Boots. She had counted seven pairs before the first one knelt, and now she counted them again as they shifted on the wet parquet — scuffed toes, steel eyelets, one pair unlaced, one pair military-black and polished, one pair that had stepped in something and tracked it dark across the floorboards. The ring closed by half a step. The gum one came back down between her legs, knees cracking, and he didn't touch her cunt this time. He touched the cord.

His fingers found the knot over her left breast and hooked under it, and he pulled — slow, testing, the way you'd test a strap before you trusted it with weight. The cord cinched. Kara's whole ribcage seized, her breath going out through her teeth in a sound she didn't authorize, and the fluorescent tube above her flickered once and steadied and the dead fly stayed dead in the light.

"Aw," he said. "Look at that. Still pink."

She turned her face away from him, cheek to the cold floor, and the floor smelled of varnish and old whiskey and the men who'd stood on it. Her bound breasts throbbed in time with her heart — every beat pushed blood into the cinched flesh and every beat it couldn't get back out, and the pain had stopped being an event and become a weather she lived inside. Above the ceiling, the crowd roared, a wave of them, and then the bassline came back underneath it like something breathing.

"Vic wants you walking tomorrow," the gum one said. He was still holding the cord. He said it the way you'd read off a shipping label. "Said so. No marks above the collar. Wants you pretty for the cameras."

He let the cord go. It didn't loosen. It never loosened.

"But he didn't say anything about your mouth."

Kara's throat closed. Not from the chokehold — from the sentence. She knew exactly what it meant, and knowing it made her stomach turn over on the cold floor, made her try to pull her knees together even with a man's weight between them, and the gum one laughed at that, at the little useless movement, and he nodded past her shoulder.

Boots moved. The unlaced pair. The shaved-headed man stepped around her head and stopped with his toes at her crown, and she had to crane her neck back to see him and she didn't want to, so she didn't — she stared at the seam in the ceiling tile instead, the one she'd memorized, the little crooked line where the grid met the wall. Then his belt buckle clinked. Then his zipper. The sound of a zipper going down is not a loud sound. In a room with a concert thudding through the ceiling and seven men breathing, it should have been nothing. It was the loudest thing she'd ever heard.

"Nope," the gum one said, cheerfully, and his hand came down on her jaw.

She turned her face hard to the left — into the floor, into the dark — and his fingers dug into the hinge of her jaw and dragged her back, thumb and forefinger digging in behind the bone until her teeth ground together and her neck wrenched and her face came up and around whether she wanted it or not. Her mouth was already open to swear at him. That was the mistake. His thumb slid in over her lower lip, pressed down, pried her jaw wide like he was opening a jar, and held it there, and the shaved man's cock was already out and already hard and already at her lips before she'd finished deciding not to do this.

The tip was hot. That was the first thing — hotter than the room, hotter than her own skin, and wet at the slit, and it smeared across her lower lip and stayed there, tacky, and she could taste it, salt and something bitter underneath, and her whole body recoiled backward and there was nowhere to go because the gum one's hand had her jaw and her hair was pinned under someone's boot and her hands were still bound above her head.

"Open," the shaved one said. Not loud. Almost gentle. Like he was asking.

She didn't.

The gum one's thumb pressed harder into her tongue and his other hand came off her jaw and slapped her — open-palmed, across the ear, hard enough that the room went white and the fluorescent tube sang and came back, and in the white moment her jaw went slack and the shaved man pushed in.

He went in slow. That was worse. Slow meant she felt all of it — the blunt pressure on her tongue, the stretch at the corners of her mouth, the way her teeth dragged along the shaft because she couldn't open wide enough and he didn't care, the head of him sliding back to the soft place at the back of her throat and stopping there, resting there, like he was settling into a chair. Kara's eyes watered. She couldn't breathe through her nose — the chokehold had left it swollen and whistling — and she couldn't breathe around him, and the fluorescent tube above her started to blur at the edges.

"There you go," the shaved man said. "There you go."

His hand came down on the back of her head. Not grabbing her hair — just resting, palm flat on her crown, the weight of it settling her, and for one stupid second Kara thought he was being kind, and then he pressed down and pushed the rest of the way into her throat.

