Boardroom Eyes
Chapter 3
by scifiscribbler
Posted by Joan Bradley
Intelligence is at the heart of everything I do
1d
Down but not out. Watch this space; I have something special coming.
It’s time for a change.
#newproject #iykyk
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*
In her suitcase, in the car ride, Joan had plenty of time to think, and to try to marshal her forces; and perhaps most importantly, to try to process what had happened and how she was feeling.
Atop everything else - frustration, anger, an edge of fear - was embarrassment, and she was in very real danger of that drowning everything else out. Knowing how fundamentally she’d been ‘got’ was a factor; having walked herself into the trap was a factor, as was not fighting physically to escape it, even though by the time she’d seen for sure that it was a trap she hadn’t had the option; ‘Joan Jiggles’ was a very strong factor.
But bigger than any of the others was the question of pride, of the woman’s certainty that her ego would be her weakness. Joan didn’t think of herself as particularly a prideful woman; everything she congratulated her for, after all, she’d done. She was a woman of sustained achievement, in the working world as well as in her small collection of hypnotic submissives.
Thinking about her harem, she gave a snort, as close as she could get to a laugh around the gag in her mouth. Marina - she’d got so angry with her, trying to figure out who’d hypnotised her and hidden themselves from her memory, who she’d been foolish enough to let herself get hypnotised by, even…
Turned out there was a very good reason Marina hadn’t been able to answer her.
Joan couldn’t remember a time when she’d been played this comprehensively before. She’d just… not seen it coming.
A part of her was obstinately proud that she was clearly much better at hypnotic amnesia than some people she’d played with, though.
She felt the car round a corner, and idle, and then, after rolling forward just a few feet, it came to a halt and the engine turned off. They were at their destination, whatever that might be.
It wasn’t long before the suitcase she was in had been lifted out and set down, and she was being rolled somewhere. A couple of bumps along the way told her they’d passed doorways, and then the case was left on its own for some time.
At first Joan was almost holding her breath, waiting for the sound of an unzipping. After that had failed to happen for some time, her thoughts turned elsewhere.
Her mind - if Joan Jiggles could be said to be part of it, and Joan was inclined to think it should still count that way - had clearly been turned against itself. She’d been perfectly happy to cuff and gag herself. Hadn’t even thought it was unnatural.
But she hadn’t known. She was pretty sure, now, that she’d know. She closed her eyes - not that she’d had much to distract herself with anyway - and ran through the process of an induction mentally. It was, as she always maintained, all in the mind; if she visualised the right context to drop, it was easy to make herself drop.
She spent some time rattling around her own mind, chasing out suggestion after suggestion that had been made beforehand. Weston had used a variety of different reinforcers, and most of them seemed to be easy enough to isolate and erase now she knew she had to.
About the only one she couldn’t fully unhook was the way she reacted to when her tits were touched… and, she reflected uncomfortably, that she called them, thought of them as, tits. That was new, and not ideal.
But it didn’t need to matter, she told herself firmly. She’d chased out, she was pretty sure, everything that might be lurking as a trap. Alice Weston already knew her hold was weakening, but she’d expect the chance to put her back under without any interruption. And that would give Joan the chance she needed.
Abruptly, the case was laid on its side again and unzipped, and she saw a room that was, all of a sudden, familiar to her.
“F bn ehhh…” she tried to say, and felt embarrassed again; certainly she hadn’t forgotten that she was gagged (had gagged herself) but she’d somehow expected, in her startlement, that her voice would be heard when she spoke her mind. She’d intended to say, simply, I’ve been here before.
Someone - a man, was Joan’s guess - hooked their hands under her arms and lifted her upward, extracting her from the suitcase, all while stood behind her. In front of her was Alice Weston, and the reason for the delay in being unpacked was suddenly clear.
Alice had changed. Unwilling to dress in her preferred fetish gear in the sober surroundings of the hotel, she had waited to get home.
