“I’m torn on what to feed you,” Tracht said when they were back in his private quarters. “Small strips of food from my fingers, or slop from a dog bowl?”
Alex’s stomach grumbled, perfectly timed with the statement. “Don’t even care.”
“Really? No preference at all?” Tracht sounded disappointed, and Alex remembered that Tracht preferred Alex fighting.
“You want me to care, try after I’m not completely exhausted,” Alex bit out. And shit, even that felt like too much fighting, because he really wanted to eat, not get stuffed back in the dark with the memories of the cleaning and hair pulling and the non-orgasm to keep him company.
Tracht sighed loudly. “Very well. Strip and kneel by the couch.” He went to the small fridge in the corner and pulled out a bottle of water and a tray of food.
Oh god. Alex’s mouth was watering already. He stripped and stumbled to the floor, arranging himself as directed and hating his own eagerness. Tomorrow he’d fight more, he promised himself. It was okay to be tired.
Tracht sat down on the couch and held the tray out of reach. “Kiss my boots first. Like you mean it.”
Back to that. But that was nothing, not in comparison to his still aching armpits and balls. Alex leaned forward and pressed a kiss to the tip of the first boot and then another kiss on the calf. Another one further up, just below Tracht’s knees.
He thought he heard Tracht groan, and he repeated the process with the other boot.
“Good,” Tracht said, his voice sounding a lot breathier than normal. “Sit up and open wide.”
Alex did, and Tracht held out a strip of chicken just far enough out of reach that Alex had to lean forward. Tracht’s fingers ended up in his mouth too, and Alex licked them clean of all flavor before he started chewing on the meat.
Oh god. That tasted amazing.
It wasn’t plain chicken; it was properly seasoned, and Alex could tell that this had been a quality meal at some point. When he and Nick had cooked, it tended to be microwave food or instant nutrient shakes. A few times they’d splurged on fancy restaurants, when they knew they’d be skipping stations soon and it wouldn’t matter if they could actually afford the meal or not. This food was on that caliber.
“More?” Tracht asked.
Alex opened his mouth.
This continued, occasionally trading off food for drink, and sometime during the meal, Tracht started petting Alex, touching his lips, his face, his head, rubbing behind his ears. It was weird and unsettling, but in exchange for not starving, Alex was willing to put up with it.
It wasn’t until the last of the food was gone that Alex started really caring about– everything that had happened, really.
Tracht, for his part, looked extremely aroused. “This was a lot more interesting than I expected. You’ve been—” He leaned forward and cupped Alex’s face.
Up close, Tracht didn’t seem half as terrifying. Especially not now, with his mouth slightly parted and his pupils wide with lust. Small lines fanned out from the corners of his eyes, and obvious gray hairs mixed with the dark stubble on his cheeks.
With horror, Alex realized that Tracht was going to kiss him. He quickly turned his face away, and Tracht’s nose bumped against his cheek.
Tracht chuckled into his ear, and the hands that had been gentle now tightened. With one hand, Tracht grabbed Alex’s hair and pulled on it hard, tugging his head back at a sharp angle.
“And here we were doing so well,” Tracht murmured.
“I don’t– fuck you.” Alex spat, and at this short distance, the spit actually landed right on Tracht’s face.
The feeling of victory was short lived: Tracht used his foot to jab Alex’s cock, and Alex howled in pain.
Fuck fuck fuck. Alex curled into himself as much as he could, his vision hazy. He writhed and managed to dislodge Tracht’s hands from him, crawling a few feet away. He had no real place to go though. He was naked save for the bond-servant collar. He was on a ship in the middle of space on its way to who knew where, and if he actually tried to get out of this fucking contract there would be one semi-expansive crime-syndicate looking for him.
Tracht came around with the mitts and encased Alex’s hands. Alex didn’t struggle, not even when Tracht moved Alex’s arms behind his back and attached the mitts to each other.
“Get up,” Tracht said with a sharp slap to Alex’s ass.
It took a few tries, because balancing was difficult like this, but Alex did get to his feet. Tracht stepped up right behind him and ground his hard dick against Alex’s ass. “To the bed.”
“You having fun now?” Alex muttered and received another slap to his ass in response.
Tracht had him get on his knees on the bed, and then he blindfolded him and inserted the ear plugs. Alex’s legs were pulled wide apart, his torso was pushed forward, and he lay in the darkness, not able to anticipate anything that Tracht would do.
He received several slaps to his hole, a few cursory jabs with lubed fingers, more slaps to his ass.
Alex’s eyes started leaking at some point, the moisture making the blindfold damp and uncomfortable.
He jolted when Tracht penetrated him with his cock. But this was familiar enough from the first few nights, and Alex knew he could endure it without feeling much of anything.
Except that Tracht wasn’t just brutally thrusting into him. He was nailing Alex’s prostate, so precisely that it had to be deliberate. Alex’s cock started hardening in response, and with nothing else to distract his attention, Alex found himself drowning in that sensation, the pleasure mingling with the lingering soreness from the cleaning and hair removal. It wasn’t like the cock cage, which had mechanically forced arousal on him. This felt– more real. More immediate.
Alex started struggling. He didn’t want this. He didn’t want Tracht to make him feel good.
He received another few slaps to his ass, and a few moments later he felt the heat of Tracht’s spunk entering him.
There. Done and over with.
Alex startled all over again when Tracht’s hand wrapped around his cock.
Holy fuck. He squirmed, but the hand tightened and started stroking, and then fingers plunged into his sloppy ass, assaulting him from inside too. After the non-orgasm from earlier Alex thought there was no way he had anything left inside him, but he felt that tell-tale sensation of his balls drawing tight.
