His lip curled, wanting to deny it, but she wasn’t done. “You’re a submissive of such wondrous beauty and power, any Mistress would kill to cherish you as her own. If your soul wasn’t poisoned. And if you weren’t mine.” The possessive comment startled him, the proprietary words slamming into his chest, robbing him of breath for a moment. When he remembered how she’d left him dangling, so close to coming, he rallied.

“Was that what denying me was about? Your way of ‘cherishing’ me?” He sneered it.

“Karma has a much shorter turnaround time here. Wasn’t that what you were doing to me a few moments ago? Bringing me pleasure and then planning to use it against me as a weapon?”

“I was right,” he snarled. “To try to do it to you before you did it to me.” He yanked against the bonds. With her words rasping across his nerve endings, his limbs jerked as if they’d been touched by electrical current. He was feeling suffocated. He had to go, to leave. He needed to run.

“Sshh…ssshh…” When she touched his head to calm him, he whipped in that direction, seized her wrist in his teeth and bit down.

He punctured her flesh, clamping his jaws together with the grim determination of a pit bull. She’d know he wasn’t to be fucked with. Play with his mind, would she?

Bitch. She wasn’t allowed to hurt him. No woman hurt him.

No, no woman will. If you could reach my face, would you tear that away too? Break my ribs, rip them free, gnaw on them? Will consuming the flesh and heart of a woman give you your vengeance on us? Bring you peace?

The red haze before his eyes began to fade away at the gruesome image of himself bathed in blood and reveling in it. Wanting nothing more than to kill anything female.

Dona wasn’t struggling. She hadn’t cried out. He could taste her blood, but she was sitting motionless, letting him hold her arm in that bear trap grip, her dark eyes watching him.

She could feel pain. That at least was a relief, something familiar. There was a tension to her features, a quiver in her wrist against his cheek. It bothered him though, seeing those signs of pain but no signs of her trying to strike out at him. She lifted her other hand, touched his cheek.

“Jonathan has made you into a rabid animal, hasn’t he? Nothing but rage. Ssshhh…

Let me go, my sweet slave. Let me go.”

As he eased his bite, her fingers wiped away the blood on his lips, even as her arm oozed more, dripped onto his skin. It gave him back that image of being bathed in her blood. He swallowed, tasting it in a way that made bile rise in his stomach. No. He didn’t want that.

“You’re a submissive naturally,” she said softly. “You’ve made yourself a vicious bottom. On top of that, you have the territorial instincts of an alpha. All those facts don’t change anything. You’ve never trusted yourself to experience being a submissive fully, or met the woman who can force you to do so. Until now. You stay here a moment and think.”

As if he had any choice. Rising, she walked down to the water’s edge, dipping her arm in the sparkling current. When she lifted it, blood and teeth marks were gone, but he felt as if the wound was still there, evidenced by the way she turned her back on him, leaving him bound and ignored.

When she sat down on the bank, he followed her gaze to where Fiona was bathing.

Her leopard sat restively on the bank. When Olivia joined Fiona in the water, she poured liquid from one of those crystal bottles over her breasts. Fiona massaged the soap in, enjoying her own touch, apparently unconcerned by their regard. As Olivia let the bottle drift away in the water, she pressed herself against Fiona’s back, her hands moving forward to help as Fiona let out a sigh of pleasure and leaned against her, nestling her head comfortably and looking up at the blue sky, the froth of clouds moving overhead. Most of the other women were in the water now too. Playing with each other or floating on their backs like sensually curved lily pads, their pale breasts the white blooms. Dona linked her hands around her bent knees. She was still naked, her hair whispering down her pale back.

Sirens, just like the picture. Only in this quiet moment when they weren’t concerned with him, he thought he might be seeing the picture when Hylas wasn’t in it.

Not creatures of predatory danger to men, but women indulging their own pleasure in a quiet way, at ease in their surroundings and methods.

His attention was quickly jerked away as a hand took hold of his cock. He tried to jump back from Aliyah since the hand she gripped him with held her snake. The beast, a good foot of his body wrapped around her forearm, had his hooded head resting on the top of the hand that deftly snapped a tether on the new ring at the head of his cock.

“Get that…” He gritted his teeth, fighting the quivering panic that came from having very little ability to move. With that damn snake too close, he was afraid it would strike, be on his cock…

“Be still,” Dona ordered. She’d turned, her head cocked as she watched them, her hair blowing across her shoulder, feathering against her left breast. He could see the pink lips of her pussy because the soles of her feet were spread apart, bracing her against the grass. She still glistened with her arousal, with his pre-cum.

