"You must prove your devotion to me first, before you can see me," she said. The edge of the crop drifted along the line of his pectoral. The skin quivered beneath it, and she suppressed the urge to lean forward, bite warm skin and muscle.

He swallowed. Unbound, but bound by her orders, he had shown occasional flashes of humor. Here, he was helpless, focused on her and vulnerable, and she was about to tread into even more turbulent emotional waters. She thought about calling a timeout to be sure things were okay. It might break the tension that was building, tension that might be important.

She glanced down at his stiff cock. The head was full of blood, a flushed cap for the column of black harnessing straps, and she knew there was no doubt she had him in a high state of lust, when the psyche was more open to being pushed. She wanted answers. She had to have them, to be sure she could take them where they both seemed to want to go.

"Okay," he whispered, before she could open her mouth to ask him again.

She came even closer, brought her scent and nearness to him for reassurance. She caressed his bare neck, traced his lips gently with her fingers. She let him catch them in his mouth and suck on them greedily before she took them away and rested them on his bare chest, tracing the moistness he had left on them across his nipple while his breath caught harshly in his throat.

"Tell me what happened, Josh. What happened with Winona to drive you here, to make you hide here?"

His body went rigid. Whatever he had been expecting her to ask of him, it was apparently not that.

Marcus's eyes narrowed on her, but after a moment, his expression became thoughtful and he nodded, tentative endorsement of her direction. Be careful , his eyes warned.

She knew. She suspected the danger of this path, and knew it all too well herself, and maybe that knowledge was part of why she dared.

"Can you tell me, love?" she turned her hand over, stroking with her knuckles now, more soothing than provocative. Blindfolding him should make it easier for him to speak of it, just as it had been easier to tell them of Jonathan while staring at the ocean, as if they were not there. But she couldn't be entirely kind.

"Tell me. I'm your Mistress. You're not to hide anything from me." Her hand descended, and closed over the harness, her lower two fingers capturing the chain and giving it a sharp tug. He groaned, trying to thrust into her hand, but she stepped back from him abruptly, leaving his hot skin exposed to the chill of her withdrawal.

"Anything," she repeated. "Tell me. If I decide you need to be punished," she sidled up close again, pressed her full length along his body, let his captive cock slide between her thigh muscles. It was like embracing a board; he was so rigid with hunger and heat. "I'll take care of it. Or perhaps you need a punishment now, to remind you who you obey, who you tell your secrets to?"

"A punishment worse than not being able to see you?" He groaned out the question. He tried to fasten his teeth on her throat, but she eluded him with a chuckle and a sharp strike of the crop along his inner thigh, the left one this time, and a quick flick over his testicles. Then she withdrew again. She took her time walking back, five paces, to the throne Marcus had vacated. She turned, took a seat, and considered him, a whip in each hand.

"Tell me, Josh. Tell me what happened. I'm going to sit here in this chair, and wait for you to tell me.

Until you do, you will not be punished as you deserve. You will not touch me or suckle my breasts, or get to plunge that steel cock of yours into my pussy. Do you know how wet my pussy is for you, Josh?

It's drenched. I could come just by sitting like this, watching you bound on display for me, as beautiful as one of your sculptures."

He made a noise, part plea, part animal sound of pain. Lauren refused to let herself soften, even though she saw concern flit across Marcus's face. She sharpened her tone.

"Tell me, Josh. It starts with one sentence. You said you trusted me completely. Prove it to me."

She watched and waited. It would have been a nice moment to simply indulge herself in the heartbreaking beauty of his restrained body, but the rasp of his breath and the intensity of his internal struggle came off his body in emotional waves that swamped her. She didn't need to see the visual chaos of his expression to know he was in anguish.

She wanted to know who had caused him such pain, protect him, heal it, kiss it away. Forgive him, if he suffered because he had caused pain. She thought she would forgive him anything.

"Start with one sentence, love," she said, softly, so her voice was like the murmur of his own consciousness. "I came here because I couldn't look in a mirror. Why are you here? What eats at your soul, Josh? It's just us here, and there is nothing outside this room."

"I'm a monster." It came out a whisper, but the raw pain in his voice made it even more potent than a declaration delivered in a shout. She heard accusation, judge, jury and conviction in his resigned tone, the sound of someone trudging off to hellfire with no hope of reprieve.