Her hips were, barely, encased in a pleated black latex skirt that was perennially puffed out slightly because of the plump ass beneath it, and as such it was just possible to make out the lowest tip of a pair of black panties below. The soft, broad thighs encased themselves at about halfway down the thigh in black PVC boots laced in red, though the zippers on the outer leg that were the actual fastenings were just barely visible. Above the waist there was a glimpse of enticing softness before reaching a transparent white latex blouse that hugged in the right places to support her bra-less chest and tame her body shape, and above that, she’d taken careful time on her makeup, although it was still brighter and more in-your-face than Joan would prefer.
She stood, hands on hips, one leg straight, one splayed out a little as she grinned at her captive’s unpacking.
“You remember being here, then?” she asked with a grin, and Joan nodded.
Alice dipped her fingers into the waistband of her skirt and deftly produced a key. With two quick steps she made her way over to Joan, who was still relying on the man behind her to hold her upright. Joan stared directly back at her, silently trying to gauge the other woman’s ability to hold eye contact, looking for any indication she might be made to back down.
Weston reached up with one hand, sliding her hand into Joan’s dark hair, and pulled her head forward and down, leaving Joan staring at the floor and her cuffed ankles, while with her other hand, her captor unlocked the padlock holding the ball gag in place.
"Just between the two of us,” Alice purred, “you kind of deserve this, it turns out, but that’s not why it’s happening to you.” Still holding Joan’s head face-down, she pulled the gag loose, and a rope of drool splashed down onto Joan’s exposed cleavage, beside the sapphire pendant.
“You’re getting this because you caught my eye, that trim little package in white, so confident, so sure of yourself. So proud.” She twisted her wrist, and Joan’s head came up to meet her eyes just from that one movement. “I just wanted to break you,” she said simply. “And just as important, I knew I could.”
Joan’s thoughts had been jolted by the eye contact. She tried to pull away, pushing herself to resist, but the man holding her up made it difficult. She attempted to brace her feet, but she was still in heels, still cuffed by the ankles, and her feet were still inside the suitcase; it was an unstable place to be.
“Of course,” Alice continued, “once I knew you had the position you did, it was clear there was a way to finance this. And that was important. Not, you understand, because I lack money,” and she broke eye contact, falling back a step, to gesture around the room, the… there was no other word for it… dungeon that she had built. Between her fragmentary memories of being there before and what she could see, Joan didn’t doubt that this woman had money, though she did wonder where exactly she’d got it from.
“Just because you were too busy to disappear.” Alice smiled brightly, and Joan’s heart sank a little. “Waaaay too busy. But not anymore, are you?” Still holding Joan by the hair, she turned her hand, making Joan shake her head slowly.
Joan swallowed. “I realised that,” she said. Her intention had been to say it clearly, but her voice had faltered, and she saw the other woman’s smirk just grow broader. “Well played.”
Alice released her hair and turned away for a moment. “And there you are,” she said. “You know who the source was now. And you’d think you can hardly go back there and tell them that. But you will.”
It was all Joan could do to stop herself hotly denying that, but she needed Alice to think she was, if not controlled, then cowed. “This is what you meant,” she said, “when you said we had work to do.”
“Exactly right,” Alice Weston said, wheeling around on one heel. “Just exactly right, Joan Jiggles.”
The demeaning name that was also a slave persona was also, Joan had uncovered in her brief meditative self-hypnosis, a trigger to drop her back into that role. Joan let herself smile vapidly in response, internally disturbed by how easily the smile came to her lips.
She was watching the blonde for any sign that her last-gasp strategy might work, and finally she saw the sign she’d been looking for; a dip of the other woman’s eyes from Joan’s face to her cleavage.
Joan was still being held under the arms by whoever that was - Joan had the name Giles in her head, and didn’t know why, and didn’t want to investigate that unless she had to; all the same, she could shift her bodyweight a little.
She did what she’d seen Janice Huttlestone do, not so long before; she rolled her shoulders, just subtly, enough to help her cleavage catch the eye and, especially, enough to make that glittering sapphire that nestled there catch the eye.
And unless she was imagining things, Alice Weston’s eyes tracked the movement. Joan took a deep breath in as she continued to shift from one side to the other, holding it to swell her chest before exhaling a release, doing everything she could to give Alice reason to focus on it.
