Owners by the Dozen (Slave of the Aristocracy Book 4) Read online

  “Help yourself, Geoffrey,” Drake said.

  This was the son.

  Geoffrey didn’t ask for an explanation. He stood behind Irene, dropped his trousers, worked his cock for a minute to get rigid, and then thrust it into her cunt.

  “Now, Irene, what were you saying?”

  She bent her head upward to look at Drake’s face. “I’m here on behalf of Adele Bishop. She is the niece of one of my owners.” Irene’s words were broken because Geoffrey’s thrusting was interrupting her breathing but she managed to make herself understood.

  “Your twelve owners.”

  “She was your son’s girlfriend until he broke up with her.”

  “Not so. Geoffrey doesn’t have girlfriends, just girls that he uses for a while. And he never makes any promises to them.”

  “You lent her a substantial amount of money.”

  “Nine thousand plaqs, right, Geoffrey?”

  Geoffrey didn’t answer. His mind was lost in his cock, which was thrusting hard in and out of her cunt.

  “You have foreclosed on that debt,” Irene said.

  “Technically, not. I have called for payment. I will be foreclosing in a few days if I do not receive nine thousand plaqs.”

  “I’m begging you not to drive her into bankruptcy. Not to press her into slavery.”

  “That was the whole point of the exercise. Why would I not proceed?”

  The stimulation in her cunt was distracting her. She liked sex. Even if she detested the young asshole who was fucking her, he was filling her nicely. She had to concentrate to keep her thoughts clear. “Adele will pay you back after she graduates and gets a job. You can add reasonable interest. That will accumulate over the next two years and provide you with ample compensation for your loan.”

  Geoffrey was grunting loudly, now.

  “Our investment in her was greater than the principle of the loan. We bought her an expensive dress, admission to the horse races, and took her to a ball. I don’t have the exact figures in front of me, but I believe that our total investment was nearly thirteen thousand plaqs.”

  “I understood that the dress was a gift,” Irene said.

  “I view it as an investment on which I expect a return.”

  “Very well, then we will consider the entire loan to be thirteen thousand, with payments to begin six months after she graduates.”

  “If I were to agree to that, then we would lose more than fifteen thousand plaqs.”

  Damn, Geoffrey’s pounding in her cunt was making it hard to concentrate. “I don’t understand.”

  “When she is adjudicated into slavery, she will be bound over to us as redemption for her debts. We will auction her. She is a pretty girl. She will fetch at least thirty thousand on the block. Maybe she will go as high as thirty-five if bidding is brisk. A thirty-thousand plaq sale on a thirteen thousand investment returns a seventeen-thousand plaq profit. Surely you don’t think that I’m going to forego seventeen thousand plaqs just because you gave me a blow job.”

  The fronts of her thighs were getting sore where Geoffrey was pounding them against the edge of Drake’s desk. “You want to consider the principle on Adele’s debt to be thirty thousand plaqs when you only lent her nine thousand?” Irene’s choler was rising at the injustice.

  “No. I don’t want that at all. I want to sell her at auction. Even if I were to accept thirty thousand with interest – say five percent compounded annually on the outstanding balance, payments to begin in twenty-four months and amortized over a ten-year period – I would only be compensated for the minimum that I could expect. I’ve seen slaves like Adele sell for as high as fifty thousand. Not often, I admit, but it can happen. Why would I forego even a slim possibility of such a rich profit?”

  “What if we split the difference? And call her debt forty thousand? With the interest and terms? That you just offered?” She was getting close to coming. Her words were coming in bursts between her panting.

  “Forty thousand plaqs? You think that she could ever afford to repay that? A commoner with no connections who is likely to be a secretary or shopkeeper? She couldn’t manage a debt like that even if she went to work in a whorehouse and serviced two-dozen men every day. She’ll be better off as a pleasure slave than as a whore. I’m doing her a favor by selling her.”

  Geoffrey grunted and came hard in her cunt.

  She had to stop speaking while she came along with him.

  When she could speak again, she said, “You have a reputation as a shrewd business man. I can respect that, but I never realized that you were a slaver.”

  “Don’t lie to me. You and your ilk never respected me. You disrespected me exactly because I’m a businessman. You don’t respect money that’s earned, only money that’s inherited. I wasn’t born to a knighthood. I earned every penny that I have through my businesses and my first business, long before I was rich enough to be knighted, was pressing foolish young women into slavery. The women who were too beautiful to let me court them were never too beautiful to borrow money from me. And every one of that I pressed into slavery serviced me to my full satisfaction before I sent them to auction. You can’t auction virgins, you know, so I had to make certain that they weren’t.”

  He looked over Irene’s head at his son, who was fastening his trousers. “I’m definitely looking forward to ascertaining that Adele Bishop is no virgin. In every possible way. Geoffrey will undoubtedly want to double-check that, as well. He’s more talented and enthusiastic at turning out pleasure slaves than I ever was. And I was damned good at it.”

  That was his final answer.

  It wouldn’t be long before young Adele was bent over this very desk, pressing her naked tits against Drake’s ledgers while he pounded her cunt. Irene could handle the degradation but that poor girl would be traumatized.

