Don’t even think of it. I already have a headache from you as it is.

“What will you do? Spank me?” she muttered.

Lucifer sent her spinning out of His plane with a mere flicker of a thought, knowing she’d land hard before the portal to the oasis reality, possibly with palm tree fronds up her defiant backside. The spark of humor that flickered through Him was brief, however. Tossing the goblet into the fire, He curled His lip back in a snarl. “He’s dragging her down, as I said he would. We will destroy her with this madness.” The flames shifted and He saw Her face there, the suggestion of the body that She’d chosen for the moment.

“You care about her. But this meeting between them was meant to be. Soul mates cannot deny their bonds here. You said as much to her.”

“This man has dedicated his mortal life to destroying the souls of women. You know what could happen to her soul if it is destroyed by her own soul mate. It’s not him I worry about. The Cycle will take him where he needs to go.”

“You had to do something. Her soul mate, as immature as he yet is, may do what we have been unable to do. Make her believe that she is deserving of love again.

Perhaps the two of them together can accomplish what they cannot alone.” The fire flared out, surrounding Him. He passed his fingers through it, feeling Her within as well as without. “Love creates miracles, my Lord. That is what we are. Dona is strong, one of the strongest Mistresses of Redemption who has ever served you. Have faith.”

“Faith is your department. Justice is mine.”

Her soft breath touched Him. “Oh, you are so wrong, dearest. How could I have the faith to come out and shine in the fullness of the moon at night if I did not feel the heat of your rays lingering from the daylight warming me? Your justice is balanced by my mercy, but my mercy comes from the love you give me as a gift. For every half a heart there is another heart. You could have cast him into Hell’s fires, but since he is hers, you gave her the choice. You have faith.”

“Know me so well, do you?” His brow quirked, a mortal gesture, but one She enjoyed, evidenced by the fact She raised fingers of flame that were cool as water and stroked it, reached in and touched the light energy of Him, twining it with Her own.

“As I know my own heart. We are One, as we have always been.”

* * * * *

They were done. Mariah sat on the grass several yards from Nathan, combing out her copper red hair and watching the leopard play with the fiery ends. They’d released her slave’s head and neck, taken his arms from behind his back and tethered them out to his sides with some slack, but his ankles and thighs remained bound. The D-rings gleamed at his nipples and the head of his cock, making her lust stir despite the emotional upheaval her visit to Lucifer had caused her.

As Dona circled him, she saw the silver of the one in his scrotum. It was just visible under the fold of his cock. They’d cleaned up the blood, but he was pale, bathed in sweat from what she was certain was throbbing, excruciating pain. His jaw was tight, his teeth clamped on a metal bit they’d placed between his teeth and fastened tightly around his head, stretching the corners of his mouth cruelly. Fiona’s doing, she was sure. The leopard woman had an appealing vindictive streak.

Squatting, Dona lifted his semi-erect member and examined the ladder of barbells they’d run all the way up from the base to below the flare of the head. They’d hooked a chain to each bar and latched the end to the scrotum ring so as he became fully erect the tension would pull on all the inserted metal bars, increasing the sensation.

She was tempted to stroke him, see if she could do just that. Holding him like this so intimately, feeling him watching her every movement, unable to speak to her, made her want to do even more. Take him somewhere that wasn’t about Redemption, Hell or anything other than just exploring this fluttery tug of feeling as he watched her.

What would it be like, to have the leisure to do that? She hadn’t thought of the things of the mortal world in some time, not in relation to herself. Now she visualized herself in her living room, the gas logs flickering. Maybe it was a Friday night and they’d planned to go out to a club. She was in a short blue silk dress that fit like a second skin. He wore slacks and a dress shirt that strained over his broad shoulders as he went to his knees before her and tried to tease her into staying home. His lips nibbling up her ankle, his gaze full of nothing but her and hot desire as he tried to coax her into parting her legs. She imagined pushing him back. Perhaps he’d resist her at first, prove to her he was stronger by capturing her and rolling her to the floor, holding her pinned under him as he teased her neck with his mouth, pressed his hardness beneath the slacks between her legs.

Because he knew he was her slave, which had nothing to do with strength, at length he’d obey her and roll to his back. Tremors would run through those fine muscles as she stroked him, made him stay still at her command. Opening his dress shirt, she’d spread it out to look at his fine chest. She’d stand over him, straddling him so he’d get teasing glances of the bare skin in the shadows beneath her short skirt. As she performed a slow, writhing dance over him, one hand playing with the folds of the skirt, inching it up, the other rising to trace the curve of her breast in the plunging neckline, she’d tease him with her words as well.

