by Kitty Thomas
He jumped off the bed to stop her. “No! You can’t. Please, you can’t take her from me! That’s all I have left.”
The photos of his mother had long been destroyed. He couldn’t remember what she looked like. All he remembered was the smell of cookie dough and these records—this music.
“Please!” he screamed as his stepmother left the room. “Don’t take her from me!”
She shoved him back and took the records outside to burn in a big trash can.
Brian bolted up in bed. He could still feel the heat of the flames from when he’d stood helpless watching what felt like his mother burning away. His hand shook as he turned on the bedside lamp, afraid he was still back there. But it was just him, alone in his room at the house.
Sleep had been much harder until he’d grown up and found the music again. It was a comfort to know that in nearly two hundred years, no fire had ever destroyed that music. It had survived. Like he had.
He’d grown bigger and stronger, ran away, gotten a job. It was only years later that he worked up the courage to face his stepmother again. By that point she seemed so small and helpless.
Hers was the first life he’d taken. After he’d finished, he’d cut her into pieces, burying them in different states. It was possibly foolish to have so much evidence scattered in so many places, but he’d convinced himself if he didn’t separate the pieces, they’d only reassemble and come after him again.
After that, he’d slept soundly for a few months. But then the itch had started, and no amount of scratching would make it go away.
He wondered if he’d cried out or screamed in his sleep tonight. Instinctively, he wanted to reach out for Mina for comfort and to make sure she was okay… as if his stepmother could have stepped out of his dream and into hers to cause more carnage there. But he could see she wasn’t here. Why hadn’t he fought to keep her? Why had he let them take her? Michael couldn’t have done a goddamn thing about it if he’d ordered her downstairs until they left.
And now the dreams were back.
He took a quick shower and put on a T-shirt and some sweatpants and tennis shoes. The house was quiet as he ascended into the main entryway. The lights were out except for the guide lights set low into the wall. He went out to the pool as if he might find Mina waiting for him to bring her back inside.
The collar and security bracelet were still on the ground where they’d fallen after he’d thrown them. He bent to pick up the collar and inspected it under the pool light. It was undamaged, which surprised him given how hard he’d thrown it. He went back inside and placed the collar in a box in his room. He couldn’t destroy it. It was the only thing he had left of her.
When the collar was safely tucked away, he went back upstairs to the gym, put a Chopin CD in the sound system, and got on the treadmill. He didn’t give a shit if he woke the whole house. If someone came in, they’d take one look at him, turn around, and walk back out. If they didn’t, they’d wish to God they had because there was nothing he wanted more right now than to hurt someone.
When the dreams came, the only thing he wanted to do was run. Run from her, run from himself, run from everything, run from the monster that chased him, even when he was that monster. He didn’t know who or what he ran from this time. But he was afraid nothing would stop his stepmother now.
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?
Chapter Twelve
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.”
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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.
A short, but still somehow very frightening Japanese man came into focus above her. His accent was thick, but his words had been clearly spoken.
“That’s the fucking Gaijin whore you were going to pay one and a half million for?”
Mina’s head swiveled to the left to see another man in the room. Larger, also Japanese. He looked like a bodyguard and probably was.
She scrambled to a seated position as her eyes continued to adjust to the light. The room had the sparse, minimalism of a zen garden. There was a bright red mattress and bedding on the floor. Meditation pillows sat in a row next to a short, square table. Lamps lit the space. The floor was bamboo with rugs on top. The room had sliding doors that were pale cream and looked translucent like fine quality paper.
“Do not let the room mislead you. You’re in a cell underground. There is stone surrounding the outside of this oasis. You will not be allowed to wander the property unescorted. This will be your room, and you will call me Master.”
It had to be another dream. The implausibility of landing back in another sadistic master’s hands without even seeking it out was too much.
A crack sounded as the back of his hand connected with her face. The sting seemed to come years later, but it arrived with a crushing brutality that stole the breath from her lungs and sent her to a crouched position.
“Say it,” he demanded.
“M-Master.”
“Good.”
“H-how… w-why…” She cringed as his face darkened at the words she hadn’t been able to keep under wraps.
“You were greatly resented at the house. One girl overheard a conversation where my name was mentioned. After being punished for you, she reflected on the conversation and stole my contact information. She called after you left. The only thing she asked was that I make you pay for the suffering you caused her. To be truthful, I don’t care about her suffering, but I do like to hurt people, so granting her request is no burden. I would have done it anyway.”
