The Four Tied Him Up in the Basement and the Punishment Began

Damián Vázquez had been out of prison for barely three months, and in that time he hadn’t changed a gram of what he was. He was thirty-six years old, with a physique honed in expensive gyms and a smile he used as bait. He had been a swimmer, had played semiprofessional soccer, and carried an inherited fortune that included two houses, brand-new cars, and a yacht moored at the yacht club. That same fortune had served him for something more useful than luxuries: buying a judge.

He had been convicted of assaulting three adult women, all over twenty-five, all seduced and then forced in his downtown apartment. The sentence was five years. He got out after two and a half for “good behavior.” Those who had followed the case closely knew that good behavior was the color of money.

Prison hadn’t made him repent. It had only taught him to be more careful, not to leave traces, to delete messages. Next time I won’t make the mistake of letting them talk, he sometimes thought while driving along the waterfront at night. He didn’t imagine that someone, somewhere, was thinking exactly the same thing about him.

***

Lucía, Carla, Noelia, and Sabrina had known each other since high school. They had met in a classroom at a public school, all four listening to the same music, all four sharing the same poorly concealed rage toward men who thought they owned the world. A literature teacher lent them the first books that gave words to that rage, and from then on they were inseparable.

They had learned to defend themselves early. When one of Lucía’s boyfriends raised a hand to her because she had gone dancing without telling him, the other three didn’t debate it. Carla drove a kick into his groin that doubled him over; Noelia landed a second one before he finished falling. The young man was left on his knees, white-faced and breathless, clutching himself with both hands.

“The next time you touch one of us,” Noelia told him, crouching down to his eye level, “you’re leaving the neighborhood in an ambulance.”

After that they understood something: together, they were something else. They started training in kickboxing, not as a sport but as a method. They perfected a single technique until they made it infallible. And for years they contented themselves with humiliating some arrogant nightclub creep, emptying his wallet, leaving him hard and standing there alone. Until Damián’s case appeared in every newspaper, and all four agreed, without needing to say it aloud, that this time things were going to be different.

***

For a month they gathered intelligence. They wrote down Damián’s routines as if they were keeping a diary: what time he trained, which nights he drove alone, when he turned off his phone. The plan was simple, and therefore dangerous: any improvisation would ruin it.

Lucía would be the bait. She was the one who best matched the kind of beauty Damián hunted, and she knew how to use it. The idea was to lure him to an isolated lot with the promise of something easy, and once there, while she kept him distracted, Carla—the strongest of the four—would drive a syringe of fast-acting anesthetic into his neck. Asleep, he would be dead weight, easy to transport to the country house Sabrina had inherited, lost among the hills, with no neighbor for miles and a thick-walled basement that seemed built for what they intended to do.

They waited for the right night. Damián left the gym after eleven, gym bag over his shoulder and his car parked half a block away. Lucía appeared leaning against the hood, playing with the keys and pretending there was a problem with the engine. He took the bait in less than a minute. When he came close enough to believe the night belonged to him, he felt the cold prick in his neck, managed to turn his head, and the empty lot slipped from his grasp like water.

***

He woke up naked.

That was the first piece of information his brain managed to organize: he was completely naked, sitting on a wooden chair, with his arms cuffed behind his back and his ankles tied with rope to the front legs. A bare bulb hung from the ceiling. The floor was cement. It smelled of damp and earth.

While he was unconscious, the four of them had taken their time. They had removed his clothes with almost bureaucratic thoroughness: his shirt unbuttoned one button at a time, his socks folded inside each shoe, his belt coiled on a table. They had saved the last part for the end, and they had enjoyed it. With a pair of scissors, they cut away the fabric of his boxers around him, slowly, until he was exposed. They had taken pictures. Then they finished cutting them off and put the pieces in a bag.

“Welcome,” Lucía said, sitting backward on a chair, her arms crossed over the backrest. “You slept like a baby.”

Damián took a while to speak. When he did, his voice came out thick.

“What the fuck is this? Do you know who I am?”

“We know exactly who you are,” Noelia replied without looking up from the device she was inspecting on the table. “That’s why you’re here and not at home.”

He tugged at the metal of the cuffs. They didn’t give a millimeter. He tried his feet; the rope was loose, he thought, and for a second he believed he could free himself. He rocked forward, miscalculated the weight, and the chair tipped sideways. He hit the cement with a hard thud that echoed throughout the basement.

The four of them came in before he finished groaning.

“There he is,” Carla said, looking down at him. “The champion trying to escape.”

All four of them lifted him and righted the chair. Damián was panting, his shoulder injured and his cheek scraped.

