PART TWO: THE BREAKING

Marek pulls the thong down to her knees in one movement, and it's the hands that do it, not the removal — both palms flat on her ass first, on the black lace of the garter belt's back straps, then sliding down over the bare skin below it, and only then the thumb hooked in and the drag. The thong comes down over her thighs, catches on the front garter straps, and Marek just pulls it through them and leaves it bunched behind her knees.

Elen makes a sound. Not a word. A small, high, tight oh — and there is no laugh anywhere in it, and that's the change, that's the thing you notice first, because twenty minutes ago in this room she was a woman having a nice evening and now there are two men behind her with their hands on her, and her underwear is around her knees, and nobody has explained anything.

She tugs at the cuffs. Eight inches. She has done that five times now and it has been eight inches every time, and each time she has believed it a little less.

In the dark, on the bench behind you, somebody shifts their weight and the leather creaks.

───

"Okay," she says. "Okay, so —"

Marek puts his hand between her legs from behind, flat, cupping her, and she stops talking.

She's face down with her hips on the table and her knees slightly apart and there is nowhere for her to go, and that's the thing she hasn't understood yet, that's what the cuffs mean: when Marek's fingers move — slow, blunt, dragging back through her from behind with no warning and no preamble — she has nothing to brace with. No hands. No leverage. She can only lie there and be touched.

Her back arches. Her toes curl against the table. The seams of the stockings pull taut down the backs of her legs.

And she's frightened. That's what the arch is. She's not aroused yet, not really — she's a woman being handled by strangers in a bright room with her wrists locked, and her breath has gone short and fast, and every time Marek's fingers slide back through her she makes a small nervous hah, like she's been surprised again, and she keeps turning her head to look at the door and then at the mirror and then at her own cuffed wrists.

Marek does her tits next, from underneath, both hands slid under her chest where she's lying on the table, cupping them, lifting them, thumbs rolling the nipples while she's pressed down onto them.

And they're not small. That's the thing about the bra, that's what she's spent the evening being wrong about: the cups gape because they're cut for a shape she isn't, not because there's nothing there. What's there is a full, heavy handful each — high, round, with real weight to them — and when Marek lifts them off the table and lets them drop back they drop, they've got a proper fall to them, and he takes two full minutes with them and never once speeds up, and by the end of it Elen has stopped looking at the door.

"Mmm," she says. "Okay. Okay, this is —"

She doesn't finish. Marek has stopped cupping her from behind and started working two fingers into her, and she's face down with her ass slightly up and there's nowhere for the sound to go, so she makes it into the towel under her face.

Behind you, quietly, the man at the back door says: "Eight minutes. She's fast."

───

She finds her voice again around the nine-minute mark, and this is where the shape of the thing changes.

"Wait," she says. "Wait, wait — hang on, what are the cuffs for?"

Nobody answers her. She lifts her head and looks round — at Marek's hands, at the mirror, at nothing.

"Hello? What are the —"

Anton brings his flat hand down on her ass. It is not a massage slap, it's a slap, it's the sound of a door closing in a quiet house, and the whole of the left cheek goes from pale to pink in half a second.

Elen says "ow."

Anton slaps the right cheek. Harder.

"Ow — okay —"

Anton slaps the left again, same place, and this one lands on the pink and turns it red.

She's got her head up now, twisting back over her shoulder to look at him, bangs coming unstuck from her forehead. "What was that for?"

Anton says: "For asking," and hits her again, backs of the fingers this time, on the side of the hip where the garter strap sits, and the strap jumps and settles.

And Elen — you watch this happen — Elen stops looking confused and starts looking worried. Because up to now everything has been a hand and now something has been a decision. Somebody in this room is deciding things about her.

The man behind you, bored: "Two minutes in and she's talking back."

───

Marek takes her ankles and Anton takes her shoulders and they roll her on the table, a half-turn, all the way over onto her back, and her cuffed wrists swing up over her head and past the end of the table and end up stretched out above her, chains taut, arms straight, shoulders pulled long.

And now you see her front for the first time since the robe came off.