  She scooped her dress off the floor, slipped it on, and began the long climb back down the aptly named service stairs.

  * * *

  It was Caleb’s turn to have her for the day. This was the first time that she had been with him since he had proposed breeding her at the last meeting and she had argued against him.

  Caleb was a small, grizzled man of about forty years. His face had a pugnacious appearance that matched his temperament. He didn’t have a natural under bite, but he constantly thrust his lower jaw past his upper out of long habit.

  He didn’t look happy with her when he came to her apartment. It was early in the afternoon. On his two previous days, he had done the same: come to her at about two and stayed with her until almost midnight.

  “What can I do for you?” she asked.

  “Yeah, right,” he said. “It’s all, ‘What can I do for you?’ now. But at the meeting last week, it was, ‘Everything you say is wrong.’”

  “I’m sorry if you saw it that way, but I didn’t want my owners, including you, to make a decision that you were going to regret. A lot of people think that breeding slaves is easy money. But if you look closely at the enterprise, you can see that it’s a nasty business that costs a lot in the short term and doesn’t earn much money in the long term. Which is why so few slave owners do it.”

  “That’s your opinion.”

  “That’s the truth.” It was intemperate for her to argue with him, but Caleb’s certainty about his own opinions often goaded others into saying too much.

  “I expect slaves to keep their opinions to themselves.”

  “I have twelve owners. When I’m with you, I’ll keep quiet. But when I’m with another owner who wants me to talk, then I have to talk. Slaves don’t have any choice when their owner gives them a order.”

  “You’re with me now, so shut up.”

  She nodded and said nothing.

  “There ought to be some way to make money from a slave.”

  There was. On the days when she was his, he could prostitute her. Order her to service men for money all day long. Fortunately, he had told her to shut up and he hadn’t asked her an explicit question
, so she didn’t have to suggest that to him.

  She also had excellent talent for organizing orgies and had acquired a good reputation among the aristocracy. Caleb could make more money contracting her out as an entertainment director than as a whore.

  She kept quiet about that, too, as per Caleb’s last instruction.

  “I ought to beat you for the way you behaved in that meeting. Contradicting me like that.”

  She said nothing.

  “What do you think about getting beaten?”

  A direct question. “If you wish to punish me, I can suggest ways to do it.”

  “Yeah? What do you suggest?”

  “Some men like taking a belt or paddle to my ass. Or using their hand for a more intimate punishment.” She was hoping for a hand. That didn’t bruise as much as spanking with an implement. “Partial suspension – hanging me by my hands so that my heels are off the floor is surprisingly painful. When my calves get too tired for me to stay on my toes, then all my weight pulls on my shoulders. Half an hour is a long time when you’re hanging by your hands. You’d need to install a hook in the ceiling, but a quick trip to a hardware store could fix that. Crucifixion is similar but hurts even worse. A half hour of crucifixion makes me wish I’d never been born. That would require hooks in the walls. Alternatively, you could make my punishment appropriate to my transgression. A traditional punishment for speaking inappropriately is to repeatedly dunk a slave. Hold my head under water for a while. That’s a little tricky because you don’t want to drown me. But the period between running out of air and drowning is a terrible punishment. Or, less drastically, you could gag me for the evening. A simple gag is annoying at first but gets oppressive after a while. A gag that stretches the jaws open too far, like a ball shoved into the mouth, can be quite painful from the moment that it’s inserted. There are more complex gags. For example, a brank is a whole harness around the head. It has a piece that inserts into the mouth to hold the tongue down. Sometimes that piece is spiked so that any movement of the tongue pierces and tears it. Unfortunately, we don’t have one of those around here.”

  Caleb was staring at her. “Anything else?”

  “Sure. You can tie me into any of a number of painful positions. Don’t let me sleep. Don’t let me eat. Make me eat really hot peppers. Make me sit or lie on tacks or nails. Insert needles into me. Pinch me with clamps, especially my nipples or sexual organs. Burn me with hot candle wax. Freeze me with ice cubes.”

  “Have your owners done all those things to you?”

  “Most of them. Not all. I’ve never experienced having a brank in my mouth. I’ve just heard about it. And I’ve never been tortured with hot peppers.”

  “What about nails?”

  “I’ve been forced to spend all night lying on a bed of nails. And I’ve been strapped to a chair that was covered with sharp tacks. The chair was worse because the tacks were sharper than the nails.”

  “It doesn’t sound like there’s much that I can do to you that hasn’t already been done.”

  “Not much. But you don’t have to worry about that. I’ll suffer just as much the hundredth time that my ass gets beaten as the first. It’s not something that a slave starts liking just because she’s been beaten a lot already.”

  He drew the belt from his pants. “Bend over.”

  She was already naked. She stood in the middle of the room and grabbed her ankles.

  He doubled his belt and laid a hard stroke across her buttocks.

  She yelped in pain.

  He hit her again and she yelped again.

  By the fifth stroke she was dancing in place, her hands still grabbing her ankles.

  By the tenth stroke, she was crying loudly and sincerely. Tears were flowing down her face.

  Caleb stopped whipping her. “Stand up and face me.”