“That was a mistake,” Lucía said, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. “Here, everything you do has a price. And you’re going to pay this one now. Girls, what do we vote for?”

“I say electricity,” Sabrina said, appearing from the back with a metal box in her hands. Two cables ending in clips protruded from the box; on top it had a dial and a small needle gauge. “So he understands with his body what he doesn’t understand with his head.”

“Approved unanimously,” Noelia said.

***

For the first time since waking, the arrogance disappeared from Damián’s face. He looked at the device, looked at the clips, and something in his stomach clenched like a fist.

“Wait, wait,” he said, his voice coming out an octave higher. “I have money. A lot of it. Whatever you want. Accounts, cash, anything. Don’t do anything crazy; let’s talk.”

“Money?” Lucía laughed without amusement, a short, sharp laugh. “With money you bought the judge. With money you bought the prosecutor. Two men just like you let you walk free. And now you come offering us the same thing.” She crouched until she was level with his eyes. “It isn’t enough. Not this time.”

Sabrina approached with the clips. With a nurse’s cold efficiency, she took hold of his chest and attached one to each nipple. The metal was cold, and Damián shuddered before anything happened.

“With those pecs, he should be able to take quite a bit,” she remarked, connecting the cables to the box. “Let’s start here.”

She turned the dial. The current shot through him like a whip from the center of his chest. His whole body tensed against the restraints, the muscles in his neck standing out like cords, his eyes rolling back for an instant. The scream came out hoarse, bounced off the cement walls, and stopped only when Sabrina lowered the dial.

“Too much,” Carla said, assessing him with her arms crossed. “We don’t want him dead. We want him awake.”

“Relax, I’ve got it measured,” Sabrina replied, turning it again, this time only slightly.

The second shock was longer and weaker. Damián trembled and gasped, his head falling forward, and they lifted it by pulling his hair. They gave him a third, then a rest. His nipples were red, the skin around the metal marked. His chest rose and fell like that of a cornered animal.

“This,” Sabrina told him as she released the clips, “is what happens for trying to escape. Next time the shock won’t be up here.”

“It’ll be lower down,” Noelia added, and all four laughed at once.

Carla squatted between Damián’s spread legs and took his cock in one indifferent hand, like someone picking up a tool she wasn’t sure worked. She squeezed it, moved it, then let it drop against his thigh with contempt. A spasm of humiliation traveled from Damián’s stomach up into his face.

“Look at this, girls,” Carla said. “With this dick he finished three women. With this same dick he’s going to finish in here, right, champion?”

“No...” he began, his voice breaking. “No, please, don’t...”

“Don’t what?” Lucía grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head back. “You don’t want us to look at your cock? We’ve already seen it, you son of a bitch. We took pictures. Now we’re going to see what good it’s for.”

Sabrina licked two fingers and ran them over the glans with clinical slowness. Damián clenched his teeth and fought against his own body, but his skin betrayed him: his cock began to swell between Sabrina’s fingers, indifferent to what its owner thought.

“Look at the poor bastard,” Noelia laughed. “He doesn’t care who grabs it. He gets hard even for the women who are going to kill him.”

“He’s a dog,” Carla said. “A dog doesn’t choose. It goes where it’s touched.”

Sabrina closed her hand around it and began jerking him off with a firm fist, without the slightest tenderness, as if milking a machine. Her other hand pinched his balls whenever he tried to close his thighs. Damián moaned involuntarily, eyes squeezed shut, his face red with shame and the effort not to respond to the stimulation.

“Look at me, goddammit,” Sabrina ordered, slapping the inside of his thigh with a crack like a whip. “Look at my face while I jerk you off. Like you did with the girls when you covered their mouths.”

She pried open his eyes with her free hand, forcing his eyelids apart, and kept stroking his cock against his will. Damián felt his orgasm climbing up his back like a betrayal, and all four of them realized it before he did.

“He’s going to come,” Sabrina announced, amused. “Look at the rapist. He’s going to come all by himself for us.”

“No, no, no,” he panted. “No, please, stop, stop...”

“Oh, no. Now you’re finishing,” Lucía said, squeezing his jaw with one hand. “Now you’re going to come like a little slut, in front of us, and then we’ll keep talking.”

Sabrina increased the pace, dry and hard, without a drop of saliva, and Damián came with a guttural howl he didn’t recognize as his own. His come burst over his belly and thighs and onto her hand, which she didn’t even bother to move away. When he was finished, Sabrina wiped her fingers in his hair, dragging his semen across his temple and forehead.

“There,” she said. “Now he’s marked.”

