Marketplace (40 page)

* * * *

Just one day later,
Alexandra had Sharon show herself to a pair of men wearing
expensive European suits (one very light, the other dark) and
carrying small, exquisitely designed briefcases. The men were alike
enough to be brothers, spare and economical in movement and bearing
themselves as though they were diamond merchants looking at
decidedly inferior merchandise. Conferring with each other in fluid
Italian, they prodded her and issued curt commands in lightly
accented English.

“She does not look
healthy,” one commented to Alex. “Do you have her medical
files?”

“Of course.”

“Turn—no, slowly! Lift your
arm up, that’s it, higher, higher...” the other man stroked the
inside of her arm, and she giggled. He drew his hand away
immediately and slapped her, hard, across the breast. Sharon gasped
and yelped, and her arm came down. She ground her teeth together in
the incredible effort not to demand what the hell this guy was
doing! And he turned away from her with a look on his face that was
more eloquent than any verbal exchange.

The man in the dark suit
shook his head. “No, Alexandra, I don’t think so. She’s not even
ready to enter our training program. But we thank you for allowing
us to look at her first.”

“Your house is always
welcome to place advance bids here,” Alex said, rising. “When we
heard you were looking for her type...”

“Yes, and we appreciate it.
She would be adequate for our needs if she had better training. Not
to suggest that you have not done splendid work with her!” Light
suit hurried to correct himself. “But perhaps when she has
completed her training, we can come out and take another look at
her. Six more weeks? Eight, perhaps?”

“Maybe you have something
else to show us?” Dark suit suggested. “We have the new catalogs
from Los Angeles and Stockholm, and they are very disappointing.”
He opened his case and drew several bound documents out, placing
them on her desk. “I think the market will like to see some fresh
faces from New York this year.”

“Thanks,” Alex said,
flipping through one. “I’ll show you the others if you like, but
I‘m afraid I don’t have anything else like her right now. Why don’t
we meet with Grendel? He wanted to ask you about the possibility of
creating a kind of foreign exchange program designed to foster a
more marketable linguistic base for some specialty
merchandise.”

“Good idea! Excellent!”
Dark suit nodded, and they let Alex precede them. On the way out,
Alex gestured a dismissal to Sharon, who slumped into a pouting
position as soon as they left.

Are they staging all this
stuff for me, she asked herself. I mean, what is this shit! They
don’t like me because I’m, like, ticklish? I don’t believe it, I
mean, what am I supposed to do? She was going to leave, but then
the glossy covers of the catalogs caught her eye. She walked over
to the desk, and contrary to everything she had been warned not to
do, picked the top one up. As she flipped through the pages, her
eyes widened and she licked her lips.

They were catalogs of
slaves! One of them, with elegant gold-bordered pages, showed
photos and numbers only, but the photos were astounding. Each slave
was shown in several poses, full-frontal, kneeling with legs
spread, rear, and a head shot. They all wore chain collars around
their necks, with numbered tags. Many of them sported piercings
through nipples, labia, clit hood, and even through the head of a
cock or two. Some had tattoos. Since the photos were in color, she
could see that almost all of them had experienced recent
beatings.

They were male and female,
some terribly young, others well into middle age. They were white,
mostly, but an elegant Asian woman with sensual lips gazed out from
one page, and a muscular black man with a shaved head and several
rings along the bottom of his cock posed on another. There were at
least fifty people in the catalog, identified only by a
number.

Oh God, Sharon thought,
flipping through the book. Some of these guys are fucking gorgeous!
So hot! The men looked good enough to grovel to, their bodies hard
and sculpted, their poses placing them at angles to show off biceps
and asses, cocks and heavy balls. And some of the women made the
world’s top models look plastic and one dimensional. Not all of
them, Sharon noted with satisfaction. I’d be no dog in this group.
In fact, as she flipped back and forth, she noticed that mixed in
with the cuties were lots of perfectly ordinary-looking guys and
girls. But even their pictures showed a sense of erotic
estheticism, like even they were seen as objects of desire and
people to be possessed.

She looked in vain for
information about these people, their names and how old they were
and where they came from, but didn’t find any. The other catalog
was the same way, only there were more people of color in it, and
more exotic-looking slaves. There was nothing, only pictures and
numbers.

I could be in there, Sharon
mused. In a minute. I don’t know why they’re doing this to me, but
they’re not being fair.

By the time she left the
room, the two Italian agents had already met with Grendel and they
all shook hands on the start of a new program between their houses.
As a courtesy, Alex made them an offer, and to show her that they
didn’t mean any insult to her house, they asked for Sharon. She
sent Sharon to them in the largest guest room with her
compliments.

“She thinks she’s worth
something to us because she is a skinny American girl with big eyes
and a hunger for sex,” Dark Suit said, pinching her nipples
sharply. “She’s a fool.”

“There are a million girls
like her,” Light Suit added, pulling a pair of nipple clamps out of
the top drawer of the dresser. “And they are smarter, they know
more languages, and they know how to behave when they are being
examined. Or, they can be taught.”

Sharon winced and whimpered
as Dark Suit started to twist her nipples back and forth. Why were
they talking about her like she wasn’t there?

“She, on the other hand,
seems to have a talent for not learning,” Light Suit continued. He
passed the clamps to his companion, who attached them quickly,
making her cry out. “When we saw her photograph, we thought she
might be worthwhile. Now, we are sure that she is not. Which is a
shame for this house. Don’t you agree, Mauro?”

“Yes, of course,” Mauro
said, tugging on the chain. “But we will have success with them in
the winter. For now, let’s see if this girl has any potential at
all. There are places where the brains don’t matter.”