  She stood and faced him.

  “Are you sorry that you spoke against me in the meeting?”

  She nodded.

  “Are you going to do it again?”

  She nodded again.

  “What?”

  “If one of my other owners order me to speak my mind, then I will have to speak my mind.”

  “Bend over again.”

  She grabbed her ankles and offered her ass for further abuse.

  He set to waling on her already tender and bruised butt with twice his previous vigor.

  She set to wailing with twice her previous vigor.

  After he had administered another ten strokes, the said, “Stand up and face me.”

  Once again, he asked, “Are you going to speak against me if someone else tells you to?”

  “If it’s one of my other owners, I have no choice.”

  “Bend over.”

  “Please have mercy on me. Please. I’m begging you. I’m in terrible pain.” But, even as she was begging for mercy, she was turning away, bending over, and presenting her ass for further whipping.

  The next ten strokes make her shriek like to wake the neighbors. Between each stroke, she continued to plead for mercy.

  This time, when he was finished, he didn’t ask her any more questions. He threaded his belt back through the loops on his pants and left the apartment.

  He hadn’t given her permission to stand up, but he hadn’t ordered her to stay bent over, either.

  After a few minutes, when it was clear that he wasn’t coming back immediately, she slowly unbent. But she didn’t try to sit down. Her ass was far too sore. It would be bruised black and blue tomorrow.

  It was almost half an hour before he returned. She was still standing in the middle of the room.

  “Open your mouth.”

  She opened her mouth wide.

  He shoved a small piece of plywood inside. A dozen small, sharp nails had been pounded through the wood. They extended a quarter of in inch and pressed painfully against her tongue. The splintery, unsanded edges of the wood cut into the roof of her mouth right above her teeth.

  She worked hard to suppress her need to gag and eject the horrible thing from her mouth.

  Two holes had been drilled in the end of the wood and a cord was threaded through them. He tied the ends of the cord behind her head so that she couldn’t spit the spiked piece out.

  “It’s not quite that brank thing that you described, but it’s the same idea. You won’t be talking now, will you?”

  She shook her head silently. The presence of the wood made her excrete copious amounts of saliva. She had to keep swallowing even though that made her tongue work against the sharp points and caused notable pain. There was no way that she could speak, even in a whisper, without tearing the surface of her tongue against the cruel device.

  “How about we leave that in there for the rest of the night?”

  She nodded miserably. It was going to be a long night.

  “Now give me a royal fucking.”

  She nodded again, slowly so that she didn’t jostle the thing in her mouth.

  Silently, she stripped his clothes from him. Then she laid him on his back on the bed.

  He let her take the lead, curious about what she intended.

  He was mostly erect, but not entirely hard yet.

  She couldn’t use her lips and tongue to guarantee his erection, so she pulled the tube of lube from her bedside stand, spread a generous amount on her hands, and then worked him manually. In a minute, he was as hard as the piece of wood in her mouth.

  She straddled him and then lowered herself until she was impaled on his cock.

  She grabbed his waist to steady herself and then began massaging his cock with rhythmic contacts of her cunt. It was a skill that she had worked hard to perfect since she had been enslaved.

  As she worked, her mouth filled with drool and she kept swallowing. The action hurt her tongue every time, but she didn’t want to drip drool on the man below her. If he objected to that, then he might whip her ass all over again.

  The contractions of her vulva were stimulating her as much as him. When he cam
e, she came, too. But she made not the slightest noise while he howled to the gods.

  She wondered if he knew that she’d come. She wondered if he would care.

  For the rest of the evening, they sat on the couch and he talked for hours, mostly telling her his opinions about politics. That surprised her.

  Government was the province of the aristocracy. The lords selected the governor from the marquettes while the earls ran the various departments. Baronets and knights staffed the senior positions in the civil service. The government was entirely funded by property taxes. As only aristocrats could own property, only aristocrats paid taxes. The only role for commoners in the entire government was to take contracts for civil work – building roads, staffing the police and fire departments, serving in the military, and so forth.

  Her former husband, Lord Fortson, and his friends discussed politics incessantly, but she never guessed that a commoner would know anything about it. Or care.

  Not that Caleb’s opinions were especially well informed, or even coherent. He didn’t know who did what. But he did have a general idea that committees of marquettes, assisted by their departments, wrote edicts and budgets, which were approved by a vote in the Assembly of Lords, vetted by the Privy Council of Earls, and then passed to the Governor for signature and proclamation.

  And he had strong opinions about the merits of various edicts that had been proclaimed during the past few years. The general gist of his opinions was that the aristocracy was taking good care of them and that commoners who complained about the edicts and the government were ignorant ingrates.

  From what he said, she inferred that a great many commoners had a great many complaints about the aristocracy. She had been wise not to tell her owners that she had been raised as an aristocrat.

  All the time that Caleb rambled on and on, Irene spoke not a word. She drooled continuously around the spiked gag in her mouth.

  By the time Caleb left, well after nine o’clock, the front of her body was drenched from neck to knees with saliva. The cord that held the hateful gag in place was so wet that she couldn’t untie the knot at the back of her neck and she had to cut it with a paring knife.