“Go die in a fi—” I stopped. Even I wasn’t cold to tell him togo die in a fireon purpose. “Sorry. Master,” I said hurriedly.
But was it going to be enough?
His back straightened, his expression going utterly and completely flat. This was worth than the dangerous anger. It was like he’d locked away all of his emotion behind a blank mask, and I couldn’t see beneath it.
Hell, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see beneath it, not when I was sure there was a whole hell of a lot of anger behind there…
And hurt.
No. No, I was not going to fucking sympathize with my captor. I had apologized. I’d even called himMaster, just like he’d wanted, for fuck’s sake. There wasn’t a whole lot I could do now that the words were out there.
His jaw was tight, and I watched him swallow hard as his hand trembled on the leash enough for me to feel it pull against my skin. Oh, fuck. I’d really hurt the guy.
I started to feel bad, then I remembered that he’d — oh, I don’t know, kidnapped me, gotten me to strip, forced me to give myself enemas and eat out of dog bowls and drink out of a phallic waterer and put on a collar with a lock on it and wear this stupid get-up and sleep in a dog bed with a goddamn tail, and—
And things. He’d done things.
The erection hadn’t been my fault.
All right, so he’d almost really died in a fire, and maybe it had ruined his entire life even though he’d saved someone else in the process, and maybe—
Oh, for motherfucking fuck’s sake, I was not having this conversation with myself right then. No. It wasn’t even going to happen.
I waited in silence, completely unsure of what he was going to do.
For a moment, I thought he’d walk away without a word. Instead, he tugged lightly at the leash.
“C’mon, boy,” he said, his voice a little rough. “Let’s go for a little walk.”
As expected, the cement hurt like a bitch as I crossed it. As he’d said, there was a nice little mat covering the floor that dulled the impact it had on my knees.
“This is still gonna rip my knees to shreds,” I told him. He’d had every inclination of wanting to take care of me in the past. Surely he’d listen to that?
“Right now, I don’t particularly care,” he muttered, his voice so low I could almost think I imagined the words.
I flinched. I didn’t know why it hurt so much to hear him talk like that, but it did. God, I was so fucked up. Why did he have to go and make everything so complicated?
Why did I have to be thinking about an old Avril Lavigne song at a time like this?
Great. Now I had that stuck in my head along with everything else, stuck on fucking repeat.
I paused for a moment, trying to get used to the awkward crawl he’d forced me into. He gave me several seconds then tugged again, more insistently.
“Okay, okay,” I mumbled, still feeling a little docile from what I’d done not long before. I started to walk again — well, crawl, and we went faster that time. His pace kept picking up, and it wasn’t until I finally collapsed onto the mat, exhausted, that he stopped.
“Good boy,” he told me, crouching down and running his fingers through my hair.
I eyed him wearily through the strands, wanting to reach out and knock him off balance onto his ass. It wasn’t worth it, though. It wouldn’t accomplish anything, not when he still held the handle to the leash.
Nothing would accomplish anything.
I let out a half-hysterical little laugh, hating myself forcoming to that conclusion but unable to think about anything else. Nothing I did mattered. Nothing I did was going to change this. Nothing I did would get me out of this mess. I was solely dependent on the outside world to figure out who’d abducted me, and the more time that passed, the more hope I lost.
“Shh,” he said quietly, still stroking my hair and wiping sweat from my forehead. “You were good. You were such a good boy. You made your master proud.”
I didn’t want to make my master proud. The only thing was, making him proud meant I got to just relax there for a moment instead of being forced in a ring around the basement in a rendition of a fucked-up children’s song.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