She’d tell him how she planned to take him to the club, make him sit at a table on the edge of the dance floor while she did a fuck-me-now dance just like this, attracting the attention of other men. She knew her slave, knew how possessive and jealous he could get.

She’d dance out under the flashing strobe lights, watch his eyes get more heated until she could feel the violent need of his passion at a hundred paces, his fury with the men who dared get near his Mistress. Only then would she call him to her so she could do that sensual dance against him, prove that he was the only one she wanted. She’d make him agonizingly hard so all the women would see and be envious if they didn’t have such a fine, large cock to call their own.

As she taunted him with the picture in their living room, she’d slowly peel the dress away from her flesh, the firelight dappling her skin. He’d beg her to fuck him then. Knees pressing into the carpet, she’d go down on him, her heart full of the look in his face, her skin shivering under his touch as he disobeyed and reached for her, overwhelmed by the feeling swamping them both…

That was what she would do with Nathan. Jonathan had no place in her fantasy.

His alter ego had the upper hand in him right now, his malice and fear infecting his actions the same way they infected his soul.

Evil preyed on fear and insecurity. Used it as the pathway to dig into a soul, corrupt and turn it. Her job was no different from an exorcist’s. With surgical precision, she removed the tentacles of evil that grew around the soul and reminded it of its strength and purity. If the evil had already permeated it, then the soul was beyond her help. The scalding fires of Hell were needed to burn it to ashes. Like a phoenix, it would be reborn, with no memory of any lessons learned.

As Lucifer had implied, Nathan was a borderline case. Decay was a spider web throughout his soul, but the mass of it was on the outside, not in the marrow. Hell would be the most efficient solution, no doubt. But because he was connected to her in a way she couldn’t deny, she couldn’t accept that Hell’s fire was his fate. It made her angry, because she knew Lucifer was never wrong.

She’d told herself repeatedly that soul mates were just an instinct, a physical addiction that had forced open her mouth and made her beg to take him on. Eventually, as Lucifer had said, she’d have to release Nathan, whether to Hell or to Purgatory.

Really, it was a relief to know she didn’t have to resist this feeling. She could explore it as much as she wanted without danger to herself, because he was going to be taken from her whether she could bear to let him go or not.

She was so tired. It was an unusual feeling down here where needs of the body could be optional, though lust and sex in this instance had been turned on full force to tap into Nathan’s soul where he was most vulnerable. One of her strongest compulsions in her mortal life was her most expertly used tool here, the ability to sexually dominate a man.

He reminded her of the tender side of that compulsion. Things she’d long ago lost faith in, such that Hell had seemed a better place to be than anything the Hall of Souls or reincarnation could offer.

I’ll do the job. Then it will be over. I’ll figure out a way to convince Lucifer to let me stay, so I never have to go down that road again. There were people who thought that refusing to go forward was stagnation. She knew progress was just a mislabeled road sign for “this way to self-annihilation”.

“Beautifully done, ladies.” Dropping onto her knees next to his head at last, she gazed down into his lovely blue eyes. In them she saw agony, fury, fear…and relief to see her. She could tell that confused the hell out of him. Her heart twisted in her chest with understanding. She wasn’t any less confused just because she had the ability to give the connection between them a name.

Reaching around his head, she removed the bit and guided it out of his mouth, touching Nathan’s finely shaped lips as she did so. She noted the redness and blue bruising at his nipples, same as at his cock. From the strain in his face, she knew he was still feeling the pain keenly. Yet his hand rose, albeit trembling with that agony. She watched, mesmerized as he almost made it to her face before the restraints on his arms brought him up short. When she leaned forward, closing the distance, he cupped her cheek, his thumb brushing her jaw just below her lips, as if he did not dare to presume so much as to touch her mouth.

“Did he hurt you?” he asked thickly. He’d apparently bitten his tongue, explaining why they’d employed the bit as an afterthought. “It looks…in your eyes. It looks like he did.”

She looked for charm or duplicity in his expression. While she didn’t see any, she knew he was very clever. Because she saw the soul that was Nathan speaking through him, trying to struggle through the wreckage Jonathan had made of him, she gave him honesty back. “That’s what those who love you do. God’s no different in that.” His eyes crinkled, his lips drawing back into a grimace, showing her that the corners of his mouth were torn by the bit. His body shuddered with a harsh chuckle. “I always…figured…God ran Hell.”