"Why are you a monster? What did you do, Josh? Tell me."

"I... can't. It's too bad."

She swung the whip, snapped it a hair's breadth from his ankle, so he felt the air a moment before the noise and jerked. Even Marcus started, surprised by the force of the move, his look of uneasiness quickly replaced by admiration as she brought the whip back in a sweeping, controlled curve around her calves. She was, for a moment, the image of the unrepentant Lilith, in the garden of Eden with the sly serpent coiled around her body.

"You have been bad, Josh," she said. "Bad for holding back on me, and Marcus, who cares for you so much. So you need to be punished."

She considered him, then rose, came to him. "So you will be," she murmured, a silky purr as she slid one fingernail down the center of his chest, depressing slightly to leave a red welt, scraping a line down his belly, stopping just below his navel. She lowered herself to a feline crouch, her breath heated, tickling just above his glans. Josh's arms became cords of iron, pulling against the restraints, and she wondered if there was anything more erotic than watching a powerful man strain against manacles.

She hoped the Salernos had made the bindings strong. This was no playful dungeon session. There was devotion here, and yes, intimacy, but there was also catharsis, purging and release. There was something painful in the room, and filled with rage, and it wanted its freedom.

She hoped to God she knew what she was doing, because at this point what was happening had taken on a life of its own. The reward might be a leap forward in trust and love, a binding of the souls, or it could destroy them.

They'd both been there, to that point of soul destruction. Now, whether they were fools or hopeless romantics, they were pushing the envelope again to see if they could find in each other what they had hoped to find the time before and failed. The result was going to be fire, but would it be conflagration, purification or resurrection?

"God, you are so gorgeous." She slid the butt of the whip along the inside of his calf, the ticklish indentation behind his knee, trailed it along his inner thigh. She could almost feel the heat pulsing from his captured cock. She coiled the whip behind his leg, tightened the slack so it pressed into his thigh. She leaned in and bit him there, soothing the pain with a warm swirl of the tongue, savoring the warm taste of his skin, the quivering and bunched muscle under her teeth. Her ear brushed his cock. He rasped out her name, a plea. Her eyes lingered on the tight clench-and-release spasms of his buttocks. He could not stop his body from imitating what it wanted to do, the mindless instinct of a dog humping a leg. Instead of amusing or repulsing her, the image increased her own hunger, for they were rapidly leaving niceties behind. Responses were raw, primitive. She wanted those hips pumping, jackhammering himself into her until she screamed. But not yet.

"Tell me, Josh. Why do you need to be punished? What did you do?"

She eased herself back into a straight-backed chair Marcus brought for her, so she could sit closer to Josh, brush her heeled boot along the inside of his calf.

His head lifted, his eyes and cheekbones masked to her, his lips moistening nervously, somehow appearing even more vulnerable for their solitary exposure on his face. "I can't," he repeated, desperately.

She twisted her wrist and the snap end of the crop zapped his thigh just below the bound scrotum, a quick sting, meant to raise the emotional response. He jumped, swallowed, and the quivering in his legs increased. "Please, don't..."

Marcus made a noise, and Lauren gave him a sharp, negative shake of her head.

"Marcus is here, Josh, and I am here. But in the darkness of that mask it's just you, facing yourself. I will take care of you," she reminded him, and this time the whip's touch was a gentle caress, teasing his balls.

"Tell me."

His fists remained clenched against his bonds, muscles unconsciously resisting his restraints still, but she knew it was only a physical manifestation of resistance to the chains that held him in his mind. She longed to let him go, but he had to put it in the open between them. It was the sacrifice that all Masters demanded before they allowed themselves to be worshipped. Complete openness, no hidden corners.

Come on, Josh. Let it go, so I can let both of us go.

"She was a sub. She liked me to really take control." The first words were thick, clotted as if they had to fight their way free of the grip of a festering wound, choked with pus. His lips pressed together. "She wanted me to dress her sexy when we were out, make her expose herself. We'd go to a club and she'd beg me to make her lift her skirt when she was dancing, let other people see her bare ass. She'd usually have me spank it good before we went out, hard with a belt, so it would have red welts on it.

"I liked playing with her, but I was afraid of being too rough. She could drive me up, make me get so savage with her. She wanted it that way, but... I enjoyed how much she got off on it."

