by Kitty Thomas
“It’s decorative.” He pointed to a gray box on the wall. “We recently extended our intercom system to all suites. We have a few phones with outside lines, but you can understand why those are not for your use. If you need something, use the intercom. The rules of how you are to comport yourself while here are in the binder. Read and follow them. Are you hungry?”
She was hungry. She hadn’t realized they were going to be driving so long or arrive so late. Maybe she should have made dinner at a normal time, but she’d been too nervous to eat until her fate was decided.
“The kitchen closed half an hour ago, but I’ll send something up.”
“T-thank you.”
Lindsay took both of her hands into his again. “You are going to be fine, Mina. I promise we will handle you with care, and I’ll find you someone who won’t hurt you.”
He pulled a silver bracelet from his pocket. “Have you ever been under house arrest?” He tried to make it sound like a joke.
Mina shook her head.
“I won’t lock you in your room, but you have to stay on the grounds—for obvious reasons.”
He may as well have gone ahead and said, “You’ve seen too much already to be set free.” But he simply locked the metal band around her wrist.
“It’ll zap you if you go outside the property lines, so keep that in mind if you venture outside. If it beeps, you are to stop whatever you’re doing and come to my office on the first floor. Someone can guide you to it. I need to go meet with Brian now.”
Lindsay left her, and she sat on the edge of the bed. She prayed she wouldn’t have to interact with Brian. He was exactly the kind of man she’d been trying to escape.
***
Brian impatiently paced Lindsay’s office, distracted by thoughts of the new girl. She’d been so exotic. Dark olive skin and silky raven hair that went halfway down her back. Her eyes were a luminous green, which made them seem to glow against the dark palette of her skin—like a cat staring out at him from the shadows.
She was scared of him. Smart girl. Everyone was scared of him. If he were being completely honest, sometimes he scared himself.
Brian considered himself a monster with a purpose. His job at the house was to mete out the more sadistic punishments that the other trainers didn’t have the stomach for—and especially to train the girls who were at the extreme level of masochistic and too much for the others to handle. At the end of the day most of the trainers were lightweights living out their soft-core porn fantasies for a healthy paycheck.
He got all the grunt work, but he wasn’t complaining. It fed the dark, swirling shadow that crawled underneath his skin demanding blood and retribution. If he went too long without feeding it, his skin started to burn and itch. And he’d get headaches. The shrink said it was all psychosomatic. All in his head. No, only the headaches were in his head. The other issues were more all encompassing.
Each trainer was a type of tool in the grand scheme of their ambitious enterprise. Brian was a blunt force instrument designed to do damage, create fear, and keep every girl obedient on threat of being sent to him. He was the enforcer. With him there, the house only needed one.
When he was hurting someone, his own demons stopped tormenting him briefly. The images and flashbacks from his youth short-circuited, and the loop stopped playing for those few moments while he made memories that would give his victim flashbacks of her own. It was an ugly form of transference, but it let him sleep at night, however unsoundly.
Before they’d started this unusual and very illegal business venture, Lindsay had tried to put him on medication. But the drugs just made him foggy on top of everything else. Acting out his sadism on living flesh was the only drug that worked.
In fact, one might say that the house revolved in some sense around Brian. He was the seed that had sprouted into this deliciously wicked idea. To the casual observer, Anton ran the show, with Lindsay and Gabe right behind him in the pecking order. Most of the myriad trainers in the house deferred to them. But the three of them, plus Brian, were all partners—equal now that they’d all invested into the business. Brian was a silent partner. He’d gone along with the outward ruse of being a mere employee for optics.
God forbid the people they do business with think the sadist in the dungeon was an equal partner. By definition weren’t they all sociopaths to be doing this? Brian was the only one who was honest about it. The others wanted to believe they were good.
And what of the buyers? No one was a spotless lamb, here. No sense pretending about it.
He was startled when Lindsay entered the office—all business. Brian began to speak, but the doctor raised a hand and picked up the phone from his desk.
“Could you prepare some food for our newest guest? She’s in the south tower. Yes, thank you.”
Lindsay disconnected the call and settled in the high-backed leather chair. “What is it, Brian?”
“Who’s the new girl?” His attempt at nonchalance was weak. The last time he showed an interest in a new girl Anton had forbidden him from going near her. Too much eagerness would just start a fight he didn’t want to deal with.
“The new girl is Mina. She won’t be your concern. You will not be training her.”
Brian slumped in a chair on the other side of the desk. “Is that right? Is this a new trend? The house protecting everyone from me? First Vivian, now Mina? Is she Michael’s, too?”
Michael had gone to college with most of them and had been asked to join their endeavor but considered the whole business distasteful. That is until he suspected his wife had a touch of the kink and wanted them to train her for his pleasure. Well, all of them except for Brian who’d been banned from the fun and games.
Lindsay looked annoyed. “No, she isn’t Michael’s.” He opened his briefcase and slid typed papers across the desk. There were several, held together by a thin green paper clip. “This is the contract her eventual buyer will sign. I made promises to her which I intend to keep.”