The bra has shifted. The small cups have been pushed up and the band dragged down, and one of her tits has come entirely out of the cup — full, pale, high, the nipple hard and the whole weight of it resting on the edge of the lace — and the other is still half caught, and she looks down at herself and back up at the mirror, and there is one clean moment where she sees exactly what the audience sees: a woman in a black garter belt with her underwear round her knees and one tit out, chained by both wrists, on a table in a white room.

And she says, "You could have told me," with a wobble in it, and she's looking straight at the mirror when she says it.

At you. At a wall. At a wall three feet from your face.

You do not answer. You have not been told not to move yet, but you do not move.

Then Anton slaps her across the face and she stops laughing.

It's a light one, as these go. Open hand, cheek only. But it's on her face, and she's not expecting it on her face, and her head turns a few degrees and she blinks twice and her mouth is still open.

**Inside her, for two seconds:**he hit me. On the face. Nobody has ever hit me on the face. My mother hit me when I was a child. And it didn't hurt, it didn't hurt at all, it was just — loud, and fast, and now the whole left side of my face is warm and everyone can see it and I don't know when the next one is coming.

"Say it," says Anton.

"Say what?"

Anton slaps her again, same cheek, same place, and this one has a little weight in it. "You hit me again."

"I did."

"Why?"

He hits her a third time, exactly the same spot, and now there's a bloom coming up on her cheek.

"Why," she says, and it's not a question this time, and her eyes are wet at the corners.

Anton says: "Because you ask questions instead of doing what you're told. And because I like watching your tits move when I do it."

Elen says "oh," quietly, and looks up at the mirror, and — you will swear to this for the rest of your life — she looks pleased.

───

Bo comes in at the twelve-minute mark and Bo is the one who changes everything.

He's younger than the other two, maybe twenty-six, thin, in shorts and nothing else, black, and he comes in through the door carrying a small black rectangle with a rubber grip on the end. He doesn't introduce himself. Elen sees him out of the corner of her eye and turns her head and says, "What's th—"

CRACK.

The stun gun goes off against the outside of her thigh and the sound is not what she expects, it's a hard flat crack, and Elen's leg jumps off the table a full three inches and her whole body goes rigid for a second and then she screams.

It is a real scream. It's the first real scream of the night. It comes up out of her from somewhere under the ribs and it doesn't sound like pain, exactly, it sounds like terror — like a woman woken up by something in the house.

And she is screaming into a room with four downlights and one wall of mirror, and on the other side of that wall eleven men lean back in unison.

Crack. Other thigh.

She shrieks. The whole leg jumps. She pulls on the cuffs and gets eight inches of slack and drops back onto the table. She is laughing and crying at the same time, "what is that, what IS that —"

Crack. Right on the meat of her ass, on top of the red handprints, and this one takes her breath and she makes no sound at all for two seconds, and then all of it comes out at once in a long ragged wail.

**Inside her, for two seconds:**it doesn't hurt like the slaps hurt. it's inside. it's in the muscle. it's like being grabbed from the inside by something with no hands. My whole leg is buzzing and there's a smell, there's a smell, like the air after a hairdryer, and my heart is going so fast and there is absolutely nowhere on this table to get away to.

And then — this is the part that gets you — Bo puts the stun gun down on the little bench and walks away, and the three of them just stand there for a full minute letting it wear off, and Elen lies on the table with her leg twitching and her chest heaving and her mascara starting to run, and nobody touches her, and it is worse than if they had.

Behind you the man at the back door says: "Give her ninety seconds. She'll ask for the next one."

She doesn't ask. She lies there and cries quietly and looks at the mirror, at herself, at the ruined eye makeup, and you watch her decide that she is going to lie there and take whatever happens next, and you watch the exact moment the decision lands, because her shoulders come down, and she stops pulling on the cuffs.

───

Anton unzips.

That's all the announcement there is. He takes her by the hair — the short dark red hair, wet now at the roots, bangs stuck flat to her forehead — and pulls her head off the end of the table and tilts it back, and then he puts his cock against her mouth, and Elen's eyes go wide and she lifts her chin to look at it and says, "oh," in a completely different voice to the way she has said it before.

