"Thanta, are you sure? I know you, inside and out, and I know what this idea does to you, but you realize this would be for real, right?"

Thanta hugged Dan tightly, pressing her bare body against his T-shirt and jeans. He could feel her heart pounding, hear her shallow, excited breathing. "Danny, I've never wanted anything so much! And you heard him... we could win a thousand dollars!"

They ignored the other whispered conversations around them. Probably just partners speculating on whether anybody would volunteer. It sounded simple enough. Participating ladies would lay on their stomachs on the floor, their hands cuffed behind them, a noose around their necks, the rope running up to a ring overhead and down to their ankles. The rope would be taut, and any movement of the woman's feet would be immediately felt around her throat. There would be other penalties that would be explained later. Anyone who could stand it for an hour would win one thousand dollars.

"Thanta, I know this isn't about the money. Just look me in the eye and tell me you know what could happen."

They had both spent enough evenings in the Club to know the challenge would not be as simple as it sounded. While on rare occasions a contest was based on purely erotic content and the contestants all lived to talk about it, more often only one contestant survived. Or sometimes none.

"Danny -- I know. If... anything happens, you'll find someone else, won't you?"

He kissed her and smiled. "Not like you." He kissed her again, longer, more deeply. "Okay, let's wait and see first if anybody else enters it."

"I think they're all kind of... absorbed, Danny. They all have something they want to do." About ten feet away, a beautiful naked girl in handcuffs and ankle shackles knelt, giving her master a blowjob. On the other side, an equally undressed girl was wincing as she straddled a thin metal pipe that hung like a trapeze from the ceiling, her shackled feet trying to reach the floor just inches below them. Her legs were stretched tautly, the muscles standing out, as taut as the short chain running from her ankle shackles to a ring in the floor. Her hands were cuffed behind her, about halfway up her back, held there by a chain running to her leather collar. Her entire weight was resting on her pussy sitting atop the pipe. She moaned with pain as her master tickled her behind her knees, the attempt to bend her taut legs away from the source of the tickling causing her pussy to grind that much harder against the pipe.

Behind them a bright voice chirped, "I'll try it!" Thanta and Dan both turned to look. It was a girl they had never seen before, clearly Vince's guest. He often brought new girls to the Club. As a first-timer she had been allowed to wear her bikini top and panties, both pink. Dan doubted she had any idea what she was really volunteering for. Vince smiled at Dan and raised his eyebrows.

"Alright!" crowed the emcee. "What's your name, darlin?"

"Christa." She looked around the room, grinning with excitement.

"Come on up here, Christa, and let's get you ready for the time of your life." He threw a knowing smirk at the audience. "Anybody else?" he asked as the girl ran up to the stage.

Thanta turned back to Dan. "Oh please, Danny, please please please?" She batted her eyes winningly.

He sighed. "Okay, first c'mere." He leaned towards her and kissed her, putting his arms around her and holding her tightly, then tighter still, his tongue licking hers. They broke apart, after a long while, Danny planting one last wet kiss on her cheek. He looked at her, fixing his eyes on hers. "Who's my Dolcett girl?"

Thanta's grin lit up her face. "I am!" She spun to face the front of the room. "I'll play!" Her announcement was greeted by applause. Danny and Thanta had many friends in the room. Several of the men signaled thumbs-up to Dan.

The emcee was grinning from ear to ear. "Thanta, we're honored. Here to win an easy grand, are you?"

Thanta stepped up onto the stage and waved to the watching crowd. "I just want to have some fun, Cliffy."

"Let's not waste any time, then. Christa, since you're part of the show now, you're going to have to doff those little pieces of cloth."

The girl looked blankly at him for a moment, then caught her breath as she realized what he meant. Her face reddened as she hesitated, then reached up behind her back and untied the string of her bikini top, smiling weakly. She looked at him again, and he made a keep-it-moving gesture with his microphone. "We want to see all of you, Christa." The audience yelled its approval. Growing red as a beet now, from the attention as much as the impending nudity, she put her fingers through the waistband of her panties and slid them down. Trying to make a last-second show of bravado, she kicked them into the crowd. Darrell caught them and waved them over his head, the crowd cheering still louder.

"Are you girls both ready now?" The crowd quieted.

Thanta grinned. "Let's get this thing going, Cliffy." She looked to her left, where Christa, her lip shaking, seeming on the verge of backing out, looked out at Vince. His arms were folded across his chest. She bit her lip, then looked at the emcee and nodded.

"Well, why don't the two of you lie down right here then. Thanta over here, Christa here, we'll want to be able to see both of you. No, lie facing each other, on your stomachs. Put your head by that ring, Thanta. You get your head next to that one there, Christa. There ya go!"

Thanta wriggled, her breasts pressed against the floor, trying to get comfortable. Looking up, she found herself looking into the frightened eyes of Christa. Thanta did her best to look calm, in spite of her hammering heart. Christa seemed to relax slightly; she could tell Thanta was a Club veteran, so if she wasn't worried, evidently everything would be okay.

