Page 60 of Brave
“Take her and go.”
Pony grabbed at his arm when he tried to walk away. “Wh-what… wait!”
It was strange not to be afraid. Puppy watched him yank his arm out of reach, feeling weirdly nothing. After everything that had happened—Piggy, Kitty, this whole last year—he was just releasing them? She didn’t believe it, not for a second.
“No, please!” Pony cried. She grabbed his wrist, but he knocked her back so violently that she lost her balance and actually fell into the table.
A shrill whistle from one of the guards silenced the room, drawing stares from other inmates and their guests.
“You’re done, O’Dowell,” a guard boomed, but Pony’s cry drowned it out.
“Don’t go!”
If this was an act on his part, then it was a damn good one. The only thing Puppy could see in him now was the irritation he shot at Pony as two guards made their way to him, one of them with cuffs in his hand.
“When a horse no longer pulls its weight, you put it down.” Evading Pony’s reaching hands, the look Ethen gave Puppy next was just as derisive. “The same goes for a bitch.”
Pony burst into tears when the guard shackled him. Scrambling on all fours, she got in front of him in a kneeling position that never should’ve happened in the vanilla world. “I love you,” she begged.
He tried to walk around her, but she latched onto his leg like a two-year-old trying to stop daddy from leaving. Except this daddy had no problem kicking her away.
Both guards grabbed his arms, physically muscling him out of the visiting room.
“I love him!” Pony shouted after them, holding her chest where his foot had made contact.
Ethen disappeared through the locked doors without ever once looking back, and Pony broke down. She bowed, her forehead almost touching her knees. With nothing else to cling to, she hugged herself as she rocked and cried.
They weren’t free. They couldn’t possibly be. Stunned, Cynthia stared at the closed gate, fully expecting him to come back through it. He never did, and in the end, it was a female guard who came to help pick Pony up off the floor.
“Come on, honey,” she said, as immune to her tears as only a place like this could make a person. “He ain’t worth all this.”
Ripping out of the guard’s grip, Pony turned on her. “I love him!” Turning on Cynthia just as savagely, tears overflowed her eyes as she hissed, “Look what you’ve done!”
There at last, she felt something. Not that old creeping sense of guilt, but pity.
“I love him,” Pony moaned, anger giving way to despair as she broke down again. “I love him so much.”
“I know.” She slipped her arms around Pony’s thin shoulders, a little surprised when the other allowed it. “I know.”
Hugging Pony to her side, Cynthia walked out of the prison, leaving both Ethen and Puppy behind.
She was surprised that she didn’t feel better.
* * *
Pony cried nonstop for days. Carlson knew because she was the reason he had to relent on his two-days edict, allowing Cynthia to stay and nurse her sub-mate through the misery. From the texts he kept getting, there was a lot of it.
According to the texts, immediately upon returning home, Pony went to bed and didn’t get up again for days. She refused to eat. She barely drank. Only when Cynthia begged, pleaded, and finally bullied her into sipping a few drops did she comply. On the fifth day, Cynthia placed a frantic call to Carlson and forty minutes later, he pulled into their driveway.
He strode into the house, rolling up his sleeves as he came. In his drill-sergeant best, he ordered her out of bed and into the shower. It was not his finest moment, but that voice worked as well on her as it did the most stubborn of his new recruits. Within minutes, she was crawling out of the blankets and he helped her, stumbling and crying into the bathroom where Cynthia was waiting with soap and a towel. Leaving the two of them to shower, he stripped down her bed and opened the windows to help air out the room.
“I need sheets,” he told Cynthia’s mother and she sighed heavily, but dutifully fetched them from the closet.
“I’d love to get rid of her,” the older woman muttered, arms folded disapprovingly as she watched him work. “Unfortunately, getting rid of her means losing my daughter too, and I just can’t make myself do it. No matter how terrible she is.”
The open hostility should not have surprised him, but it did. He didn’t like Pony. She was a parasite, attached to his submissive in a relationship so brutally unhealthy that both women had hovered and still were hovering on the brink of physical, emotional, and mental starvation. She had physically attacked Cynthia. She had dragged her week after week to visit her abuser.
But she wasn’t a parasite, Carlson suddenly realized. What she was, was deeply wounded. Every bit as much if not worse than Cynthia.
