Upward Ambition Ch. 05

"No." It comes out more as a croak than a word.

The corners of his mouth twist slightly.

"Tell the truth: that night after I whipped you and gave you your first taste of cock, you went home and jerked off to the memory of it, didn't you?" It's not really a question. I break from his gaze, my cheeks flaming. "That's what I thought."

"That doesn't mean anything," I mumble.

"You're addicted to your own self-loathing, Jack." He squeezes my chin and forces my eyes back to his. "You get off on being humiliated because you think it's what you deserve. And more than that, you like when someone else takes control of you because then you don't have to take responsibility for yourself. When you're helpless and broken at my feet, you don't have to think about your shitty life and all the expectations you failed to meet—especially your own."

I hate you I hate you I hate you. Tears are pouring down my cheeks. Coming face to face with the reality of my whole existence, laid out so neatly and nonchalantly by Derek fucking Harrow, hurts worse than any of the torments he's put me through.

"You're wrong," I whisper. I don't know who I'm trying to convince—me or him.

He doesn't seem fazed. In fact, he shrugs, then he reaches down and unbuckles the restraints on my wrists and thighs, freeing me. He relaxes back on the couch, slinging his arms over the back. The sudden loss of his mouth so close to mine and his hands on my bare skin is more disorienting than I care to admit.

"Okay," he says. "If I'm wrong, then there's no reason for you to stay. If I'm wrong, then you can get up right now and walk away. Your belongings are in the closet by the front door."

It feels like a trap. I search his face for some hint of irony, some sign that if I try to move he'll immediately throw me over his lap and start thrashing me. But he looks entirely genuine.

He also looks like he doesn't care one way or another. That alone almost drives me to my feet, but I'm halted by the memory of him the night before as he drove into me. You belong to me, Jack Spencer...You're mine.

I don't move. I can't. It feels like I've been wandering around for years, lost and alone, and I've finally found the northern star. I still hate him. I hate him so much, but he's right—I need him. I can't give him up.

His lips stretch into a slow smile. He snags my collar and pulls me in for a kiss, hot and sucking and not nearly long enough.

"Now why don't you stop complaining," he says into my ear, "and ride my cock like a good little slut."

My fingers fumble with the opening of his trousers. He's half-hard but it only takes a few strokes of my hands before he's at full mast. My own dick is hard and throbbing—I don't know when exactly that happened. He sticks his fingers in my mouth and uses my own spit as lubrication. I know it's not going to be nearly enough, but I also know better than to complain. I angle the head of his penis against my pucker and press slowly down. He puts his hands on my hips, and I'm afraid he's going to force me down all the way, but he lets me continue with my careful pace.

My channel burns, still raw from last night's fucking, but it's not entirely unpleasant. My knee and thigh muscles quiver with the effort of keeping myself up. Derek was right that I used to run track, but all that conditioning is years gone. I still have several inches left to go when my traitorous legs give out, and I skewer myself with a groan. Even when I'm fully seated, he doesn't move. It seems that once again, I'm going to be expected to do all the work.

I shift my hips slightly, trying to gain the leverage my poor legs need to keep this up. Derek tightens his grip on me and leans in to kiss me again. As he spears my mouth with his tongue, I impale myself again and again on his pole, trying to find a rhythm. He ducks his head and finds my nipples with his teeth, alternating between licking and biting until they are hard as pebbles and so sensitive that even the slightest brush of his tongue makes me moan. I quickly find the angle I need to hit my prostate, and I have to grip his shoulders to keep myself from touching my own needy cock.

He lets me ride him until I'm so exhausted I can barely move—which really isn't as long as it should have been. I'm beginning to see how a regular fitness routine might come in handy. Then he digs his fingers into my hips and takes control, pounding into me from below. I bury my face in his shoulder, overwhelmed by how completely he fills me, by how entirely he owns me.

He comes with a low moan, coating my insides with his hot cum. Then he deposits me back on my knees and makes me clean myself off his dick, grabbing my hair and forcing me down on it when I hesitate in disgust. When he has been sucked clean, he doesn't let me come, but he does let me curl up on the couch next to him to sleep while he finishes his work, which is the closest thing to kindness he's ever shown me. I don't think I'll be able to sleep, but it only takes a few minutes before I'm dead to the world.