“Working,” Joan said softly, “hypnotically?”
“Oh yes,” Alice agreed. Joan was wondering… Her hypnotic skills were something she was proud of, but she knew she wasn’t the best among her friends. For all that she’d lost the duel, Janice had shown that the mind can be made to lead the body, that desire can open the door, and it was a technique Joan had determined to make her own.
But it wasn’t the only place she could borrow from. Alistair, her close friend, swore by yes sets; by the strange psychological quirk that means, if a human being agrees four times in quick succession, that the fifth acquiescence is automatic.
Joan wondered, quite intensely, if she could combine the two.
She kept her slow shimmy going, watching Alice carefully, trying to read her face. Initial signs, she decided, seemed positive.
“Lulling me into deluded security?”
“Yes.”
“Letting my… resistance… ebb away?” Her voice was slowing, trying to match the slow rolling pace of her words, so that she would speak only in motion, never at the pause at each end. She had settled into the steady cadence of her usual trance voice, and only hoped that Alice would be too drawn in to see what she was doing.
“Oh yes,” Alice said, and she smiled.
“Excited?”
Alice grinned, slinking back closer.
“We can send Giles here off to do something else, right?” Joan asked, and Alice smiled and nodded.
“Off you go,” she told him.
“Miss?”
“Run along now.” There was no iron in Alice’s voice, no open exercise of the power she wielded, which of course just served to underline more clearly how much there truly was.
“Yes, Miss.” He released Joan, who suddenly found herself struggling to stay upright (even if she knew she couldn’t afford to fail and lose what authority she’d gained. She swayed. Almost lost the balance she was trying to maintain.
She smiled back at Alice. “Are you ready to begin?” she purred, and Alice’s tongue ran around her lips, still studying Joan’s cleavage and the sparkling sapphire as she did.
“Oh, yes,” Alice Weston said lightly. She wasn’t looking Joan in the eyes, so it was difficult to gauge exactly how affected she might be, but Joan’s heart soared with hope.
Joan started mentally flicking through her options, considering what to build a second yes set toward. What was going to get her out of this fastest?
“Very good,” she said. “You know how this goes, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“You understand how quickly a hypnotic web can catch you?”
There was a giggle, but Alice’s eyes didn’t flick up to meet hers; her attention was still sharply locked onto Joan’s tits (dammit, she chided herself, you’re still thinking of them that way) so it felt less like an awareness of what might be happening and much more like the first signs that the tight rein she clearly kept herself under was starting to loosen.
And that was a great opening. “Yes,” Weston said, and Joan found herself smiling, not the vapid, dreamy, pleasure-drugged smile of Joan Jiggles but the sharp smile Joan Bradley had always worn once it was clear she would get her way no matter what came next.
“You know how easily it can become irresistible,” she said. “Don’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” Alice said simply, and she looked up, meeting Joan’s eyes, and Joan felt a startling jolt up and down her spine at the eye contact, feeling a heady mix of conflicting and contradictory emotion. “I know what you’re doing, you know,” Alice said.
Nothing for it, Joan thought wildly, but to plough on. She wished she had use of her hands, to bring the sapphire pendant more properly into play. Could she try for uncuffing her wrists are the next yes-set push?
All of this went through her head in an instant, fuelled by a strange adrenaline. She opened her mouth, and yet, somehow, she still wasn’t quick enough.
As her lips shaped the word ‘Why’, Alice had hold of her by the chest. The moment the blonde’s fingers closed around her tits, Joan’s voice faltered; the moment her tits jiggled, her attempt to speech derailed entirely. Before she could finish the syllable - it having elongated, punctuated by a sudden intake of breath - it had twisted into a giggle.
Joan’s vision swam and she shivered. Alice was right up close now, biting her lip as she studied the effect she was having, the results of her earlier hypnotic suggestions and her current actions, and as she clearly liked it.
She smirked. “What were you going to ask me?” she said, just underlining with a question of her own that the yes set had been interrupted, that there was no guaranteed positive answer coming.
