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  No. No, not again not again not again . . .

  He couldn’t help it—he fought.

  It hardly seemed to matter, though. They barely even had to hit him once before they’d shoved him inside and locked the door behind him.

  He threw himself against it, pounding with fists and feet, begging and screaming through the gag. But of course, nobody listened. Nobody cared. And why should they? He was just one more dead thing for the living to bury and forget.

  “Ugh,” someone said, presumably at Mat.

  Someone new.

  No time to think about it, though: a gush of ice-cold water hit him in the head, knocking the breath and thought right out of him.

  At least he wouldn’t smell like piss anymore.

  “C’mon, get up,” the new man said, and then he stooped down, hooked something beneath the ties at Mat’s wrists, gave a tug, and cut them away. “Time to go. Bet you can’t wait to see the backside of this place.”

  “Fuck you,” Mat groaned, but did manage to roll onto his newly freed hands and knees. The man offered him a hand, but he didn’t take it. He ended up having to crawl over to the doctor’s examination table and use it to help himself up, but at least he wasn’t voluntarily grasping at some asshole who was probably five minutes away from raping him.

  Standing, now—well, leaning against the table for dear life—he was finally able to take the new man in.

  Definitely not one of this place’s guards. He was handsome, but older, maybe in his mid-forties. Leaner than any of the guards. Had a soft, inscrutable expression, no real trace of cruelty in it. Dressed in a suit. The buyer? No, he was . . . he was wearing a collar, like Mat was. Except nicer. More refined. Not what you’d put on the vicious dog you kept to guard your junkyard, like Mat had been reduced to.

  “Who are you?” Mat asked, hating the hope swelling in his chest that this man, whoever he was, would take him away from here.

  “Your new best friend. Come.” He turned to go, clearly expecting Mat to follow without a fight.

  Mat almost gave in that easy, but stopped himself just in time. They hadn’t broken him yet. He wouldn’t let them. “Where are you taking me?”

  The man’s answering laugh took him completely by surprise. “I used to be like you, kid. Been a lot of years for me, but I know how one of those—” he waved at Mat’s ass, at the horrible expanding plug the guards had shoved back in him when they’d finished raping him the last time “—feels. And the other stuff they did to you here, too. I haven’t been given permission to take pity on your sorry ass, but right now I really am the closest thing to a friend that you’ve got.”

  “If you were any kind of friend to me, you’d find my brother, and you’d let us both go.” But he was following. Just like he was expected to. God, walking hurt with that plug jacked so wide.

  “I’m not that kind of friend, kid, and I don’t think you’ll ever find that kind of friend again, so I’d stop looking before it costs you your tongue. And I already found your brother, so if you want to see him again, you’ll come quietly.”

  So he did.

  Dougie’s hallucinations were getting worse. It didn’t help that he knew now how very real monsters were, that terrors did lurk in the dark, though so far they’d all come in human form. That skittering in the corner, that scritching near his ear . . . he tried to tell himself it was normal, a perfectly reasonable reaction to being alone in the cold silent dark for so long. He tried to tell himself they weren’t real.

  It didn’t help.

  He’d given up trying to stomp out the unseen skittering creatures. Given up trying to unfasten the gag or even trying to yell around it. Given up feeling along the walls for some kind of latch or handle or knob. He hadn’t eaten in days, if the stubble on his chin and cheeks was any reliable measure of time; he didn’t have the energy for trying to escape anymore.

  Or the hope.

  He knew he should have been happy. Nobody was hurting him here. He never woke up to a cock in his face or hands on his body, prying at his legs or pinching his nipples or squeezing his balls. He woke up to darkness. And silence. It was all he ever woke up to.

  Darkness. Silence. Fear. Hunger. Thirst—he couldn’t drink from the toilet this time; it was chemical, no water. And, strangely, loneliness, as if any human company—even the beasts who raped him—was somehow better than this empty, black nothingness.

  He missed Mat.