He wakes me up for dinner. I get to sit at the table this time, although I'm still wearing nothing but that stupid collar. The butler serves three courses, and I devour each of them in turn. As much as I hate to admit it, the gourmet food is much better than the cheap pizza I would've had at my apartment. If I didn't know any better, I'd think Derek was trying to impress me (seriously, who has porterhouse steak on a regular Saturday night), but I suspect that he always eats this well. Hence his derision of my penchant for frozen TV dinners.

"So did the butler come with the house?" I ask.

He seems a little surprised at the question, like he'd forgotten I had the capacity for speech outside of begging.

"Groves has worked for the family since I was a boy," he says, swirling the last of the red wine in his glass. "When my father died, I asked him if he wanted to stay on, and he did."

"And what does Groves think about you drugging your subordinates and tying them to a bed?" Yet again, my full stomach has made me reckless, but rather than offended, he seems amused.

"He's paid not to care, and so he doesn't, as long as his paychecks gets signed. That's why my father kept him around. He's good at pretending not to notice things." On the last, the amusement in his tone fades, and the thin line of a frown appears between his brows.

I'm not sure what to make of that, but I take a guess. Even though it was tragic, Mike Harrow's death didn't come as a surprise. He battled liver cancer for a year, still coming into work every day until the last few weeks when he was hospitalized. I remember someone told me that Derek didn't fly in from London until the day of the funeral. It takes a cold bastard to keep working while your father wastes away in the hospital, but anyone who'd ever so much as met Derek wasn't surprised. I wonder if maybe there was another reason he didn't come. Maybe seeing his father withered and in pain wasn't something he could handle.

"Mike was a really great guy," I said cautiously. It occurs to me that I never actually gave Derek any condolences. Even at the funeral, I never got up the nerve to approach him. There were so many people there it's not like he would have noticed anyway. "Losing him was terrible."

The frown clears, and he shoots me a flippant look.

"Was it?" He drains the rest of his wine. "You're one of the few people who thinks so."

I blink. Whatever reaction I had expected, it wasn't this.

"What?" I ask, wondering if I somehow misunderstood. It would be one thing if Derek didn't get along with his father, but I'd never heard anyone suggest anything but the utmost respect for the man.

"Mike loved to play the part of everyone's best friend, everyone's favorite boss, but really he was a selfish, sociopathic piece of shit who would sell his own mother into slavery if he thought it would benefit him. He left a long trail of ruined lives in his wake."

"That's—that's not true." I'm aware how ridiculous it is to assume that I knew Mike better than his own son, but on the other hand, isn't it patently obvious that Derek himself is the sociopathic piece of shit? I'm hardly going to take his word for it. "I worked with him for five years. He was always nice to me. He helped me out a lot in my career."

"Did he?" Derek raised an eyebrow at me. "How many promotions did he put you up for in those five years? How many times did he even suggest that you might be ready to move into a better position?"

I flounder, thinking back over the years, but I can't come up with a single example.

"Exactly," says Derek, sounding bored. "And if you'd tried to leave before he was ready to let you go, then you would have found your future job prospects mysteriously sabotaged."

"At least I wouldn't have found myself bent over his desk," I retort hotly.

Again, instead of offended, he looks amused. He regards me for a few seconds, lips twitching. Then he pours himself some more wine.

"I hate to break it to you," he says, "but you were too old for him."

For a long while, I'm too stunned to speak. It feels like everything I thought I knew is being ripped out from under me, like the last five years of my life were nothing but a lie.

"I don't believe you," I manage.

"I don't care if you do or not," he says with a shrug. "I'm glad he's dead, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise."

"If he was so evil, then why have you spent your whole life working for him?" I demand.

He eyes me over his wine glass. I can't tell what's going on in his head. His features, as always, are crisply indifferent.

"I'm done talking about my father," he says at last, in a tone to match his expression. "Now finish eating. I've been working all day, and I'm ready to take a break."

I don't even have to ask what the nature of that break is going to be. Whatever it is, it's probably going to hurt. I finish my meal as slowly as I dare, to stave off the inevitable without incurring his wrath. When I'm done, he leads me on the leash back up to the bedroom from the night before. I had a faint hope that I might get off easy with a quick buggering, but that's dashed pretty quickly.