Sharon started to open her
mouth to say something, anything, but all that came out was a
little scream when Mauro dragged her down to her knees by the chain
that linked her nipples. Light Suit got behind her and pushed her
head down with his foot, pressing her face into Mauro’s narrow,
polished walking boot. “Lick!” he shouted down at her, the first
time she had been addressed. “Show us what a slave you
are!”

Quickly, she lapped her
tongue out, running across shiny, smooth leather while the man
behind her smashed his hand into her again and again, hitting her
thighs and the sides of her upturned ass, places where it hurt a
lot. Sharon moaned and cried out, and her mouth was pressed even
harder against the man’s boots.

“She’s useless!” The man
behind her said. He switched to a torrent of Italian, and while he
was speaking thrust two fingers into her, twisting that around as
if to determine her size and depth. He found her wet, despite her
obvious discomfort, and his announcement of that fact led to her
being pushed around until her lips were on his boots, so that Mauro
could explore her too.

“What a pity she’s such
a... difficult case,” Mauro said, wiping his fingers across her
back. He took his belt off and doubled it in one hand. “Let’s see
if she can run. Run, little doggy, around the room!” He swung the
belt fast and hard, and when it connected, she sprang forward,
practically into the other man’s legs. Sharon howled like a dog as
Mauro kept up a steady rhythm of heavy, biting smacks. She tried to
get up, and he beat her back down, and then she understood that he
wanted her to crawl around the room.

He chased her three times
around the room, until bruises began to show faintly on the backs
of her thighs. His companion cheered them on lustily, and when they
got back to him for the third time, he thrust his hard cock
directly into her gasping mouth, before she had one chance to gasp
for air. Laughing, he clamped his hands onto her head and held her
to him, cutting off her air until her struggles became frantic, and
then he pushed her away. With one quick move, he caught her
shoulder and arm and spun her around so that Mauro could spear her
mouth for a while.

Between the two of them,
she never caught a full breath. The only time they let her breathe
was when they were turning her back and forth, from one to the
other. Sharon became dizzy, and started to cry, and one of them,
she wasn’t sure who, slapped her, hard, across the face. They began
to speak exclusively in Italian to each other, and they laughed
when she stumbled or choked. They just cuffed her when she
gagged.

When it seemed that they
had enough of that, the one in the light suit took a turn chasing
her around the room, using a heavy wooden paddle to encourage her.
Then, he tossed things across the room, and made her fetch them in
her teeth. The first was a thick, heavy dildo. When she brought it
back, he shoved it deeply into her, and warned her to keep it in
while she went after things like another pair of nipple clamps,
(which he put on her, replacing the first pair), a pair of
handcuffs (which went on, locking her hands behind her) and
finally, a strip of condoms.

They used her in tandem,
Mauro in her mouth and the other up her tight ass. She screamed
against the cock in her mouth, the pressure from the dildo and the
anal intrusion almost too much for her to take. Light Suit, whose
presence in her asshole was so terrible and so good, reached under
her and began to play with the dildo, pulling it out when he was
in, pushing it in when he pulled out, and when Mauro picked up the
chain attached to her nipple clamps and tugged on it to bring her
mouth up against his pubic bone, she screamed again, a sound well
muffled and barely paid attention to.

They switched places after
a while.

And then again.

They never spoke to her,
other then to yell a command to change positions. And every time
she seemed to come close to actually enjoying what they were doing,
they stopped, and brought out more items of torture to play with.
They both beat her with riding crops, making her race from one side
of the room to the other. They clamped the lips of her cunt and
beat the clamps off, and then made her clean them off in her mouth.
They put the clamps on her tongue for a while, fucking her mouth
with the handles of their crops, before they put her back on her
chest and knees to take turns in whatever hole suited
them.

Sharon didn’t know who was
fucking her any more. They had blindfolded her, and now, she was
positive that they were both in her at once, one up her cunt and
the other in her ass. A thick gag with a mouthpiece shaped like a
cock head spread her jaws open. The sounds she made might have been
pleas, or they might have been sounds of pain or joy. When the two
men finally finished with her, she wasn’t sure what she was hearing
or saying. She only knew that she would do anything to make them
stop. When the gag came out, she eagerly kissed whatever was
offered to her, an ass, a foot a cock, a hand, the dildo,
anything...

“Shall we visit Anderson
and see what she has this year?” Mauro said in English as they
dressed. Sharon lay between them, her hands still behind her back,
the blindfold still on, the dildo sticking half out of her ass.
Assorted nipple clamps and paddles and riding crops lay scattered
on the floor beside her.

“We can give her a call
from here and see if she’s receiving,” the other man said. “I would
hate to just, as they say, barge in on her.”

“Good. Let’s go see
Alexandra again, and then we’ll get on our way.”

Sharon panted and sobbed,
and her voice broke as she shifted around, trying to get into a
position where the pain wasn’t so bad. Her cries faded into
hiccoughs, and she kicked weakly, unable to summon the energy to
get up on her knees. She didn’t know how long she lay there until
someone touched her. She jerked her whole body, tensing.

“Shh. Be still,” Chris
said, unlocking the cuffs. “It’s me.” He removed them carefully,
and massaged her wrists for a moment before removing the dildo from
her, and then the blindfold.

“Oh, God,” she sobbed,
bringing her hands around to shield her eyes. “Oh, God, that was
fucked up.”

“Remember your language,”
Chris warned. He lifted her up so she was sitting on the floor,
weakly resting on one arm, her legs curled up underneath her. She
shook and looked up at him. He gestured toward the scattered toys.
“Clean these things up and bring them downstairs. You can give them
to Claudia to put away, after you’ve washed the appropriate
items.”

Sharon gazed at him in
amazement. He didn’t have the least sympathy for her condition.
“You... please, Chris,” she choked, swallowing bile. “Can’t you
see? I’m... I think I’m hurt. I can’t do anything now! How could
you... do you know what they
did?
”