“Ugh,” someone said, presumably at Mat.

Someone new.

No time to think about it, though: a gush of ice-cold water hit him in the head, knocking the breath and thought right out of him.

At least he wouldn’t smell like piss anymore.

“C’mon, get up,” the new man said, and then he stooped down, hooked something beneath the ties at Mat’s wrists, gave a tug, and cut them away. “Time to go. Bet you can’t wait to see the backside of this place.”

“Fuck you,” Mat groaned, but did manage to roll onto his newly freed hands and knees. The man offered him a hand, but he didn’t take it. He ended up having to crawl over to the doctor’s examination table and use it to help himself up, but at least he wasn’t voluntarily grasping at some asshole who was probably five minutes away from raping him.

Standing, now—well, leaning against the table for dear life—he was finally able to take the new man in.

Definitely not one of this place’s guards. He was handsome, but older, maybe in his mid-forties. Leaner than any of the guards. Had a soft, inscrutable expression, no real trace of cruelty in it. Dressed in a suit. The buyer? No, he was . . . he was wearing a collar, like Mat was. Except nicer. More refined. Not what you’d put on the vicious dog you kept to guard your junkyard, like Mat had been reduced to.

“Who are you?” Mat asked, hating the hope swelling in his chest that this man, whoever he was, would take him away from here.

“Your new best friend. Come.” He turned to go, clearly expecting Mat to follow without a fight.

Mat almost gave in that easy, but stopped himself just in time. They hadn’t broken him yet. He wouldn’t let them. “Where are you taking me?”

The man’s answering laugh took him completely by surprise. “I used to be like you, kid. Been a lot of years for me, but I know how one of those—” he waved at Mat’s ass, at the horrible expanding plug the guards had shoved back in him when they’d finished raping him the last time “—feels. And the other stuff they did to you here, too. I haven’t been given permission to take pity on your sorry ass, but right now I really am the closest thing to a friend that you’ve got.”

“If you were any kind of friend to me, you’d find my brother, and you’d let us both go.” But he was following. Just like he was expected to. God, walking hurt with that plug jacked so wide.

“I’m not that kind of friend, kid, and I don’t think you’ll ever find that kind of friend again, so I’d stop looking before it costs you your tongue. And I already found your brother, so if you want to see him again, you’ll come quietly.”

So he did.

Dougie’s hallucinations were getting worse. It didn’t help that he knew now how very real monsters were, that terrors did lurk in the dark, though so far they’d all come in human form. That skittering in the corner, that scritching near his ear . . . he tried to tell himself it was normal, a perfectly reasonable reaction to being alone in the cold silent dark for so long. He tried to tell himself they weren’t real.

It didn’t help.

He’d given up trying to stomp out the unseen skittering creatures. Given up trying to unfasten the gag or even trying to yell around it. Given up feeling along the walls for some kind of latch or handle or knob. He hadn’t eaten in days, if the stubble on his chin and cheeks was any reliable measure of time; he didn’t have the energy for trying to escape anymore.

Or the hope.

He knew he should have been happy. Nobody was hurting him here. He never woke up to a cock in his face or hands on his body, prying at his legs or pinching his nipples or squeezing his balls. He woke up to darkness. And silence. It was all he ever woke up to.

Darkness. Silence. Fear. Hunger. Thirst—he couldn’t drink from the toilet this time; it was chemical, no water. And, strangely, loneliness, as if any human company—even the beasts who raped him—was somehow better than this empty, black nothingness.

He missed Mat.

He was starting to feel a creeping, dreamlike sense that Mat wasn’t even real. All in his head, just like the creepy-crawlies ghosting over his skin. Just like the rest of the outside world. Strange, distant concepts like psych papers and journal reviews and contraband potato chips. And clothes, and happiness, and peace, and dignity.

What that left of him, he didn’t know. Was too afraid to think on it very hard. Easier just to close his eyes and be the nothingness they’d taken such care to shape him into. And maybe that was giving up, but right now it was the best he could do. He just had to hope Mat would forgive him for it.

The stranger led Mat to a parking garage, where a huge RV was waiting. Opened the door for him like a gentleman.

Mat climbed in, struggling but unwilling to ask for help, using the walls to propel himself up the stairs. The stranger followed, closing and locking the door behind him. Not a simple deadbolt. You needed a key even to open it from the inside. Mat stowed that information away as he took in the rest of his surroundings. A kitchen, a room in the back with a bed. A curtained area up front where the driver’s seat must be. A bathroom. A wall of cupboards. A little living room area. It looked like a place you could take a nice vacation in, except for the part where the bed was fitted with straps at each corner of the mattress, used to keep a person spread-eagled, and the windows looked thicker than the ones in airplanes. His eyes must have lingered too long on those, because a hand fell on his shoulder and squeezed.

“You can see out them, but people can’t see in. And they’re Plexiglas, not anything you can break. So don’t try it. Now go sit at the table.”

The kitchen had a little eat-in nook, a table set into a booth of seats.

“I’d rather stand,” Mat said, with a tone that suggested there was no fucking reason he should have to elaborate on why.

The guy cuffed him upside the head so hard he fell.

A moment later, there was the hand to help him back up again. Which he refused.

