37. Mina

THIRTY-SEVEN

mina

I turn the lamp back off and lie in the quiet stillness of the dungeon room. It’s been three weeks since Halloween night and piece by piece, every day Brian slips away from me a little more. He won’t meet my gaze, won’t touch me, barely speaks to me.

He hasn’t told me what the nightmares are about, but I know. He can’t forgive himself for Halloween. I’m surprised he hasn’t run off on a personal job and left me behind—or gone hunting to create a personal job. Brian doesn’t require a contract or a directive to kill.

I lie in the dark forever, waiting for him to come back, wondering if he’ll get back in bed and fall asleep beside me, giving me the one unguarded moment when I can press my body against his and pretend things are the same, that we’re fine. How did we get here?

And how do we get back?

I finally drift off again into dreamless sleep and when I wake, I turn to find the glaring red numbers on the digital clock say eleven am. I turn on the lamp. Brian’s side of the bed is exactly as he left it when he got up to go run. He’s not coming back. I try not to let it bother me. He’ll get over this; he has to. But I cry in the shower anyway.

Once I’ve had enough of feeling sorry for myself, I put on some leggings, furry boots, and a sweater. I put a 9mm and several extra magazines in holsters on my waistband and make my way upstairs to join the rest of the house.

I grab some food from the kitchen and wander the grounds. The girls and the trainers stare at me as I pass, including the new girl, Julie. Gabe’s girl. Though is she really Gabe’s? It doesn’t seem like it to me.

They all know something’s wrong, but no one dares ask. They’ve still got enough healthy fear of the new me to prevent that.

I find Brian out in the woods where I knew he’d be, throwing rounds down his homemade gun range. Glass shatters in perfect time as he goes down the row, taking out six bottles, changing magazines, and then taking out the remaining six.

“For fuck’s sake,” I say when he removes his hearing protection. “I need you to get over this.”

He rounds on me, eyes blazing with far more fury than I expected, but I’m so tired of this mope-y Brian. Since when does he have guilt about anything? And I know that’s what it is. He can’t forgive himself for something that didn’t happen.

I never told him no. I never wanted him to stop. It’s unnatural for him to be this worked up about this.

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew,” he says, cryptically.

“Knew what!? Jesus, Brian, whatever it is, just say it. Say it so we can get past it!”

“There’s no getting past it.”

“That’s not for you to decide!”

His gaze narrows on me, and I can see when the decision is made. “Fine. But you asked for this. Just remember you could have remained blissfully ignorant.”

Oh, yes, it’s been total bliss.

Another full minute passes before he sighs and says, “I almost killed you. I wanted to.”

I just blink at him.

“Because I let Gregor kiss me?”

Brian scrubs a hand through his hair. “No. I just… I can’t explain it. It’s not rational.”

“But you didn’t. You didn’t even hurt me. We all have dark thoughts, Brian. But you didn’t act on them. That’s what’s important.”

“You have no idea how close I came.”

That admission sends a chill through me, but I know what he’s doing. He’s trying to scare me. He’s punishing himself for something he didn’t do because I refused to. So in a way, maybe he’s punishing me. But I don’t think he’d see it that way.

He brushes past me. “I’m going back to the house. Don’t follow me.”

I stare after him and resist the urge to crumple to the ground and cry some more. Of all the feelings Brian has brought out in me since I returned from Japan, the one that slices the deepest is this grief at the way he’s pulled away.

It wasn’t immediate. That first night when we got back from the Windsor estate, I thought we were okay—or that we would be. And nothing was noticeable for the first few days because we were busy planning and taking care of Gabe’s job.

The big take down of Dmitri’s house. It was personal to Gabe but he paid us handsomely for the work. He’d been hung up on Julie several months before but lost track of her. He’d stopped pursuing her and let her go because she was too sweet and innocent for his darker brand of sex and desire, a fact I don’t disagree with judging from their current state of limbo.

When he found her again, she’d been kidnapped and was being trafficked in Dmitri’s house—prostituted out to all his gross associates. Dmitri had made our house an offer of partnership and Gabe was sent to go check it out, not knowing the full details of the way they were running their business. When he got there and found Julie, he’d requested she be brought to him for the night but ended up buying her to get her out of there.

Three days after Halloween, Brian and I took down their house and killed Dmitri and all his associates. I made an anonymous call to the police to get the girls to safety that night.

But Julie and Gabe still aren’t really together. And right now it feels like Brian and I aren’t really together. Anton and Annette seem to be the only happy couple at the moment.

Somehow despite my best intentions, a few stray tears have made their way down my cheeks. I swipe them away with the back of my hand then glance to the side and notice several bottles gathered beside one of the trees. Brian and I collect them from the cafeteria at the end of each day.

Phyllis wanted to send them to recycling, but we decided we’d recycle them into target practice. I’m sure he was planning to go through all of them before I showed up to bust up his guilt party. I pick up a handheld broom and brush stray shards of glass off the tree stumps, then I carefully line my bottles up.

I shoot until I run out of ammo, but my aim is not nearly as good as Brian’s when I’m upset. I shoot more trees than bottles—sending birds scattering and squawking as they abandon their trees—though I do get the satisfaction of at least breaking a few.

“Fuck this,” I say to the now empty forest. I’m not letting Brian ignore me. He wants to be punished? He wants to pay for the crime of having a bad thought? Fine.

Wish fucking granted.

I holster the 9mm and go back to the house, ignoring the startled looks on everybody’s faces as I blaze past them with new purpose. Brian told me not to follow him, but fuck him. He can’t ban me from my own room. He’s getting over this shit one way or another.