He clapped his hands together in two sharp snaps. The doors slid open, and a couple of men brought in familiar dungeon equipment.
The men set up the equipment, then brought in a box of whips and shackles and riding crops. They slid the doors shut again on their way out.
The man now known only as her master, stared at Mina as if he were trying to decide if she’d been worth the trip to pick up, even though no money had exchanged hands. She didn’t beg him. She could already tell by the hard glint in his eyes that begging would only excite him more. It was the look Brian got when dealing with other women in the house, and no amount of begging had ever resulted in mercy from him.
Her new master would force it out of her when things got bad and she was desperate and babbling just to prove to herself she was still alive.
How long that might be the case, she wasn’t sure. After all, this man hadn’t invested anything in her. Had he actually paid all of that money, she might have the hope of long term survival. Not that she thought that would be a better outcome at the hands of a sadist.
Her ring was gone. Of course he wouldn’t let her keep it, but could he know it was one of the few physical objects that meant anything to her? Only her collar had come to mean as much. But Brian had taken that.
All at once she started to cry. She cried for the foolish decision to try to escape Brian when she’d already begun to miss him as they were pulling away from the house. She cried for his rejection and how coolly and easily he’d tossed her aside. She cried for the jealousy and pain that crawled up her throat trying to choke her from the inside as she’d watched Michael and Vivian the past few days, seeing how happy they were, how healthy their dynamic was, wondering why it couldn’t be her. Finally, she cried for the fate she’d been sealed into as if bricked in behind a wall piece by piece where no one would ever find her.
Her new master watched as she wore herself out. He hadn’t laid a hand on her yet, and surely he must think all of her tears were for him. She hoped to cry herself out so almost none of them would remain for him to claim as his own.
He clapped again—this time, once. The doors slid open again, and in walked another American girl. But her style of clothing was more Japanese. The fabric was transparent, and Mina could see the other woman’s breasts and bare mound. A dragon tattoo snaked it’s way around her belly, gently touching the top of her pubic bone as if it might crawl down just a few inches to tease an orgasm from her.
The girl knelt in front the man who’d summoned her. “Yes, Master?” She brushed her lips over his bare feet and waited. There were deep purple bruises around her throat and wrists. And it looked as if she’d been recently beaten.
“Meet your replacement.”
“N-no, Master, please. Please keep me. Whatever I did… I’m sorry to offend.” Her next words were a string of unintelligible Japanese.
Somehow Mina didn’t think the other girl wanted to stay because she liked him so much—more likely she only wanted to live.
“Bring me the tapestry,” he said.
She disappeared out the door and came back with an elegant, embroidered white tapestry. She spread it out under a Saint Andrew’s Cross the men had placed against one wall.
“You may go. Use this time wisely to find a way to convince me to keep you instead of the new whore.”
She made a small, dignified bow, having seemed to collect herself, and made her way to the door. The bo
dyguard gave her a long once-over, his fingertips brushing over hers as she left. The movement wasn’t noticed by the master, but it was significant to Mina. It was a crushing blow, that even here in this place with this cruel man, the other American girl had found someone to show her kindness, perhaps even love.
The bodyguard’s hard gaze went back to Mina, leaving no doubt that his softer expression wouldn’t extend to her.
The master circled Mina, observing her. “Do you know your name means love?”
She shook her head.
“How ironic that you appear to be so unlovable at the hands of every man who touches you.” He paused, seeming to enjoy dragging out her torment. “Do you know what the tapestry is for?”
Again, she shook her head. It earned her another hard slap.
“No, Master,” he said, sharply.
“N-no, Master.”
“You will spill blood for me tonight. You will spill it many nights. You’ll spill it on that tapestry, and then I will hang it on this wall. When every wall is covered in these tapestries, the full weight of your enslavement to me will have sunk in.”
***
Brian crouched behind a bush on a hilltop two hundred yards from the house. Matsumoto’s property stretched for thirty acres or more. Brian had already taken out the few patrolling guards outside. He’d made an extra few circuits over the path he’d watched them walk to ensure no more were coming.
When he was sure it was only him and the local wildlife, he set up equipment. He’d had night-vision goggles on since he’d reached the property. He took them off to switch out the batteries, then put a suppressor on the sniper rifle.
He’d picked this spot because there was a large flat rock and a clear view of the house. It was as if Matsumoto had gifted him with it specifically to eliminate his men and take down his well-guarded fortress. Perhaps the man had a guilty conscience and was begging for pain to absolve him of his misdoings. Brian was happy to oblige him.