Chapter 27 Mina
MINA
I never want to leave this room.
The private room swallows the noise. The walls are padded in a black leather that drinks the light. The door is heavy enough to deflect bullets. It has a bolt I watched Roman slide with his palm. No one is getting in here without his permission.
There is a sink with a steel bowl. Hooks and rings dangle in a way that appears careless, but every inch has been meticulously curated that way. It smells like clean leather and eucalyptus from a bottle someone forgot to cap tight.
This is the room people enter once they’ve made a dark choice.
I certainly have. “I want to stay in here.”
Roman studies me. His face is open and shut at the same time. “We can.” He does not ask why.
I love him for that. I hate the reason I need it.
If we stay here, Vitaly cannot get him. He cannot stand at the rail and watch me cross a line. He cannot see the switch flip and the walls rise and my hand go under the left arm of the throne for the knife I felt but did not take. Vitaly lives for the show.
This room denies him that. I want to deny him everything.
“What is all this?” I ask, because a neutral question is a rope I can hold without my hands shaking.
I nod at the strange equipment on the walls.
A low cross with buckles. A line of padded cuffs.
A matte black bar with silver rings at the ends.
A single hanging ring that I can’t fathom the purpose of in the realm of kink.
“Hard points,” he explains. “Safe load. The anchors are rated for various weights. The cuffs lock and release by touch. The buckles are for theater. This”—he touches the hanging ring—“is not for beginners if the mind is noisy. The wall binder is kinder.”
He moves like a chef in a professional kitchen. Everything in reach. Everything where it belongs. He takes two wide cuffs from a drawer and shows me the padded lining. He opens them and closes them so I hear the click. He shows me the quick release hidden by the leather tongue.
“Do you like it?” I mean the toys, and in some ways, me.
“I like what happens when people explore their tastes in a safe way. This room allows for that.” He brushes his knuckles along my jaw where the thin scar shines. His eyes go soft the way they always go soft when he touches it. “Talk to me. You promised.”
The promise was a lie. “Show me what you do in here first.” Delay, delay, delay the inevitable. It’s all I’ve got to keep me sane.
Otherwise, the chyron in my head is too loud, too cruel.
Him, or my mother. Him, or my babies. An endless loop of doom.
I shut it out to smile coquettishly at him. Thank God, he buys it.
He chooses the wall binder. He touches the padded panel where he wants me, then looks at me for the consent that tells him I am with him.
I nod. I am with him. I am also somewhere else, at a window with a shade lifted, with my palm to cold glass and a phone at my ear, listening to a voice that will not let me unhear it.
“Hands here,” Roman says, and I lift them to the level he indicates.
He kisses each palm before he fits the leather and closes the buckles.
He does not pick up speed when he could.
He looks at my fingers as if they are a fragile thing he intends to return whole.
The cuffs hold without biting. The pressure is clean and exact.
My breath seesaws. He hears it. He pauses and waits until it is mine again.
“Feet,” he says. He kneels and fastens me at the ankles with the same care. I can’t budge more than two or three inches from the wall. He taps the release on the left ankle and shows me how it gives. “If this is too much, that’s how easily I can let you out. Understood?”
“Yes.”
He fastens the clasp again and stands. He leans his shoulder to the wall next to me and lets his weight rest so I can see he is not in a hurry. “This room runs on three rules. We say what we want. We say what we will not do. We stop if we need to stop. That is it. That is all.”
“Simple.”
“It has to be,” he says. “When the body is loud, the mind can only hold so much, and vice versa.”
He steps close and takes my chin the way he did upstairs. He raises my face until I have to look at him. It’s unbearable. This closeness. The love in his eyes. I want to look away. But he kisses me, slow and sure. He tastes like mint and metal and patience.
He tastes like something I do not deserve, and that I want anyway.
“What is wrong?” he asks against my mouth.
My eyes close unbidden. “Not now.”
He touches my throat with the back of his fingers.
My pulse knocks against his skin. He smiles, but this smile carries an edge.
“I’m not letting you go until you tell me what troubles you.
I know tonight is frightening. But there’s something you’re not telling me, and I have a right to know what troubles my wife. ”
He’s right. I know he is. But I can’t make myself say the words. If I say them, I’ll lose my nerve, and then I’ll lose more than that. I’ll lose everything.
“Please, Roman—”
“Your safeword is latte. Understood?”
“What are you talking about?”
“We will begin.” With that, he steps to a wall of paddles, canes, and things I don’t recognize. “What are your thoughts on impact play, wife?”
“You’re going to hit me?”
“Only in ways you might enjoy.”
My mind works on that. “You mean, like when you spanked me during sex?”
He nods once. “I noted how much wetter you were after that. You enjoyed it.” A question and an answer.
I swallow as my throat dries. It’s the only dry part of me. “Yes.”
“Then we will experiment.” He takes a small leather paddle from the wall. “Something simple to start.”
“But how will you use that on my ass? I’m attached to the wall, facing you.”
His smile turns sinister. “Oh ye of little faith.” He clicks a button on the wall next to me, and suddenly the unit I’m bound to thrusts slowly out from the wall and turns from above, then pulls me back to the wall. There’s even a fucking chin rest there.
He presses another button, and the wall reforms with a padded bar at my hips and adjustments at my legs so my ass comfortably sticks out from the rest of me.
“You really thought of everything.”
“I do enjoy my toys.” His rough hand raises my dress the way he did when we were fucking. My ass is completely exposed. “Now, as I was saying. What troubles you, wife?”