At a signal from the emcee, two beefy men entered from the side, bearing equipment. They dropped it noisily on the floor, causing louder murmurs from the mostly hushed audience, and immediately picked out a pair of handcuffs each. The one next to Thanta knelt with the handcuffs, and she helpfully put her hands behind her back, feeling the cuffs slapped onto her wrists and quickly locked.

She'd never had handcuffs like this, she realized. They seemed to be connected by some sort of spring-loaded mechanism. She could pull the cuffs as much as an inch apart easily before they suddenly snapped back together. She tried it again and again, wondering what the purpose was.

At least the gag was ordinary, though big. Thanta opened her mouth politely to let the man insert it, watching Christa flinch away from hers. With a first show of force, the man held her head with one hand and pinched her nose with the other, quickly shoving the ball in as she opened her mouth to breathe. Christa shot a terrified look at Thanta, who nodded to try to reassure her. She wished she could smile for her.

At a whining sound from above Thanta craned her neck to look upward, and saw a winch mechanism lowering a chain ending in a ring, directly above her back, and another over Christa's. It stopped within four feet of the floor. Each of the two men picked up a rope from the floor, one end of it tied to form a noose. Thanta closed her eyes as the man pulled the noose down over her head and slid the knot closed around her neck. Christa, who had at least known this was coming, looked scared again nevertheless, and Thanta could see a tear rolling down her cheek. The free end of each rope was fed through the ring hanging above each girl's back. Thanta felt her feet gathered together and lifted off the floor, and the man quickly used the rope to tie her ankles together.

At a signal from the emcee, a hidden operator flicked switches to slowly raise the winches until each girl's head was just beginning to be pulled off the floor. The winches stopped humming suddenly. Thanta could still rest her chin on the floor, but her neck could no longer reach it. She could feel any tiny twitch of her feet immediately around her neck. She closed her eyes, feeling the wetness dribbling between her legs.

"With just one more piece of equipment, we'll be ready to go." The men each picked up something Thanta hadn't noticed, in her concentration on everything else happening: a pair of cruel-looking nipple clamps connected by an elastic band. The man put his hand under her shoulders and lifted, and she winced as the clamp took hold, squeezing the skin of her breast tightly behind the nipple, holding her breast so firmly she knew it would take a strong pull to dislodge it. He fed the free end through the ring in the floor in front of Thanta's head, and brought it back to clamp the other end to her other breast. Her eyes closed tight in pain, she could hear the other girl trying to scream through her gag.

"Okay, we're about ready to begin. I want both of you girls to listen very closely, for your own safety. Christa honey, you're going to need to lie still and stop tugging at those cuffs. Okay sweety?" He waited and, in a moment, she looked up and nodded, tears now streaming down her cheeks. Thanta waited quietly, feeling tears starting in her own eyes, her breasts twin pinpoints of pain lying on the clamps.

"Girls, listen up: we're going to turn on the special contest machinery as soon as I stop talking. I'm sure you've noticed something unusual about your handcuffs. That spring is connected to a transmitter that sends a signal to the winch. Every time you tug on your cuffs, they will send a signal that causes the winch to raise the rope an inch. You'll be perfectly fine if you can just lie perfectly, absolutely still for an hour. Okay, let's go!"

The crowd, quiet during the setup and explanation, suddenly roared louder than ever: this had to be the most brilliant idea ever conceived by the Club's Games Committee. Laughter and applause erupted from every corner of the room.

Thanta could see Christa shaking her head frantically. She wanted to tell the girl to stop, but could only watch as the winch raised the rope holding her at least four inches, maybe more. Christa caught on just in time, her head pulled completely off the floor, held tightly by the noose. Her weight was still resting painfully on her breasts, as well as her tummy and thighs, but she couldn't hold her head up that high using her neck muscles alone, and Thanta could hear her starting to strangle. The girl looked at Thanta with pleading eyes, as if somehow she could help her.

Thanta saw that the situation was perfectly diabolical. As hard as she worked to keep her hands still, wrapping the fingers of each hand around the wrist of the other, it was a powerful instinct to try to free her hands when threatened with choking. Using every ounce of concentration telling herself to lie still, without moving a muscle, within the first minute she had already tugged twice on the handcuffs, with a noticeable effect: she could no longer touch the floor with her chin. As the weight of her head lying across the rope began to compress her windpipe, the compulsion to try to free her hands grew stronger -- the farther this went, the more quickly the rope would rise, pulling her up by the ankles and neck. Soon, also, the elastic stretched out between her nipple clamps would begin to elongate her breasts, adding to the pain, increasing the compulsion to move her hands. Thanta knew that what Dan had said was true. This was real. Very real.

A cool breeze blowing through the room told her just how wet her pussy was getting.