Carter and I haven’t done anything together other than my nightly cuddles since I severed contact with Elsa, because I’m terrified he’ll see the mark on me. Then when our orders to deploy to Afghanistan come through only a couple of days after my rebellion, I suspect the timing is not coincidental. Elsa has two pets who’ve left the fold?
Two pets with dirt on a certain colonel?
Yeah, I smell bullshit.
The night before we’re deploying, I go to Carter and finally confess everything except about the mark.
I’m certain he’s going to hate me, because it’s obvious I’m the reason we’re being sent to the desert.
But instead, he tightens his grip on me. “Shh, pet. It’s not your fault. The colonel offered me a private deal outside of Elsa, and I turned him down.”
“What?”
“Yeah.” He tells me all about it and I can’t help but feel a little jealous that the colonel wanted him so badly.
“Why didn’t you take it?”
He cups my face in his hands and kisses me. “Because no fucking way am I abandoning you. I told you—you’re mine.”
Carter doesn’t see the fresh scar on my back until our first night at our assigned FOB in Afghanistan. We’re sharing a “room,” if you can loosely call it a room.
And when he pulls me into his arms to kiss me, I soon find him stripping me, I’m stripping him, and then he’s fucking me on my back on the floor where it’s quieter, facing him and staring into my eyes as he whispers the things I crave from him.
“Who’s my good pet?”
“Me, Sir!”
He smiles and kisses me. “Yes, you are. My very good boy.”
Once we’re done—and he jerks me off before finishing inside me—I wince as I feel where my barely healed mark rubs against the floor and he scowls.
“What’s wrong?”
I start to shake my head but his hand clamps around my throat and squeezes. “Tell me.”
I…can’t.
Shaky and ashamed, I climb to my knees, turn around, and I’m already crying as I drop into theWorshipposition in front of him, my ass facing him, so he can see.
He sucks in a sharp breath as his fingers touch me. “Oh, buddy…”
I cry myself to sleep in his arms that night as he tightly holds me. The last thing I remember him saying before I crash into oblivion is that, one day, somehow, hewillmake Elsa pay for what she’s done to me.
For what she’s done toHisperfect pet.
Chapter Five
Now
What can I say about my life? I don’t even know where to begin.
It’d be a lie if I said I ever imagined myself here, right now. Younger me never would have dreamed where my path eventually led me, or the paths I’d cross along the way.
One thing I became very skilled at over the years is willfully engaging in disassociation. I didn’t realize, at first, that it had a name. I thought it was connected to subspace, and floating the endorphins and dopamine and adrenaline high playing gave me.
I also didn’t realize I did it with Elsa, and rarely with Carter, unless it wasn’t just me and Carter. That was back before Carter and I both left her, obviously. I never did it after that with Carter.
I always did it with the colonel.
