Leaving the bedroom, I walked down the stairs. At the bottom, I paused a second, listening. Above me, Julia and Hannah continued to squirm and struggle against the strict hogties I’d placed them in, grunting and screaming through their gags. Fortunately, the several pairs of wadded up panties I taped in each of their mouths were more than up to the task of quieting them. Loud as I’m sure they were screaming upstairs, it was barely audible from down below. There was no chance they’d get the attention of anyone outside the house.

So I ignored them for the moment and started preparing for my next captive. Before the end of the day I needed six young women I could hand over to my sales agent, Steve, to be sold into the international white slave trade if I was to get the money I needed to disappear and set up fresh with a new identity in a new city. Julia and Hannah were a good start, but I needed more. Fortunately, I had an idea how to get two more…

Taking out my phone, I dialed the number of my next door neighbor. Using my actual phone instead of a burner, routed through at least a couple proxies pained my professional sensibilities, but the phone was going to be discarded, along with everything else associated with my present identity when I left here tonight.

Charlotte, the neighbor, picked up on the third ring, asking what was up. “Hey Charlotte,” I said, effecting a tone of polite, friendly, annoyance. “I just had a package dropped off this morning I didn’t order. Can you come over a check if it’s one of yours?” Charlotte, as was well known in the neighborhood, was a compulsive online shopper, constantly ordering things off Amazon and Etsy and the like, and having it delivered to her house. More then once in the past packages had been left on my doorstep by mistake and I was sure she wouldn’t suspect this was anything other then that, yet again.

Sure enough, Charlotte’s only response was to ask, firstly, what it was and once I’d lied and said I hadn’t opened it yet and the labels were too worn or smudged to be readable, she promised to come over in five minutes. I hung up and went to the door to wait for her, keeping the kitchen knife hidden, tucked under my forearm. It was more like eight or nine minutes, but eventually I saw my next door neighbor come hurrying up the front walk at a brisk power walk.

Mrs. Charlotte Wilkins had gotten married at 24 to her husband, Tom, a wealthy and successful doctor about ten years older then here. In the neighborhood gossip, the phrase “trophy wife” got tossed around a fair bit, along with speculation of if, or perhaps when, Charlotte’s husband would start thinking of trading her in for next year’s model. In that light, I suppose I was doing him a favor of taking her off his hands and freeing him up to get that new model without the hassle of a messy divorce.

At 42 years of age, Charlotte would be a bit old for a slave, especially a fresh catch, but I could see, as she approached the door, she still retained the good looks, soft blonde hair and sexy figure that had landed her her rich husband. Maybe she could lose a couple pounds, but that wasn’t uncommon with many of the ladies I brought in. Steve was good at making sure they were whipped into shape when they hit the market. Besides, there was another reason for taking her…

“Sorry about this…” Charlotte said, as I opened the door to let her in. “I’m very careful about entering my address, I don’t understand how this keeps happening...so where is the package?”

“It’s no problem, really…” I replied. “Upstairs…” I directed her up to the bedroom, where the binding materials and everything else was. I’d hoped I could get her all the way there without trouble, but no such luck. In the last few minutes, Julia and Hannah had quieted down a bit, having realized screaming through their thick gags was as useless as struggling against their tight ropes. But as I ascended the stairs with Charlotte, the two captives must have realized there was someone else in the house besides their kidnapper. Perhaps they were trying to warn her about falling into the same trap they had, or maybe they were just hoping rescue might be at hand, but when we were about halfway up, the two suddenly let loose a chorus of frantic grunts and groans. It was still little more then a low murmur, but it was still enough to carry over to the stairs and catch Charlotte’s ear.

“What’s that?” She asked, looking up in confusion.