“I don’t care what you’d ‘rather’ do. If I tell you to sit, you fucking sit. If I tell you to put on a bra, you fucking do it. If I tell you to suck my dick, you suck it like a porn star. Just because I’m not a pig sadist like those assholes at Madame’s doesn’t mean I won’t hurt you when you deserve it. Unless sadism is the only language you understand?”

Mat thought about it for a moment. Thought about knocking the guy unconscious and taking the key. Running. Finding Dougie. Getting them both safe. Getting this fucking plug out of his ass.

But then the curtains parted and three heavies armed with Tasers filed into the living space, so broad shouldered they couldn’t stand side by side. He knew instantly how this would go: they’d hurt him, and then they’d make him sit anyway.

He was tired of hurting. He sat down.

And lurched right back up. The plug, oh God, he couldn’t, they weren’t really going to make him do this, were they?

“Points for trying, I suppose,” the man in charge said, and gestured with his chin at the heavies. One stayed back, Taser aimed at Mat’s chest. The other two stalked forward, grabbed him by the shoulders and arms, and pushed him back into the seat. He had just a moment to note that these heavies were significantly more skilled than the usual guards—they’d grabbed him effortlessly by pressure points—before the force of his weight and their strength drove the plug deeper inside him.

His hands flexed, his back arched, anything to reject the plug. His so-called friend walked out of his line of vision, apparently satisfied he’d sit still, and came back with . . . a plate of food. Which he calmly set on the table in front of Mat, as if he honestly believed Mat even could.

A plate of chicken cut into bite-sized pieces. Mashed sweet potatoes. Peas and carrots. Real fucking food. And a plastic spoon to eat it with.

“Eat,” his new friend said. “Or else I’ll bring you back in to see the good doctor, and he hooks you up with a feeding tube.”

“I can’t.” The plug. The plug. The plug.

“Yes, you fucking can. You can do anything with that plug in that you could do without it, except take a shit, I guess.” And then, to prove his point, he grabbed the spoon, shoveled up a pile of peas and sweet potatoes, and shoved it into Mat’s gaping mouth. Held Mat’s jaw shut until he swallowed, then swallowed once more against a surge of pain-induced nausea, trying to keep the food where it belonged. “Now eat.”

Hands shaking, Mat took the spoon for himself. Ate a bite. Did the sickly double swallow again.

“Listen. Your new owner wants you fit and well fed, and you’re gonna get there one way or another. I need to go now, because I’m the driver on this pleasure trip and we’re already behind schedule. So here’s how it’s gonna work. When you’re done with this plate, licked-fucking-clean done, these associates of mine are gonna let you sleep it off in the bed at the back. Until then, they’re gonna hold you sitting here with that plug so far up your ass I can see it in the backs of your eyeballs. Fight them, and they’ll crank it so wide your damn colon will leak out. You took—excuse me, your brother gave you—seventeen turns of the screw at the auction without any damage. You’re only on six turns now. They’ve got plenty of room to go. Your choice.”

Mat nodded, for the moment defeated. “Where is my brother?” he tried.

“Exactly where he needs to be.”

He left. The RV rumbled to life.

Mat ate.

Dougie’s ears perked in the vacuum of black, heart jumping in his throat. For a second, he thought he’d heard something. A door slamming closed from three blocks away. There, again—a faint, nearly sub-audible whisper of voices. A sigh on the wind. Or maybe just in his head. God knew he was losing his mind. By the time they came for him again—if they came for him again, if they hadn’t forgotten him, abandoned him, left him here to die—there’d be nothing left of his mind. Nothing left of the person he used to be. Which was most certainly the plan; he’d read all about the use of sensory deprivation as torture. About how it increased suggestibility. And if it came to that, would he be able to resist them, or would he give in to their control over him completely, a slave in the truest sense?

Another sound. And a vibration now, too. Definitely not imagining it—or at least, if he was, the delusion was thorough. The floor lurched beneath him. He banged into the padded wall, felt acceleration in his belly. Oh, right—RV. He’d forgotten. He was in an RV. They must be going somewhere, the faint deep buzz and vibration coming from the engine. To his new owner’s house? Was Mat here somewhere? Maybe in another cell like this one? Had he seen another door in the RV when they’d shoved him inside? He closed his eyes—not that it made a difference; it was pitch-black either way—and tried to remember. Couldn’t.

He reached down, stroking his own body, trying to connect with something, anything, to prove he was still physical, still alive, that he really did exist. Maybe I’m a ghost, he thought, despite evidence to the contrary: the feel of his own heaving chest under his palm. They killed me and I’m a ghost and this is limbo, and they sent me here for hurting my own brother.

As if on cue, he thought he heard Mat scream. Distant again, so distant it all had to be in his head. Just guilt, that’s all. Guilt and insanity. Mat wasn’t here. Wouldn’t want to see him again anyway. Not after what he’d done to him, how he’d hurt him. Raped him, tore him open, made him scream and beg and held him still to make him scream and beg some more.

He’d become no better than the guards who’d hurt them. The men who’d taken them. The woman who’d sold them.

The man who’d bought them. What kind of person bought someone else?

What kind of person allowed themselves to be sold?

Maybe Mat was free right now. Maybe Dougie didn’t deserve to be.