Sold to Master Jay

I curled up in the corner I had deemed the warmest in my cell, with nothing more than a thin slice of fabric around my waist and breasts. Some of the more obedient girls got cells with comforters and pretty collars, but I was nothing but an annoyance to the trainers here.

I was twenty now, a "Sellable."

They had been running this operation for years, much longer than I'd been here. The men kidnapped girls of their picking, trained them to be perfect slaves, and put them on the market as 'certified' slaves, who they sold to men they deemed appropriate to take us and use us as they saw fit.

The man who ran this hellhole was a sadist and delighted nothing more in breaking the stubbornest of the girls and selling them to men he found appropriate. He had no shortage of customers: every man buying wanted one of us, and every man not buying wished he was.

My chapped lips grew into a small smile. The man who ran this had never broken me, though. My slave name was Cataegis, which meant storm or gale or something of the like in Latin. I didn't remember the name I had before this, but I had rather liked the name they gave me.

It meant I was still free in all the places in my mind it truly mattered. And somehow, it had raised my price value to be worth almost as much as the pretty perfects who sat on the pillows on the farthest end of our cell corridor like dogs. The man called it 'Ferocity Value.' On my price tag, hanging off my cell door, it proclaimed I 'had all the skills to be a perfect submissive, but only submitted to the fiercest of men.' I had snorted and tore it off, then ate it.

The next day, I had been chained to the corner of my cell, got my clothes taken away, and had a new price tag hung up on the cell. I couldn't read what it said this time, though.

I had been so lost in my thoughts that, when I heard the seller bell go off from the door at the far side of the cell block, I jumped. Then, I shook myself and curled back into the corner.

We were supposed to be alert and vigilant at this time, but I was at the top of the ferocity value and very few wanted to come even near the end of the row, much less to the very last cell. The seller bell rang twice more, indicating two more prospective men had entered. This time, I did haul myself up and walked across the cell to peek through the bars, straining to see the corridor. There were about thirty girls in this cell block, and thirty in another. We were the top fifty percent and cost more, for whatever reason we had been deemed expensive. I could see the sparkling clean cells at the end of the hall and the three men who moved back and forth across the hallway, inspecting the women like we were nothing but property.

They were too far away for me to see them clearly, but they were all tall, well-muscled, and each had the walk of a person comfortably situated in life. Their voices drift down the hallway. One man pauses halfway down and inspects a girl in a cell closer. I go back to my corner. They wouldn't come this far down. Men like this wanted pretty slaves who sat on cushions and sucked cock eagerly, said their pleases and thank yous, and took every punishment to heart.

Another ten minutes passed, but no slave bell rung to indicate a choice had been made. I sighed through my nose and rested my forehead on my knees. The pale lines on my back ached a little as I did so and my ribs pressed into the skin on my back. Some men took so long to decide which one they wanted better. "Would they rather have the one who sits pretty or the one who stands pretty," I muttered to myself and smirked. Ridiculous, the lot of them.

I dozed and then jolted awake a few minutes later as a bell rings. Every slave had a distinctive sold sound. Based on the light, pleasant tone, girl number six had been chosen. A redhead, I remember. Ashley. Not as expensive as number one, of course, but she'd please whoever had chosen her well. Annoyed that I had been awoken, I rest my head back on my knees and have barely closed my eyes when I hear footsteps coming this way.

I sigh. Of course, the men wanted to check out the curiosity in the coldest darkest cell in the block. But it was only one set. I shook my light brown hair in front of my face and peeked through the curtain to look at the cell door. With any hope, he wouldn't know I was watching him, evaluating him. He came into view and my heart gave a little skip against my will.

I squashed that instinctive reflex at seeing someone attractive and continued to stare at him. He was black-haired and blue-eyed, taller than the others perhaps, dressed in a simple grey t-shirt that complimented his eyes, and jeans that looked like he'd never put them to good use. His muscles were clearly defined even under his clothes. He seemed calm, mild-mannered, a little bored compared to some of the over-excited men that came to buy.

He had his hands shoved into his pocket, an expensive watch glinting at his wrist. He walked to my price tag, completely ignoring me. It irked me a little. Most of the men gawked at me, not even wanting to look at the tag. I'd rather be stared at than evaluated like an object. He didn't speak to me simply summoned the man who ran this place, the Grandmaster, with a casual wave of his hand. He was the kind of man used to be obeyed.