“Nothing...just the TV. Must have left it on…” I lied, quickly, but I could tell it wasn’t enough. Charlotte paused at the stairs, trying to figure out what the sound was and what it meant. And when she did…

Acting before that could happen, I took out the knife and moved behind Charlotte. Standing on the step below her, I couldn’t easily put the blade to her throat, so I settled for pointing it at the small of her back, applying just enough pressure she could feel it poking through the back of her shirt. Perhaps not as immediately fatal as a slit throat, but still a strong motivator to do what she was told.

Charlotte gave a loud gasp. “Gloria! What’s going on? What on Earth are you doing!?!”

“Shut up!” I growled, dropping easily into my kidnapper voice. “Just do what I say and you won’t get hurt! Otherwise…” I gave the knife a little more pressure.

“Oh god!” Charlotte gasped, jumping forward to escape the poke.

“Hands up! Get moving!” I ordered. As Charlotte raised her hands and continued up the stairs, I hurried to keep pace so she wouldn’t get ahead of me and out of range of the knife. Charlotte kept talking, babbling, asking me what this was about, what I was going to do with her, asking if this was a joke, but fortunately she didn’t think to scream for help. It might not have mattered. The only other women in the house were already my prisoners and I didn’t think there would be anyone close enough outside for even Charlotte’s voice to carry that far, but you never knew…

“Oh my god!” Charlotte exclaimed as we entered the room and she saw Julia and Hannah hogtied, gagged and blindfolded on the floor. Or maybe she’d noted the piles of rope and tape on the bed and guessed she was going to get the same treatment. Either way, with the knife at her back, she didn’t have a choice but to move across the room and get down on the floor beside the other trussed up ladies.

“Please, no! You don’t have to do this! Ah! It’s too tight! It’s hurting my-Mmmmppphhh!!!” Charlotte kept up her talking right up until I stuffed a double wad of panties into her mouth. She probably kept on talking after that, I suppose, but now it was nothing more then garbled moans, like the kinds the other ladies had been making nonstop since they were gagged. And speaking of them...

“You two are just too noisy.” I told them, after I had finished yanking Charlotte’s arms and legs back into the same strict hogtie the other ladies had been enjoying so far. Julia and Hannah could only shake their heads and mumble what I took to be pleas through the mass of cloth filling their mouths. Little good it did them.

Starting with Julia, who’d shown the most resistance and stubbornness of the two so far, I knelt down over her and ripped off the thick layers of tape covering her mouth, dragging a sharp grunt of pain from the helpless woman. The wadded up panties already in her mouth were joined by a couple more, until her mouth was crammed full, her jaws forced wide open and bits of the cloth stuck out.

Grabbing a length of rope, I first tied a couple quick loops around her head, pulling the cord tight between her teeth to keep the extra-heavy packing in. I then took the remaining feet of rope and drew the free end back to her tightly bound ankles, pulled it taut and knotted off the ropes securely. The tight rope forced Julia’s head way back. I knew from previous captives how much of a strain this sort of position would be to endure for any length of time and how quickly it could cow even the most stubborn of girls.

This process was repeated with Hannah, just as stringently. The two ladies groaned and sobbed miserably as they struggled to adjust to their new, far worse, position. Meanwhile, I turned to Charlotte, whom I had left without a blindfold, so she could watch me work on them. “I’ll come back and do the same to you if you make any noise, understand?” Eyes wide with horror and disbelief, Charlotte could only nod, frantically, not wishing to give me any excuse to visit the same cruelty on her as well.

“Good.” I said, and quickly stretched a couple strips of tape across her eyes to blindfold Charlotte. I then turned back. “As for you two, if you’re good for the next few hours, I’ll switch back to the nicer gags. But if you keep it up, I’ll find something even worse, got it?” The two could only sob and groan through their thick packing, unable to even nod, but I was sure they wouldn’t give me any more trouble.

And just in time, because as I was fussing over the bonds, making sure the knots remained secure, the ropes as tight as possible and their bondage as miserable and restrictive as it could be, the doorbell rang. “Back in a second, ladies.” I said, rising to my feet. “I’m just going to go down and see who’s down there and invite her up!” Giggling, I left to the dismayed groans of the three captives I’d assembled so far. Downstairs at the door, I presumed, would be my fourth.