There was the possibility, Joan reminded herself firmly, that Weston was at least feeling a little more susceptible than usual. She opened her mouth to say Uncuff me and I’ll tell you and Alice jiggled her tits again and it came out instead as “Unc - uhh! Huuuh… I’ll… tell…”
The other woman laughed. “Oooh, are you a fighter now you know what’s coming?” she asked, eyes shining with delight. “Let’s get started…”
So saying, she took hold of Joan’s blouse on either side of the buttons, gripped tightly, and pulled it apart, sending buttons flying everywhere.
Joan bit her lip, hoping to stifle the hypnotic, compelling giggles she knew were coming, and yet knowing she would not.
“Joan Jiggles serves and giggles,” Alice told her. “Repeat.” And in spite of herself, Joan felt the words bubbling up inside her, eager to be spoken - but not just spoken, which might, on its own, have been acceptable. To be heard, too. That, Joan could not allow.
“Joan… nnngh… Jiggles… nnnooo…”
Alice regarded her coolly. “My dear, this isn’t the time to be feisty, this is the time to know you’re beaten. Again.”
“Joan… Jiggles… sss… ssseer… sss… screw you…”
“You really are too proud for your own good, aren’t you?” Weston tutted. “Well, the good news is that we can fix that.”
She ran her hands up from Joan’s tits to her shoulders. Joan wanted to shy away, but standing as she still was in the suitcase, unable to steady herself with her arms, it seemed like a gamble that was sure to fail.
Then Alice took hold of something, and lifted, and Joan realised to her horror that her blue sapphire pendant was being taken from her, lifted up over her shoulders, held by this woman who had taken whatever she wanted from Joan, to this point, with apparent impunity.
“The problem,” Alice said, “is that you’re proud about the wrong things.”
Joan tried to sneer back, and found that she couldn’t; that her lips had parted slightly, as her eyes drifted to her own blue sapphire pendant, now being held at her eye level just a few inches ahead.
She’d held the pendant a similar distance from her face before, dangling it into the eyeline of someone she was entrancing, and it had never been a problem, she’d never had to fight to tear her gaze away, never felt its swing make her vision fuzzier in almost the exact opposite way to windshield wipers clearing up the view ahead, and yet now, that was exactly what she was trying to resist. It turned out that who was holding the pendant and where the focus was mattered a great deal.
“You should be proud of how easily you sink deep,” Alice said, although Joan wasn’t really listening; she was staring at her sapphire pendant. She’d always told new subjects to look for the heart. She’d promised them that they’d find it, if they stared closely enough for long enough. Now she found herself dreamily wondering if that were true. “You should be proud of how well you focus.
“You should be proud of Joan Jiggles,” and Joan once again felt a hand at her tit, jiggling it with a cheerful amusement that set her scalp tingling and sent shivers up and down her spine. “You did so well at forgetting and obeying, obeying and forgetting, that you hid from yourself what you were doing for months.” She paused. “Joan Jiggles is better than Joan Bradley,” she said. “Repeat.”
“Joan Jiggles,” Joan answered promptly, scarcely realising what she was saying, “is better than Joan Bradley.”
“Good girl. Again.”
“Joan Jiggles is better than Joan Bradley.”
“You’re proud of Joan Jiggles. Repeat.”
“I’m proud of Joan Jiggles.”
“Again.”
“I’m proud of Joan Jiggles.”
“You’re proud to be Joan Jiggles. Repeat.”
Joan wasn’t paying any attention at all now. She’d almost found the heart of the sapphire; the only thing that was holding her up was that occasionally Alice would jiggle one of Joan’s tits and she’d lose track of where she was, just enjoying how good it felt to be groped and sink deep. “I’m proud to be Joan Jiggles.”
“Good girl. Again.”
“I’m proud to be Joan Jiggles.”
“Joan Jiggles beat Joan Bradley,” Alice said, and then, “Didn’t she?” she asked, jiggling Joan’s tits as she did.
Joan’s eyes crossed and she lost track of the pendant completely. Something that was not quite a thought and not quite an absence of thought noted This must be what it feels like to drop as she said “Yes,” aloud.
“So you can’t be that proud of Joan Bradley.”
