The Boss

T H E R E D R O O M

James was flung into the room. Everything was a deep crimson. Red walls, carpet, ceiling, lampshades, ropes, bondage chairs...ropes and...bondage chairs?

"What the fuck?" James whispered.

"Welcome to the Red Room, James. This is where I break the weak, in a more literal sense." Tate strode in, domineering even in just his pyjama bottoms. He picked up James like he weighed no more than a pillow and carried him to a red leather chair. It was the kind of bondage chair with stocks attached and arms protruding from the side that James was ashamed to admit that he recognised.

He was dropped into it and barely even tried to fight as his arms were locked in and then his ankles were clamped into the stocks. Even if he escape Tate would just catch him and lock him up anyway. Why delay the inevitable?

"Please Tate! What are you gonna do? I wasn't doing anything bad, I promise! I just wanted to get back at you! You lost me my job!"

Tate leaned in closed. "Silence." The way he said it made James stop talking immediately. He was at the mercy of this psychopath, so he wasn't keen to push his luck. Tate climbed gracefully up onto the chair and perched on the stocks, facing James' trapped figure, so that his bare feet were placed either side of James' black-clad torso. "You're so stupid it's almost cute. You thought you could break into my house because I was at the ball. Dumbass. I didn't go to the ball this year. I was in my bedroom watching porn and I hear a noise coming from downstairs. I grab Stacy," His bat? "And then find a snivelling little rodent digging through my stuff. It must be my lucky night."

He hopped off the stocks and wandered about the dim room. He ran his fingers along the various items dangling from a rack on the far wall: paddles of various shapes and sizes, handcuffs, feather dusters, brushes and many other sinister things that James didn't particularly want to know about. Tate curated a selection of them and wheeled them over on a trolley. "Weakness. It makes me feel sick. I bring weak people down here, James, people like you, and I break them body and soul. And you know what?" James said nothing. "Do you know what?" Tate pinched James' cheeks so his lips puckered.

"What?" James said, dejected.

"Men are the most fun to break. They are so determined to be strong that they prolong their torture. Watching them crumble beneath my power...it makes me hard. So resistant to begging at first, then it becomes too much and they snap like twigs. When I break them they would do anything to get me to stop. They beg like the puny slugs they are."

Tate walked to James and whispered softly in his ear making him tingle all over. "That's what I'm going to do to you."

James gulped. He was already beginning to perspire from the way Tate had described what he did to people. This guy was even crazier than James had previously thought. Or was he? Maybe he was just so terrifyingly sadistic that it seemed psychopathic to a normal person.

These wonderings were all secondary to his primary reaction to Tate's whisper: abject terror.

"Now there's a thing I save for the people who I want to punish the worst. Previous subjects have said that they would take pain over what they experienced any day." He walked back to the stocks and rested his hands on James' sneakers. "Let's see if you can guess what it is."

His sneakers were tugged off gently, teasingly. James didn't even question it, just raised his eyebrow in puzzlement. Then the feeling of a single nail dragging down his foot punched  him in the hypothalamus.

No.

This couldn't be it. He was going to— James couldn't even bring himself to think it. Memories flooded in, reawakened by the sensation: him being pinned to the floor by his friends, screaming for mercy; his older cousin trapping his ankles in a headlock; his brother digging into his armpits mercilessly.