Opening the front door, I came face to face with a close copy of the blonde woman I now had hogtied upstairs, minus a decade or two. Charlotte’s daughter, Kate, flashed a cheerful smile with a face that resembled her mother’s, but with youth still softening the lines. Her blonde hair, half a shade lighter then the older woman’s, was tied back in a ponytail with a blue ribbon. Below, her teenage body, dressed casually in a t-shirt, shorts and flip flops was starting to fill out into the knockout, gorgeous figure her mother had.

“’scuse me Miss Michael…” Kate asked in a pleasant tone. “Is my mother here? We were going to go out this afternoon and do lunch, but she’s not home. I think she came over here.”

“Yes…” I said, smiling at my fortune. Where Charlotte might have fetched a decent price despite her age, her 18-year old daughter Kate was prime slave material: young, innocent and possessing a hot body just flowering into full beauty. And if the right buyer could be found, which I felt my agent more then capable of, mother and daughter sold together as a pair would bring in far more then either would fetch separately. “She’s upstairs. I was just showing her something upstairs and I guess we lost track of time…”

I guided Kate in and up the stairs. This time, cowed by my earlier punishment, the three prisoners upstairs kept deathly quiet. Kate had no warning of what she was walking into. The first the teen knew of the danger she had unwittingly come into was upon entering the bedroom and seeing her mother tightly hogtied on the floor, tape across her mouth and eyes and beside her two other neighbors bound with even greater severity. But of course, by then it was too late. A hand clamped over her mouth to stifle the alarmed scream and a flash of the knife convinced Kate it was in her best interest to cooperate with me.

“Someone was wondering where you’d gone to…” I teased Charlotte as I dragged her daughter over and forced the teen to lie down beside her mother. “She came by looking for you and I insisted she come on up!” Charlotte sobbed and moaned into her gag, pulling against the ropes binding her, overcome with fear for her daughter, but there was nothing she could do. Kate put up no resistance as I wrapped the ropes around her hands and feet, but the teen balked when I grabbed another ball of cloth and moved to gag her.

“What!?! Oh no! Ew!” She stammered as she realized the wad was two or three pairs of crumpled panties. “Please! No! Don’t stuff those in my mo-Mmmmppphhh!!!” Her pleas were cut off as I forced the underwear into her mouth. I sealed them in with a couple strips of tape.

“Now listen dear…” I told the teen, turning her head to look at Julia and Hannah, with their much heavier gagging. “You may not think it now, but you’ve got the nice gag on right now. Those two were bad. They tried to scream and now they’re being punished. You don’t want that to happen to you, do you? You don’t want to be a bad girl and get punished? Are you going to be a good girl for me and keep quiet?” Terrified, Kate nodded, frantically, tears welling up in her eyes. “Good. Just remember that, or you’ll get worse then they did…” With that, I tore off another strip of take and used it to blindfold the teen. She gave a quiet whimper of terror, but otherwise stayed quiet.

“Alright ladies, I’m going to go downstairs and leave you along for a bit. But I’m not going far and I’ll be back soon. You all just lie still and quiet and this will be over soon.” I told the captives, neglecting to mention that it would end with all of them in the back of a truck being carted off and sold as sex slaves, but I’d need their cooperation for a while longer at least and so long as they thought things would turn out alright for them if they just played along they wouldn’t be so inclined to try and escape. Soon enough, though, they’d found out just what a bad idea that was…

In the meantime, I went back downstairs, making enough noise I could be sure the four ladies heard me go. Then, moving much quieter, I slipped out the front door. With luck, they wouldn’t realize I wasn’t in the house anymore and thus weigh the chances of successfully escaping versus being caught if I came back too soon and caught them in the act. Leaving them alone was a risk all the same, but a necessary one.  I had four captives so far, but I needed a few more. And I had two in particular in mind…