While he didn’t have much choice but to obey Dona’s wishes, he couldn’t help the futile locking of his muscles as Aliyah attached a second, shorter chain on her tether to the D-ring at the scrotum. The chain that had been installed with the piercing that ran the length of the ladder already put a strain on his constantly stiff cock. Now this tether attached to the crown and root would join the equation, such that he’d be alternately teased and tormented by any increase in his erection or fiercely administered yank.

After Dona’s refusal to allow him release he wanted to put his own hands defiantly on his cock. He could have jerked off to climax in probably less than ten seconds, as long as natural body function still worked as it should here. He could tell himself that doubt caused his hesitation, but it seemed like the tunnel through which he’d always seen the writing of his thoughts had expanded, a light cast on a jumble of different theories he hadn’t wanted or thought of considering.

Did he want to have Dona command his release to prove he could hold out for it?

Or because he wanted to know she desired it, like when he was eating her cunt? Or maybe she’d hit the right nerve, saying that he had a true submissive’s nature, that something inside him needed her to command it?

Bullshit. It was all bullshit. He could think straight if Aliyah would pull that damn snake back a few feet. Okay, a fucking mile wouldn’t be far enough. He turned his gaze away from the creature, knowing the ridiculous but overwhelming compulsion to keep staring at the serpent would not keep fangs from sinking into his flesh. He focused on Dona and tried to figure out something that would transfer some of the power back to his side.

She was sitting on that bank like an innocent girl, for Christ’s sake. She had a mole on the back of one thigh, a tiny scrape on one finger from who knew what. Did they have Band-Aids in Hell? Little demons with red faces and horns printed on them, like kid’s bandages? Her mouth, when relaxed in neither smile nor frown as it was now, was somewhat crooked on her face.

Unfortunately, that curvy little body, those wet crooked lips, the dark, taunting eyes, the memory of all of that rising and falling over him, was not helping in the least.

He cursed on a groan as Aliyah gave him a cruelly playful squeeze before she stepped back. The restraints on his limbs vanished, releasing him at the same moment that damned snake’s tongue flickered against his skin. He scrambled back and swore even more colorfully as he came to the end of Aliyah’s firmly held chain. The resulting pain brought to mind the disturbing memory from his childhood social studies class, where he saw Richard Harris suspended by his pectorals in A Man Called Horse. He shuddered.

Dona rose then, sauntering toward him. The innocence vanished and the boots reappeared. He watched the first sway of her hips as she moved toward him in nothing but those boots. Then the latex pants slithered up her legs, repainting her pussy and hips. The corset closed around her, cinching up and lifting her breasts so that the swivel of her hips became even more pronounced. When she put out her hand, Aliyah laid the end of the tether over it. Dona twitched it idly, so he felt the movement like electrical current running between the scallops of chain connecting each ladder down to the scrotum ring. There were three feet between them and he ached to close the distance, just slide his arms around her and find out how she would feel in his arms. Maybe she’d like it, like knowing he was strong and could hold her as long as she wanted him to do so. The thought made his heart ache in an unusual way, not necessarily pleasant.

For some reason that didn’t matter. He didn’t want to stop feeling that desire.

As if she’d read his thoughts, his Mistress spoke. “Hands behind your back.” He made himself stand still this time, keeping his eyes on hers. Watched hers heat at his obedience.

It was Olivia who came out of the water, droplets rolling down her breasts, her hair shiny and wet on her bare shoulders. She cuffed his wrists to the crooks of his elbows so his arms were folded up above the small of his back again. Dona stood before him while it was done, twisting the leash.

“Lower your eyes.”

“No.”

When she reached out to brush at his lashes and force his compliance, he turned his head, pressed his lips to that spot on her arm, the one that no longer bore the imprint of his teeth. He brushed his cheek against her. I’m sorry. He couldn’t say the words, but hoped she felt them.

She stayed still, let him do it. He lowered his eyes then.

“Are you ready to obey your Mistress?” She murmured it. There was something wistful to the tone, something that was an odd echo of what he’d just felt in his own heart.

He inclined his head. He felt as if he were gripped by a fever as he stood before her so helpless and aroused at once. Was this what those male subs felt, the married ones, the ones with Mistresses to whom they’d committed themselves entirely, permanently collared? This feral, raging desire to do or be anything she wished, if only she’d keep them chained to her side forever?