Faith got up to leave, confused that nothing scary had happened, and that he was keeping her in the east wing for now. He intercepted her at the door, wrapping her in his arms. His lips pressed against her cheek, then went to her ear.

“You will survive me, I promise,” he whispered.

15

A week passed and Leo still hadn’t taken Faith to the dungeons, though he had resumed meals with her in the kitchen. One afternoon, he’d given her a few books on BDSM and asked her to read them so she would know more of what to expect. That night at dinner she’d been more pale than the night she’d offered herself to him in Mei Lin’s place.

When he asked if she had any questions about anything, she’d shaken her head and looked at her plate, her hand shaking as she brought the fork to her lips.

Leo had spent much of the week digging through old medical texts on psychology. He had little respect for the field—considering it a pseudoscience at best. And yet everything he did with women in his dungeon, and everything between himself and Faith… it was all psychology on some level.

He’d skimmed past the parts about Stockholm Syndrome. He didn’t want to believe Faith’s feelings could be merely a survival mechanism. The look in her eyes when he’d kissed her, the way she responded to him… that had to be real.

Hadn’t the scientific community determined we were all just chemicals swimming around—that behavior was a mechanical reaction to stimuli and nothing more? Nothing mystical or magic, mere cause and effect. If they were right… would any love or feeling be real? Would Stockholm Syndrome be any less real, if that was what she had? Did a personal judgment on the value of one set of chemical reactions over another make one empirically better or more real than the rest? Leo believed humans were more than stimulus-response machines, but the men who’d written the psychology books in his den didn’t.

Leo shook the textbook thoughts from his head as he watched his timid slave. He could drag this on for another six weeks without touching her once, and she’d still have that terrified look on her face, maybe more intense.

He poured the wine as they sat down for their Friday meal together. “I’m taking you to the dungeon after dinner.”

The tension that had been coiled in her for the past week pulled tight, jerking her head up like a puppet on a string. Her eyes widened as if she wanted to beg him to go back to Mei Lin or any other woman and leave her in peace.

“What did I tell you before I sent you off to bed last Friday?” He had no doubt she remembered everything he’d said or done since that moment. She’d watched and listened to him as if her life depended on memorizing every nuance of every interaction between them.

“Y-you said I’d survive you, Master.”