Damián cried silently, his head hanging, his chest heaving in spasms. Never in his life had he felt so small, not even on his first night in prison. That had been worse than any shock, because his body had abandoned him in public, in front of the four women who decided whether he lived or died.

“Now,” Lucía said, calmly pulling off her T-shirt and remaining in a black bra, “comes the part for us.”

She straddled him, still wearing her jeans, and pressed her cloth-covered pussy directly against his limp, sensitive cock. Damián jerked in pain. She laughed, pressed down harder, and began moving on top of him slowly, rubbing herself against him, using him as furniture.

“This is the only thing you’re going to do right tonight,” she whispered in his ear, biting his earlobe. “Bear my weight.”

She came that way, clothes against skin, her open mouth against his neck, sinking her teeth into his shoulder when the orgasm shook her. When she was done, she climbed off, adjusted her clothes, and patted his cheek with two fingers, almost tenderly.

“Thanks, champion.”

“My turn,” Noelia said.

She undid her jeans, pulled them down along with her panties to her knees, and sat backward on Damián’s face, pressing her ass against his mouth. With one hand she pinched his nose shut. With the other, she reached behind herself, grabbed him by the hair, and pressed his head against her pussy.

“Lick,” she ordered. “Lick and do it well, you son of a bitch. And if you bite me, I swear on my mother that Sabrina will grab your balls with the machine again. Stick out your tongue like you’re begging forgiveness.”

Damián stuck out his tongue. He moved it as best he could, choking, his nose plugged and his mouth occupied. Noelia rubbed herself against his face with the calm of someone collecting an old debt, moving her pelvis in slow circles and setting the rhythm with tugs on his hair. When she came, she pressed his head against her so hard he felt as if she would break his neck. At last she stood up, breathing deeply, and looked at his face smeared with fluids and saliva.

“You’re much better like this,” she told him. “Quiet and on your knees. That face should stay on you forever.”

Carla and Sabrina didn’t touch his body. They stood in front of him, one against the other, and began kissing less than a meter from his face, each with her hands beneath the other’s clothes. They made him watch. Every time he lowered his gaze, one of them pulled his hair upward so he would keep looking. Sabrina finished with Carla’s fingers inside her pussy, moaning softly against her mouth, and not once did either of them look at him. It was as if he didn’t exist. It was worse than everything before.

When they were done, Carla wiped her hand on Damián’s cheek and smeared the sticky palm across his lips.

“Lick,” she said. He licked. “See how easy it is to obey? Your victims learned quickly too. You taught them.”

Damián’s cock, against all logic, had gotten hard again at some point during the last act, betraying him once more, pointing by itself toward the ceiling. Lucía indicated it with her chin.

“Look at that. Look at the poor little bird,” she said. “He never learns. He gets hard for the four women who are going to ruin him.”

“Let him endure it,” Sabrina said. “Let him stay hard all night without anyone touching it. That’s punishment too.”

And that was where they left him, his cock hard and alone in the air, his belly shining with old come, his face sticky, his breathing ragged.

“Now,” Lucía said, looking down at him. “Now it’s time for the water.”

***

They brought a bottle of water to his mouth and let him drink. Not out of pity: they wanted him intact for what came next. While he swallowed, the four of them discussed it among themselves with a calmness that chilled his blood more than the screams.

“I say we leave him like this for a while,” Lucía said. “Let him think. Let him sweat. Fear does the work on its own.”

“I’d keep going now,” Carla replied. “He’s soft, he’s begging. This is the moment.”

“Majority rules,” Noelia cut in. “We let him rest. And when he opens his mouth to threaten us again, we’ll resume.”

Damián listened to them decide over his body as if it were an object on a table, and he understood, with a clarity that churned his stomach, that he wouldn’t get out of that basement by force or by money. Those four women weren’t going to leave any witnesses, and he knew it better than anyone, because it was exactly the calculation he himself had made before, on the other side.

“Please,” he murmured, and there was nothing of the champion left in that voice. “Please.”

Lucía leaned in until her mouth was a centimeter from his ear.

“That word,” she said slowly. “I’d bet more than one of them said it to you. And you didn’t stop.” She straightened and looked at her friends. “We have all night. And we’ve only just begun.”

The feeling of having absolute control over that man ran through all four of them like a current of their own, stronger than any voltage. Sabrina carefully coiled the cables and left them on the table, in plain sight, where Damián could keep looking at them during the break. Fear, as Lucía had said, did the work on its own.

They switched off the basement bulb as they left. They left him in the dark, tied up, listening to their footsteps recede up the wooden stairs. And in that darkness, for the first time in his life, Damián Vázquez wished with all his might that he had never gotten out of prison.