She has never had anything that size in her mouth. Not close. You know this because you know what she has had in her mouth, and it has been you, and you are not this.

And she's scared of it — she's lying there with her head hanging off a table and a black man's cock the size of her wrist an inch from her lips and she's doing the arithmetic — and she says, "It won't —" and Anton pushes in.

Her jaw unhinges like a snake's. The corners of her mouth go white. The head of him goes in and stops at the ridge and then goes further and she makes a choked nnngh around him and her throat works and her eyes water and two clean black lines start down from the outer corners of each eye.

He pulls out. She gets one breath.

He goes back in, deeper, and doesn't stop, and doesn't wait, and now he's fucking her mouth in earnest, and she has her hands cuffed above her head and her head hanging off the end of the table and there is nothing she can do but take it and breathe when he lets her.

She gags. He waits a beat and pushes through it. She gags again. Spit is coming down the corner of her mouth and over her chin and onto her own throat and she can feel it and it's humiliating and she has never been so aware of her own mouth in her life.

The mascara tears start properly. Not lines now. Strings. Two of them, one from each eye, black and wet, tracking down through the blush and past the corner of her jaw and into her hair. Her lipstick is already gone sideways, one half of her mouth smeared bright red, the other half wiped clean by the shaft.

This is the part that will be in the photographs, you think. If they take photographs. This is the face she will have.

Then Anton pulls out and she gasps a lungful, and Marek steps round the table and puts his hand between her legs and finds that she is completely, absolutely, ruinously wet.

He holds his fingers up where she can see them. They're shining.

And Elen looks at the mirror — at herself, at her own ruined face — and says, "I know," and something in her voice is genuinely upset about it, and behind you, in the dark, four or five men laugh at the same time.

───

Anton unclips her from the ceiling. Marek takes her by the upper arm, puts her on the floor, on the tile, on her knees and then onto her front, and cuffs her wrists behind her back. Behind, not above. Palms together in the small of her back, elbows out, chest and cheek flat on the cold tile, ass up.

The thong is still round her knees. Nobody has taken it off, and nobody ever intended to, and Elen has to lie on the floor with her underwear round her knees like a girl who's been interrupted.

Then Marek puts his foot on the side of her face.

Not a stamp. Just the sole of his foot, flat, on her cheek and jaw, on the tile, so that her head is pinned down on one side and she's looking sideways along the floor, and she can't lift her head, and she can barely turn it, and she has to just lie there while Anton kneels down behind her, takes himself in his hand, and lines up.

Elen says, "It won't —" and then stops, because she doesn't know how to finish the sentence.

Anton says, "It will," and pushes in.

It doesn't, not at first. Her whole body goes rigid and her eyes go huge and she tries to push back and can't, because her hands are behind her back and there's a foot on her face, and she makes a sound into the tile that isn't a word, and Anton stays exactly where he is, one ridge of himself inside her, and just waits.

Marek presses down a little with his foot.

And Elen — you watch it happen through three feet of glass — Elen gives up. Her shoulders drop. Her whole body goes soft and open like a door. And Anton slides in to the hilt in one long stroke, and she screams into the floor.

The scream goes on longer than you expect.

Her back is a long pale arc with a black satin garter belt cinched around the middle of it and four straps down the backs of her thighs and stockings and the seam running up the back of each leg, and every one of those seams is now moving. Every thrust, the seams jump and settle, jump and settle. Her whole body is being used to move a man's cock, and the way she's built — the small waist, the high round ass — means she has no slack anywhere, and each withdrawal drags her back an inch and each thrust shoves her forward an inch and the whole length of her moves like something with his cock glued inside it.

He goes deeper. She screams louder. He goes deeper. Her scream changes pitch.

And she's crying. Fully crying now, the black strings running sideways across her cheek and onto the tile, her bangs plastered to her forehead, her hair wet at the roots from sweat and tears and spit, and she has never in her life been this much of a mess, and —

— and she's wetter than she has ever been. You can hear it. You can hear it over the slaps and the tile and the low talking of the men behind you, a wet dragging sound every time he pulls out, and Marek takes his foot off her face for a second and lifts his own fingers and shows them to the glass, to nobody, to the room, and they're glistening to the wrist.

