On Home ground
The noise I made in the kitchen roused them just after eight.
It was obvious they were hungry again.
I cooked breakfast while they sat quietly at the table. Chad had the folder of reading material open in front of him. As I joined them, he tapped one of the pages.
"This is the real deal," he said. "There's no way out of it. It’s insider trading."
"We know."
He looked at me for a long moment.
"So that weekend... we were fucking you... you already knew you had us cornered."
"As good as."
He gave a humorless laugh. As usual, Chad was ahead of the game.
"Then why'd you still bend over?"
I shrugged.
"I though we’re not claiming to be any better. We needed to know exactly what sort of people we were dealing with. Blackmailers can be reasoned with. Bullies sometimes can. Rapists, rarely. We needed to find out where you sat."
"And?"
"You answered the question."
Chad nodded slowly.
"Rapists then."
"Bullies. Thugs. Men willing to cross whatever line suited them," I replied. "Once we knew that, we knew what we had to do."
Silence settled over the table.
Chad broke it.
"If we hadn't asked for you to come back... how long would you have left us on the crew?"
"Until you couldn't physically do the work anymore."
He stared at me.
"And then?"
I shook my head.
"We honestly don't know. We never asked."
Neither of them spoke.
The answer seemed to land harder than either had expected.
"You don't need to worry about that now," I said.
Brendan looked up.
"Thanks."
He hesitated.
"For coming back... and for at least hearing us out."
I nodded.
"Don't expect life to go back to what it was. It'll be different. You'll earn less. You'll work harder. You’ll be fucked regularly."
I paused.
"And one more thing."
"No drugs."
Chad managed a faint smile.
"Whatever comes next," Chad said quietly, "it's got to be better than dying slowly in the middle of the desert."
He looked across at Brendan before meeting my eyes again.
"And... sorry about the rough fucking.”
*
My new house guests had landed on Thursday. They spent the next few days quietly wandering around the house, always naked, and mostly keeping to themselves.
They had a great deal of emotional exhaustion to work through.
Whenever the opportunity arose, I spent time with each of them individually, strengthening the hypnotic influence I'd established during our earliest meetings, long before the BSD weekend.
Back then the suggestions had been subtle. Just enough to obtain their trading account details and persuade them to accept the cufflinks. The conversations had centered on money and status symbols, subjects they gravitated towards. It was enough for the hypnosis to stick.
Now though, I didn’t hold back. I drove solid mental foundations down to the bedrock of their existence. None of us were ever going through any of this shit again. At least not with these guys.
*
During the week before they were taken, I barely managed to drag their company's HR processes out of them. It had been seriously touch and go. When we actually arranged six weeks annual leave for each, it wasn’t based on our skill. It was mostly down to the junior assistant we lucked on to with our phone call to the department.
Resting around the house when I had them in trance, I used the opportunity, to understand what had been happening inside their heads, during their time on the road gang.
As they described the weeks following our first visit, one thing became obvious.
They had genuinely believed they were going to spend the rest of their lives there.
It wasn't the work that finally broke them.
It was the belief that there was no way out.
*
They were genuinely surprised to learn they would be returning to their old jobs first thing Monday morning. Both had assumed they would be starting over somewhere completely new.
We told them we'd smoothed things over by quietly paying off the right people in management.
As far as everyone else was concerned, they had simply been on annual leave.
We instructed them to behave as though that were the truth. If anyone commented on their deep tans, or unexpectedly shaved bodies, they could explain they had spent their holiday trekking through the desert.
It wasn't entirely a lie.
We drove them back to their apartments on Sunday afternoon.
Nothing appeared to have changed.
While they had been away, we'd kept the places clean, collected their mail, watered the pot plants, and made sure everything looked exactly as they'd left it.
The transition back into their old lives was seamless.
Almost.
The only difference was the network of concealed micro-cameras we'd installed, throughout both apartments.
Late that evening, after dropping them home, I checked in remotely.
Each followed much the same routine.
They unpacked, showered, spent time inspecting the unfamiliar ring around their balls, then settled in for the night.
By the time the lights went out, neither had the slightest suspicion they were still being watched.
*
The following week marked a return to the routine we'd enjoyed before Chad and Brendan had entered our lives.
Everything suddenly felt quieter.
I caught myself almost looking for drama, before reminding myself we'd had enough chaos to last a lifetime.
Ordinary suited me just fine.
The teams were stable, the money was flowing faster than ever, and the business had settled back into its familiar rhythm.
Despite the calm, the events of the previous few months had forced us to think further ahead than we ever had before.
Our oldest teams were only two years away from turning thirty.
Each of us now had around $1.3 million in the bank, and for the first time there were no immediate threats hanging over the business.
Naturally, our conversations shifted to the future.
One idea was to retire the four oldest workers from contract labour and set up a brothel. Six day a week fucking, a day to recover and no contracts to manage? Production line arse, the idea had possibilities.
The concept had merit.
The real question was what came after that.
The rabbits would continue to grow older, and eventually even that solution would reach its limits.
In the end, we chose a different path.
As each man approached thirty, we gradually unwound our involvement in his life. We removed ourselves slowly, allowing the previous seven years to fade into something that felt more like an interruption than a permanent destination.
The process proved remarkably effective.
They were left with the rest of their lives to rebuild.
We had simply occupied a chapter of them. A second to last chapter.
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