Chapter 1 Rule 1 Kneel
The first thing I know is that someone is dragging me.
Black grit scrapes under my cheek, sharp and endless. Hands are locked around my ankles, pulling. My head lolls, bounces once off something hard. The world is liquid dark and tilted all wrong.
Drugs. The thought surfaces through the syrup in my veins. Someone drugged me. The memory of the last conscious moment is a blank wall. A drink? A needle?
Fuck.
My body is a dead weight, and I can only barely lift my head. I see boots, black tactical ones, in sand so dark it drinks the moonlight. The tide hisses somewhere close, a wet, hungry sound. The air smells of salt and rotting seaweed and…chemical cherries? Or cough syrup.
The man dragging me grunts.
“Saved you for last,” he mutters, his voice gravel in the dark. “Heaviest bitch on the boat. Last on, last off.”
He drops my ankles, and my legs thump to the sand. The impact shudders up my spine.
I try to move my fingers. They twitch, but that’s all.
Boots step into my line of sight, and a man I’ve never seen before crouches next to my head.
His eyes reflect a fire I can just now smell. He wears black cargo pants and a black hoodie, the hood drawn up. Skull tattoos crawl from the open collar of his hoodie down his throat, a nest of them, grinning.
He watches me try to move. “I prefer you awake for this.”
Oh god. For what?
I can’t say anything because my tongue is thick and woolen. I can’t do anything because my body is still catching up. Panic is a silent scream trapped behind my ribs.
His hand goes to his belt.
I try to scream, but the muscles in my entire body rebel. This is happening. The fact hits me in the stomach, a cold, greasy lurch. My pulse is a hollow, sucking silence where my heartbeat should be.
He unbuckles his belt, the rasp of leather through loops loud. He doesn’t look away from my face as he pushes his pants down just enough. His cock is already hard, jutting out, thick and veined.
I can’t look away. My eyes are frozen open.
“This is punishment one,” he says. “For being the last girl off the boat.”
He takes himself in hand and starts stroking.
My body is a statue of cold sand and dread. I feel my own breath, shallow and quick in my throat. I feel the grains of sand under my fingernails where I’ve clenched my hands. I feel the weight of his stare like a physical pressure on my skin, pinning me.
This is a test. I don’t know the parameters, but I know it’s a test.
My hospice training kicks in, the deep, calm place where I sit with things that are happening that I can’t stop. Where you don’t feel, you observe. So I watch his grip, his rhythm, the way his breath changes on the upstroke. The way his knuckles whiten. He’s watching me watch him.
It doesn’t take long.
He shudders, a full-body tremor that ripples the skulls across his chest and makes them seem to snarl. His cum lands hot and wet across my neck, and the salty, musky smell of it fills my nose, thick and cloying.
He lets out a slow, ragged breath. Then he smiles, and it’s the most frightening thing I’ve seen yet.
His thumb swipes through the mess on my neck, brings it to my mouth, and presses against my closed lips. “Open.”
I don’t.
His other hand comes up, fingers tangling in my hair, yanking my head back. Pain sparks bright and sharp at my scalp. My jaw loosens, a stupid reflex. His thumb pushes past my lips and smears his cum across my tongue.
My stomach heaves, but I swallow against the bile. I don’t spit. I don’t make a sound. I stare up at him, and I let him see nothing. Just a flat, empty look I’ve perfected while watching people die.
He watches my throat work, then he growls low in his throat. “Good girl.”
He lets go of my hair, and my head falls back to the sand.
He stands, fastens his pants. The action is so casual, so utterly matter-of-fact after he came on my neck, that my mind stutters. It can’t process. This isn’t how people are.
He turns his back to me and looks out at the water, where a low, dark boat is already pulling away, its running lights off, leaving us here.
My body is starting to report in. A deep ache in my joints from whatever drug they used. A raw patch on my ankles from being dragged. And underneath it all, a cold, expanding terror. It starts in my gut and spreads out along my veins like frost, cracking everything open.
This is not a mistake. This is not a dream.
“That was collar lube. Now it’s collar time,” he says without turning around. “Up.”
Collar? What?
He turns and hauls me roughly to my feet by my elbow.
The night tilts, and all directions scatter.
He yanks me flush to the hard column of his body to keep me upright, my toes spinning in the sand, my arms flailing.
His chest is solid heat against my back.
I can smell his sweat, his cum, the smoke on his clothes.
“Rule one,” he says, his voice a low purr next to my ear that vibrates through my bones. “Kneel.”
He shoves me to my knees, and it’s then that I hear screaming in the distance, high-pitched and panicked, tearing through the hiss of the waves. I’m not alone here, but that doesn’t soothe me. It makes it worse. There are more of them. More of us.
The man pulls something off a table I didn’t notice before, set back in the shadows. A band of gray metal about two inches wide. It gleams dully in the low light like a dead thing.
He closes the metal band around my throat and clicks something at the back. A soft, digital chime—three rising tones—sounds from it. The band tightens, just enough that I can feel it. Not choking. Present, a constant, humming pressure against my windpipe.
He’s stands over me again, wiping his hands on his pants. “Up.”
I force myself to stand. The screams grow louder, more intense, weaving together into a chorus of raw fear. The collar sits against my clavicle, a strange, foreign weight. It doesn’t feel heavy. It feels like a sentence.
“Run,” he says, pointing inland, away from the water.
I shake my head because I can’t fathom what he’s saying.
Down the beach, maybe a hundred yards, torches burn. Behind it is a thick wall of jungle, flames licking at the black. Behind it is a thick wall of jungle, a solid mass of deeper darkness. Another scream tears through the night, high and ragged, and is cut short. The silence that follows is worse.
“Run, or I’ll demonstrate what that collar can do at level two,” he says.
I run because I don’t know what that means, and I don’t want to know.
My legs are clumsy, and the black sand sucks at my feet, trying to hold me back. I stumble, catch myself on one hand in the black sand. Boots crunch behind me, not chasing, just following, in a steady, relentless pace.
The torches are stuck in the sand around a rough wooden platform, and shapes move in the flickering light.
Maybe two dozen women are being herded toward it by two other men in black.
One is big, broad-shouldered, shoving a sobbing girl forward.
The other is leaner, standing back, watching with his arms crossed.
All of the women are collared like me. The firelight winks off the dull metal at their throats.
A sign is planted in the sand at the edge of the torchlight on a piece of charred driftwood. Words are burned into it, deep and black, and I slow my pace slightly to focus my eyes enough so I can read it.
WELCOME, ANCHOR.
Anchor. What does that mean?
The footsteps behind me draw closer, almost upon me, wordlessly shoving me forward.
My pulse is a frantic bird beating itself to death against the metal at my throat. I press my tongue to the back of my front teeth.
Don’t scream. Don’t cry. Watch. Learn.
The thought is a cold stone in my chest. The only thing I have.
I run faster.
Toward what, away from what, I have no idea.
Click here for Rule 1: Kneel!