Behind you, quietly, someone says: "She's a crier."

Someone else, further along the bench: "Best kind."

───

And then Bo crouches down behind her with the plug.

It's on a short stem, black rubber, with a squeeze bulb on the end of a tube — small, about the size of two fingers — and Bo wets it in his mouth first, and then puts two fingers into her ass to open her up, and Elen makes a sound like a question with her cheek on the tile.

Bo works the plug in.

It goes easily enough at first, and then it doesn't, and Elen's whole back arches and she says "oh — oh" in a rising voice and tries to close her legs, and Anton keeps them open with his own from behind, and Marek puts his foot back on her face.

"Breathe out," says Anton, from somewhere behind her.

She breathes out. Bo pushes. The widest part of the plug goes past and the whole thing slides in and settles, and Elen lies on the tile with her ass full of rubber and a cock still working in her pussy, and starts to cry properly, in earnest, the way you cry when something has happened that you didn't agree to.

And then Bo squeezes the bulb.

Once. Twice. Three times.

And inside her, something expands.

**Inside her, for two seconds:**it's growing. It's growing inside me and there's nowhere for it to go. It's pressing on everything, on the front, on the — and he's still moving, he's still moving, and the two of them are doing it at the same time and there is more of me full than there has ever been and my hands are behind my back and my face is on the floor and —

She makes a noise that isn't a scream. It's lower than that. It's the noise a woman makes when she has been filled past the point where she can argue.

Bo pumps it twice more, ties off the tube, and leaves it.

Then he takes hold of the base of it and works it — in, out, a half-inch at a time, twisting — while Anton fucks her pussy, so that the two of them are moving inside her at cross purposes, and Elen lies on the tile and stops making words at all and just makes one long continuous sound with her mouth open and her cheek squashed under Marek's boot.

Anton comes back to her hair. He gets a fistful and pulls her head up off the tile, so her throat is stretched and her face is toward the glass, and she has to look at herself while it happens.

"Look at it," he says. "Look at your own face."

And she does. And her own face is a ruin: mascara to the jaw, lipstick sideways, a red handprint coming up on the cheek, eyes streaming, mouth open, and the expression on it is the one that will haunt you — because it isn't pain and it isn't pleasure, it's concentration. She is concentrating on staying a person.

Anton hauls her up onto her knees by the hair.

Her hands are still cuffed behind her back so she can't balance, and she ends up arched backwards with her throat stretched and her tits pushed up and her knees splayed on the tile, and the thong finally slides off one leg and hangs from the other ankle, and the plug is still in her, and she's crying openly.

Anton, behind her, holding her head back by the hair, leans down to her ear and says:

"Say how much you love our cocks."

Elen, breathless, arched, black tears running into her hair: "I —"

He slaps her across the face, open hand, from behind, and the handprint blooms on her right cheek, right where the audience can see it through the glass.

"You didn't say it."

"I love —"

He slaps her again, same cheek, harder, and this one lifts her whole head and the handprint goes from pink to red and starts to have an edge to it, fingers and palm and the gap where the thumb was.

"I love your cocks," she says, fast, and her voice breaks in the middle of it.

He hits her a third time. Left cheek this time, so now she's got one of each, and the right one is coming up on the outside of the jaw where the molars are, and Elen is sobbing openly, and Anton says, "Good girl," and pushes her head back down.

And Elen, on her knees on the tile, cuffed, marked, hair wet, mascara down to her neck, lipstick gone sideways into her chin, says — you hear it, you will always hear it, it's small and furious and private and it wasn't meant for anyone:

"Good girl."

Like she's testing the words. Like she's checking whether they're true.

───

Bo steps round in front of her with the bag.

It's just a plastic bag. A clear one, thin, the kind a newspaper comes in, and he shakes it open and drops it over Elen's head from the front and gathers it around her throat and holds it there with one hand, crouching, so he's beside her and not behind her and he isn't in Anton's way.

