Page 19 of Under His Heel

“Nothing to say?”

Anger boiled up inside Alex. “Say? If I say something wrong, you might not let me eat, and fuck you if you think I’m ever going hungry again.”

The moment the words were out of his mouth, Alex realized his mistake. Tracht looked absolutely delighted, and he knelt down so he was almost eye-level with Alex. “Again?”

No. No. Alex wasn’t sharing this with Tracht. He clamped his mouth shut.

“The fact that you don’t want to tell me makes me want to know even more.” Tracht leaned forward and licked right along Alex’s scar. Alex recoiled backwards, ending up sprawled on his back on the floor.

Tracht stood back up and placed a foot right against Alex’s balls. “Do you want to know something, Alex?”

Alex tensed up. “Not really. But I bet you’ll tell me anyway.”

“Of course.” That boot, the boot that Alex had kissed just ten minutes ago, pressed forward with just enough pressure to hint at real pain. “We are currently between Cadmus and Atalanta Stations. A very dangerous stretch of space. Do you know what makes it dangerous?”

Wasn’t all space travel dangerous? It had terrified Alex the first time, but by the fourth trip he’d gotten the hang of it. “Asteroids?”

Tracht chuckled. “Possible, but not the real problem. No, the real problem is that this stretch contains a communications dead zone. If we send a signal out, there is very little chance of anybody picking it up. We could have a ship malfunction. We could be attacked by pirates. We could, somehow, end up colliding with an asteroid. No help would come. This is not an area with satellites or patrols.”

“So?” Alex yelped when Tracht pressed down harder.

“So, that means that the little collar around your neck, that protects you from me, that calls for help in case I abuse you so horribly it would be considered a breach of contract—that collar will be sending signals to nowhere. Nobody would come help you.”

Retreating wasn’t a conscious move. Alex grit his teeth through the pain to get away from Tracht and scrambled to the other end of the room. With his back in the corner he looked on in horror as Tracht laughed.

“You– you wouldn’t. You... you work for Lysander Corp. You have to go back. At some point.” Alex’s voice was doing that high-pitched thing again, making him sound like the whiniest little pussy.

“Hmm. That is a fair point. Good job, you thought of something halfway clever.” Tracht grinned. “But I could pierce you all over. Give you a nice Prince Albert, or maybe a tongue piercing. I could scar you up and then have Singh remove the scars before we entered a communications zone again. I could pump you full of hormones and give you breasts, and then wean you off them. And when you come back, looking exactly as you did before, who do you think the debt-leasing center will believe?”

Not Alex, that was for sure. Not after he’d already attempted to escape, not with his big debt and vagrant lifestyle. Definitely not in favor of somebody who was obviously important and rich, working for one of the biggest companies on Cadmus Station.

He started shaking his head, images of his own deformed body running through his mind. He didn’t– he didn’t want to look different. Wasn’t it bad enough that he had the scars that he did, that Tracht had removed his body hair? He didn’t want tits or piercings.

“So do not think that I don’t know how to exploit the loopholes in the contract. Now, when did you go hungry last, Alex? What made you decide to never go hungry again?”

Would Tracht even really do it? He hadn’t pulled Alex’s tooth out. He– hadn’t done anything but humiliate Alex so far.

The cleaning had been terrible though. The hair removal even worse. The shocks to his dick he could do without ever experiencing again.

Alex shook his head. “Can’t we– I mean, you already got full control over my body, right? Do you really need to know every detail about me? Like, not really. Doesn’t matter what I’ve lived through.”

He watched warily as Tracht approached him. The cock cage sent out a sharp zap that had Alex curling even further into himself.

“How much voltage do you think it would take to render your dick completely useless for the duration of our trip? Unable to get hard, sensitive skin layered with micro burns. We’d get that all fixed up before docking anywhere, of course.”

Another series of sharp shocks to his dick.

Alex whimpered. He didn’t know if this was worse than Peter Nilsen pulling out his tooth, if he should be somehow sucking it up. He didn’t want burns on his cock. He didn’t want his dick to not function anymore. Maybe Nick would have found a way out of this situation, but Alex wasn’t that smart.

“Fourteen! We were fourteen!”

The shocks stopped, and Tracht was sitting down next to him and putting an arm around Alex, pulling him into a tense embrace. “Good. Go on.”

“Mom was– weird.” Alex’s voice was unsteady as he forced himself to talk. “She loved us when she was alone, hated us when she had a boyfriend. And then when we were fourteen, her new boyfriend said she could keep either him or us, and so she kicked us out.”

Shit. Alex felt himself going limp and slumping further into Tracht. He hated this story. Ten years since it had happened, and he still remembered the resigned anger he’d felt when his mom’s boyfriend told them to beat it. Nick had tried to convince their mom to keep them, but she’d looked at them with her tired eyes and declared they were old enough to not leech off of her anymore.

“You and Nick?”

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