Prologue

 

The three tough men stood in the deserted road at the top of the Albanian hill, chain smoking.

They were not nervous; they had done this sort of thing many times before, although it had been a while since they had handled such a large group of victims, so they were carefully alert. There hadn't been a commission for a mass kidnapping for some time, just assignments for acquiring specific individuals but now, with Promethia established, demand at last exceeded supply and prices had risen again to the point where operations like this became sufficiently lucrative to cover the overheads involved.

The three men were of a profession much of the world thought to be extinct: they were slavers.

"There it is," said one man, observing a coach coming into view some distance below. It would take ten minutes for the vehicle to make its way up the winding road to the men's position. That gave them time to extinguish their cigarettes and check their guns.

The operation was fairly simple. The coach contained a young women's hockey squad on a tour. The coach driver and the two male team managers were in the know; the two female chaperones and the sixteen teenage girls, of course, were not. The coach would stop, the men would board it and their guns would ensure an orderly transfer of the girls and women to the waiting container lorry. Once they were locked inside the airtight container, knockout gas would flood in and that would be that as far as the females were concerned. Two of the three men would then stay behind to stage the crashing of the coach down the steep valley precipice, ensuring the right forensic evidence was planted to convince the world that all had perished in the resulting fireball. Such a deception was not difficult in this country, given that bribes not just of money but passes to Xanxta and Promethia, which could both be described as heaven on earth to most men, were easy to arrange for the local investigating officials. Meanwhile, the container lorry would make its way to a quiet little port and an uneventful, untraceable journey that would end in a certain country in the Persian Gulf, where a privileged class of men enjoyed a dream lifestyle in the isolated and carefully guarded oasis town of Xanxta and its recently established sister town of Promethia.

 

CHAPTER ONE - Three months later

 

It was rare for Rosie Cameron to wake before the shrill alarm went off, for she was often worked until late at night, but for once she had not been used the previous evening and had been able to get an early night.

What was less rare, in fact was invariably the case, was that moments after waking, the awfulness of her situation flooded over her once more. Deep despair washed over her as she remembered that she was now a slave, followed by a grim, desperate determination to get through the day ahead, whatever hideous humiliations it brought.

Sometimes she would go back over the events that had brought her here and wonder if she could have avoided her fate. How could she have known that the hockey club European trip was a front for a mass kidnap? True, the coaches had selected all the prettiest girls in the club for the trip and equally true that Slovenia and Albania were not famed for their hockey, but nobody had really noticed the former and the excuses for the latter about "going somewhere different" and "promoting hockey in an emerging area" had been entirely plausible without the benefit of hindsight. Once they were on the trip, the sheer professionalism of their abduction had been breathtaking and had been one of the factors in convincing her that escape from here was quite impossible.

Rosie peered through the dim light across the sparsely furnished room. In the next bed, Charlotte slept soundly, her cherry-red hair splayed over the pillow, her deeply tanned shoulder peeking out over the duvet. Charlotte was a nice girl - far too nice for this fate - and she and Rosie got on well. They were similar ages, both eighteen, but Charlotte had a few months' more experience of this hellish life of slavery and had helped Rosie get by. She was an incredibly attractive girl, vivacious and lithe, bubbly and full of life, with a cute face and a fantastic figure honed by much sporting activity. At home she would have been surrounded by admiring boys but here, such attentions were rather less polite and well-intentioned. Rosie felt herself to be plain when stood alongside Charlotte, which was actually quite unfair. Rosie was brunette, curved in all the right places, fair-skinned and very pretty in an innocent sort of way that attracted men, particularly here, much more than she realised and, particularly here, much more than she wanted.

The third bed was empty and had not been slept in that night. Cassandra, the third young slave girl of the household, had evidently been detained in somebody's bed. Rosie shivered recalling several highly unpleasant experiences of her own during the three weeks she had been here so far. Cassie was a blonde - the three girls had probably been chosen for the variety - and again very attractive, glamorous and graceful in contrast to Charlotte's sex-bomb attributes and Rosie's unspoilt freshness. Their owner could afford to buy the best, for he was extremely wealthy.

Rosie watched the hands on the clock on the wall creep towards six-thirty and the inevitable shrill shriek of the wakeup alarm. Charlotte stirred and, moments later, the two girls were in the communal slave shower unit, the hot water blowing away the cobwebs. After drying herself and applying subtle scents, Rosie unhooked the maid's uniform that she hated with such a vengeance and pulled it on. At the front were two large circular cut-outs totally exposing her breasts. The skirt was short at the front, with a tiny white apron, but the hem rose to her waistband at the sides and left her bottom as exposed as her boobs. As the girls were not allowed underwear, she had no protection at all.