She's on her knees, hands cuffed behind her back, so she can't reach up. She has no hands. She has a bag on her head and no hands and a plug in her ass and a red print on each cheek.

And this time she knows what it is — she saw it once already — and she says, "no," quietly, once, and it isn't a protest, it's a note. Like she's writing it down.

Anton, behind her, spreads her knees with his own and pushes back into her pussy.

And that is when Elen finds out what the bag is for.

Because she can't gasp. Every thrust punches the air out of her and there's nowhere for the air to go but the bag, and the bag sucks flat against her open mouth on every exhale and holds there, and she has to drag it back in through her nose in a thin fast hiss while he's still moving inside her, and she is screaming — genuinely screaming, on every thrust, with her mouth open — and she is screaming her own air, and the plastic fogs in a soft patch in front of her face.

Not white. Not a whiteout. That's the thing — it never gets so bad that you can't see her. It stays just clear enough that you can watch the whole face behind it: the wide eyes, the two black strings, the mouth working, and the exact second her brain catches up to her body and decides it is running out.

And then she starts to fight.

Not the way she fought before. Before she pulled on things. Now there's nothing to pull on, so it all comes out sideways — she twists, she bucks, she grinds her whole body against Anton's grip, her cuffed hands open and close in the small of her back, her knees try to snap shut and Anton holds them open, her feet scrabble on the tile, and she makes a whole language of noises into the plastic, hhh hhh hhh, fast and high, and every third one is a little nnn like she's asking.

Anton keeps fucking her.

Forty seconds. Her eyes are open and looking for something and there is nothing to look at but her own reflection, fogged at the mouth, three feet away.

Fifty. She stops fighting the grip and starts fighting the bag — shaking her head, trying to shake it off, and it won't come off, because Bo's hand is at her throat.

Sixty. She goes quiet, which is worse. The hhh hhh hhh thins out to almost nothing and she is just dragging on the plastic, and the fog patch has gone from soft to wet, and there is spit on the inside of the bag where her mouth is.

Seventy.

And Bo takes his hand off her throat.

The bag stays on her head by suction for half a second and then he rips it off, front and up, and her hair comes with it and stands in wet spikes, and Elen folds forward and inhales for four full seconds — one enormous, ragged, dragging breath — and then screams. Not in pain. Just because.

And then, immediately — while she's still got her mouth open, while she's still pulling air in — Bo puts it back on.

"nnn—" she says, and it's the shortest, saddest little sound, and behind you four men laugh, and this time she only gets thirty-five seconds and she knows it and she uses them, and you can watch her use them, you can watch her take two big deliberate breaths through her nose and hold them, and it's the first clever thing she has done all night, and it does not help.

At twenty she's squirming again. At thirty she's squirming hard, twisting left and right, and Anton is fucking her faster now, short and hard, and the two things are arriving at the same place at the same time, and Elen's eyes go glassy and unfocused and she stops fighting and leans into it — she leans back into Anton, she opens her knees herself, she lets her head drop back, and she makes a long grinding sound into the bag.

Bo counts it out loud. "Five. Four. Three —"

At two he takes it off.

And this time she doesn't scream. She just sags, and hangs there with her mouth open and her eyes half-closed and her whole body buzzing, and Anton says, "Look at her. She likes it."

And Elen, hanging from Anton's hands on her hips, cuffed, plugged, wrecked, bagged twice, says — thickly, honestly, like a confession:

"Again."

Behind you, someone along the bench says it very quietly, and it isn't the man at the door this time, it's just a man:

"Oh."

───

They walk her to the glass.

Marek does it — takes her under the arm, brings her the three steps, and Anton follows with his hands on her hips, still inside her, so that she has to waddle the three steps impaled on him with a plug in her ass, and by the time she reaches the wall she is laughing and crying at the same time and there's a wet print of her mouth on the glass before anyone has even done anything.

Marek turns her head so her cheek and her mouth are flat on the glass. Anton pins her there with his body and his hands on her hips and drives back in.

And Elen's face is on the glass. Three feet from yours. You can see the skin of her cheek flattening, and the smear her lipstick makes as he moves her, and the wet of her breath fogging a small circle right where her mouth is.

