Two Slaves for the Collector

The apartment smelled of makeup, wig resin, and the specific exhaustion of people who have spent three days smiling for other people’s cameras. Nadia closed the door with her shoulder and let the cosplay bag fall onto the sofa. Sofía, behind her, was unlacing her platform boots while leaning against the doorway, her eyes already half closed.

The two of them had spent the weekend at the biggest convention of the year, dressed as the maid twins from an anime series that had exploded in popularity that year. The result had been exactly what they had expected: lines of fans, nonstop photos, record sales. A success that now weighed on their legs and shoulders.

Nadia was the smaller one: five foot one, pale skin, hazel eyes with that particular warmth of someone who laughs easily. In the cosplay world she was known as Tsuki. Sofía was Hana: an inch taller, a slightly darker complexion, huge green eyes that the camera captured with almost unfair fidelity. If Nadia radiated a calculated innocence, Sofía had always brought the spark, the flirtation, the gesture that broke the symmetry of their joint performances.

They had been living together for two years. What began as a practical collaboration had turned into something harder to name and much easier to feel.

—Showers, then sleep —Nadia said, though the way she brushed Sofía’s bangs off her forehead was anything but pragmatic.

Sofía caught her by the wrist before she could walk away.

—Showers first —she conceded—. The rest can wait.

The shower was long and clumsy, the two of them under the same stream because after three days at the convention neither had the patience to wait their turn. Sofía soaped Nadia’s back with open palms, sliding down to the curve of her ass with a slowness that had nothing hygienic left in it. Nadia turned around, looked up at her with those soaked hazel eyes, and bit her left nipple before Sofía could protest.

—You said showers first —Sofía murmured, her voice hoarse, grabbing Nadia’s wet hair with both hands.

—We’re already in the shower.

They came out wrapped in towels that lasted less than a stretch of hallway. Sofía threw hers onto the bedroom floor and dropped face-up onto the bed with her legs open, still dripping. Nadia climbed on top of her without saying a word, settled astride her face, and grabbed her head with both hands.

—Eat my pussy —she told her, and it was not a request.

Sofía grabbed her ass with both hands and yanked her down to her mouth. She ran her whole tongue from bottom to top, slowly, savoring the hot water and Nadia’s own taste beneath it. She licked her with the flat of her tongue, then with the tip, circling her clit in tight circles that pulled a short, sharp moan from Nadia. She slid her tongue inside and came back up. She sucked her clit between her lips and let it go with a wet kiss. Nadia began moving Sofía’s face with her hips, grinding against her mouth with no shame at all, her thighs trembling with every pass.

—Like that, like that, don’t stop, bitch —Nadia panted, gripping her hair—. Suck it good, come on.

Sofía jammed two fingers into her at once and Nadia folded forward, mouth open. The fingers went in and out with a filthy wet sound, searching for that spot inside Sofía knew by heart, while her tongue never stopped working Nadia’s clit. Nadia felt her whole belly heating up, her legs tightening, that electric tingle climbing her back like a warning.

—I’m coming, I’m coming, don’t stop —she cried, and came over Sofía’s mouth in a long spasm that tore a guttural moan from her, soaking her face and chin. Sofía kept licking her slowly as she came down, drawing out every extra tremor, swallowing what she could.

Nadia let herself roll to one side, still trembling. Before she could catch her breath, she turned and got on all fours between Sofía’s legs.

—Your turn now.

She spread Sofía’s legs wider than they already were and buried her face in Sofía’s pussy without ceremony. Sofía was already soaked. Nadia ate her with hunger, tongue deep inside, sucking her lips, carefully nibbling her swollen clit. Sofía clutched the sheets with both hands, arching her back, moaning through clenched teeth.

—Put your fingers in me, come on, more, more —she begged, and Nadia slid three in at once, curling them upward, making that quick motion Sofía could never tolerate for long. Sofía came a few minutes later, pushing her pelvis against Nadia’s face, biting the back of her hand so as not to wake the neighbor.

They stayed there for a while, Nadia’s head resting on Sofía’s inner thigh, breathing hard, quietly laughing from sheer exhaustion.

—Now yes, sleep —Sofía said.

—Now yes.

***

At three in the morning the apartment was absolutely silent. The two of them slept wrapped around each other on the bed, one forehead resting against the other’s, their breathing in sync like two people who had spent a long time learning to occupy the same space. Neither heard the doorknob turn. Neither felt the cold draft that came in from the hallway.

