Chapter IV – Total Obedience

The change was slow, progressive and absolute. Gustavo stopped arguing. He began to anticipate orders before they were given. In the gym, he sometimes felt the invisible weight of the collar even when he wasn't wearing it, and his cock hardened just thinking about it. In the bar, he lowered his gaze as soon as Sánchez walked through the door and waited for instructions, even if no one gave them. Vince became his chain companion: they shared a room in the country house, helped each other clean off semen and light blood after long sessions, and comforted each other in silence when the pain was too intense for words.

Sánchez used him with calculated, patient and creative sadism. Sometimes he left him on his knees for hours, serving as a human footrest while he read or worked in silence, and every time Gustavo moved he gave him a sharp slap. Other times he tied him up in elaborate ways and left him alone in the basement with a timer that controlled a vibrator and an electro-stimulator, forcing him to endure cycles of intense stimulation and absolute denial until he cried with frustration. Gustavo learned to ask for punishment when he failed. He learned to say "thank you, master" after each new mark, each deep bruise, each red line that crossed his skin. He learned to find a strange and dirty kind of peace in the certainty that someone else decided for him in absolutely everything, even when he could urinate or when he could cum.

One early morning, after a particularly brutal session in which Sánchez had whipped him with a leather belt until his buttocks were swollen, purple and split open, and then had fucked him mercilessly against the stone wall while squeezing his neck, Gustavo stayed on his knees in front of him, trembling uncontrollably, with semen drying on his thighs, face and chest, and fresh, dirty tears on his face.

"I am yours," he whispered in a completely broken voice. "Use me however you want. Break me. I am your property. Only yours. I am nothing more."

Sánchez stroked his hair with an almost cruel tenderness, tugging slightly to force him to lift his face and look into his swollen eyes.

"I already know that. Now all that's left is for the rest of the world to know it too. And they will know it. I'm going to lend you out, show you off, and use you until there is nothing left of that coach you thought you were."

That night Gustavo slept at the foot of Sánchez's bed, naked, with the collar on and the cold, definitive certainty that there was no turning back. Obedience had become his new center of gravity, the only thing that still made sense in a world that had become dark and simple.