The Flesh Cartel #2: Auction

the assistant smeared a frankly wonderful-smelling lotion all over his skin. It had a sort of pearlescent sheen to it, turning his academic pastiness into something shiny and precious.
    29 After that, he was escorted out to the main room again.
    No sign of Mat, although there were a few other people sitting in the chairs or lying on the tables. All strapped in.
    They weren’t struggling. Their eyes were blank, their faces drawn and tired. One woman was crying, annoying the lady doing her makeup to no end as she kept applying foundation to the same cheek. The same practiced sweep, over and over again, immediately cut by a tear trail.
    Crying. Tired. Hopeless. Soulless. Half dead. Dougie wondered if he looked like that.
    They strapped him into a chair, cut his hair and shaved his face and plucked his eyebrows, the sulking assistant standing by. Then it was over to a table, where they strapped him down again and waxed him, completely disinterested in his screams. Well, maybe not completely disinterested.
    The assistant seemed to enjoy them quite a bit, smiling whenever Dougie’s cries got particularly loud.
Chest, arms, legs, belly, cock, balls, armpits. Anywhere there was hair, it was removed with practiced efficiency. Which meant it didn’t surprise Dougie when he was unstrapped, turned over, and restrapped to have the crack of his ass waxed, too.
That was when he spotted Mat being dragged out of the bathroom, conscious enough to meet Dougie’s eyes but not to walk under his own power. He looked . . . gone. Glazed over. Totally slack. He was covered head to toe in bruises, bite marks, ugly welts from a belt or a cane or whip or maybe all of the above. God, what had they done to him?
    Mat held his gaze for a second, maybe two, as they dragged him toward a chair. His head lolled when they sat him down. He didn’t fight them at all when they strapped him in.
    30 Drugged. They must’ve drugged him.
    Someone undid Dougie’s straps again. Helped him off the table, then sat him down in a makeup chair. He tried to peer over his shoulder at Matt, but the assistant grabbed his chin and wrenched his head around so hard he whimpered.
    From somewhere to his left, the crying woman started up again. He heard someone slap her and say, “Stop that bullshit right now or I’ll give you a reason to cry.”
    She had three holes to fuck. He wondered if that made it worse.
    Just the fact that he was in a mental place to think something like that made him want to gag. He stared straight forward at the blank wall. Strange to be in a chair like this without a mirror, but then, it didn’t matter what he thought about his looks. They could put him in women’s makeup if they felt like it. Like one of the kidnappers had wanted to, that first night. But they didn’t do anything like that. Just brushed some sort of powder over his face, lined his eyes with a black pencil, and ran a mascara brush through his lashes.
    He thought of his friend Jeremy, who did community theater. Stage makeup. Men had to wear it too. It made their features stand out from a distance.
Somewhere over his shoulder, a razor buzzed, and he knew instinctively that they were shaving Mat’s head. To make him look like a thug. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he did.
“Hey . . .” Mat slurred, and like clockwork came the sound of a fist hitting flesh and a drug-loosened grunt from Mat. Strange time for him to get vain.
    “Hold his head still,” someone said, and then, presumably to Mat, “I’m about to put a razorblade half an inch from your eye, hole. Don’t move. ”
    31
    If anything merited Dougie taking the risk of turning his head, it was that terrifyingly ominous statement. The makeup lady seemed to be done with him anyway, so he craned his neck, saw a guard gripping either side of Mat’s face in two giant hands, saw another man with a razorblade leaning in close and oh my God what are you doing to him, stop! Realized to his horror he’d said it out loud when the man with the razor turned to Dougie and said, “Just a little cosmetic surgery, hole.” Then he dragged the razor at a diagonal through Mat’s left eyebrow, and even drugged half out of his head, Mat clenched his teeth and growled and there was blood everywhere , Jesus, why was it bleeding so much?
But then the man placed the razorblade on a tray near the sink and picked up a wad of gauze and pressed it to Mat’s brow, and someone else cleaned off the blood that’d run down his eye and