Brian scanned the document, raising a brow at some of the stipulations. “This is unusual, these kinds of boundaries.” It wasn’t unheard of to allow a girl to set some ground rules—if she’d earned the right—but these ground rules were atypical to say the least.
The doctor shrugged. “We’ve dealt with unusual before. I believe I can help her find someone appropriate who won’t damage her further. You can see why your particular brand of sadism isn’t going to work in this situation. From my talks with her, I think she needs very little training. It’s not as if non-sadistic masters are impossible to find. The no-penetration rule may be a harder match, but I was thinking if we found someone who has another girl or two from us, so he wouldn’t explicitly need Mina in that way… and we trusted him… Repeat buyers aren’t unheard of.”
Brian slid the papers back across the desk. “Good luck with that.” Lindsay got far too close to his patients—especially the ones he brought to the house. The doctor’s unhealthy interest in this girl would bring nothing but chaos. It was a bad business decision. Those boundaries meant she wouldn’t go for much at auction, which meant she was hardly worth the cost of training and housing.
“What was it you wanted?” Lindsay asked, distracted.
“I wanted to inform you that I’m taking tomorrow off. I’ve got some errands to run in the city and need to get out. I haven’t had a day off in six months.”
“All right. We can do without you for a day.”
“Thanks, Doc.”
“Brian? Are you sleeping?”
He shrugged. How many times was Lindsay going to harp on his sleep patterns? They’d batted this issue back and forth for years now.
“I can prescribe you a sedative.”
“No drugs. I’m not doing that shit again. It fucks me up.” Worse.
“Just a mild tranquilizer. It wouldn’t have the same side effects.”
No, they’d be different and new and exciting side effects.
“No,” Brian practically g
rowled.
The doctor held his hands up in surrender. “Fine. But you need more sleep. You’re getting run down.”
“Give me someone to punish. I’ll sleep like a fucking baby. Otherwise, stay out of it.”
Brian stopped by the kitchen when he left the doctor. A tray had been prepared with covered leftovers and a glass of water.
“I’ll take it up to our guest. Thanks, Phyllis.”
She cringed but nodded.
He wasn’t sure what compelled him to take Mina’s tray up, but he wanted to see her close up and alone. He wanted to smell her shampoo again. He wanted to breathe in the scent of her fear when there was nobody there to protect her from him. If Lindsay kept too strict an eye on things, this might be his only opportunity before she slipped through his fingers entirely.
When he reached the tower, he knocked with three sharp raps.
“Just a minute,” came a soft reply.
When she opened the door, her face was scrubbed of make-up. She wore casual pajamas—the kind popular both with college freshmen and old ladies. Her feet were bare except for some glittery purple polish. When she looked up to see his face, she took several steps back.
Brian stepped into the room and set the tray on the desk. “Mina, I brought your dinner.”
“T-thank you.” She was still backing up.
He wasn’t sure if she was aware of her continued retreat. She took another step back and tripped over her suitcase. Brian didn’t know why, but he rushed to help. In her fall, her shirt rode up, displaying vicious scars. They were on her back and wrapped around to her side.
He couldn’t resist the urge to run his hand over one of the puckered marks.
For a moment time stopped. She froze as he lingered over the scar that was visible to him, his fingertip caressing back and forth.
Mina seemed to snap out of it and jerked away. She struggled to pull the shirt back down as he helped her stand. He’d wanted to scare her. The predatory instinct had awakened to her fear downstairs. And yet, now… Brian couldn’t articulate how he felt, even in his own mind. He couldn’t remember a single time he’d helped one of the girls if they’d fallen or gotten hurt. He was more likely to laugh or to use it as an excuse to punish them for their clumsiness. But his protective reaction to Mina’s tumble had been instantaneous and instinctive.
She watched him with those wide, frightened green eyes, her arms crossed over her chest in a defensive pose.
He didn’t speak another word. He’d wanted to intimidate her, threaten her, revel with sadistic glee in her fear, but all he could do was turn around and leave. He berated himself as he went down each flight of stairs all the way to the lowest level—to the dungeons. It was physically the farthest he could get from her, but it was also where he lived.
There were a few small dungeon rooms underneath the west wing of the house that the other trainers used, but this set of rooms was all his.
He stomped down the long, dimly lit hallway, past doors to the cells he used to correct bad girls’ behavior. At the end of the hallway was the door to his suite. He slammed it behind him and peeled off his shirt.
A full-length antique mirror stood on one end of the room. He turned on a nearby lamp and twisted to look at his back, running his fingers over old scars. A few wrapped around his sides. Just like hers. He and Mina were matching macabre portraits of other people’s wrath.
The mirror shattered as Brian’s fist connected with it. He sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his bleeding hands, and cried. Sobbed, really. He was thankful he hadn’t left any of the girls in the dungeon cells tonight, thankful no one could hear him down here.
A memory pushed itself through one of the normally-locked doors in his mind. He kept seeing it, over and over, his stepmother whipping him with the switch, screaming at him for letting the dog pee on the floor, then locking him under the stairs without dinner. It wasn’t as if he could control the old dog’s bladder. She’d thrown the terrified dog in as well. Brian had woken the next morning in a pool of the animal’s urine with flea bites all over him and wounds that got so infected from the filth he’d been left in that he’d almost died. He’d only been nine that time, but it hadn’t been the first beating, nor had it been the last.
