Page 1 of Brave
Chapter 1
People were like shoes, Puppy-girl realized. One leg crossed over her knee, she picked and picked at a loose thread in her new, pink and white sneakers. The most comfortable shoes almost never looked the nicest. Rather, they were worn, dirty, sometimes downright ragged. The fancy ones… now, those were the sadistic bastards; the ones no one wanted to wear. The ones that rubbed blisters on heels, pinched toes, and hurt to walk in all day long until a girl couldn’t wait to kick them off at night.
Yeah, Puppy thought again, idly plucking until she’d worked a length of thread loose far enough to yank out, roll between her fingers and drop on the floor. People were just like shoes. The good ones never caught a second glance; the pretty ones, however, drew others in, luring them with sparkle and shine, trapping them with refinement. Hurting them over and over again, because it never mattered how horrible they were so long as everyone liked how they looked.
Sitting stiff and tense beside her, Pony-girl grabbed her arm, squeezing with a bony, claw-like hand to get her attention. At first, Puppy thought it was to make her stop fidgeting—Ethen’s Rule Number she-didn’t-even-care-anymore. But then she heard the distant clang of a prison door opening and realized it was because the guards were coming.
White-blonde hair drawn back in a high ponytail, Pony sat frozen in the crowded waiting room beside her—too tall in the three-inch heels she still wore, too thin because ever since their master, Ethen O’Dowell, had gone to prison, Pony barely ate. She’d lost a lot of weight. So had Puppy, for that matter, although not for the same reasons. Pony missed Ethen with the kind of single-minded dedication reserved for cult followers and religious extremists. For Puppy, the involuntary weight loss was merely a side effect of the ongoing nightmares.
“It’s time,” Pony whispered, blinking rapidly to keep back happy tears. “They’re coming.”
Pony shivered, her braless nipples budding into peaks that the thin floral dress she wore couldn’t hide anywhere near as effectively as it hid the black leather harness that she refused to take off. She’d even gone so far as to modify it with Velcro instead of buckles, something that was sure to get her beaten once Ethen got out, but at least she could wear it in and out of here without setting off the prison metal detectors.
In comparison, Puppy’s harness had been stripped off her body in the hospital psychiatric ward where she’d ended up after everything fell apart last year. Piggy-girl’s escape had been nothing compared to the shitstorm that Kitty’s flight had brought down on them.
That was when everything had fallen apart.
That was when that angry Australian kicked in Ethen’s front door, knocked the Menagerie Master flat on his ass before locking him up in that awful punishment cage beneath the bed, and then, just before leaving, called the cops on them. Those same cops who had once been at Ethen’s beck and call, came rushing to the well-respected lawyer’s defense with lights flashing and sirens blaring. But they took one look at Pony in her collar and Puppy in her kennel—covered in welts and bruises because the Master’s rage at losing Kitty-girl had needed a victim—and everything changed.
Instead of defending him, Ethen was arrested.
She and Pony were rushed to the hospital, where Puppy was promptly incarcerated on the psychiatric floor because in the chaos of all those police and doctors, she’d had a panic attack, followed by a full-fledged freak out when a nurse tried to give her a sedative.
Then things got worse.
Her mother, a woman she’d had zero contact with since Ethen had become her Master, had arrived. Her mother called in every favor that could still be cajoled from her deceased husband’s old partners on the hospital board of directors, and eventually Puppy was placed in her care. She forced her to return to her childhood home, in the back of her mother’s minivan with the child locks engaged so she couldn’t jump out and run. The next thing Puppy knew, she was back in her old bedroom with its absurdly surreal pink and white little girl décor still very much intact, including her old Backstreet Boys poster pinned on the wall and her Roly Poly Build-A-Bear panda lying on her My Little Pony bedspread as if waiting for her to come and hug it until she fell asleep.
She did, too.
She’d cried herself to sleep for weeks, not just hugging that stupid bear, but clinging to it.
A ward of her mother at twenty-seven, she was still there more than a full year later. Only now Pony lived with her, in her bedroom on a cot in the corner, because when Ethen’s house had been foreclosed on, the too-thin blonde hadn’t had anywhere else to go. And her mother had allowed it, not because it was obvious that Pony couldn’t physically, emotionally, or even financially take care of herself anymore, but because Puppy had meant it when she very quietly said, “If Pony goes, I go.”
“Cynthia, no,” her mother had cried.
But, the only part of her life in the menagerie that she had left, Pony, moved in. Nothing else followed her from that now distant dream into this nightmarish existence that felt less like living and more like a perpetual holding pattern.
Her mask and paws were gone. Her kennel was gone. Her dog bed, chew toys, food bowls, collar, and the leashes—both the ones he’d used to lead her and the ones he’d whipped her with—her identity, all of it was gone. How Pony managed to keep her harness she didn’t know, but her own was probably being held as police evidence somewhere.
She’d be lying if she ever said she missed any of the other things that had made her Ethen’s Puppy-girl, but she did miss the routines. She missed the security of knowing where she stood. She missed the power exchange most of all, although she’d known for a long time now that Ethen was anything but a good Master.
A good master would have cared about them, at least on some level. The only thing Ethen cared about was whatever he wanted at any given moment, whether it was good for his ‘girls’ or not. Mostly, he just liked hurting them. It was like the chafe wounds on Pony’s skin because she wouldn’t stop wearing the harness. Beneath her up-style clothing, those wounds were constantly raw and bleeding, despite the care Puppy took in dressing and bandaging them every morning. Once upon a time, wounds of any kind would have angered Ethen. Nobody damaged his property but him. These days, he seemed to like knowing he could still make them bleed, even from behind bars.
Sadistic fuck.
Pony’s breath caught when a dull buzzer sounded, but Puppy’s stomach dropped. A moment later, the security door that led back into the secured visiting area opened and two uniformed prison guards stepped out, one with a clipboard in her hands. Somewhere on that list were her and Pony’s names. Already Puppy felt sick.
“Finally,” Pony whispered, grabbing her arm and hurrying Puppy to her feet. She would never run, but she rushed as much as she was able in those heels to be first in line. If she wasn’t the first thing Ethen saw walk through the doors at visiting time, then there would be a punishment and Pony would have a meltdown.
Puppy followed her lead, not because she wanted to be here, or even because she was supposed to be the second person Ethen saw walk through the visiting room doors, but because if she wasn’t, then Ethen would get upset and Pony would have a meltdown. Personally, she’d stopped caring about the things that upset Ethen months ago. Or at least, she’d stopped punishing herself for them. And Ethen knew it, which was why he now gave all her punishments to Pony.
Pony would do them too—from fasting to whipping, sometimes even until she bled. Each and every time.
And so, months after Puppy would happily have cut her last tie to her ex-master, here she still was. Taking her place behind Pony at the head of the line, waiting to be checked in with everyone else there to visit with incarcerated loved ones.
Stomach rolling, she kept her head and her gaze to the floor. Her sweaty palms pressed flat against her jeans so no one would know how badly her hands were shaking. Including the officer who took her ID, marked her name off the list, and sent her straight down the hall to the cafeteria-style visiting room where Ethen was already waiting for them.
He’d chosen a small, round table in the very back corner of the room where he could see everything and everyone. Elegant hands folded before him, short blond hair neatly brushed, he watched with his hawk’s gaze as they approached him with the proper degree of subservience—eyes lowered, palms turned up, dipping discrete curtsies in deference to him once they reached the table and waiting for him to grant them permission to sit.
