The Flesh Cartel #2: Auction

queasy with the thought.

    The guard checked his watch. “Wow, so long? Enjoy your evening, hole.”
    A hard pat on the back of one welted thigh, a final cruel twist of the nightstick, and Mat lay perfectly still as his cell door opened and closed and locked again, holding his breath until the guard’s footsteps faded down the hall, away from Dougie’s door.
15

chapter
two
    ventually, Dougie slept.
    E For a while he just hunched in his corner, silently listening to Mat’s ragged cries. The second time he’s cried today. He’d tried to speak up, say some word of comfort, but each time, Mat interrupted him with a distraught, humiliated, “Just go to sleep , Dougie!”
    So he gave up, for the sake of Mat’s dignity. Pretended to sleep, until suddenly it wasn’t pretend anymore.
    He woke up to Mat screaming again. Tired as if he’d never slept and aching in places he hadn’t known it was possible to hurt. Whatever they were doing to Mat, he couldn’t stop it, and though it shamed him to his toes to think it, left him hollow and queasy inside, he just huddled in his corner and kept his mouth shut, praying they wouldn’t come for him next.
They didn’t. Mat wouldn’t tell him anything, just, I’m okay. Go back to sleep, Dougie.
He slept. Woke up next to his door unlocking, a pair of guards, two forced blowjobs and a hard kick to the belly after he’d swallowed down their cum. And when they took him from his cell, he didn’t ask where they were taking him. They wouldn’t have told him anyway. Mat raged at them, face pressed to the window of his cell door, voice carrying down the hallway as they dragged Dougie off— Where are you taking him! Take me instead! Hey, get back here, you dog-fuckers, leave him alone! —but they paid him no more mind than they paid Dougie.
16
They took him back to the doctor’s white-tiled domain.
    Everything in there scared him, but he went willingly enough —what would fighting get him? Where could he run in this place? The doctor looked up from his computer screen and smiled when the guards shoved Dougie through the door. “You’ll be good for me, boy?” he asked.
    Dougie sniffled, resisted the insane urge to cover his nudity with his hands. “Y-yes, sir.”
He was, too. Up on the table as ordered, legs in the stirrups. The doctor removed the plug, let him use the toilet, cleaned him gently, and smoothed more salve across his burning flesh. Put the plug back in, prodded clinically at the worst of his bruising, seemed to be pleased with what he found. “You’ll heal fast, I think,” he said, and then, surprising Dougie, “There’s a toothbrush and paste in the cabinet over the sink. Use it.”
Dougie wasted no time scrubbing the taste of cum from his mouth. He rinsed, then filled the little paper cup again and drank. And again, and again, and again. God, he was so thirsty
The doctor, eyes on his computer screen, said ever-socasually, “Did I say you could do that, boy?”
Dougie froze, hands clenching in fear, the little paper cup crushing between his fingers. “N-no sir, but I—”
“Quiet.” Dougie clamped his jaw shut so fast he bit his tongue.
    He wanted to explain, wanted to beg. Didn’t dare. “I’d take a cane to you again, but Madame’s made clear the
    marks are bad for business with you, and they wouldn’t disappear in five days.”
    Five days? What was in five days? And what business? Why wouldn’t anyone tell him anything? 17
    The doctor pressed a button on the phone beside his terminal and said, “Bring in M-36-527.”
    That number sounded familiar. Wasn’t that the new “name” the doctor had given him when he’d . . . what, processed him? No, different somehow. Off by one? Mat. He means Mat. “Sir, please —”
“I said quiet , boy!” The doctor stood, advanced a step. Dougie fell back a step, hating himself for it. He was a coward. A complete and utter coward .
    He couldn’t even bring himself to hold his brother’s desperate gaze when they brought him in and beat him for Dougie’s mistake.
    They dumped them back in their cells. Fed and watered them at what Mat assumed were regular intervals, though time seemed as fuzzy here as it often did in the ring—
    passing unnoticed sometimes, like after a too-hard hit to the head, but mostly slowing down, crawling , an endless morass of frozen seconds beneath the always-burning fluorescent lights. He tried to sleep, as much to pass the time as to escape his body or because he