Marcus's eyes flicked to Lauren. A frown flitted across his brow, but she shook her head, putting a finger to her lips and he sank back down on the dais near Josh's feet.

The mask would let him talk inside his head, temporarily push away his surroundings. The outside became the inside, and emotions not normally allowed the sight of day became irrepressible, because sightlessness and being helpless turned you inside out, made shields and controls impossible.

Lauren had watched many subs fall apart. A slave was supposed to have no secrets, expose his or her fears, worries and longings to the Mistress, and the Mistress would address them as she saw fit. It was the way the game worked. It was that automatic vulnerability, impossible to avoid, that gave the Dom such a dangerous edge, that made D/s walk so close to the darkness.

Marcus removed his hand from Josh's ankle, recognizing, as she did, Josh's need for an isolated dark void of space into which to spill the weight on his soul.

"So she got off on you doing all this. Why does that make you a monster? It sounds like you were a good Master."

"She didn't know anything about the clubs at first, just knew she wanted me to tie her up and whip her. It made her come all the time...in the beginning. She didn't really know about the other stuff you could do. I found out about those for her, because I knew she'd like them, and because, I liked them, too."

"It made you hard, didn't it?" she murmured, bending forward and rubbing her fingertips over his constricted organ, eliciting a moan of pleasure, another whispered plea that she ignored. "So you did what she wanted."

He nodded. "Anything. But some things I just couldn't...she wanted me to leave marks, permanent ones, and when she saw how much it bothered me, she wanted me to do it even more. And if I didn't want to do it, she'd take me to the clubs and make me watch while some other Dom did it, make me give her to another Dom."

"Did you like that?"

"Yes...no. It hurt, in a strange way, but it always got me off. It just felt...wrong. But I liked it," his fingers dug into his palms, so fiercely they left marks. She saw the flesh whiten and inflame around the puncture. "I fucking liked it," he repeated, not as emphasis, but as accusation. "It made me hard as iron. I wanted to pull her out of his hands and pound into her, but it was like rage...it felt wrong. I couldn't do it, though I was supposed to be in charge. It hurt," he repeated, confused, arguing with himself.

Lauren swallowed, feeling emotions of her own rise up. A bad feeling was growing in her and she saw it reflected in Marcus's eyes. Did she really want to hear the end of this story? No, she didn't, but she would. She had to.

She pressed her knee against his left leg. She laid her hand upon his thigh.

"So what happened?"

"I just...I did everything she wanted, but it never seemed like enough. I stopped working for awhile, because I was pouring all my energy into new things that I thought might turn her on. It was like..."

"Being strung out on drugs," she finished for him, remembering.

"Yeah..." he swallowed, and his hands eased, twitched a bit. "One night, we went out to dinner together. Just a regular thing, though I did the usual things. I made her wear something sexy I really liked, no panties so I could play with her pussy under the table. She liked me to make her flash the waiter, you know, lean forward over the menu so he could see everything, but she didn't push as much of that, not that evening. She seemed really affectionate, not real pushy, and I could focus on her, enjoy her. But I noticed that night...we didn't have much to talk about.

"I realized we had gotten away from what it was that had brought us together and now it was all about sex. That night felt better, though," he added wistfully. "It was more like us again. I had my arm around her, and through most of dinner, she cuddled against me and seemed happy with me, like she was pleased with me, and that felt good. It had been awhile since I'd felt that way."

Hadn't it been so similar for her, never feeling as if she had pleased Jonathan, always anxious, on edge, not caring about career or personal identity any longer, too keyed up to think about the destructiveness of it? It shamed her to think of it now, how she signed herself over to him, who she was, with barely a murmur or qualm. It was also frightening how she had done it, with no real sense of having done so. She had just hungered for acceptance, self affirmation, because she lost the ability to give that to herself. She had let Jonathan take it away. She and Josh, two insecure people with low self-esteem, uncovered and stripped bare by two people who needed to degrade them to feel worthwhile themselves.

It was pathetically formulaic and painful to see the mirror, but she was strong enough to look. She held the cards now, and had been holding them, since she became true to herself again and said the words that made Jonathan walk away. Now she just had to figure out what the winning hand would be for Josh.