The man moved with the mechanical efficiency of someone who had repeated this procedure enough times not to need to think about it. He took a small vial from his jacket pocket, soaked a cloth with it, and leaned first over Sofía. The contact was minimal, almost delicate. One breath, and the green eyes closed without resistance. Then Nadia. The same result: the hazel eyes sank into a dreamless black.

Raúl took less than twenty minutes. Nylon ropes that would not give. Gags that canceled any possibility of voice. Thick leather collars tightened with a metallic click that sounded, in the room’s silence, like a sentence. He carried Sofía first, then Nadia, and placed them in the black van waiting in the building’s basement with the engine off.

Before closing the rear doors, he watched them for a moment.

—The client is going to be very pleased with these two —he murmured, and shut the doors with a metallic slam that echoed through the basement silence.

***

Nadia’s first thought was that she was still dreaming. The second was that the floor was far too cold to be a dream. The third froze her completely: her hands did not respond.

She opened her eyes in the near-total darkness inside the vehicle. The motion was constant, a dull vibration, the sound of asphalt. She tried to bring her hands to her face out of pure instinct and felt the rope burn into her wrists: elbows immobilized behind her back, ankles anchored to a side metal tube. The gag in her mouth prevented her from doing anything but making clumsy sounds. The collar reminded her with every heartbeat that she was no longer in control of her movements.

She turned her head in desperation.

Sofía was less than a meter away, in the same degrading position: on her knees, arms immobilized, brown hair messily covering half her face. A thread of saliva escaped the corner of her lips.

—Mmmph! —Nadia tried, throwing her body forward.

Sofía’s eyelids trembled. Her green eyes opened with agonizing heaviness. For a few seconds there was only confusion, the trace of an interrupted dream. Then focus returned, and she met Nadia’s tear-filled gaze. Recognition was instant and brutal: confusion turned into pure terror.

Sofía began to struggle. The ropes tightened and cut into her wrists. The two of them tried to crawl toward each other, searching for the only refuge available, but the anchors would not yield. The vehicle took a sharp turn and Nadia’s body slammed against the metal wall. The impact was short, dull, humiliating.

They stayed that way for more than an hour: unable to speak, unable to touch, looking at each other because it was the only thing no one had taken from them yet.

***

The van came to a screeching stop somewhere where asphalt had long since given way to a dirt road. When the rear doors opened, the air that came in smelled of pine and wet earth. There was no city, no streetlights, nothing that could serve as a point of reference. Only forest and, beyond it, the floodlights of a compound surrounded by a fence that took Nadia a second to process as real.

Carmen was waiting for them in the yard with her arms crossed and the expression of someone managing inventory. She was a sturdy woman, her hair pulled back tightly, her gaze clinical. Beside her, Raúl lit a cigarette leaning against the side of the van.

When they removed the gags, Sofía spoke first.

—Where are we?! What is this place?! Help us!

Carmen’s slap was dry, calculated, loaded with the precision of someone who had done it many times before. Sofía’s head snapped to the side. A dark thread began to slide from the corner of her lower lip. The silence that followed was total except for Nadia’s sobbing.

—Learn fast —Carmen said without raising her voice—. No one screams here.

They were taken inside. The cells smelled of damp and cold metal. A steel chair bolted to the floor in the center of the room, a spotlight flickering with an electric hum, stone walls with nothing that could serve as a temporal reference. They were forced to sit and left there, their arms still tied behind their backs, for what felt like an eternity.

Before they could speak to each other, Raúl came back with two more men and a tailor’s shears. They cut the clothes off both of them without ceremony, letting the fabric fall in tatters onto the stone floor. Nadia instinctively tried to close her legs and received a whip lash to the inner thigh that tore a cry from her. Sofía closed her eyes and did not move.

—Open your legs —Raúl ordered Nadia—. Both of you.

Nadia obeyed with her cheeks wet. The three men examined them with the same coldness used to inspect livestock before a fair. One pried open Sofía’s pussy lips with two gloved fingers and said aloud, to Carmen, that the merchandise was in good condition. Another squeezed Nadia’s nipples until they stiffened by reflex, and nodded.

—Shaved, moisturized, no marks —Carmen listed from the doorway, checking items off on a tablet—. Rodrigo is going to be pleased.

—Who are we for? —Nadia asked quietly when Carmen came back with a sealed envelope.