I smirked behind my curtain of hair. He'd have a hard time with me, if that was the case.

"Aren't ferocious girls usually less expensive?" he asked. I ground my teeth. I worth double whatever was on that tag, for just resisting the brainwashing, if not because I was a human and not an object. The Grandmaster, the sadist, was a pale-haired man with a neat-cut goatee and a dangerous way of walking.

"Usually," the man said, also ignoring me. "But she's so resistant she's more expensive."

"So you're trying to charge double the price of the lower thirty to make up for your failure to train her properly?" the reprimanding tone was enough to make the Grandmaster flush a dark red. He stuttered and the buyer put a hand up and finally looked at me. "She's scarred too, and underfed. Her hair looks like it hasn't been washed in weeks. Half of her price is going to go just to making her look presentable again."

The Grandmaster stammered some sort of excuse and the buyer turned cold blue eyes on him. Whatever words the seller had died in his throat. The man turned his eyes back to me. "Half the price."

"I can't..." the Grandmaster stammered. I had never seen him so unsettled. He tapped a foot. "She begged once. She has the potential to be a submissive for a strong enough man." The way he said it was almost accusingly. "That's why she's priced so high. The potential."

"I could grab any woman off the street and she'd have the same potential," he growled. "That's not what I'm paying for." And it seemed the man who had tortured me for years had run out of excuses.

"Well, we have some excellent options farther up, if you'd like to look at them," he waved toward the other girls and the man shook his head.

"Half price and I'll buy her," he said easily, turning toward the Grandmaster. I couldn't believe my ears. My head slowly raised, my hair falling away from my face. He didn't even look and I scowled. I was worth that entire dollar amount. I was pretty under my poorly-taken-care-of body, and who was he to tell me I wasn't! The Grandmaster contemplated the price tag and then me.

"You pay seventy percent and she's yours."

"Sixty."

"Sixty-five."

The buyer shrugged and started to walk away. The Grandmaster ground his teeth in aggravation.

"Fine!" he snapped. "Sixty. In cash."

The man paused in his walking. "Delivered to my house."

The Grandmaster's chest swelled with anger and he finally relaxed himself through some will. "Fine. Fifty dollars for the delivery."

"Thirty," the man checked his watch. "Chained to my porch by six tomorrow night." And walked away without another word. I stared after my apparent new Master, practically giddy. A delivery was the best chance for escape. It was too rushed, too public, and the delivery men weren't paid well enough to risk going to prison just to keep one slave.

I grinned, then quickly hid it when the Grandmaster gave me a dirty look and rang my bell.

After two years, I was going to be free.

I started awake as my cell clanged open. In the two weeks I had been housed here, the cell had only been opened once. The scraps of food they afforded me were pushed between the bars and the water came out of the rusted faucet in the other corner. One of the burly guards came in and I pulled my teeth back to growl. This man in particular hated me. I prided myself on being a pain in the ass to transport anywhere, even a cell away, and he was always the one to do it.

"We'll have none of that today," he growled and I noticed at his side he had two pairs of handcuffs and an extra chain. He prowled closer to me and my instincts to fight reared up as powerful as they had been the day I had been kidnapped. I could barely remember my family, but I'd like to think they'd be proud of me for what I was doing. That I was still fighting.

As he grasped the metal chaining my ankle to the cell corner I leaped at his face, clawing, a nail nicking his chin. He backhanded me and I grinned through the pain. God, how I had missed this. Even this was better than curled up in my cell day after day, waiting for a buyer who would never come. But now I had a chance to escape. I was dizzy from his blow. I think I had forgotten, in our time apart, that he was strong. I stumbled to my feet and he pushed me out of the cell, grasping my thick metal collar in his meaty hands, and the chain in his other.

The length of it dragged on the ground as he pushed me down the row. The other girls gawked at me as I passed. I purposely spit blood at the base of cell number eleven, a bitch named Skye. Sold after me. The man leading me, Master Jake, pushed me viciously and I nearly fell on my face. The other reason I wasn't punching every inch of his body was that it would do me no good, I convinced myself. But in reality, the weak state my body was in scared me.

