The Flesh Cartel #5: Wins and Losses

that when the opportunity came . . .
Nikolai left him alone with the paper, then, but Mat didn’t write a list. He drew a shoddy picture of Nikolai’s face, stuck it to the heavy bag with some of the tape he’d been given for his hands, and beat the shit out of it until his hands and arms were so tired and sore he couldn’t even move them to take the gloves off.
But he felt better. Better than he had since this whole fucking mess had begun.
    Like it or not, Mat found himself thinking about Nikolai’s question. On the treadmill. On the chin-up bar. While shadowboxing. While working the speed bag. In the shower. What were his joys? What—aside from Dougie, because that was his first answer, always his first answer—had he been living for these last however many years? What the fuck had he been doing with his life?
    He got tangled up in his jump rope like some hopeless newbie and threw it down in disgust. No more plastic speed roping until he could learn to shut out Nikolai’s bullshit distractions.
    He turned to grab the slower, heavier, leather jump rope instead, and the marker and paper on the table caught his eye. Again.
    He sighed, wiped the sweat off his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Fine,” he sniped to the empty room, or maybe to the hidden cameras and Nikolai on the other side, watching from some monitor somewhere. “But for me, you hear? Not you.” The only way he was gonna get this out of his head was to write it down and be done with it.
    He threw himself into one of the chairs—God, how nice it felt to have shorts on for once against those wooden seats— and snatched up the marker and ripped off its cap. Stared at the blank pad for a moment—how could something so innocuous feel so ominous and daunting?—and then wrote down Fighting.
    Blinked at it for a second, crossed it out, and replaced it with Winning.
And then couldn’t think of a damn other thing to add. He had no other hobbies, no other pleasures. Didn’t read novels, didn’t watch TV, never even dated. (Fucked sometimes, sure, but after what he’d been through here, he doubted he would ever look at another man’s cock again without feeling physically ill.) He worked a shitty job with people he didn’t particularly like, and when he wasn’t working, he was training, and when he wasn’t training, he was doing laundry, and grocery shopping, and running errands, and when he wasn’t doing any of that, he was spending time with Dougie.
Dougie. He wrote that down in enormous letters. Underlined it. Drew a box around it.
This can’t be it. This can’t be my whole life.
He tossed down the marker and scrubbed both hands through his buzzed hair. What was he going to do when he was too old to fight and Dougie graduated and moved away?
Coach, hopefully. Open his own gym and let kids like he and Dougie had once been train for free.
That’s it. He seized the marker again, wrote beneath Dougie’s name, Help people. That’s what he was, wasn’t he— what he’d always been. The big brother. The protector. That’s what he would live for. Because obviously this whole mess was bigger than him and Dougie. Was huge. Frighteningly organized—he ran gentle fingers over his forearm, where the microchip sat just beneath his skin—and nationwide at least. Maybe worldwide. So he’d live, Dougie or no Dougie, to get out of here. To help everyone else stuck in hellholes like this one and like Madame’s to get out too. He’d be the fighter Nikolai wanted him to be.
Except secretly, he’d be fighting for his own cause.
chapter two
    D
    ougie didn’t see anyone for a long time. He napped, mostly. There was nothing to do in the tiny room but mentally go over all the horrible things that had been done to him, or to actively suffer through the horrible thing being done to him right now—and God the plug was horrible, buzzing and pressing and buzzing and buzzing and buzzing, so bad his teeth had started chattering with need—so he slept. Ten minutes, twenty, an hour, six, there was no way of knowing, and really, what did it matter, because every time he woke up it was to the same thing. Loneliness. The vibrating plug. The cock cage. And every time he slept, he dreamed of . . . God, he didn’t want to think about it. Hands. Teeth. Cocks. Pain and ecstasy and burning need and Nikolai, Nikolai looming above it all like the world’s most polite puppet master.
    And for all that he was sure he wasn’t sleeping deeply— how could he be,