“I’m just tense—”
Smack.
It’s not harder than he spanked me, but it’s odd. And I think I like it.
“The next lie will cost you.”
“You’re being ridiculous. We have bigger problems—”
Smack!
A moan tumbles out of me. I can’t help myself.
He breathes against my neck until the skin there lights up. He brackets my hips with his hands and holds still until the stillness becomes pressure. He trails his fingers under the edge of my dress until I melt and then withdraws.
I try to say I am fine. He skims his nose along my cheek until I want to cry from the gentleness. He puts his thumb on my lower lip and presses down until it trembles back at him.
I thought the cost would be more smacks. Not tenderness that makes my eyes water or my heart soar. “Please—”
“Tell me,” he says. His voice is low and patient and relentless. “What is wrong?”
“Nothing!”
He taps the inside of my ankle with his shoe. A reminder of the release. A reminder of choice.
Even now, when he knows I’m lying to him, when the stakes are life and death, he’s still so fucking gentle with me. Even in this room of torment and sexual anguish, he can’t bring himself to cross that line. Not with me.
It breaks something inside me I can’t explain. A hot knot forms in my throat, and I can’t swallow past it. So when I speak, my voice cracks. “Everything.”
“Use your words.”
Tears stream down my face. I can’t hold the words inside anymore, and I’m terrified of what that will bring. “Vitaly texted me. Before you came home. He told me to come to the window.”
Roman stills, and then he is calmer than calm. He rests his head next to mine for one second. He does not rush me. He waits.
“He had my mother. Outside the main fence. Tied. Gagged. He had a van. He was smiling.” That last word chokes me.
I gulp to continue. “He told me I would go with you to the club and be your whore and make you feel safe and convince you to put the walls up. He said there would be a knife tucked into the left arm of your throne. He told me to take it and stab you in the chest when the walls were up. Said that way, you’d know what it’s like to be stabbed in the heart by me too. ”
Roman’s jaw tightens once. He does not move away. “He told you that. He spoke that filth into your ear.”
“He called me Scarface. He said if I didn’t do what he said, my mother and the boys would die screaming.”
The world goes quiet in a way that adds sound to my own breath. Roman rests his palm on my chest, over my heart. It pounds against his hand and does not settle. He kisses my forehead once. He does not curse. He does not promise me comfort.
The panic I have been holding begins to tear.
It rips down my chest and opens like a mouth.
The words pour out because the room makes words and because he will not let me hide.
“I don’t know if the guards at the retreat are alive.
He knows I love my mother. He knows I love our sons.
He knows I will do anything to keep them breathing.
He knows I am weak for you. He knows I will cut my own throat if he tells me to, as long as they live. ”
“Love, you—”
“Let me finish.” Because if I stop I will never start again.
“I don’t know how to make the right choice.
Every choice breaks the wrong person. I am supposed to be clever and brave and quiet and useful.
But I’m a shaking woman in a pretty dress with her hands cuffed to a wall because she can’t say a sentence without wanting to scream. ”
The tears come because they have to. They do not ask permission. Roman leans in and kisses them where they fall. He does not hush me. He does not tell me I am brave. He lets me be exactly as scared as I am.
“Look at me,” he says. His mouth is gentle. His eyes are not.
I lift my head. He smiles. It is small and sad and true.
He kisses me hard enough to stop the thought that is eating me.
He pulls back a fraction so he can say the next thing with his mouth against mine.
“We all do what we must for the people we love,” he says.
“If this is what you must do to protect our children—if you have to kill me to save them—fucking do it.”
My whole body jerks against the cuffs. The leather creaks. I stare at him. I cannot pull air. He said the thing I have been running from. He said it without flinching.
“No!” It tears out on a breath. “Do not ask me that.”
“I am not asking. I am telling you that if he puts you in that box and there is no other way, you take the way that keeps our sons alive. You trust that I will do everything to make sure it never comes to that. You also trust that if I fail and you have a knife in your hand, you do not fail.”
I try to shake my head. The cuffs hold. “I can’t do it.”
“You can. You will. Our sons are counting on you.” He reaches up and presses the release on my left wrist. The cuff opens with the soft click he showed me.
He does the right and then the ankles, slow and kind so my blood can come back without sparking.
He rubs my wrists with his thumbs to bring the feeling down.
He cups my cheek. The sadness is not gone from his eyes. It sits there like an old friend who cannot be convinced to leave. “You should have told me at once.”
“I know.” It is all I can give him. “I couldn’t…I couldn’t bring myself to say the words, in case he bugged something or was listening some other way.” I glance around the room. “I’m still scared he heard me.”
“Scared is fine,” he says. “We use it. We do not let it use us.”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
“You will. When the time comes.”
I wrap my arms around his neck and let him hold my weight. He takes it without stepping back. He breathes into my hair. I count his breaths until mine match and the panicked edge goes from razor to dull.
“When you’re ready, we go out there and finish this. One way or the other.”
I gulp down air, and there’s just not enough of it. “I can’t kill you.”
“You’re not going to kill me. You’re going to save our sons.”
“That’s the same thing!”
He takes both of my hands in his and kisses my knuckles. “If you save them, you’ve saved the best part of me. Nothing else matters.”
My heart shatters hearing that. “You matter to me! I love you!”
His eyes shine in the low light. “Hearing that from you is all I’ve ever wanted in this life. I didn’t know it until now.”
He opens the door, and we plunge back into the dark.