She can see herself. Her eyes are open and she's looking at her own eyes, and there is a wet print of her open mouth on the wall in front of her, and her tits are against the glass, flattened, the full weight of them squashed out sideways in two pale ovals, and each time he pulls back they come away a little and each time he thrusts they press back, and the whole wall of glass moves, it actually moves in its frame, there's a quarter-inch of shake in it, and every thrust makes a soft flat thud that the eleven men on the other side can feel in their knees.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Her tits flatten. Her tits come back. Her tits flatten.

Her cheek slides an inch down the glass and she pulls it back up and it slides again, and her breath fog is spreading, and there's a long black streak of mascara and a bright red print of her mouth and a wet smear of her nose, and her whole face is being pressed into the wall in front of her own eyes, and she can see it happening, and she cannot see who it is happening to her.

Then Bo crouches beside her and puts the stun gun against the side of her ribs.

Crack.

Elen's whole body slams into the glass and the wall shakes and she screams with her mouth open against it and leaves a ring of red, and her eyes are streaming, and she is so far past knowing which one is which — past the slaps, past the cuffs, past the sting, past the bag, past the size of it — that she doesn't scream in pain anymore, she just screams because the scream is the only way she has left of being a person, and every thrust is a scream and every scream is a thrust and there has been no difference between them for ten minutes.

Crack.

She shrieks and comes away from the glass and Marek drags her back.

Crack.

She screams into her own reflection.

───

And then they chain her to the ceiling.

Anton pulls out. Marek takes her wrists and lifts them behind her back — up, off her spine, up — and clips the cuffs to the ceiling chain, and takes up the slack until her arms are straight up behind her and her chest is pulled forward and her tits are pressed into the glass, and then he takes another half-turn of slack and her heels come off the floor.

And she's hanging. Face and chest flat on the glass, toes pointed, arms up behind her, plug still in, and from the other side of the wall she is a pale upside-down question mark pinned to the window.

And Bo picks up the flogger.

Short leather one, maybe eighteen tails, and he doesn't announce it, he just steps up beside her and lays the first one across the backs of her thighs.

It's not a hard one. It's a warm one — a broad soft smack of leather that covers both legs at once, and Elen gasps and her whole body jumps and the glass takes her weight and holds her.

Second one. Higher. Across the ass.

Third one. Across the backs of the thighs again, harder, and this is the one where it stops being a game, because the leather has edges now, and Elen makes a noise and tries to step forward and can't, because her toes are off the floor and there's a wall in front of her.

That's the trick of it. She can't get away from the flogger in any direction. Forward is glass. Up is chain. Back is the flogger.

Bo works her for two minutes. Slow, even, methodical — thighs, ass, thighs, the top of the ass where the garter belt sits, the little strip of skin between the belt and the stockings — and Elen hangs on the glass and takes it, and by the end her whole lower half is one long bloom of pink, and there are individual tails printed on her in thin red lines, and she is crying in a completely different way now — steady, almost peaceful, like it's a job.

And her tits are against the glass the entire time. Every stroke, her whole body presses forward and the two full weights of them squash flat against the window and then come back, and you watch it, and the eleven men behind you watch it, and the glass has two wet ovals on it at the height of her chest and a fog patch at the height of her mouth and a red smear at the height of her cheek, and Elen looks at all of it, at her own face on the wall, and understands something.

Behind you, the man at the back door, in the voice of a man closing a book:

"Ten seconds."

Bo lays the last one across the top of both thighs, and Elen's whole body goes up on the glass, and she says a word, and it isn't a word you've heard her say.

And then Marek reaches down and takes hold of the plug and pulls it out in one slow twist, and her whole body shudders on the chain, and she is left hanging on the glass, empty, open, pinked, wet to the knees, with her mouth open on the window and her eyes shut.

And behind you, in the dark, along the bench, eleven men are sitting with their hands in their laps and their cocks out, and one of them says the thing that breaks you open:

"That's his wife."

Someone else: "Where?"

"In the chair."

A pause. Someone laughs softly, not unkindly.

"Lucky bastard."

END OF PART TWO.