What happened to Tracht being a selfish lover? Couldn’t they go back to that? Alex found himself sobbing harder, all while Tracht forced this pleasure onto him.
He shuddered and came over Tracht’s hands. Tracht kept stroking, rubbing Alex’s own come all over his dick, and the fingers kept jabbing inside, playing with the splooge and spreading it all around Alex’s hole.
After a few more minutes of this, the fingers retreated, only to reappear at Alex’s mouth.
“Suck,” Tracht’s voice echoed in Alex’s ears.
Alex obediently opened his mouth and sucked, gagging at the taste of himself and Tracht, recoiling when those fingers traced his tongue and gums.
When the fingers were clean, Tracht recaged Alex’s cock and replaced the anal attachment. Then he pushed Alex off the bed and guided him back to the cage via kicks.
“Good night, Alex.”
===
He wasn’t in the darkness nearly as long, Alex didn’t think. He didn’t feel as hungry or thirsty, in any case.
“Are you going to behave today?” Tracht asked. “If you think you can manage, I’ll remove the blindfold and let you crawl around the room.”
Yeah. Alex was going to be-fucking-have. He nodded carefully and found himself sighing in relief when the blindfold and earplugs came off. The mitts were unhooked from each other, relieving the tension on his arms, but they stayed locked around his hands.
Tracht pointed towards his boots. “You know what to do.”
Alex considered not doing it, but he didn’t actually want to get locked up again, and if he got to move around his muscles might loosen up. So he crawled the few steps over and kissed the tip of each boot.
“Good.” Tracht touched the top of Alex’s head. “Tomorrow you’ll help me get dressed. The quality of the rest of your day will depend entirely on how you behave in the mornings.”
Tracht strode away and then placed a dog bowl in front of Alex. It was filled with a gray sludge of some sort, which smelled like undiluted protein powder.
“You have five minutes to eat that. Do not move the bowl. It’s all you’re getting for today.”
There was no real question on what to do. Alex lowered his face into the bowl and started sucking up the gruel. It tasted about as appetizing as plain protein powder would, but at least the moisture meant Alex was no longer thirsty.
He finished just as a timer beeped, his face and nose dripping with leftover sludge. Tracht kicked the bowl away and made Alex look up so that Tracht could wipe his face clean.
“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?”
“Yeah. Me and Nick. We ate out of the trash for a few weeks, until Nick figured out he could beg money off people. And sometimes we’d beat money out of people. Whatever worked. And we got good at both.”
They’d figured out to grab kids or old people who couldn’t fight back all that well. It had taken almost a year, but they managed to earn enough to rent a small room and keep themselves fed. Clothing they usually grabbed from the people they mugged.
“Interesting. And how long did you two do that?”
“Like two years, and then some local gang leader got mad at us for encroaching on her territory. We got lucky ‘cus she didn’t know there were two of us. So we skipped to another station, and...” Alex shrugged. “Started all over again.”
They’d been scared that they’d been followed, but it turned out nobody cared that much about two sixteen year old station brats.
Tracht hmm’ed. “Surely you didn’t continue in that vein the entire time.”
“No. Nick got good at sweet-talking people, and I got good at beating up anybody who had problems with getting scammed by Nick. Their own fault for being dumb enough to fall for Nick’s lies anyway.”
For some reason that made Tracht laugh. Alex pulled away and glared. “What?”
“Alex– your brother was scamming you the entire time too.”
“What? No. We were looking out for each other.”
Tracht patted Alex’s shoulder condescendingly. “Of course you were. And that’s why you had to take all the hits, why you ended up with the large debt, why you took on the bond. I did notice that your brother had a much handsomer face than yours. Clean nose and cheeks.” He traced Alex’s scar with a single finger.
“No. No. You’re wrong. You’re lying.” Alex shook his head. That was impossible. Yeah, he usually ended up hurt more, but Nick would help him afterwards. Usually. Mostly. Not so much with the tooth, that had gone badly all around, but...
Tracht’s hand on his shoulder dipped a bit lower, towards the burn marks. The burns Alex got stepping in to protect Nick from their mom’s cigarettes. That was what he did. He protected Nick. As long as Nick was okay, Alex would be okay too. Nick had been kind of weak as a kid, and had cried when there was danger, so Alex took it upon himself to keep him safe.
But Nick was pretty good at crying on command. He’d used it a lot on the strangers they’d mugged in the early days.
Alex shook his head. No. This was Tracht trying to get into his head. Nick had left Alex behind because there was no other choice for him. He’d said that.
“I like this look on you too,” Tracht murmured straight into his ear, and Alex didn’t resist when he got pulled into a kiss this time. Tracht’s tongue plunged into his mouth, exploring all over, while Alex just kept himself slack.
He hadn’t been manipulated all his life. That couldn’t be true.
Eventually Tracht pulled away, looking satisfied with himself. “Oh Alex. I almost feel bad for you.”
Not this pity shit again. Alex got enough of himself together to glare. “Fuck off. We can’t all be born rich like you.”
“We really all can’t. I would hardly expect anybody else to be lucky enough to have a sister who married into the Lysander Corporation’s CEO’s family. I might have been a regular merchant captain scrambling for contracts if not for that fortuitous connection.” Tracht extracted himself and stood up. “No, I feel bad that you were too dumb to see through your brother. But I find myself glad for it, because I am enjoying your body very much.”
He looked at his wrist watch. “And now I must definitely get to work. I’ve left the tablet on the table. If you can find a way to operate it without the use of your hands, feel free to enjoy the entertainment videos on it. I’ll pick you up in the afternoon to take you to the gym. As much as I enjoy keeping you here, I absolutely can’t have your muscles atrophying completely. They’re the only thing of value you have.”
Alex was still seething about that comment long after Tracht had left.