“Your mother.” Dona’s voice, quiet. When her hands moved to his arms, rubbing them even as they were held fast, he couldn’t push away the memory or keep himself from saying it.

“I sat on her lap once. Tracing the needle tracks on her arms. She took a pen and helped me connect them to draw animal shapes. It was a game and she smiled at me…

We made an elephant, sort of. She hugged me. She got high later that night, threw a beer bottle at me to get me to leave her alone.” He closed his eyes to keep himself from seeing his own face now, the tiny white scar covered mostly by his eyebrow so he was the only one who could see it. As he shook his head, trying to push away the image, he couldn’t seem to stop shaking it. He started to thrash, jerking back and forth. Yanking against the hold of the mirror, he shoved against Dona’s grip, shrugging her off. It was going to let him go. The strength of his rage would be enough to break even Hell’s grip on him. The room would be consumed in flame and simply explode from it.

“You bitch. You fucking…stupid…bitch.” He screamed, roared at the image, wanted to be free so he could beat on it. Not just break it into pieces. He’d grind the shards to dust under his feet, even if it cut him. The blood would mingle with the dust and it would be justice. “I would have done anything to stay with you and you were a stupid…loser…junkie…whore. Tell this fucking…thing…to…LET ME GO!” Dona’s touch came back, rested on his back. He fought, railed, screamed endlessly as she said nothing, just stood behind him as a silent witness. It seemed to take a long while, but at length he became self-aware again, enough to feel her soft stroking on his skin, the way it seemed to be easing the compression in his chest, the burning in his throat and behind his eyes. It helped him get a grip and stop, gasping at his exertions.

“Look at yourself. Look.” Her voice resonated through his upper body because she pressed her mouth between his shoulders, sliding her hands around to stroke his chest and belly. Long, soothing motions with a hint of nails.

A tall man with murder in his expression, his body layered with cold sweat and his muscles taut, wanting to destroy something with them.

“You said you didn’t believe you could have a true Mistress,” she whispered, kissing the base of his neck, making him close his eyes. “That you didn’t believe in the fantasy of it. Jonathan denies you the reality. He’s the angry little boy acting out, terrified, hiding in the closet, afraid his foster mother will find and beat him again. Or worse, not care that he’s there, as if he’s nothing, as if his existence doesn’t matter.”

“Stop it.”

“No. You said it yourself. Think of what you made of yourself. You are strong.

You’re not garbage.” She slid under his arm and was between him and that mirror now.

When she lifted her hands, laid them on either side of his face, they seemed so fragile.

He could break her fingers with barely any pressure and yet she seemed to have no fear of him when he was like this. When he was so enraged he feared himself, what he was capable of doing. “The only thing you lack is the courage to love, to forgive. That’s the only thing that gives Jonathan power over your soul. That’s what turns all those good things to poison. Let the little boy go and become the fine man I know is in my arms.

Forgive.”

“This can’t be forgiven. Not ever.”

“Are you talking about your mother? Or yourself?” She was gone. His hands were free and the glass shattered, as if the brief interlude was just a passing dream and now time had resumed, the mirror feeling the impact of his fists. Blood bloomed on his knuckles.

The shadows in the surrounding mirrors swirled, a heavy fog that spilled out of the glass and poured into the room, black and silver, twisting together like the bodies of charred trees, touching his nose with the acrid smell of burning flesh. It warned him that something was coming, something that was at the heart of all of it. What had brought him here, the foundation of everything else. He knew enough to try and close his eyes, but he couldn’t.

There were crimes that damned a man the moment they were committed. The soul always knew it. After that, nothing evil he did mattered. The black magic of this place wouldn’t let him have the escape of seeing Dona this time. The mirrors clustered around him like the walls of a coffin, dancing out of the way only when he struck out at them.

Then his fists stopped in midair, clenched, unable to strike. For he was surrounded by her. By so many different images of her.

Eliza.

“You met Eliza when you were with your last foster mother. Your first true love.

You were seventeen.”

Eliza had been fifteen, and that’s how he saw her now. Straight blonde hair, blue eyes. It was suddenly so pathetically obvious why he had stayed with Lauren longer than the other Mistresses he had manipulated. That same purity in her glance. Not the sickness infecting his own soul that made him such a good match for his foster mothers, so capable of manipulating them. He’d manipulated Lauren, but he’d never touched the core of her, because she was a grown woman who had been strong and clean enough that the filth of his soul hadn’t been able to completely break her. Eliza hadn’t been so lucky.