I had tried to convince myself that two weeks of eating badly couldn't do anything to me, that I was stronger than that, but I wasn't. Master Jake shepherded me to the heavy metal door past cell one and slammed me against it, pressing my cheek to it. From here, I could see the long hallway that connected with the lower thirty cell block, and the executive halls on the very end.

With one hand he pinned my head. I kicked at him with my feet as he grasped my hands and pulled them together. I couldn't be handcuffed. I would never escape with my hands behind my back, I had to have something to pull and push things with.

I screamed and finally, my backward kick connected with something. He grunted and crumbled. I gave him a vicious kick to the head as I sprinted down the hallway toward the lower thirty. An emergency switch to unlock and release all the cells, I repeated to myself, swinging the corner down the executive hallways. At the end of the hall. I was almost there. I could see the red button. And suddenly, my chain went taut. My leg snapped behind me and I crashed onto my face.

Pain blitzed up through my nose, pounding behind my eyes. My hands and forearms were scratched and bruised. I thrashed in the chain, exposing myself to the man holding my chain. He yanked it and I slid across the hard concrete, screaming as new cuts were torn in my fragile flesh. He grasped my hair and forced me to my knees as Master Jake came around the corner, his eyes blazing. I grinned at him. From the way he was striding I could tell he was about to hit me, hard, maybe even breaking my nose. I welcomed it.

The Grandmaster stopped his hand.

"We're already getting half price for this bitch," he snarled. "Don't make it even lower." Master Jake checked his temper with a clench of his fists.

"Help me get her handcuffed, Kyle."

Kyle. Funny how he had tortured me several times over two years and I had never learned his name. Grandmaster Kyle forced my hands together, leaving my head free to snap and snarl at Master Jake, who edged around me as though I was a wild animal. Jake tossed his handcuffs at him and Kyle snapped them around my wrists. They bit in all the wrong places.

Kyle pushed me onto my belly and snarled at Jake. "Do I need to babysit you all the way to the man's house or can you figure it out?" I could tell Master Jake wanted Kyle's help, wanted it badly. Kyle was the professional one here, and had chartered girls for years without getting caught. Even feistier ones than me, I supposed. But I knew this man. He wouldn't lose face in front of Kyle.

He dragged me to my feet by my hair and his hand went right back around my collar. "I can handle it."

"She's almost escaped twice under your care."

"I said I can handle it," he hissed and dragged me away. Hopelessness grasped me, suddenly. The only thing not chained together were my feet and I was too weak to run fast for very far, especially not with my hands cinched painfully behind my back. Jake marches me past the lower thirties and right back to that metal door. He knocks and it opens. We enter a room, barely a closet. The metal door closes behind us and another one opens.

I winced and blinked at the sunlight as he pushes me through a sterile metal lobby with a large window at one end. A few men stand around the desk, filling out applications for a purchase. Some of them glance at me.

"A lower thirty, I suppose," one of them muttered and tears sprung into my eyes at the simple cruelness of that statement. Even in the real world, even with filtered sunlight temporarily shining on my overly pale skin, men were still cruel. Jake pushed me through a service door on the other side and we're plunged back into darkness. It was a service dock, cars and vans exhaling exhaust as they pulled in and out, transporting girls who had all once had a life. I watched with pained eyes as ten girls, chained together, are hustled and whipped into the training building on the opposite side. Some of them spit at the officers and my heart reached for them.

That defiance wouldn't last long, not if they were like most of us. Jake let me examine them for a moment before bringing his mouth to my ear. "Remember how you were raped over the counter in the back room?" he hissed into my ear. "It was the only way I could convince you it was all real." I try to spin around to bite him, to hit him, to do something. He darted out of the way of my backward kick and clutched my collar and handcuffs more tightly.

He dragged me over to a smaller 'transportation' car. Another man stood by it, keys in his hand, texting. When he glanced up to see how heavily restrained I was he instantly tucked his phone in his back pocket and went to open the trunk, then popped the secret compartment on the bottom. I struggled viciously then, screaming, collapsing onto my knees and kicking them when they tried to carry me.