  He was starting to feel a creeping, dreamlike sense that Mat wasn’t even real. All in his head, just like the creepy-crawlies ghosting over his skin. Just like the rest of the outside world. Strange, distant concepts like psych papers and journal reviews and contraband potato chips. And clothes, and happiness, and peace, and dignity.

  What that left of him, he didn’t know. Was too afraid to think on it very hard. Easier just to close his eyes and be the nothingness they’d taken such care to shape him into. And maybe that was giving up, but right now it was the best he could do. He just had to hope Mat would forgive him for it.

  The stranger led Mat to a parking garage, where a huge RV was waiting. Opened the door for him like a gentleman.

  Mat climbed in, struggling but unwilling to ask for help, using the walls to propel himself up the stairs. The stranger followed, closing and locking the door behind him. Not a simple deadbolt. You needed a key even to open it from the inside. Mat stowed that information away as he took in the rest of his surroundings. A kitchen, a room in the back with a bed. A curtained area up front where the driver’s seat must be. A bathroom. A wall of cupboards. A little living room area. It looked like a place you could take a nice vacation in, except for the part where the bed was fitted with straps at each corner of the mattress, used to keep a person spread-eagled, and the windows looked thicker than the ones in airplanes. His eyes must have lingered too long on those, because a hand fell on his shoulder and squeezed.

  “You can see out them, but people can’t see in. And they’re Plexiglas, not anything you can break. So don’t try it. Now go sit at the table.”

  The kitchen had a little eat-in nook, a table set into a booth of seats.

  “I’d rather stand,” Mat said, with a tone that suggested there was no fucking reason he should have to elaborate on why.

  The guy cuffed him upside the head so hard he fell.

  A moment later, there was the hand to help him back up again. Which he refused.

  “I don’t care what you’d ‘rather’ do. If I tell you to sit, you fucking sit. If I tell you to put on a bra, you fucking do it. If I tell you to suck my dick, you suck it like a porn star. Just because I’m not a pig sadist like those assholes at Madame’s doesn’t mean I won’t hurt you when you deserve it. Unless sadism is the only language you understand?”

  Mat thought about it for a moment. Thought about knocking the guy unconscious and taking the key. Running. Finding Dougie. Getting them both safe. Getting this fucking plug out of his ass.

  But then the curtains parted and three heavies armed with Tasers filed into the living space, so broad shouldered they couldn’t stand side by side. He knew instantly how this would go: they’d hurt him, and then they’d make him sit anyway.

  He was tired of hurting. He sat down.

  And lurched right back up. The plug, oh God, he couldn’t, they weren’t really going to make him do this, were they?

  “Points for trying, I suppose,” the man in charge said, and gestured with his chin at the heavies. One stayed back, Taser aimed at Mat’s chest. The other two stalked forward, grabbed him by the shoulders and arms, and pushed him back into the seat. He had just a moment to note that these heavies were significantly more skilled than the usual guards—they’d grabbed him effortlessly by pressure points—before the force of his weight and their strength drove the plug deeper inside him.

  His hands flexed, his back arched, anything to reject the plug. His so-called friend walked out of his line of vision, apparently satisfied he’d sit still, and came back with . . . a
plate of food. Which he calmly set on the table in front of Mat, as if he honestly believed Mat even could.

  A plate of chicken cut into bite-sized pieces. Mashed sweet potatoes. Peas and carrots. Real fucking food. And a plastic spoon to eat it with.

  “Eat,” his new friend said. “Or else I’ll bring you back in to see the good doctor, and he hooks you up with a feeding tube.”

  “I can’t.” The plug. The plug. The plug.

  “Yes, you fucking can. You can do anything with that plug in that you could do without it, except take a shit, I guess.” And then, to prove his point, he grabbed the spoon, shoveled up a pile of peas and sweet potatoes, and shoved it into Mat’s gaping mouth. Held Mat’s jaw shut until he swallowed, then swallowed once more against a surge of pain-induced nausea, trying to keep the food where it belonged. “Now eat.”