First he forces my arms behind my back and binds my forearms together horizontally with some kind of tape. It's both debilitating and uncomfortable. I'm all but helpless as he heaves me onto the bed like a sack of potatoes. He ties the leash tightly around the spindles of the headboard. I wriggle experimentally, but if try to move more than a couple of inches in any direction, the collar cuts off my air supply.

I'm on my back, and with my arms folded beneath me, my chest is pushed up with my nipples completely unprotected. And just in case I thought my thighs might be getting a reprieve, his final touch is a spreader bar cuffed between my ankles to keep my legs painfully wide and my penis, scrotum, and asshole easily accessible.

Christ, do they teach classes on this sort of thing? How does he manage to make me feel so utterly open and vulnerable with so little effort?

I try to keep my breathing calm as he straddles my hips. He hasn't even taken off his shirt.

"Can we at least have a safeword this time?" I ask. The collar's edges are already starting to dig into my skin.

"You can have as many safewords as you want," he says. Earlier he put a small, black zippered case on the bed, and now he grabs it and sets it beside my hip. "But I'm not letting you go until I'm done with you."

"But I—" Before I can say more, he leans forward and grasps the leash at the back of my neck, yanking it tight so that I choke on my objection.

His face is only inches away from mine. He plants a soft kiss on my mouth, drags his lips along my cheekbone, and then bites down on my earlobe. I try to yelp, but only manage a strangled gurgle.

"Let's get something straight," he says into my ear. I can barely hear him above my desperate wheezing. "Just because I explained your own neurosis to you and told you about my father, that doesn't make us friends, or confidantes, or lovers. You're my fucktoy, to do with as I please. Since you seem to keep forgetting that, I've got something to help remind you."

He lets go of the leash and sits up. I gasp for air as he unzips the pouch and dumps the contents onto my stomach. It takes me a few seconds to realize what I'm seeing. Small metal clamps. At least a dozen of them.

I twist violently, as if dislodging the hateful things from my torso will save me from my fate. All it does is earn me a stinging slap across my face.

"If you can't lie still," Derek says in a detached tone, "I'll strap you down so tightly it hurts to breathe."

I do my best to obey, even though I can't help the heaving of my chest. Derek leans down again and stabs at my left nipple with his tongue. He teases and nibbles at it until it's aching and stiff, then he snaps a clamp onto it. I scream, bucking and arching my back instinctively. Derek pushes me back down and starts the same treatment on my right nipple. I'm better prepared for it this time, but I can still barely bite back my cry when the clamp bites onto my sensitive nub.

I realize the two clamps are connected by a loose silver chain. Derek slides his finger underneath it and tugs it upward. I arch my back, trying to relieve the increased strain on my nipples, but I can only bend so far. I want to beg him to stop, but I can't manage to form any words. My sobbing cries remain shapeless and unheeded.

"How about we give that mouth something useful to do?" Derek sets a clamp in the center of the chain, then pulls it upward—my nipples with it. He shoves the clamp into my mouth. "Hold it there."

I close my lips around it, trying to breathe through my nose. My nipples feel like they're going to snap right off my chest. I tuck my chin, trying to give the chain as much slack as possible, but it doesn't make much difference.

With my chin against my chest, I have an excellent view of Derek as he moves his attention down my stomach. In neat, methodical fashion, he creates two even rows of four on the milk lines of my torso. They hurt less than the clamps on my nipples, but it still feels like my entire torso is on fire. I'm trembling and sweating so hard, it's a miracle that none of them have popped off yet.

Derek backs off my hips to kneel between my legs. As he begins to tenderly massage my scrotum, I wonder if my brain will be kind enough to black out before this goes much further. With one hand, Derek lightly pinches some of the loose skin of my sac. With the other, he picks up a clamp. I close my eyes rather than bear witness to what's coming next.

It's like my entire consciousness narrows down to that one single point of bright, agonizing, impossible pain. I scream and thrash so hard that if Derek hadn't held me down, I probably would have wrenched more than one joint out of socket. I lose the chain from my mouth. I know he'll punish me for that later. I can't bring myself to care. There's no room left in my entire body for anything but the single, inescapable concept of anguish.

He's not done yet.

