The Flesh Cartel #6: Brotherhood

they were dressing him like this at twenty-nine, what were they making Dougie wear? Dougie, who probably could still pass for a high school student, who’d get carded at bars until he was forty, who still had that lean-but-soft, narrow-shouldered build of a teenage runner.
Well, at least they weren’t girls. No pigtails and miniskirts and shirts too small for their boobs to contend with. He’d seen straight porn, he knew what guys like that were into. Sick.
The door to his room opened. Roger. The guy who’d driven him here. His not-ally.
“He’s ready for you,” Roger said, with all the emotion of the receptionist who called people from a doctor’s waiting room.
Mat ran his hands down his chest, smoothing the leather of the jacket. “How do I look?” he asked, not even sure why he had. He was a bundle of fucking nerves, that was why. Terrified. Desperate to see Dougie—it’d been so long he’d lost all track of just how long—but simultaneously not wanting to see him at all, knowing what seeing him would mean. He wanted to stall.
“Like a former twink in denial.” Roger’s reply was cool, but not angry or impatient. Almost good-humored. Mat had no idea whose side Roger was on, only that he felt some kind of kinship with him that he just couldn’t shake. He wanted to like him. Wanted to trust him.
“Did you—did you see my brother? Is he okay?”
Roger shook his head, and for one horrified moment, Mat thought he meant, No, he’s not okay. But then he said, “The master’s escorting him personally. And if I were you, I’d be worrying about your own ass. Sir’s sweet on your brother, he won’t let him get hurt too bad if you behave.”
Did he tell you to say that? God, Mat didn’t know. He didn’t know anything at all anymore. It was all one long mindfuck and he was falling so far behind that no amount of running could ever catch him up.
“But you . . .” Roger shrugged, looking mildly sympathetic but none too bothered by any of it. “Well, let’s just say I’m glad I’m not in your shoes. Now, come on.”
Mat’s feet froze for a second, but then Roger tossed him a look that somehow said, Move it, asshole and Please don’t make me have to tell the master you misbehaved all at once, and again there was that strange sense of kinship and . . . and not trust, not exactly, but enough to make him think that Roger was looking out for him as much as his loyalty to Nikolai would allow. Mat found himself able to move again. He followed passively, stood silent and fidgeting when they came to a heavy steel hall door Roger had to unlock, and stepped into a new room when Roger gestured him inside.
Stopped dead as he took the room in. Bunk beds with football sheets. Posters everywhere—basketball players Mat didn’t recognize, some has-been hair band, even a couple of pinups of women in one-piece bathing suits with haircuts straight out of the seventies. It was like some fucking nightmare porno set out of “Daddy’s” childhood. Had he designed it himself, with care, or had Nikolai just scraped up whatever he could find in secondhand shops?
“Go on.” Mat startled at the voice behind him, but it was just Roger. “Go sit on the bed. Unzip your pants and take your cock out. Don’t get undressed. Don’t take the jacket off. Get hard.” He checked his watch. “You have about five minutes. Good luck.”
Mat sat numbly on the bottom bunk of the bed, wishing he could scratch out the eyes of the poster girl hung over it so she couldn’t watch.
That’s crazy. She’s just a poster. She probably has grandkids by now and a house in the suburbs. It’s the fucking cameras you should be worried about.
The door closed and locked. He was alone. He wanted to just curl up under the covers and sleep—strangely enough, felt quite sure he could, felt . . . not quite here somehow, like this was all too fucking nightmarishly surreal to accept—but he hadn’t forgotten Nikolai’s threats. Nikolai’s orders. His fingers shook as he unzipped his jeans. Pushed the jock strap aside. Pulled his flaccid cock through his fly. There was no fucking way he’d be able to work himself into an erection in five minutes or fifty minutes or five fucking hours surrounded by this creepy fucking sideways time capsule of a bedroom.
Well, if he was going back in time anyway . . . He spat into his palm, wrapped his hand around his shaft. Closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and pictured his high school boyfriend, the way