  Hands shaking, Mat took the spoon for himself. Ate a bite. Did the sickly double swallow again.

  “Listen. Your new owner wants you fit and well fed, and you’re gonna get there one way or another. I need to go now, because I’m the driver on this pleasure trip and we’re already behind schedule. So here’s how it’s gonna work. When you’re done with this plate, licked-fucking-clean done, these associates of mine are gonna let you sleep it off in the bed at the back. Until then, they’re gonna hold you sitting here with that plug so far up your ass I can see it in the backs of your eyeballs. Fight them, and they’ll crank it so wide your damn colon will leak out. You took—excuse me, your brother gave you—seventeen turns of the screw at the auction without any damage. You’re only on six turns now. They’ve got plenty of room to go. Your choice.”

  Mat nodded, for the moment defeated. “Where is my brother?” he tried.

  “Exactly where he needs to be.”

  He left. The RV rumbled to life.

  Mat ate.

  Dougie’s ears perked in the vacuum of black, heart jumping in his throat. For a second, he thought he’d heard something. A door slamming closed from three blocks away. There, again—a faint, nearly sub-audible whisper of voices. A sigh on the wind. Or maybe just in his head. God knew he was losing his mind. By the time they came for him again—if they came for him again, if they hadn’t forgotten him, abandoned him, left him here to die—there’d be nothing left of his mind. Nothing left of the person he used to be. Which was most certainly the plan; he’d read all about the use of sensory deprivation as torture. About how it increased suggestibility. And if it came to that, would he be able to resist them, or would he give in to their control over him completely, a slave in the truest sense?

  Another sound. And a vibration now, too. Definitely not imagining it—or at least, if he was, the delusion was thorough. The floor lurched beneath him. He banged into the padded wall, felt acceleration in his belly. Oh, right—RV. He’d forgotten. He was in an RV. They must be going somewhere, the faint deep buzz and vibration coming from the engine. To his new owner’s house? Was Mat here somewhere? Maybe in another cell like this one? Had he seen another door in the RV when they’d shoved him inside? He closed his eyes—not that it made a difference; it was pitch-black either way—and tried to remember. Couldn’t.

  He reached down, stroking his own body, trying to connect with something, anything, to prove he was still physical, still alive, that he really did exist. Maybe I’m a ghost, he thought, despite evidence to the contrary: the feel of his own heaving chest under his palm. They killed me and I’m a ghost and this is limbo, and they sent me here for hurting my own brother.

  As if on cue, he thought he heard Mat scream. Distant again, so distant it all had to be in his head. Just guilt, that’s all. Guilt and insanity. Mat wasn’t here. Wouldn’t want to see him again anyway. Not after what he’d done to him, how he’d hurt him. Raped him, tore him open, made him scream and beg and held him still to make him scream and beg some more.

  He’d become no better than the guards who’d hurt them. The men who’d taken them. The woman who’d sold them.

  The man who’d bought them. What kind of person bought someone else?

  What kind of person allowed themselves to be sold?

  Maybe Mat was free right now. Maybe Dougie didn’t deserve to be.

  They didn’t actually let Mat sleep it off. At least, not for a while. But then, he hadn’t exactly expected them to. Oh, they took him to bed, all right, and they strapped him down spread-eagle on his belly and removed the plug and fucked him six ways from Sunday. Had a break and a laugh and a game of cards, and then fucked him again. One guy came inside him and then replaced his cock with his fist, toying idly for what seemed like hours as Mat grunted and screamed. Didn’t beg, though, not this time. Wouldn’t have mattered anyway, and maybe it was the real food, or the change of scenery, or the strange sort-of ally (or at least not-quite enemy, maybe?) driving the RV, but whatever it was, he felt stronger today. Strong enough to endure what they did to him. Strong enough to endure it when they put the plug back and turned the key ten times. He heard it ratchet. He counted.

  At least he was horizontal.

  They drove for hours. If he turned his head the right way, he could see the passing scenery. Mostly electrical poles and trees, but oh God, sky too. He’d missed the sky.

