Trust Me (Rough Love 3)

“Where then?”

“How about inside you? How about letting this go? How about forgiving yourself for this crime you never committed? If you go to that funeral, I know what you’re going to do.” He yanked up my chin when I tried to look away. “I know you, Chere. You’re going to whip yourself bloody, enumerating your many faults until every crying poser and art freak there is a victim of your negligence. Or mine. It’ll be my fault, right? The whole thing. The whole funeral,” he said, waving his hand. “My fault for not letting you help poor Simon face his self-inflicted demons.”

“This has nothing to do with you,” I said, and that was my fatal mistake, but I barged on anyway. “This is between me and a person I had a relationship with. If I feel guilt— If I wished I’d helped—”

“It wouldn’t have changed anything!”

“I could have done it though, even without your permission. And if I want to feel guilty about that, and go pay my last respects, I don’t see why you won’t let me do it. Why does it matter to you?”

“Your last respects,” he said in a biting tone. “The funeral’s going to be a joke, some last ditch effort to sanitize his legacy. It’s going to be a lot of people wanting to be seen, wanting to rub shoulders with the art world players.”

“So what if it is?”

“And everyone there will be culpable for the train wreck that was Simon Baldwin, not just you. There’s no honor in that, no respect. It’ll be a pack of fucking users pretending they cared for a waste of a person.”

“A waste of a person?” I choked on the harsh phrase. “Simon touched a lot of lives. His art made a lot of people happy. It’s in homes and museums all over the world. A hundred years from now—”

“Don’t.” His voice was steel, hard, a cold threat as we faced off against each other. “Don’t tell me he’s wonderful. Don’t tell me Simon is some shining beacon of humanity that we must remember.”

“I want to remember him. Just me, for personal reasons.” God, I didn’t even know anymore what those personal reasons were, or why it was so important for me to go. I just needed Price to allow me to make this decision. Otherwise I had no personal power at all. “Let me do this, please. Give me this last chance. What does it matter to you?” I said again, stupidly blundering into my own destruction.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, pulling me up from the floor. “I thought I’d explained why it mattered. I thought we’d been over this enough times.”

But we weren’t over it. I wanted to go to Simon’s funeral, and the man in front of me wasn’t going to let me go, and I was a prisoner here, naked, vulnerable, powerless, and I didn’t want to be a slave anymore, and fuck, fuck, fuck, he was dragging me toward the dungeon, and I couldn’t stop him even though I fought with every ounce of my strength.

“Let me go,” I pleaded, and I didn’t know if I meant Let me go to the funeral or simply Let go of my arm.

Either way, he wasn’t listening, and I wasn’t strong enough to break free of his control.

Chapter Thirteen: Suffocation

I’d told her she wouldn’t always like being under my control, that she wouldn’t always be happy, and she wasn’t happy now.

Bang.

She was in the cage, and she was trying to get out of it.

Bang.

She’d been trying for a couple of hours.

Bang. Bang. BANG.

“Shut the fuck up,” I yelled. “I’ve had enough of the fucking noise.”

I’d put a gag on her, but she took it off. She screamed and swore, demanding that I let her go. After our peaceful, productive week of training, all hell had broken loose because I wouldn’t let her go to that goddamn funeral. Fuck. All I’d wanted was to spend a quiet afternoon with my slave at my feet.

“Let me out,” she screamed.

I stood beside the cage watching her, not just for safety’s sake, but because I’d never seen her lose her shit to this degree. And it was over Simon. Fuck, she made me so furious. Didn’t she understand? This damn funeral would just cause more pointless emotional trauma.

“Let me out. I want out!”

The metallic sound of the bars rattled my nerves every time she flung herself against them. In between flailing, she kicked, bang, bang, bang.

“Give me a safe word,” she pleaded. “I need a safe word. I’m missing the funeral, damn you. It started at three o’clock.”

“You’re not going. That’s why you’re in the cage. I told you that you weren’t allowed to go.”

“Let me ouuuttt!”

“And the fact that you’re still in there kicking and screaming—”

She went nuts again, banging her feet so hard against the bars that the metal strained. It wouldn’t break. I’d studied engineering along with architecture. I knew the cage would hold. I also knew that we were engaged in the battle of all battles, and that she needed to calm down.