Chapter 66

Content Warning: This chapter contains depictions of transphobia and of brief non-consensual sexual violence between a man and a woman.

Valerie had no way to mark or measure the passage of time, and it seemed to flow by unevenly.

Sometimes, the pain smeared into white noise, her mind slipped out of gear, and entire minutes flowed by without thought, memory, or experience.

In the worst moments, most of the moments, when each agonizing second dripped past like thick syrup, all she could do was survive, one breath at a time. With what little thought she could muster, she wished she could choose not to.

The inside of the box had grown uncomfortably warm from her body heat and the outside air; and Valerie trembled, her skin and hair damp with perspiration. There was no ventilation or circulation to dry the sweat from her body, and the moisture simply dripped away into the darkness.

Her jaw ached from biting down on the dense silicone gag, barely a distraction from the pain. Relaxing her jaw only meant letting the gag stretch it wide, just as uncomfortably. Her feet and legs cramped, and she could do nothing to stretch them. Her bent knees and shoulders were knotted and tight, and the steel cuffs around her wrist and ankles bruised and chafed, especially against her sweat-damp skin.

If she could stay motionless enough, the plastic nubs pressing against her shins and kneecaps faded to an incomprehensible burning numbness; but she found true stillness impossible.

Her entire body was a construct of pain, no longer something human; she was instead a mind trapped in an amalgam of flesh and machine, whose only purpose was torment.

Her only achievement was that she had not triggered the volume limit again.

Yet.

Without warning, her world tilted and the lid opened for a brief moment, blinding her with bright, harsh light. Valerie jerked in surprise at the suddenness, and the movement renewed the pain in her shins.

“Shit,” a man’s voice said, a fragment of surprised speech filtering through the open lid.

“I didn’t—” the voice began to say, but it was cut off by the lid dropping closed.

Before she could even start to react, the crate crashed to the ground, dropping several inches and throwing her even more forcefully around.

Every aching joint cried louder, every sore muscle protested, and the agony that exploded from her shins whited out any conscious thought she had. The pain was too much for even an involuntary scream or whimper; she only gasped mutely for air.

After a few moments, the lid opened again, this time with more intention. The hangar’s floodlights were on, though they did nothing to illuminate the crate’s impossibly black walls.

Her eyes had adapted to the darkness in the crate, and even the light reflecting off the metal fittings and her own skin blinded her like a camera flash on a moonless night. She winced and squeezed her eyes shut.

Her bondage and the tether on her collar stopped her, anyway, from turning her head; stopped her from seeing anything other than the flat black surface in front of her.

“Well, well, well,” the same voice as before said.

“What?” Another voice, another man, standing farther away.

“Turns out we’re not moving cargo, we got us a passenger.”

Panic was starting to claw its way out of Valerie’s chest. She had spent more of the last three months in bondage than out of it, but she had never felt so helpless, vulnerable, and unsafe.

Work boots scuffed against concrete; the second man walking over to look for himself.

“What the fuck?” he exclaimed, voice full of disgust and annoyance.

Valerie could not even talk, much less beg for mercy or scream for help.

“Seen a lot of weird shit in this job; people that live all the way out here ain’t doin’ it because they’re normal, know what I mean? Ain’t all like this though.”

Surely Lucca is keeping an eye on them? The thought seemed like foolish hope.

“I’m just getting paid to move a box, not be a part of whatever perverted freak-ass shit this is,” the second voice said.

A calloused hand brushed down the side of her body, and she recoiled, pointlessly, fear and surprise taking over her body despite her bonds. If the owner of the hand even noticed, there was no sign.

She felt nauseous, and only stopped herself from screaming because the pain it would cause would only make things worse. Whatever sound she could produce would not be audible anyway.

“What if someone else is here?” asked the second voice.

The hand paused, resting in the curve of her hip and butt. A moment later, it draw back.

