To you, I am Lord! The true Alpha.

It was a silent ceremony. Alex didn’t speak to him beyond practical orders—“sit,” “eat,” “drink”—and Marcos obeyed, aware of every crinkle of the wet diaper, of the weight between his legs, of the collar that reminded him who he was with every movement of his jaw.

When he finished, Alex didn’t allow him to clear the plates. Instead, he pulled on the invisible chain that seemed to link their wills and led him to the living room rug.

“Knees,” he ordered, and the word resonated with a new weight, different from those in the basement. This was visible, daytime domestication.

Marcos obeyed, feeling the change in texture beneath his knees: from the kitchen wood to the rough fiber of the rug. Alex circled him slowly, assessing, and then—without warning—grabbed the adhesive strips of the diaper and tore them open. The sound was dry, violent in the stillness of the morning. He removed the diaper without consideration, leaving Marcos exposed, naked except for the spiked collar that now seemed heavier, more real.

“Stay there,” Alex said, taking the used diaper to the kitchen, leaving Marcos kneeling in the middle of the living room, feeling the cold air on his freshly freed skin, aware that he still smelled of them, of their mixture.

Alex returned with a black leather bag that he left on the coffee table. From it he took out a leash—black, with buckles—and adjusted it around Marcos’s neck, just above the spiked collar. Then he clipped on a carabiner.

“Come,” he pulled gently, and Marcos had to crawl, truly crawl, following the tug of the leash as Alex walked toward the desk in the corner.

There, Alex sat in his ergonomic chair, opened the laptop, and spread out a pile of handwritten exams. Marcos waited for the order, but it didn’t come immediately. Alex simply began to read, sometimes scribbling corrections in red, completely ignoring the kneeling presence beside him.

The minutes passed. Ten. Twenty. Marcos felt his knees beginning to protest against the hardness of the floor, his back demanding to straighten. But he didn’t move. He watched Alex’s hands move over the paper, his concentrated face, his lips slightly pursed as he evaluated some student’s work on some unspecified writer. The normality of the scene—the steaming coffee in the cup, the ticking of the clock, the morning light coming through the window—made his nakedness, his position of submission, feel sharper, more absurd.

Alex put down the pen and, without looking at him, rested a hand on Marcos’s head. He didn’t caress him, simply rested the weight there, like someone leaving a hand on the knob of a cane or the back of a dog that has learned not to move.

“Good boy,” he murmured, returning to the exams. “That’s it. Good boy.”

Marcos closed his eyes, feeling the warmth of the palm, the casual pressure that anchored him more than an...