The Flesh Cartel #1: Capture

Sound-dampening panels on the walls, like the ones in the music rooms back at school where he’d plunked out clumsy melodies on the slightly-out-of-tune pianos when he couldn’t focus for one more second on psych.
    Why do they need those here? he thought, and then, an instant later, Duh.
    He hoped Mat was okay.
    No time to dwell on it, though. They’d reached a door. One of the men at his shoulder grabbed him by the ear. “This is where we part, sweetheart. G’luck.” The tone was a lot crueler than the words on their own, and the man followed them up with a sloppy too-much-tongue kiss and a grasping hand that cupped Dougie’s ass cheek and hooked several fingers into his hole. And then the door was open and they were shoving him through, into harsher, brighter light, and then they were gone.
    The door slammed shut behind him, followed by a distinctly lock-like click.
    The room was tiled and absolutely immaculate. A doctor’s stool was tucked into one corner, within arm’s reach of a triangle of apparent necessities: a touch-screen computer console built into one wall, an examination table with ohGodstirrups , and a shiny metal wheeled cart like the one at the dentist’s office, its trays covered in the same blue tissue that disguised whatever implements were underneath. It really could have been a doctor’s office. He could’ve half-tricked himself into that, except for the part where there were fucking shackles hanging from the center of the ceiling, directly above a strangely ominous shower drain.
    A door, opposite the one he’d come through, opened and then closed again, and indeed, it was a person dressed like a doctor who’d walked through.
    “Around here, you kneel when a better walks into the room,” the man said without looking up. He breezed over to the console, tapped a few buttons, nodded to himself. “You’re still not kneeling.”
    He’s alone. My hands are free. I could attack—
    “Those are dangerous thoughts, boy.” He pointed at one corner of the ceiling, still not looking up from his console. “See that camera? Remember those charming gentlemen who brought you in? They’re on the other side. I’m sure they’d be delighted to come visit you again.”
    Dougie looked dutifully at the camera, swallowing hard against the thought of those hands on my skin cock in my ass my mouth my—
    He fell to his knees, and told himself it was just the exhaustion. Nothing more.
    “Name?” the man asked, not remarking on Dougie’s sudden obedience.
    “D-Douglas Carmichael.”
    And what can I do for you today, Douglas? he imagined the man saying, as if he were a real doctor.
    But the man didn’t. He just opened a drawer in his metal cart, producing a pair of latex gloves, and pulled them on. “Not anymore you aren’t. You’re now . . .” He squinted at the screen. “M-36-526. But I’ll just call you boy, since it’s all the same. Let’s get you cleaned up, boy. Madame says your procurers brought you in absolutely filthy.”
    Something like relief swelled in his chest. It was the first kindness he’d known here. To be clean again, and not by—not using—not—
    The doctor rose, striding to the center of the room where the chains hung. He looked to Dougie with an expression of patent annoyance. “These do extend to reach you, but I’d really rather you showed some initiative. Making things hard on me makes them hard on yourself.”
    “Uh . . . oh. Sorry.” A sense of absolute absurdity had washed over him, dulling the acute fear. He shuffled forward on his knees and held out his wrists to be cuffed.
    “Going up,” the doctor said, seemingly to himself, and wandered back to his console. The chains jerked, then drew smoothly upward, retracting into the ceiling and pulling Dougie along with them. The muscles of his shoulders screamed until he managed to get his feet beneath him.
    The fear came back.
    At least the chains stopped before his feet came off the ground. His shoulders unclenched. There was slack. Not much, but enough not to hurt.
    “Eyes closed, now. And don’t get this in your mouth.”
    Before he could ask Get what in my mouth? a cold, clear . . . something cascaded down from overhead, viscous as liquid dish soap, drenching him and setting his teeth to chattering. It smelled sharp, like disinfectant, and stung the dozens of little cuts and scrapes he hadn’t realized, until now, were covering his body.
    It flowed for maybe thirty seconds, as goopy and disgusting