The woman did not even look up from the paper she was reading.

—For Rodrigo —she answered, as if that explained everything.

And by the way Raúl stopped smoking when he heard the name, Nadia understood that it did.

***

What came next she could not measure in time, only in sensations. The prick in her neck that plunged her into another chemical void. The cold of steel when she regained consciousness. And then, slowly, the understanding of the position she was in.

She was face to face with Sofía, so close she could feel the heat of her breath. Their naked bodies pressed together, forced by a metal structure that held them at hip level through a steel belt from which four chains rose to the ceiling, keeping them suspended a few centimeters above the floor. Their ankles were anchored to the base of the structure, legs stretched to the limit.

She tried to move her arms and felt the immediate pull: hands forced into an inverted prayer position, anchored to the back of the collar. Elbows tied until they almost touched behind them.

But what paralyzed her was something else. When she tried to separate her head from Sofía’s, a surge of pain was born in her tongue and spread downward with an intensity that stole her breath. Their tongues had been pierced and joined with a surgical steel bar placed farther back than normal, forcing them to keep their heads tilted forward to relieve the tension on the muscle. From the outside, the scene had to preserve an almost perfect geometry: two bodies entwined in what looked like an endless kiss.

And there was more. Nadia’s right nipple connected to Sofía’s left, and vice versa, by cross piercings that turned any independent movement into a stabbing tug in the most sensitive tissue of their bodies. Their breasts flattened by mutual pressure were the epicenter of a constant, throbbing pain amplified by every breath.

Carmen walked around the structure with her hands behind her back, examining the symmetry of her work.

—You have two options —she said—. Stay still and hurt less. Or move and hurt a lot. The choice is yours.

Sofía made a sound that was half sob and half question. Her green eyes, which had always shone with natural mischief, were red and completely lost. Nadia fixed her gaze on her and did not look away. Sofía. The person whose breathing she recognized in the dark, whose smell was more familiar to her than her own. Now she was here, centimeters away, touching her in a way neither of them had chosen.

I’m still here, she wanted to tell her. Here with you.

***

From the console in the corner, Carmen activated an electric shock. The current ran through the devices inserted in their bodies with sudden brutality, tensing every muscle at once. By survival instinct, both tried to arch and pull apart, but the bar linking their tongues prevented it with cruel precision, and the nipple piercings tightened to their limit, threatening to tear the sensitive tissue.

Their gasps were trapped in the space between their mouths, with no possible escape.

When the shock stopped, Nadia was trembling uncontrollably. Every spasm of her body translated into a tug in Sofía’s tongue and breasts, and Sofía let out muffled moans, punished twice over: by her own pain and by the pain of the person she loved most. It was a cruelty designed with precision, a trap in which compassion and the instinct to protect one another turned against them.

Sofía took a deep breath. Then, with a slowness that took more effort than any scream, she tilted her head until her forehead found Nadia’s. She closed her eyes. And in the middle of all that, she forced onto her lips something that looked like a smile.

Nadia cried. But she stopped trembling.

—Learn to keep still —Carmen said from the shadows, clapping slowly—. From now on, one’s movement is the other’s agony. The sooner you internalize that, the better for both of you.

***

The door opened an hour later, or three, or none at all: time in that place had stopped functioning as a useful reference.

Rodrigo entered with the unhurried pace of a collector visiting his private gallery. He was around fifty years old. He wore a dark, well-tailored suit that clashed obscenely with the room’s metallic smell. In his right hand he held a black leather leash connected to Laura’s collar, a young woman walking with her eyes fixed on the floor and the automatic steps of someone who no longer remembers she once chose where to go.

He stopped in front of the structure and contemplated it in silence for a long moment. His eyes traveled over the image without haste, with the restrained satisfaction of someone receiving exactly what he had asked for.

—Magnificent —he said softly—. They look like a single creature.

He walked around the structure with Laura’s leash in his hand, stopping behind Nadia. He ran his open palm over her ass, squeezing it, prying it apart from the other cheek with a cold thumb.

—And there’s still more they can give —he commented, more to himself than to Carmen.

He slid two fingers between Nadia’s thighs from behind and found her pussy. He pushed them in without lubricant, with the confidence of someone who knows no one is going to complain. Nadia tried to close her legs and could not: her ankles anchored to the base kept her open. The involuntary movement of her hips tugged at the piercings, and Sofía let out a muffled groan against her mouth.