  Once, at a stoplight, he spotted a bird sitting on a wire, and stared and stared until it flew away, a strange unsettling feeling in the pit of his stomach that had nothing to do with the cramping from the plug. He realized, perhaps eight or ten miles later, that it was envy.

  Evening outside the window, and then night. Stars. So fucking beautiful he could’ve wept, and he’d never exactly been the poetic type. The RV pulled into some kind of campground or park or whatever, and they all ate sitting around the same table like friends, except for Mat, stark naked, in the middle of them, with the plug down to six cranks again but still filling him long past the point of pain. The guy on his left massaged his shoulder, surreptitiously pushing him down on the plug as he choked down salad and brown rice and a chicken breast. The guy on the right let his hand wander up and down Mat’s thigh, stroking him gently, with the confidence of a man who knew he wouldn’t be rebuffed. The hand wandered to his cock, tugged lightly, and then wandered away again, and Mat thought he’d be punished for not getting hard on cue. But when they put him to bed that night, he didn’t go alone; he went with his not-ally, who strapped his foot into one of the locking cuffs at the bottom of the bed, then climbed in beside him. It scared off the rest of the assholes in the RV, but it also squashed Mat’s only hope for escape, especially when his not-ally wrapped an arm around his body and pulled him close. And there was somebody else standing guard at the door. The grunts would probably guard him in shifts while their driver (their boss?) slept.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, he squirmed until he was facing his not-ally, catching the guy’s limp hand and sliding it down his back, down to cup his ass. The guy mumbled in his sleep and pressed closer against Mat’s hip.

  “Hey,” he whispered softly. “Let me suck you off. Fuck me. Tell me where my brother is.”

  No response.

  The next night, after another entire day on the road, Mat slept alone.

  Well, he didn’t sleep, and he wasn’t alone, but his definitely-not-ally made his bed elsewhere.

  Thirst.

  Not even enough water left in his body to drool around his gag. He’d drink his own piss, if he could piss in the first place. If he could drink in the first place. The gag . . . God, it had long become its own form of torture, huge and unyielding, and his scalp was scabbed and tender where he’d dug into his own skin trying to remove it.

  And darkness.

  Not even a sliver of light. Maybe he was blind. Maybe they’d blinded him, and he’d never realized.

  But if he was blind, why could he see Mat? Mat, standing less than three feet away, seeming to glow from the inside, like a beacon, like the darkness of this place couldn’t touch him at all. Dougie’s darkness couldn’t touch him. Because Do
ugie had given in to the darkness, hadn’t he? That’s why he could see Mat plain as day, but when he looked down at his own hands, saw only inky blackness. The darkness had consumed him. The things they’d done to him. The things he’d done. The thing he had become.

  But Mat had fought it, and now he was free, the last light in the world.

  And he was crying. Blood. On the insides of his thighs, running down his legs. He’d done this. Hurt Mat. With the plug. With more than the plug. God, he’d beaten him, hadn’t he? Beaten him with a whip, with a stick full of nails, with anything he could get his hands on, anything he could use to hurt.

  So we could stay together.

  “No,” Mat said. “So you could save yourself.”

  I’m sorry.

  “I hate you. Coward. Weakling. Monster. Slave.”

  Dougie would’ve cried if he’d had a drop of water left in his body to spare.

  “We’re about an hour out, Sir,” Roger said.

  Nikolai sat up straighter in his chair, switching his phone from one ear to the other. He already knew that, of course, had the RV’s GPS tracker up on his computer screen, had been monitoring it closely ever since he’d gotten home. But he still appreciated Roger calling to check in. A truly faithful man. A real rarity in this world, and Nikolai felt a burst of pride knowing he’d been the one to shape him.

  “Good to hear, Roger. How are my new projects?”

  “Well, the pretty one’s alive, at least. I’ve been monitoring him on the infrared cameras, like you asked. Haven’t opened the door to the cell since I put him there.”