Joan had not been prompted with an answer, so she said nothing.
Alice smiled. “Sleep,” she said. And Joan slept.
*
It was so strange to walk through the big double glass doors leading into Mountelligence, Joan found. She wasn’t entirely sure how long it had been; more than two months, but beyond that it was hazy.
Almost everything was hazy, these days. Everything that wasn’t important. Of course, the things that were important, Joan held on to with blinding clarity.
There weren’t many people in the open foyer. There rarely were, except around the start of the working day, but on the other hand there was always at least a handful of those people, and Joan had a clear view of the whole group. She could see the shock on each face; her appearance there alone was startling to these people.
Well, she’d expected that. It had even been possible she’d be treated as persona non grata right from the moment the doors opened.
This didn’t feel like she wasn’t welcome; it was much closer to a sense that she was a surprise, that while she as a person wasn’t a problem her presence was.
For the first time Joan wondered just how much things had changed over her leave of absence. From comments Alice had made, she knew Alice had charged several Mountelligence executives privately for what she’d done to Joan - executives Joan had helpfully, obediently identified for her, even if she now couldn’t remember which ones - despite the fact she’d have happily done it for other reasons.
Joan hadn’t thought the ramifications through - her mind was too full of new rules and new rhythms and her faculty for strategic thinking had atrophied as a result, replaced by mantras - but at that moment it occurred to her that, logically, those executives would have spent her absence positioning themselves, knowing Joan’s corner office would be empty soon, that her title and salary was waiting for them.
If they didn’t know about each other, there might have been quite an aggressive, confused, and above all short-term power struggle going on. Joan found herself smiling that Alice Weston had, simply by meddling with her mind, potentially also caused a minor civil war among the underachieving, over rewarded men she despised.
“The Board will be expecting me,” she told Reception, and the door beside them opened with an electronic buzz. Joan swept through into the elevator, and as its doors closed behind her, she lost awareness of the spreading shock, commotion, and gossip her reappearance would surely be provoking before news of the reason for her return leaked out. They had faded back into the fuzz of unimportance.
In the elevator itself she reached up to grab her tits with both hands and jiggle them, spreading a slow smile over her lips. She had now made herself completely ready for what was to follow.
She had completely forgotten that there was CCTV in the elevators; it was only the top floor, where the partners did their work, that didn’t have cameras regularly spaced along it. If she had remembered, it would not have bothered her in any case.
They were waiting for her in the boardroom, almost all of them - one or two either hadn’t bothered or hadn’t found the time, with her notice she wanted to speak to them coming as late as it did.
She wore her charcoal power suit. It had been the most expensive of them, and she’d made a special trip home to change into it. Giles had gone with her, and was currently supervising a small group in packing up her possessions.
Joan made her way to the bottom of the boardroom table, but did not sit; she stood beside the chair, feet shoulder-width apart, back upright, hands clasped behind her back, head held high. One by one, she met the eyes of every member of the board.
“I hope you will indulge me if I look to make this simple,” Joan said. “Gentlemen… and lady,” and here she nodded to Bhavana Oza, the one other woman allowed on the executive floor who didn’t have the word ‘Asisstant’ somewhere in her job title, “of the board, I have completed my investigation into the leaks.”
She cleared her throat, as much to stop anyone else from starting to talk while she gathered her thoughts as anything else. “The fault is ultimately mine,” she said, and she lowered her eyes, no longer meeting anyone’s gaze. “I allowed someone to become a part of my personal life who I should not have done. He had nothing to do with our industry, and I thought he would be safe to dally with; all the same, he gained some insight into our business which let him see an opportunity.
“It, ah… it turns out I talk in my sleep.” This statement was much truer; in the sleep of trance, Joan would tell anything she was instructed to. “From this he learned that I had information of value, and he approached a competitor, looking to secure a price for any information he could get.
“While he shared my bed, while I slept, he would ask me questions and record my answers, and sell them on. And he also asked me, I have learned, what my laptop password was. From there, he secured files that our competition told him they would pay for.
