CHAPTER TEN
Pet
Iwake and roll over, staring at the clear glass walls of my cell. “No! No! No! No!”
I sit bolt upright. Not this cell.Not this room. I stare at the mattress beneath me, at the thick thermal blanket over my body, and at the pillow. All of which are new. All of which are unwanted.
“Didn’t I do everything you asked? Didn’t I give you enough?” I shout to the empty room.
Outside my cell, he walks to the door. The keypad beeps, the lock opens, and he enters.
I toss the pillow at him. “Why? Why did you put me back in here?”
“This is where you belong, Pet.”
“I don’t belong in a cage.”
“You’re behaving like a brat,” he says through clenched teeth. “Is that the thanks I get for providing you with a bed and blankets?”
“Take them back! I don’t want them. I want out of this room.”
“You want out of this room?” Ares grabs my face with one rough hand. He leans in, his warm breath skating across my ear as his stubble grazes my cheek. “Then you have to earn it. And trust me, your bratty antics aren’t doing that.”
He releases me and walks away, pressing his hand into the keypad to unlock the door. Without another word, he leaves.
I launch off the bed and throw myself at the glass wall. He doesn’t look at me, and I know I’ll pay for my behavior later. I’ll pay this tithe in pain and bruises, in welts on my body, and in pleasure that he steals from me. For now, I circle my room like a caged animal, because that is what I am.
Caged.
I scream, bang my fists on the glass, rip my blanket from the bed and throw it at the wall. He’s almost at the staircase. I know he hears me. I know he’s keeping a tally in his head of all the things I will be punished for.Well, fuck him. I can’t do this anymore.
He’s thought of everything. All the ways I could harm him—or myself. He’s removed them all.
All except one.
I walk toward the reinforced steel door, take a deep breath, and smash my head against it. Pain, white-hot and searing, reverberates through my skull, so hard that my eyes roll in their sockets. Blood trickles down my forehead. I’m woozy, nauseous. Bile rises in my gut as if it were acid. I rear back and slam my head into the metal, harder this time.
“Fuck!” Ares shouts. I can’t see him, but I know I have his undivided attention now. I stumble back against the wall as the familiar beep sounds, and he enters the room. “Fuck, Pet! What did you do?”
I shove my hand out in front of me to swat him away, but instead, I find myself caught up in his arms as I sink into the darkness that calls to me with its siren song. “Fuck you and your freedom.”
Everything goes black.