Her body fought it. It wasn't a decision — it was her body doing the only thing it knew, gagging, her throat clamping around him, her hips bucking off the floor, her bound hands jerking against whatever held them above her head, and the gum one laughed and said oh, she likes it, and the shaved man made a low sound in his chest and pulled back just enough to let her drag a ragged breath in through her nose, one, and then pushed back in.

He set a rhythm. Slow, deep, all the way to the back and then a pause there, holding, letting her feel how far he was, and then a drag out along her tongue that left it slick and thick with the taste of him, and then back in. Kara watched the dead fly and counted. One. Two. Three. Her knees had gone numb on the cold parquet and that was almost a mercy, that one part of her was just gone, and she focused on it — on the nothing in her knees — because everything else was too much to hold.

Then the gum one's fingers found the cord again.

He took her left breast in both hands and squeezed, and the cord bit down, and Kara's whole body arched off the floor and drove her throat down onto the shaved man's cock and he groaned at that, at the sudden tightness, and held her head and fucked into it twice, fast, before she could get her body back under control. Her eyes were streaming. The tears ran sideways into her hair because her head was tilted back, and the salt of them reached the corner of her mouth and mixed with the taste of him, and she could taste her own tears and his pre-come together and it was the most specific thing she had ever tasted in her life.

"See, she's getting it," the gum one said. He was rolling her nipple between his thumb and forefinger now, pinching, and the cord was so tight that even the lightest touch sent a jolt straight down through her chest into her stomach and lower, into the wet between her legs that she hated, that she could feel cooling on her thighs. "Look at her. She's getting it."

"Don't stop," the shaved man said. To her. He said it to her, looking down past her forehead, and his thumb traced a slow line along her cheekbone, through the tears, almost tender, and then his hand fisted in her hair and he started to fuck her mouth in earnest.

Fast now. Short now. The back of her head knocked against the boot behind her on every stroke and the man standing on her hair said watch it and shifted his weight and the boot ground down and Kara couldn't move her head at all, could only lie there and take it, her mouth stretched wide, spit running down her chin and into her hair, her throat making a wet sound on every drive in that she could hear from inside her own head like it was happening to someone else.

Her hands were fists above her head. She didn't know when they'd become fists. Her nails were cutting into her own palms and she was glad of it, glad of one clean pain that was hers, that she'd made, that no one had put in her.

"Close," the shaved man said, and his rhythm broke — ragged now, uneven, his hips stuttering, and the gum one stopped rolling her nipple and just held the cord, held it steady, watching her face.

"Open your eyes," he said. "Look at him."

She didn't.

He slapped her again, the other ear this time, and her eyes flew open on reflex, and the shaved man was looking down at her — really looking, past her, into her — and his mouth was open and his jaw was tight and then he pulled back one last time and pushed in deep and came.

It hit the back of her throat. Hot and thick and more than she expected, and he held her head down on him and she had no choice, no air, no room, and her throat worked because it had to and she swallowed because she had to, and the taste of it was salt and copper and something faintly sweet and it stayed on her tongue after he pulled out, dripping, a last thick string of it stretching from her lower lip to the head of his cock before it broke.

She coughed. It hurt — the raw throat from the chokehold, the new ache from him — and she coughed again and spat onto the parquet, a wet splat next to her own shoulder, and the shaved man stepped back and tucked himself away with the same unhurried calm he'd done everything else with, and zipped up, and the zipper sound was loud again and then gone.

"Good girl," the gum one said. He was still holding the cord. He let go of it slowly, finger by finger, and the cord stayed tight, and her breast stayed red and mottled above it, and he sat back on his heels and looked at her with his wide flat sunburned face and he was smiling.

Boots shifted. Someone else was already moving into the space the shaved man had left — she heard the belt buckle first, a clink, and then the leather sliding through the loops, and then a man's weight settling in front of her face, and Kara lay on the cold parquet floor with her mouth full of the last man's taste and her breasts bound and burning and her knees gone dead underneath her, and she turned her face to the side — just an inch, just what the boot on her hair allowed — and looked at the door.

It was still closed. Beyond it, through the ceiling, the bassline went on and on, and the dead fly hung in the fluorescent tube, and the next man's zipper went down.