“The fault is mine,” she said again. “My team are blameless.” She looked up for the first time, met Oliver Hendricks’ eyes, and saw on his face surprise, not at what she was saying, but at what she wasn’t. She knew in an instant that he had been one of those to pay Alice Weston to control her. “Oliver Hendricks,” she stressed firmly, “is blameless.”
She watched the expression on his face change as he realised that the way she’d said that cast suspicion on him, and she carefully did not smile. She thought quietly that Miss would be happy to hear that his greed might yet bring him down, too.
“It’s clear to me,” she said, “that this is a fault which must be answered for. I offer my resignation, in return for the results of my investigation being kept secret.” Which she knew Mountelligence would agree to; they would want to keep their error secret, would want to avoid being made a laughing stock.
“The Board will accept,” the CEO said, without bothering to consult the others. A reminder to everyone in the room of where the power truly lay. “But we have a codicil of our own.”
Joan looked up inquiringly.
“You know a large amount about our products and our plans,” he told her. “That information is still in your head. You have already given enough to our competition…”
He didn’t need to spell it out. Joan simply nodded.
“I am leaving the corporate life behind,” she said. “I’m sure this meeting has been recorded. You may take legal action against me if you ever read that I have returned to the field.”
She lowered her gaze again. “I shouldn’t imagine I will see any of you again,” she said. “It was a privilege to work with some of you.”
And with that, she turned and headed for the elevator.
The Board no longer mattered.
*
It would be easy to say that after Alice told her to sleep, Joan Jiggles woke up but Joan Bradley never did. This was, in fact, far from the truth. Over the next few days Joan felt like Bradley more than Jiggles most of the time, and was rebellious in her thoughts though, to her frustration, she soon discovered she couldn’t be be likewise rebellious in her actions.
Not that Alice seemed to think she had the situation completely under control; even once the wrist cuffs came off and her ankles were released from each other, one ankle cuff stayed in place, and it kept Joan attached to Giles, evidently as Alice’s way of preventing her from any straightforward escape events. Giles ensured she showed up for every hypnosis session Alice wanted to administer (or, Joan suspected, to indulge in) for the first three days.
After that, Joan showed up on time for every single one, where Alice worked with her carefully.
It wasn’t about replacing Joan Bradley. It wasn’t about making her into Joan Jiggles - although she continued to jiggle; on a typical day she would approach Alice wearing only her panties, kneel before her, take her tits in both hands and jiggle herself down into trance - but about making sure that, whoever Joan was, she knew her place, she knew her duty, and she took pride in that.
By the time of her visit to the Board, Joan was fully committed to her new life. As she let herself back into Alice’s home, she was thinking of nothing but what she knew she would find in the study.
Alice’s study was airy, light, beautiful; as opposite to her dungeon as it could be while still being a place where power imbalances were very clear.
The desk was a transparent acrylic. Behind it was Alice’s chair, a near-throne, which was the only chair in the room. In front of the desk instead, she had secured hassocks, the small cushions designed for kneeling.
There was already a naked woman kneeling on one hassock, but when Joan joined her she was not naked, nor did she wear her power suit - which was to be tailored, soon, to become Alice’s. Instead she was in her white catsuit, modified - more accurately, slightly trimmed; it was now crotchless below the zip and while she zipped it up fully, strategically placed holes existed for her tits to emerge through so she could jiggle as she should.
She settled to her knees alongside Andrea, who had been her lawyer and who was currently deeply under Alice’s hypnotic influence.
“All done?” Alice asked.
“Yes, Miss.”
“Good.” She smiled. “Andrea has prepared the papers. Sign your life away.”
“Yes, Miss,” Joan said, and obeyed. Everything she owned, her property, her cars, her investments, now belonged to Alice; with it she had given up power of attorney ‘so that even if one day you break free you’ll still be in my power’ as Alice had told her with a grin.
Alice checked the signatures and passed the papers to Andrea. “Deal with this,” she directed. “Run along.”
Andrea left at a brisk trot, and Alice turned her attention to Joan. “So,” she said. “Tell me about your submissives…”
The End…?
Boardroom politics are much more interesting as hypno switch battles.