Page 28 of Enforcer Daddy
I moved then, fast enough to intercept her hand before she could grab something actually irreplaceable. She spun, shoving me with both hands, real force behind it even though she might as well have been shoving a brick wall.
"Are you soft?" Another shove, harder. "Is that it? Too pathetic to even do violence right?"
She was in my face now, close enough that I could see tears gathering in those impossible eyes. Not from sadness—from pure, clean fury at my refusal to be the monster she understood.
"Hit me!" She actually slapped me then, not hard enough to hurt but sharp enough to echo in the destroyed room. "Come on! Show me what you really are! Show me why they call you The Beast!"
The title hung between us. She'd been listening to my calls, picking up more than I'd realized. Dmitry Volkov, The Beast, who'd once broken a man's arms in seventeen places for stealing from the family. Who'd earned his reputation with blood and broken bones and bodies that took dental records to identify.
"Hit me," she said again, quieter now, almost pleading. "Just fucking hit me so I know where I stand."
And there it was—the truth under all that rage. She was terrified of the calm, of consequences without violence. Sheknew how to take a beating. Her body had been trained by years of abuse to process fists and boots and hands around her throat.
But patient discipline? Rules with consequences that didn't involve pain? That was foreign territory that left her no defense mechanisms to deploy.
"Cold shower," I said instead. "Ten minutes."
Her face crumpled like I'd actually hit her. The frustration of being denied even that familiar violence was worse than any punch I could have thrown.
"I hate you," she whispered, but there was something else in it. Not just hate but confusion, like I'd broken some fundamental rule about how the world worked.
She walked to the bathroom with the defeated posture of someone going to execution. I followed, needing to supervise, to make sure she actually complied. She knew the routine by now—we'd done this twice before when she'd refused other consequences. Strip down to underwear and tank top, step under the spray, endure.
She peeled off my henley with mechanical movements, revealing the tank top underneath that was also mine, stolen from my drawer like everything else she wore now. The track pants pooled at her feet, leaving her in boy shorts that had seen better days and my tank top that hung off her frame.
"This is fucked up," she said, but stepped into the shower stall anyway.
I turned the handle to cold, and she gasped as the water hit. Not dramatic, not performed, just the involuntary response of a body meeting discomfort. She pressed her palms against the tile, head bowed, water streaming over her in punishment for breaking things that could be replaced.
"You could just hit me," she said through chattering teeth. "It would be faster."
"I will never hit you. I’m helping you learn.”
"I'm not learning anything except that you're a sadistic fuck who gets off on—"
"On what?" I interrupted. "On teaching you that actions have consequences that don't involve emergency rooms? That you can fuck up without getting bones broken?"
She turned to look at me through the spray, hair plastered to her face, those mismatched eyes wide with something that might have been revelation.
"That's not how it works," she said quietly. "You break things, you get broken. That's the rule."
"My house, my rules."
"Your rules are stupid."
"Eight more minutes."
She turned back to the wall, enduring the cold with a stubbornness that would have been admirable if it wasn't so clearly a survival mechanism. Her whole body shook, but she didn't ask for mercy, didn't beg for it to stop. Just stood there and took it because that's what she'd been trained to do—endure whatever came at her.
At the ten-minute mark, I turned off the water. She stood there dripping, waiting for permission or further punishment or something that made sense in her framework of violence and retaliation.
"Get dried off," I said, handing her a towel. "Then clean up the broken glass before Bear steps on it."
"That's it?"
"Did you want more?"
She clutched the towel like armor, water still running down her legs, pooling on the bathroom tile. "I broke your TV. That's thousands of dollars."