“Yeah, yeah. You’re right. Let’s get her in the van. Grab those corners and tilt it this way…”

The lid dropped shut, and Valerie was plunged back into darkness. Her world canted to one side, and despite the fear coursing through her veins like ice, part of her relished the momentary relief of getting to take even some of her weight off of the torturous plastic.

Only a few seconds later, the crate tilted back toward normal, but stopped just shy of flat, caught on something beneath that edge. A moment later, the low edge was shoved up onto the unknown object as well.

She was being moved, on some kind of cart. The wheels rattled on concrete and asphalt, and every minute tremor was transmitted up through the wheels, the cart, and the box, straight into the spikes that so tortured her shins and kneecaps.

Her chest heaved with abject sobbing; she only barely stopped herself from sobbing aloud.

The rolling continued for either thirty seconds or thirty years; Valerie could not tell which. There was more tilting and shoving, and a sort of springy bounce that she thought must have been the van’s suspension.

The lid opened again, though the light was much dimmer, now; the crate was inside a much smaller space.

“She’s cute,” the first voice said, threatening and hungry.

The calloused hand returned, groping her but cheek. Fingers pressed against the base of her plug. The angle of her body meant that her caged girldick was not easily visible, but the voices did not sound like the sort of people that would enjoy the discovery.

Valerie’s anxious mind imagined all of the ways the men might vent their hatred on her; murder was the gentlest of the fates she feared were in store for her.

“We still gotta drive,” said the second voice. “Let’s just get this secured and get moving. The AC doesn’t work for shit this in this thing and I don’t want to be stuck in it any longer than I have to.”

“Oh, come on, this is some letters to penthouse kinda shit, it ain’t every day— what the fuck?”

The hand had trailed along her perineum, and his fingers brushed the steel ring of her chastity cage. He groped around further, and then jerked back suddenly.

“She’s— he’s some kind of fucking tranny.”

There was anger with just enough fear under it that Valerie’s blood ran cold with terror. Her mere identity and the man’s transphobia and homophobia conflicted in his mind with the lust he had felt moments before, and the outcome was not going to be a widening of his horizons.

This kind of situation is the one that gets far too many trans women killed; Valerie wondered in horror whether Nevada was a panic defense state.

She wanted to scream, cry, beg, and run away, but she could do nothing except breathe and imagine the worst. She tried to hold as still as possible, like the man was a predator with motion-based vision and he might just forget about her and leave.

“Hey, man, we got four hours of driving on this run, and that’s if we don’t hit traffic, which doesn’t look so good. Maybe we can-” The second man was speaking quickly; he sounded nervous.

“Yeah. We should get going,” the first man replied, after a long pause; he sounded grim and certain. “Maybe we can find a nice secluded spot for a picnic once we’re into the mountains.”

“Uhh… yeah, okay. Sounds great.”

The men stepped away, leaving the lid open. She could hear them moving around and the banging of hardware against the metal skin of the truck. Her crate shifted a few degrees, accompanied by the clicking sound of ratchet straps.

A few moments later, they went silent, and Valerie could just barely tell that a shadow was dimming the light above her, like one or both of them were looking down at her.

“You see a latch for this?” the first voice asked. “I don’t want that lid banging around while we drive. Don’t want to risk something happening to our cargo.”

The light dimmed and brightened as the lid was raised and lowered while the two voices muttered indistinctly.

“This is some kinda keypad, maybe?”

“That must be it, fancy ass piece of shit.”

The lid fell with a bang. Thirty seconds later, Valerie heard a high-pitched mechanical whine of the latches engaging, similar enough to the sound they had made when she first unlocked the case.

She was plunged back into silence and total darkness, accompanied only by the sound of her own breathing and the pain that was rapidly re-asserting itself at the forefront of her mind.

She labored to slow her breathing, catch her breath, and to try to dim her consciousness and dissociate away from her circumstances.

She had barely begun this when, moments later, she heard a synthesized voice speak. The intonations were just slightly feminine, and utterly dispassionate.

Locks engaged. Activating program.