For you, I am Lord! Privileges are earned.

Alex took a whip like the one he had torn from Victor’s hand, cracked it once in the air, the dry sound like thunder in the closed basement. Then he let it fall onto a table with a deliberate gesture, rejecting the tool of simple sadism.
“We won’t use that,” he said, turning toward a toolbox he kept in a corner. “That’s for cowards who need to mark flesh to feel alive.”

He took out an object that made Marcos narrow his eyes to see better: an electrical stimulator, compact, with wires ending in metal clamps. It wasn’t an amateur’s toy; it was adapted medical equipment, precise, fearsome.

“This,” Alex said, approaching Victor with the device in his hand, “is control. This is precision. This is knowing exactly where the limit is and touching it without crossing it... until I decide to cross it.”

Victor pulled on the chains, the muscles of his arms tensing into cords of steel beneath his skin. His eyes, still defiant, followed Alex, but Marcos noticed something new in them: a crack, an uncertainty that hadn’t been there when he believed he had absolute control.

Alex began placing the clamps. One on each of Victor’s nipples, tightening them with a precise screw until the bound man gasped around the metal ring. Then, moving with clinical coldness, he placed a third clamp on the scrotum, between the testicles, tightening until Victor arched his back, a muffled sound of pain escaping his throat.

“You feel that,” Alex said, not as a question but as a statement. “That’s the lowest electricity. Just a whisper. A reminder of who controls your nervous system now.”

He turned on the device. Victor jerked violently, the muscles of his thighs contracting in uncontrollable spasms. It wasn’t agonizing pain yet, but it was insistent, invasive, a violation of his own physiology that he couldn’t stop with willpower.

“Look,” Alex said to Marcos, signaling for him to come closer. “Look at his face. Not the one now, the one in ten minutes.”

Marcos approached, his own heart hammering against his ribs. He watched Victor, saw how the initial defiance began to dissolve into something more complex. The trainer kept pulling on the chains, but his movements were more desperate now, less calculated. Real fear was beginning to seep through.

Alex gradually increased the intensity. Victor’s spasms became more pronounced, his chest rising and falling with irregular gasps around the ring. Sweat began to shine on his forehead, drops running down his blunt nose.

“Resisting is useless,” Alex said, his voice low, almost kind, as if explaining a literary concept to a slow student. “I’m not here to break your body, Victor. That would be easy. I’m here to break your illusion of control.”

He moved closer, until his lips almost brushed Victor’s ear.

“You believed that being a Master meant not being afraid,” he w...