As Charlotte donned her uniform, Rosie noticed four evenly spaced dark lines running across the girl's firm, tanned bottom. One of the many unwelcome consequences of their bottoms being on show was that any punishment they received was always fully evident. The lines, Rosie knew from bitter experience, were cane welts. "Who did that to you?" she asked her friend.

"Master Freddie," said Charlotte evenly.

"Ask a daft question," Rosie chided herself. "Had you done anything wrong?" It was a reflection on the brutal society they found themselves in that Rosie could even conceive of such treatment being deserved under any circumstances.

"Nah; he was just practising his aim."

"I hate him," said Rosie softly. "I hate all of them."

"Best not to even think like that," advised Charlotte, "and for God's sake don't say it. You know what walls have around here."

"Sausages?" Rosie asked innocently, showing how some of Charlotte's impish sense of humour had rubbed off on her in the past few weeks.

"Nah, sausages are what they push up between our legs, only they're still attached to the original owners," Charlotte returned lightly. She locked eyes with Rosie. "Ready to face the world?"

"No," said Rosie, "but I don't have any choice, do I?" They entwined their little fingers for a moment in a gesture of friendship and solidarity and then Rosie took a deep breath and followed Charlotte out of their quarters.

It was half an hour later when Rosie walked into the dining room, carrying a tray of breakfast replenishments.

Tyler Mason, the only other person in the spacious room, was sitting at the table, reading a newspaper. He always made Rosie nervous and scared. It wasn't just that her uniform left her tits fully on view to him and her bum as well whenever she turned her back, though that was bad enough; but he was a tough, merciless man, a hard-nosed businessman who had built a family fortune through ruthlessness and cunning, a man who knew what he wanted and grabbed it, no matter who it had previously belonged to. That, of course, included Rosie herself. He OWNED her. It was such a barbaric, impossible thing and yet by the laws of this country (albeit laws not widely advertised, nor practised except in this isolated town and one other similar place) it was so. Just as the Nazis had used the law to make persecution of the Jews an accepted fact, so did the laws here make slavery into a reality impossible to reject. Rosie was now owned by this man. She hated it - and him - but she was forced to accept it.

He glanced up from his newspaper and ordered several things from the comprehensive choice of food. Rosie set her tray down on the table and served him. She was unavoidably close to him, so close that she imagined he could hear her fearful heartbeat. Certainly he could smell her fragrance and, if he chose, reach out and grope her blatantly exposed breasts. It was the sort of thing he would do; after all, he had designed the uniforms himself. And why shouldn't he? She was, she reminded herself bitterly, his property. But thankfully he seemed more attentive to his newspaper today and Rosie was able to complete the loading of his plate and retreat to a safe distance, if such a thing existed.

Joanne Mason, Tyler's wife, entered. Totally ignoring Rosie, she went to the table, gave her husband a perfunctory greeting and served herself. At around forty years of age, she was about a decade younger than he and their relationship was not smooth. Rosie wondered why they had ever married. He was bullish, a solid man with a craggily unhandsome face and balding pate, rough and tough and unyielding in everything he did, including in bed, as Rosie could personally testify. She would have been attractive when they wed, but she had not aged well. She was neat and precise and gave herself airs and graces, which irritated his no-nonsense approach. Her honey-blonde hair was always carefully coiffeured, her manicure perfect, her figure slim, but her skin was wrinkled and her alcohol consumption did not help. They slept in separate rooms and both took full advantage of the slaves. Joanne almost permanently used Ashley, the handsome, likeable young male slave who was a year or so older than Rosie's eighteen summers. This bothered Tyler not in the least, but his own usage of the three slave girls irritated Joanne considerably, even though she certainly did not want to go with him herself. All the girls knew that if they were summoned to Tyler's bedroom for the evening, they were almost certain to get a beating off Joanne the next day for some miniscule fault. Tyler gave them no protection: he just wasn't bothered. Rosie had been forced into Tyler's bed four times in her three weeks here - in fact, he had taken her virginity, although others had had her since as well - but, fortunately for her, his favourite was Cassandra. Rosie wondered if that was where the blonde had been last night.

Freddie Mason came in, causing Rosie's face to go immediately red. He was very different to his elder brother, alike only in his beefy stature, but even there, whilst Tyler maintained some musculature despite being fifteen years older, Freddie was beginning to run to fat. He was a lazy playboy, content to live off his brother's business acumen. This did not bother Tyler, whose zest was for making money, caring less what happened to it afterwards, but it irritated Joanne no end, which in turn amused Freddie and (though he kept a straight face) Tyler as well.

Freddie sat down at another table and beckoned Rosie over. She knew what he always had and began to fill his plate. Unlike Tyler, he did not leave her alone. As she reached across, she felt his podgy fingers stroke her breast flesh. It felt like spiders on her.