—Shh —Rodrigo whispered in Nadia’s ear—. Still. The less you move, the less she hurts.

He moved his fingers inside her with clinical calm, while with his other hand he unbuttoned his pants. He took out his cock, already hard, and rubbed it against Nadia’s ass unhurriedly. He grabbed her hips to steady himself against the steel frame and penetrated her with a long thrust, all the way in. Nadia felt his cock open her pussy to a deep place that tore a choked cry from her, trapped by the bar linking her tongue to Sofía’s. The force of the thrust pushed her breasts against Sofía’s, and the piercings yanked at the sensitive tissue with a lash of stabbing pain.

—Easy —Rodrigo said, never stopping—. If you move, you hurt her.

He started fucking her slowly, with a measured cadence that made it impossible to get used to. Every thrust forced Nadia to press her forehead against Sofía’s, every withdrawal tore a tremor from her that traveled through the piercings to the other woman’s chest. Sofía cried silently, mouth open against Nadia’s, tasting the tears running down her chin. Their bound tongues brushed with every breath, an enforced kiss that made them share every gasp, every whimper.

Rodrigo increased the pace. He dug his fingers into her hips and rammed her harder, the wet sound of Nadia’s pussy mixing with the slap of skin against skin. Nadia stopped resisting. She relaxed her back, let him fuck her, let the pain itself enter a place where it could hardly reach her anymore. All she had left was to keep her eyes fixed on Sofía’s green eyes, breathe her air, not separate by even a millimeter more than necessary.

—Good girl —Rodrigo murmured—. You learn fast.

When he came inside her, with a series of short, guttural thrusts, he left his cock inside for a few seconds longer than necessary, like someone signing a deed. Then he withdrew slowly, and Nadia felt the warm semen slide down the inside of her thigh.

Rodrigo circled the structure to stand behind Sofía. He wiped his cock on her ass with a casual gesture and stiffened again in a few seconds. He penetrated her in the ass, not the pussy. The entry was slow but relentless, a sustained push that tore a guttural howl from Sofía, trapped by the bar between her teeth. Nadia felt Sofía’s trembling travel through her chest via the piercings, felt her crying against her own mouth, felt how every thrust from Rodrigo pushed Sofía against her and yanked on her tongue.

—Look at her —Rodrigo ordered Nadia, speaking into her ear over Sofía’s shoulder—. Look at her while I fuck her. It’s the only thing you can do for her.

Nadia looked at her. She held her green gaze, blurred, agonized, while the man fucked her from behind with increasingly brutal thrusts. She held her gaze when Sofía squeezed her eyes shut, when she opened them again searching for her, when the open mouth against hers let out a choked gasp that the bar turned into the saddest sound Nadia had ever heard in her life. She held her gaze when Rodrigo came inside Sofía’s ass with a low growl, and when he pulled out, and when the semen began to slide down both their thighs, mixed together, like a final signature.

Rodrigo adjusted his pants calmly, picked Laura’s leash up from the floor where he had set it, and looked at the scene again with the satisfaction of a buyer who has tested the merchandise and approves it.

At Rodrigo’s feet, Laura looked up for an instant. Her eyes met Nadia’s, and in them there was no pity, but something worse: recognition. The exact mirror of what she herself had been before conditioning erased most of what remained.

Rodrigo stroked her hair with the twisted tenderness of someone who has mistaken possession for affection.

—They go tonight —he told Carmen—. I want them ready for transport.

He handed over Laura’s leash along with a sealed envelope full of instructions and left without looking back, with the same calm with which he had come in. The door shut with a soft click.

Carmen took the leash and pulled Laura toward the inner door. Laura rose without resistance and followed her. Before disappearing, she turned her head one last time and looked at Nadia and Sofía, suspended in that metal embrace neither of them had chosen and neither of them could end.

***

In the darkness of the room, Nadia and Sofía breathed the same air. Their foreheads were still pressed together. The chains had not given. The piercings had not given. The will of the man in the suit had not given.

But Sofía was still looking at her. And Nadia was still looking at her.

In that space of a few centimeters between their faces, in that kiss that was not a kiss but a trap, Nadia searched for something to cling to. And she found it: Sofía’s green eyes, still there, still her, reduced but not extinguished. It was the only thing no one had been able to take away yet. And as long as that remained true, they were not completely lost.