"Tell me what she did." Her spike heel slid against his instep, depressed slightly, just enough to cause another slight red mark, a warning. "Don't keep me waiting, Josh."

The threat laced into the warm promise was a potent mix. His erection, waning a bit from the fluctuation of his emotions, jumped, began to swell so the straps bit into the tender skin again, and he groaned at the discomfort.

She knew the torture of desolation and desire mixed. It tore the senses apart and the shields down. She hoped he didn't need a further push. Marcus was a still presence somewhere to the left of her, and she could feel his tension.

"We left the restaurant," he said after awhile. "I had my arm wrapped around her. She nuzzled against me, then took my hand, pulling me into the shadows between two buildings so we could embrace. She was shy almost, where any other time she might have begged me into the alley in broad daylight and pleaded with me to use her where anyone could walk by at any moment and see her. But she wanted tenderness, and it...God, it was wonderful. I practically swallowed her, pushing her back against the bricks, but just to kiss her, hold her, feel her holding me.

"I didn't think about how unsafe it was where we were. I was supposed to protect her, and I didn't even think about it. Something came at me out of the shadows. I was so stupid, not thinking about how we were in a not-so-great an area, though the restaurant was a nice enough one. Letting her pull me into an alley, for Chrissakes, and I was supposed to take care of her..." his lips curled in a sneer of self-loathing so bitter Lauren could taste it on her own tongue.

"There were three men. They tore us apart and two of them grabbed me, knocked me around a bit, but mainly forced us deeper into the alley, forced me to my knees and held me there while the other one shoved her onto her back in the filth of that alley and yanked up her skirt. He hit her in the face, split her lip..."

He pressed his head back against the cross, his jaw clenching. Lauren didn't move, fighting every urge she had to keep from touching him in comfort or speak soothing words. The wound wasn't open yet.

Blood had to be free flowing for it to cleanse itself.

"She was crying, crying my name as he rammed into her. And I lost it. She belonged to me. I was supposed to take care of her, but, no, no, NO. That's not it."

Lauren watched, her own eyes anguished, as moisture trickled from under the mask, curved under his jaw. His voice became brutal, unforgiving.

"For the first few minutes, I didn't even try to do anything, because I was getting hard watching them do it. I was getting off on it, because it was so much like what we did. She liked the rape scenes."

Lauren shifted, her eyes locking with Marcus's.

"I was fucking enjoying it, as if I was watching a Dom get rough with her to torture me, for not being enough. And," his voice broke, "I thought...she's finally...finally getting what she deserves." He choked on a sob. "I fucking thought that, I remembered that like I was some kind of diseased redneck wifebeater. It was that, not her being raped, that tore it loose inside me. I lost it."

A quiver ran through his shoulders, a tensing like a cramp.

"Josh  - "

"No," his face contorted. "Let me feel it. I deserve it. I became filled with so much rage; ten guys couldn't have held me. I rolled and kicked. I fought them with whatever I had inside of me, three years of unfulfilled passion, fueled up emotional fucked-upness. When I yanked the guy off her, I remember his eyes going wide, looking at my face, and he tried to say something, but I busted his mouth with my fist before he could. I was sticky, sticky, spraying blood on her, and then she was on my back, trying to pull me off, and then the police were there...the police were there."

He stopped, breathing hard, tears dropping off his chin onto his heaving chest. Lauren shifted, rose.

"Don't take it off," he snapped out. "I don't want you to see my face."

"Okay," she said softly, laying her hand against the side of his jaw.

"Don't," he tried to jerk away, but the bindings didn't allow it. "I don't want you to touch me."

"Well, that's just too bad, because I'm going to." She rubbed her hand along his jaw, stroked, kept stroking as her other hand laid along his rib cage, soothing the ulcer of emotions.

"Please," he choked out. "I'm not...that's not all of it."

Lauren raised her head and she sensed his eyes searching for her face. She nodded, stepped back and let him hear her sit before him again. "Tell me all of it, Josh," she said sternly, though her throat ached with his pain.

"One of the guys was critical." His voice was weary now, almost dead. "The other was pretty messed up. I had just knocked the third out. The messed-up one was still coherent enough to talk, and he did, because he didn't want to go to jail for rape, especially since he wasn't a rapist." Josh swallowed, and his voice broke.

"He was just doing what my wife had paid him to do."