"My God, I hope the poor fucker who bought this slut paid pennies," the man grunted. It took him and Jake working together to slam me into the compartment, pin me, and secure a gag in my mouth. Jake grinned evilly down at me and slammed the compartment closed. It was dark and too tight. I had been claustrophobic once, I remember. It had been beaten out of me here. I felt tears welling up in my eyes as the car started under me and we started moving.

I let myself cry. It had been forever since I had shown any mark of weakness, even to myself, but I let myself cry as years of attempting to escape and fighting everything they did came crashing down. I was still a slave. I had still been trained and sold like property. And now I was nothing more than Cataegis, an annoyance, in the record books.

It smelled like sweat. I wondered if I could choke on my own spit or tears and die before we got there. As I was seriously contemplating it, I felt us stop, and then accelerate. Onto a highway probably, I think. I closed my eyes miserably. Before I knew it, I was asleep.

The door smashed closed and I bolted upright, my head smarting painfully against the top of the tiny compartment I had been stuffed in. As I realized where I was and what us stopping meant, I desperately tried to wiggle my hands, pinned uncomfortably under me, free. I refused to let myself cry, though, not when Jake and the other man were about to give me to my new Master... for only half what I should have been worth.

I could barely hear voices outside the car and then it picked up into an argument, then settled back down.

The door slammed closed again. The car peeled around a corner and up a hill, smashing my head into the side of the car, and then just as quickly lurched to a stop. I groaned. Everything in my body hurt. My face throbbed from being hit earlier and my cuts from being dragged across the concrete were on fire. My fight was a barely-flickering flame deep within me, but I ready myself for an assault the instant they opened the trunk. One final bruise to remember me by.

I tense as I hear the trunk open. I hear Jake and the other man arguing and then one of them raps on the compartment.

"Still alive?" he shouted, then popped it. I lunged my hips up, kicking out with my legs. Hands locked around my ankles and I'm dragged onto pavement, smashing my shoulder painfully. I cried out through my gag as Jake chuckled.

"Told you," he said. The other man sighed and I watched through splotchy vision as they exchanged money.

"What did the bastard want us to do with this?"

"Chain it to the porch, I think," that was the last straw. I leapt up. I saw Jake's hands reach for me and I ducked under them, my vision blurry as I ran for what looked like a line of trees, right next to a large modern glass house. I heard Jake and the other man running after me and leapt over a rock at the edge of the woods. My goal wasn't to get far, it was to get far enough way to kill myself quickly.

I tripped over a log and splayed into the mud, sliding under a plant. My eyelids fluttered, my hands still bound behind my back.

I hear their footsteps grow closer and then ease up in their run, both of them panting.

"Fuck," the man cursed. "God fucking dammit."

"She's underfed and chained," Jake spat. "She can't have gone far. Let's go." I heard their footsteps resume, pass about ten feet to the right of me, and continue. I struggled up. The car. The car was unattended. I would figure out how to drive it, if I had to use my teeth or my knees to do it. Exhilaration and adrenaline pumped through me as I started a jog back to the car. I was so close to freedom.

Bruised, bloody, within an inch of unconsciousness, but nearly free. I broke out of the tree line and noticed the rough rocks cutting into my feet had vanished onto a soft well-cut grass lawn. It was surrounded by hedges, but the other side of the lawn dropped off a large hill. The mansion-like modern house to my left glinted with glass and wood, all clean-cut. Private, but modern.

The car. I fixed my eyes on it and stumbled across the lawn, dripping mud everywhere. I was almost to it. I was so close...

I heard a door open from behind me and I slowly stopped and turned around to watch the man that had been at my cell yesterday step out, eyes on me. We lock eyes for a second, his bright blue ones and my grey ones. And all at once, a deep fear seized up inside of me. This man was supposed to own me. I took a step back and he took a step toward the stairs that led to the entrance of his house. And I bolted. I ran, not for the forest where Jake and the man hunted for me, but toward the car.

I could make it.

I heard footsteps, fast and furious, as I ran as fast as my chain and my handcuffs would allow, toward the car. I was within a fingertip of the door, of leaping inside and slamming it closed with my feet, when I felt a hand lock around my collar and yank me to a stop. My neck screamed in protest and cracked ominously. My vision went splotchy again, and then black, moments before I hit the ground.