it… so I need the soothing cool water to be able to exist properly in the world, to keep me down to a mild simmer. When I get out of the pool, Annette is waiting with a towel for me and a concerned expression.

Clearly she’s decided to stop being afraid of me. Maybe it’s the new shiny scars on my back. Maybe they’ve reclassified me again as a victim of Brian’s psychopathy, someone to be pitied. She can save her pity.

She wraps me up and leads me away to a more private area. She glances briefly at my bare wrist but makes no comment. I wear Brian’s collar, but I no longer wear the security bracelet the others do.

Brian announced to the house that I’m a free-range kitty now. He actually used those words. He said I’d killed for the house and so I was free to come and go as I liked. And I guess in a way it was a kill for the house, after all I brought the house enforcer back. Their criminal empire burns without Brian.

This Free-Range Kitty thing didn’t go well with… well Lindsay mostly. The other trainers didn’t care that much.

The girls in the house were pissed, but the murderous rage coming off Brian at the time stopped the complaints they surely would have otherwise made. I could tell Annette was jealous, but she didn’t make a fuss. And Anton does take her out of the house to all sorts of fancy functions: Galas and the ballet. Art auctions.

The fact that she still wears a security bracelet is the issue—like she’s been with Anton all these years but he either doesn’t trust her to let her run free or doesn’t want her to. I think it chafes her that in his own way, Brian takes better care of me and my needs than Anton takes of hers. Or Anton doesn’t have the pull with the other owners to insist upon it like Brian does.

Of course, Brian is likely to kill you if you go against him on even something as trivial as this, so there’s that. I’ve come to see my lover as the secret kingpin at the house since nobody’s going against the guy who kills people for fun. Both Anton and Lindsay jockey back and forth for the “appearance” of who’s in charge. A small consolation prize for the throne. But could anybody really be more in charge than the guy who would gut you without blinking and hang you from the rafters by your own intestines? I’m thinking no.

I can only imagine what Brian’s dating profile would look like. “Enjoys screams… yours, blood… also yours, and body disposal… depends on your behavior.” Not exactly long strolls on the beach and candlelit dinners.

Once Annette has gotten me far enough from the rest of the group, she whispers, “Are you okay? When did he…?”

I know she’s talking about my back. A twisted part of me wants to make her explicitly spell out the words. I’m still a little hurt about the way she cowered from me, like I was a monster she needed to be afraid of. But now that she’s seen what she perceives as new violence against me… she’s what? Letting me back into her super special slave girl sisterhood?

Will there be slumber parties and a secret hand shake?

“It was my punishment for rescuing him,” I say.

Her mouth hangs open like a fish. I can see the wheels turning in her head, like she’s making unlikely and impossible plans to rescue me from Brian. It annoys me as much as it amuses me. But it also makes me feel alone. Nobody here really gets me but Brian. At least when I first got here, I wasn’t a complete alien. I was already pretty different, but I was different in a way that made sense to the others.

I stop Annette’s hamster brain right here. “It’s fine. I like it. I’m happy he marked me like this.”

“You’ve... changed,” is all she’ll say. Understatement of the decade. It’s like she thinks there should be some sort of intervention. Someone needs to save me from myself. I love how everybody wants to save me, but only Brian ever manages to successfully do anything useful. He’s the one who bought me initially and brought me back from the brink, and he’s the one who saved me from Matsumoto in Japan. Everyone else has only had good intentions that hurt me in the end.

I’m pretty sure Annette thinks I have some form of Stockholm Syndrome—as if she doesn’t—like I’ve gone all Patty Hearst on her. I mean, maybe. I do want to run around and do crime with Brian, now. But it isn’t because I’ve identified with my captor and am only trying to survive . It’s because my needs are beginning to mirror his. But if I spoke these words to Annette, she’d be horrified.

She’d never understand.