I lose count of the clamps on my scrotum. The thin flesh is pulled so taut by them I'm surprised it hasn't ripped. Maybe it has. I'm in so much pain; I don't think I'd know the difference. At this point, I would have thought my tear ducts would be dried out, but somehow tears are still draining down the sides of my face, splattering in the shells of my ears. My breath comes in ragged, uneven gasps.

I'm so lost in my own misery that I don't even notice when Derek slides off the bed. It's his voice that drags me out of my own head.

"You see why I didn't let you have a safeword, Jack?" He steps into my blurry line of vision. He's pulled off his shirt, and oh god, he's holding the riding crop. "You would have used it well before now, and I'm just starting to have my fun."

"Why—" I manage, my voice thick with tears and mucus. "Why are you doing this to me?"

"Fucktoys aren't owed explanations." He smacks me lightly across the cheek with the crop, but then he leans closer. "But I'm feeling generous tonight. I've told you before that you have an ass that begs to be whipped, and a mouth made to be stuffed with cock. You've also got nipples that are made to be pinched—" He slides the crop beneath the chain and gives a swift upward tug, drawing a shriek from me as I arch my back in vain. "—and skin made to be marked. Your balls are made to be tortured, and your hole is just begging to be reamed out."

He drags the crop across the clamps on my scrotum, sending a new wave of agony rippling through me. When I cry out, he shoves the leather loop of the crop into my open mouth, gagging me on it.

"You sound so lovely when you scream and beg and choke. And you look so pretty right now—fuck, you have no idea. You're nothing but a little pain whore, aren't you?"

I find myself nodding, before my mind has even fully comprehended the question. He pulls the crop out of my mouth.

"Say it."

"I'm...a...little...pain whore." I'm gasping with every word. My eyes are bleary again with tears.

"Are you ready for these clamps to come off?"

I nod again, so vigorously my teeth chatter.

"Please, oh god, please."

I know better than to hope for mercy or gentleness in this, but even so, when he grabs the chain and rips both clamps off my nipples at once, my shock and pain are a dual explosion. I'm still mid-scream when he uses the crop to snap the first clamp off my torso. Any numbness my body achieved is burned away as blood rushes back into the tender areas. Smack, smack, smack. He works his way down the lines on my chest. Some of the clamps take more than one hit. As he makes it to my scrotum, I'm shaking and sobbing so hard I can't breathe.

I'm desperately grateful when he uses his hand instead of the crop, but when he removes the first one, it is such a violent collision of agony and relief that the gratitude evaporates quickly. By the time the last one is gone, I'm little more than a quivering heap of flesh, soaked with sweat and tears. I barely notice when Derek unclips the leash from my collar or when he rolls me onto my stomach. Distantly I register the sound of him undressing the rest of the way. I bury my face into the mattress as he mounts me. Thanks to the spreader bar, my legs are wide open for his access. He doesn't waste any time burying himself to the hilt in my ass. His fingers dig into my hip bones as he pummels me over and over again. Honestly, I'm so far gone by now, that it feels like it's happening to someone else. The rawness of my channel as he rapes me is just a tiny fragment of the nightmarish whole.

He told me before that I was addicted to my own self-loathing, and I'm thinking he must be right, because I can't think of any other reason I would have stayed and subjected myself to this.

He groans as he releases his liquid warmth inside me. I have no idea how much time has passed. Minutes, hours, days. It all feels the same to me right now.

Gradually, I become aware that he's releasing my ankles from the spreader bar. I barely have the strength to pull my legs together and ease the throbbing in my thighs. I fully expect him to leave me like this, but instead the mattress next to me dips with his weight. I whimper when he grips my shoulders, tensing in fear of what torment is coming next, but he only pulls me back against his chest and slides his arm under my head, spooning me. Considering my arms are still tightly restrained against my back, it's not exactly a romantic cuddle, but then his other hand slides over my hip to stroke my dick, and I don't care anymore what it is.

He rocks his hips, rutting against me gently while he pumps my cock. I moan and drop my head back against his shoulder. He kisses my neck, my jawline, my cheek. He teases my earlobe between his teeth, not enough to hurt, just enough to spark a heady rush of sensation. I start humping his hand, desperate for a harder and faster rhythm. He gives it to me for a little while, but then he slows it back down, forcing me into an agonizingly slow and infinitely pleasurable cadence.