He’s in the shower when I reach our dungeon room. Good. I input the code for the weapons room and return my gun to the drawer I took it from. I’ll have to remember to clean it later. Brian is religious about cleaning his guns after each use, and it’s probably why he’s just now gotten into the shower. But right now, I have other priorities.

I press my palm against one of the stones in the wall, and a thinner hidden drawer slides out with all of Brian’s syringes—several already prepped and ready to go.

He’s just getting out of the shower, toweling off, and wiping the steam from the bathroom mirror when he spots me.

“Mina, I thought I told you not to…”

But he doesn’t get the rest out. He catches the shiny glint of the needle in the mirror just before I jab it in his neck. He goes down like an elephant.

And then I’m left with the realization that he may as well be an elephant, because there’s no way I’m going to be able to get him out of here. I was fueled a little too much on fury and not enough on logistics.

I try to drag him, but he is really big. You don’t stop to consider just how heavy such a tall and well-muscled man is, and his height makes him even more impossible to move. I pause, my gaze lingering over his ass. I’m so tempted to touch him, but that feels a little rape-y to me, so I resist the urge. He’s completely vulnerable and helpless right now, and I feel a responsibility to respect that.

But he won’t be for long. I’ve got probably forty-five minutes before he snaps out of it and there is hell to pay. The drugs are supposed to last an hour, but I’m pretty sure he’ll shake it off sooner, and then I’m in big trouble.

I panic as it fully sinks in that I really can’t move him, and the clock is ticking. Like I cannot budge him at all. I use all my strength to move him an inch. At this rate he’ll definitely come to well before I can get him anywhere to start enacting the rest of my barely cobbled together plan.

Fuck me. Okay, think Mina, who can help me?

I race out of our room and up the stairs.

“Have you seen Gabe?” I ask Anton. He’s the first one I spot when I get back to the main part of the house. I really really hope Gabe isn’t on a mail run right now.

“He’s in the office.”

I let out a relieved sigh. “Thanks.”

I don’t bother knocking when I reach the office. “Hey, I need your help.”

Gabe looks up from his laptop. “What do you need?”

He is so hopelessly mope-y lately. He gallantly decided to leave Julie alone because she can’t bring herself to submit to him and all his kinky desires. I mean, I get it with all her trauma. I was once her. So… I get it. And I don’t even think she started out kinky—unlike me.

But now they’re just… existing together or not really together , but you know, in the same general giant mansion. It’s annoying the shit out of me.

“Ummm, it’s really more of a show than a tell sort of situation. Could you come with me?”

He follows me back down to the dungeons, and into the bathroom.

“Mina, what the fuck happened? Is he all right?”

“He’ll be fine, I dosed him with some of the drugs.”

Gabe’s eyes are the size of saucers. “You WHAT?”

I think he’s genuinely afraid for my life right now, and that’s sort of sweet. I’ve always had a soft spot for Gabe ever since he rescued me from Brian when Lindsay locked me in a cage when I first got to the house.

It was a long time before I knew it was Brian who set that situation up because he didn’t like the idea of me trapped like that, but he also didn’t want to kill off his sociopathic evil reputation in a single afternoon. So in the grand scheme of things, Brian was my real rescuer that day

Still, Gabe has always been kind to me. And he’s been the only person at the house to not treat me like a total alien since I’ve changed.

“Oh my God, Gabe, if you knew how he was being, you would have dosed him, too. But I need your help moving him.”

Gabe is probably the only trainer at the house who likes Brian at all. I like to think they have a weird sort of Bromance going on. At least I’m shipping them that way.

“He’ll kill me.”

“I mean, not if he’s chained up,” I say, batting my eyes sweetly. “Also, we did take care of your Dmitri problem. And I got all the girls to safety.”

Gabe lets out a long sigh. “I’m telling you, he will kill me if he finds out I helped you do this.”

“I doubt it. You’re the closest thing to a friend he has and the only one who isn’t constantly antagonizing him.”

Gabe seems to think my faith in Brian is misplaced, but he picks him up under his arms anyway.

“Can you grab his feet?” he asks.

“Yes, I’m an expert at this part.” Between Halloween night and the Dmitri job I could do workshops on this part.

“Where are we taking him?” he asks.

I pause to think.

“Mina, he’s heavy. You don’t even know where you’re taking him?”

“Give me a second, I’m narrowing it down.”

“Narrow faster.”

“Okay, okay, cell A. It’s the one right next door to our room.”

“Thank you.”

We lug Brian to cell A. Well, Gabe does all the actual lifting and lugging. I’m more like the person holding up the bride’s train as she walks down the aisle. It’s really more of an honorary position than an active role in lifting anything heavy. Though I do lift heavy in the gym… but not Brian heavy.

“Where?” Gabe asks.

“Ummm, let’s chain him to the pole in the center.”

“Are you sure it’ll hold him? For your safety…”

“I’m sure. It’s solid steel and concreted into the floor and ceiling. It’s not coming up. We can secure him with the manacles coming down from the ceiling and out of the floor. We can let the pole take his weight.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to use a different piece of furniture?”

To Gabe’s credit he doesn’t ask what my actual plans for Brian are.

I thought about the St. Andrew’s Cross, but that reminds me too much of Halloween and his request for punishment. I don’t want it to look too much like that night. And any of the furniture he’d have to lay on would make him feel far too vulnerable, which might close him off more. And that’s not the point here.

“I’m sure,” I say.

Gabe helps me secure him, then lingers in the doorway.

“You planning to watch the show?” I ask

“Are you sure about this, Mina?”

“I mean, he saw me jabbing the syringe in his throat so it’s really not like I have any plausible deniability here or any general safety after making that choice. It’s safer to have him chained.”

“But you’ve got to let him go sometime.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

Gabe sighs. “Okay. Good luck.”

And then I’m alone and second guessing every choice I’ve made today.