“You can’t make me look at her. You can’t.” He dropped to a squat on the ground, his hands tight over his head. He wouldn’t look at it. He’d be damned first.

Careful, Nathan. There are no metaphors in Hell.

The smoke cleared. He recognized the irony in the combination of smoke and mirrors, but he still wouldn’t lift his head. Not until he felt the brush of Dona’s leg against his side.

He exploded into motion, seizing her so in less than a blink he had her on her back, his body arched over hers, hands pinning her wrists to the ground, sitting on her hips to hold her down.

Her eyes were wide, startled, telling him she hadn’t anticipated that move. Nor had some other power, if the rumble that went through the floor told him anything. It gave him the fleeting uneasy feeling of a lover about to confront the father of the village virgin he was ravishing. He didn’t care. Let whatever demons that dwelled in this place come get him. He wasn’t going to be torn open and left to bleed. He’d go down fighting.

His chest rose and fell, not from the effort of pinning a woman half his size, but the reaction of a man being chased over a long distance by things he knew he’d never outrun.

He’d keep running until he couldn’t run further, though. When he went for her lips, she bit him. Snarling, he settled for her throat, biting her back, suckling on the skin to mark her as his, tasting her with his tongue, pressing his cock hard against her belly, letting her feel how much he wanted to fuck her. He could rape her, but as much as he hated having it pointed out by her earlier, he didn’t work that way. He wanted her to command him, to arouse her so much she couldn’t deny her own need. Her breasts pressed against his upper abdomen. He hated that corset. Letting go of her hands, he reached down and yanked the cups out of the way so he could grip the full curves, feel the press of her nipples in his palms.

“I want to see you come.” His voice was rough, pleading to his own ears.

“I’ll grant that wish.” Those sorceress’s eyes, looking up at him, told him a blink before it happened that he’d never had the upper hand at all.

The world spun and he was on his knees, ten feet away from her. He wanted to howl. Dona was still there, her corset dipped down like a waist cincher, showing those luscious breasts fully. When he tried to move forward, he was brought up short. He had manacles on his biceps and wrists and they were chained to an eyebolt in the floor, as if he were an animal in truth. As she studied him with that remote expression that saw everything, he felt vicious despair at it, at the way he felt so close to understanding one moment, close to getting into her head and yet yanked away in the next blink. The mirrors still rotated, but at the moment they were mercifully blank.

He wanted his hands on her thighs, his mouth and body close to hers. She came to him, cupped his face, let him catch his lips briefly on her wrist, the curve of her palm.

Then she strolled across the chamber, back to that old Victorian fainting couch, complete with gold tassels over the carved wood and rich tapestry-patterned fabric.

Tracing her hand over the top of one breast, she paused, her gaze going somewhere behind Nathan.

“Come,” she said imperiously. “I wish you to service me.” Nathan stiffened as two men walked past him. Both were specimens of physical perfection, muscled, oiled, cocks erect. Each had an identical harness on his cock. A painfully tight chain ran from the base of it through the cleft of the muscular buttocks and hooked to the firmly buckled waist strap. In the front, there was a series of straps fastened with a metal stud in an overlapping point on the cock harness. They fanned out over the shaved pubic area in a sunburst design studded to the waist strap, measured exactly to keep the cock pulled up high.

One of the men had dark hair rippling down his back. The other’s locks were almost white, so they were like yin and yang. As they turned, he saw one had wholly white eyes and the other black, both appearing to be blind, finding her by her voice only.

“Dona, no. I wanted—”

“To bring me fulfillment yourself? I don’t think so. You prefer to tease women, not bring them true pleasure.” She reached out, caressed and stroked the cock of the white-haired man now standing at her side. Bending, he finished unlacing the corset all the way down the front as she fondled him, wrapping her fist around his cock. “You could never surrender yourself, never give yourself so wholly over to a Mistress’s pleasure.” She touched the thigh of the other man, standing on the opposite side of her. “Get me wet with your mouth,” she purred the command. “I want to straddle that big cock of yours.”

“Yes, Mistress.” He moved to obey. Nathan watched, furious and confused, as the man knelt. The man waited for her to drape her legs gracefully on his shoulders and then he tore the crotch of the pants with one powerful movement that made her gasp.