He tried to push the images out, tried to remember his mother instead. She’d been so kind. She was taken too early—in a car crash. He remembered her smell, and feeling safe and loved. But what he remembered most about her was the music. She’d played old records of Chopin at night to help him sleep as he fought through the fears small children feel—before he knew the real monster who was coming.
His father remarried too soon—a woman he couldn’t see the truth about because of his grief.
As a young child Brian hadn’t understood why his father didn’t protect him from her. But as he got older, he realized how sick the man had been. He’d been too weak to protect Brian from his stepmother’s bitter anger. And once he was gone, things only got worse.
Somehow Brian knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight, either. Seeing the marks on Mina had created an opposite reaction than he was used to. Knowing Lindsay, the doctor might say that perhaps it was because he wasn’t the one in control of the damage. He’d left marks on women worse than what he’d seen of Mina’s, but her marks weren’t created by his hands. The girls always came to him as blank canvases to paint his sadism across in splashes of bright red.
Those women were his foul stepmother all over again. Not a fucking mark on her. And every time he punished them, he wrote out his revenge across her back. Killing her once hadn’t been enough. In the dungeons he could make her pay over and over, make her scream in pain and beg him for mercy he was no longer capable of giving—mercy he didn’t want to give. Mercy was weakness. Just an opportunity for someone to swoop in and find the cracks in your soul to hurt you.
Except Mina… she wasn’t that perfect unmarked canvas. Mina had arrived already broken, and suddenly, somehow this woman he’d only just met was locked under those stairs with him, huddling in the cold darkness.
Chapter Three
Mina only worried about five times that her food might be poisoned. When nothing dramatic happened, she let go of the fear. Besides¸ Brian wouldn’t have put something in it. She’d known the moment she looked into those cold dark eyes that he didn’t do stealth pain.
He wanted to be there to watch you suffer. He wanted to deliver it with his own hands.
Though it was late, Mina doubted everyone was asleep. Night was when the perverts played. And yet, as she descended the endless stairs—stairs that seemed to have multiplied since the time of her arrival—everything was quiet.
Small lights along the base of the walls illuminated her way. Off the entryway on the first floor was a hallway and another set of stairs that were nearly hidden. A basement? In a house with the purpose this one served, it was probably dungeons. That thought alone should have sent her scurrying back up to her tower.
But she felt drawn, like young Aurora on her sixteenth birthday, moving steadily toward her doom.
She shook herself out of the brief sense of hypnotism. It felt as if some force outside herself pulled her, but whatever was down there was unlikely to be anything she wanted to see.
Mina was about to go back upstairs, when she heard someone coming down the hall. Heavy, sure footfalls. Brian? She was blocked in. If whoever it was kept moving closer, they’d find her. The stairs were her only option.
She slipped down the winding steps as quietly as she could. Behind the stairs at the bottom was another door. When she pushed it open, the heat almost knocked her over. There was an incinerator inside. She shut the door quickly and stayed hidden, waiting.
Whoever she’d heard didn’t venture below ground. She felt so stupid now. She moved from behind the staircase to see the rest of what was kept down here.
A long, narrow corridor stretched before her. The floor was concrete, the walls stone. At equal intervals were doors. Five on eac
h side. Straight ahead at the end was another door, this one larger than the rest.
Each door along the passageway had a window with bars, but the door at the end was solid. Mina peeked into one of the rooms—a dungeon, just as she’d suspected. Terrifying implements hung from hooks on the wall. Poles were bolted into the ceiling and floor, meant to tie people to. Shackles hung from one wall. There was a wooden crate filled to the brim with things she wasn’t sure about—most likely more implements of pain. There were spanking horses and Saint Andrew’s Crosses.
But this place didn’t look like a play dungeon. It wasn’t like the BDSM parties she’d been to. It wasn’t naughty games with a thin veneer of pretend danger—danger that didn’t materialize in public, but only later when she’d given her heart to someone.
Mina squinted at a dark spot on the wall and another on the floor. Jesus, were those blood stains?
The door at the end of the hallway opened, and she froze. It was the stupidest and most useless fear response. She was sure that normal people, upon encountering danger and extreme fear, ran. But Mina’s muscles responded by going on lock down. She wasn’t sure she was even breathing—as if she could simply be still and silent enough to go undetected until the danger passed.
Brian closed the door behind him, his stare holding her captive. She glanced down to note one of his hands was bandaged. They hadn’t been when she’d seem him before.
Move. Move! Run run run!
Her muscles might not want to respond to the danger, but her brain screamed at her, throwing all sorts of logic and common-sense sounding plans at her. Like run. And move. But still, her legs stayed frozen inside blocks of imaginary ice that refused to melt and give her freedom.
“What are you doing down here, Mina?”
While words ran through her mind like a psychotic rat darting down a tunnel, her lips refused to relay any of those words to the man moving closer to her in the confined hallway—which shrank smaller with each long stride he took.