“In that way, you were. See your Mistresses another way. Open the eyes of your soul like a newborn. Have the bravery of an infant to face the reality with no blinders on to protect yourself. I know you can. I know you have courage.” Because she believed he could, he found himself raising his head, lifting his nose from her hair to look at them. They were illuminated in the crowd, motionless among the many gyrating bodies so he could not miss them. Silent, accusatory statues.

Compassionate women who had loved him, sexy Mistresses confident in their power who never expected his intention was to shred and throw their love back into their faces.

No, he didn’t want these thoughts. These weren’t his. That wasn’t how it was. They had malice in them, they all did. If he hadn’t done it to them, they’d have done it to him. Eventually.

His gaze flicked down so he could stare into Dona’s face. Desperately he sought it, that trace of deception he saw lurking in every woman’s eyes. Her eyes, dark and mysterious, were capable of hiding everything. But as they looked back into his, all he felt was confusion clouding what he’d always believed to be true.

Another body pressed against his back. Two hands slid up his thighs, teasing the muscles and the curve of his buttocks. Aliyah and her snake.

“How long does this go on?” He couldn’t stop himself from asking the child’s question.

“Until I say so. Until you figure it out.” Dona answered the question as Aliyah’s hands caressed his biceps. Dona palmed the broadness of his back. The snake woman’s purr of pleasure and warm breath were against his spine.

“You can’t fool me,” his Mistress whispered. “You can’t run.” Her fingers crept up to his nape as Aliyah’s lips pressed just below that portion of his skin. Their bodies held him between them, soft, generous curves of breast, hip and the lengths of their thighs against him. The strain on the piercings as his large erection increased proportionately made his head light, just as Dona had predicted. He tried to look away from the knowledge in Dona’s face, but he couldn’t.

“You thought you discovered the ultimate game preserve in the BDSM scene.

Mistresses who have the audacity to bring a man to his knees willingly, for his own pleasure and theirs. You thought you were the hunter, but we both know there was more than that going on, don’t we?” She rubbed her thighs against him, captured his cock between them and let him feel the pressure of her pussy on top of him, the squeeze of her thighs. “I could make you come just from this. Because you’ve always wanted your true Mistress, the one who will care for your soul, the part that needs her so desperately. A Mistress you could love and cherish fully with no fear of her betrayal.

Jonathan is keeping you from that.”

“Maybe he protects me from the empty fantasy. The lie of it. Aren’t you here because you don’t believe in it?”

He’d lashed out defensively, but he saw he’d landed an arrow with that one. He felt satisfaction along with a moment of regret at the flash of pain through her expression.

He shoved it away. “Fuck you. You’re just playing with my head, like all of them.” Her lips tightened, her eyes going cool. “I’m trying to get you to stop listening to your fucked-up head and listen to your heart. If you want to do it rough, we can do it rough.” She stepped back, taking her body beyond his reach, her attention shifting to his shoulder.

What he’d thought were Aliyah’s hands moving to his shoulders was something else. Two snakes, one coming up over either side. He twisted, crying out in fear, but Dona had the chain to his cock still wrapped around her fist. At some point during her fondling, Aliyah apparently had snapped one to the back of the collar and tethered it to the arms, so all she had to do was keep her hand in that taut vertical line of chain to hold him fast. He struggled as more snakes came out of the mosaic floor at his feet and wound around his ankles, spiraling up his calves to his thighs, holding him the same way the pond weed and ropes of grass had done. Only these restraints moved, rasping their live, damp bodies against his skin. The snake at his right shoulder wound around his throat once and then continued down his body, the slender body perfectly suited to winding herself in a tight coil along the length of his cock, giving him a momentary terror as to whether boa constrictors came in pencil-width size. However, the snake seemed content to hover just above his genitals, the threat somehow worse than the reality.

He’d immediately assumed the creature was a she, as if a threat to his manhood could only come in female form. Wouldn’t Dona have a field day with that one? He wished he was flaccid and limp so he could dissuade the creature from using his cock as a tree limb. However, whether it was the piercings, the curse of the place or Dona’s presence commanding him, his traitorous body was more attuned to her Will than his sense of self-preservation. He remained hard as a steel rod.

“Now, my arrogant slave.” Dona reached out, her fingernails raking down his chest, caressing him and the snakes together. “Stay very still for me. Not a muscle, except those I want you to move.”

The crowd was a shifting, blurred movement of shadows outside their circle now.

Even the music had died to a mumbling roar of sound, like a distant ocean. Olivia stepped to her side holding a box. Nathan watched, fear turning his vital organs to ice.

He had fucking snakes on him. All over him.

When Olivia opened the box for Dona, his Mistress withdrew the contents carefully.

He knew he didn’t want to look, but of course he did.

For a moment, he thought it was a three-headed snake, a creature of the surrealism of this world. It didn’t help that the snake on his left shoulder suddenly dropped down his pectoral, latching on to his nipple ring. He cried out, expecting to be bitten, but the creature remained where she was. The snake at his midriff looped back up to take the opposite nipple ring so he had her weight pulling downward on the right ring as the other snake pulled upward on the left, a tugging sensation on each piercing.

When he was able to focus through his terror, he saw the object from the box was in fact an object. It wasn’t a snake. It did move like one, like liquid silver in the Terminator films in serpentine form. A phallus come to life, as if Dona charmed men’s cocks or the simile of one the way a snake charmer made a snake rise out of a basket and dance. She certainly had no difficulty getting his cock to rise, no matter the circumstance.

Dona stroked the three-headed thing’s glittering liquid skin. “This lovely device has one purpose. It’s going to give me great pleasure to watch it fulfill it with you. Stay very, very still.”

Dona held up her arm, the chain to his cock still wrapped around her knuckles. The object started to elongate, ratcheting up his terror. He started back, an instinctive reaction, but Aliyah, her snakes and Dona had too firm a grip upon him. It wrapped around her arm like the coiled bracelet of an Egyptian queen. The largest “head” of the thing led the way, the other two gliding along like a bent fork’s tines at the back.

“Wh-What does it do?”

“The two smaller heads will lengthen about six inches and wrap around your balls.

Stretch them, milk them. The main head will drive deep inside you and fuck your ass.” He wasn’t certain what happened next, but several moments later, rational thought returned to find him coughing, panting, hoarse from screaming out and struggling against his live bonds, a panic attack so bad he had no grip on his emotions, no sense of the passage of time.

“No… No… Don’t touch me with that.” He was raging, pleading. His mind told him it wasn’t a snake, that it was an inanimate object that was no different from a sex toy run on batteries, but the way they’d covered him with the real things took common sense away. It was just too much.

The snake bindings on his legs vanished, a momentary reprieve only as Dona and Aliyah shoved him up to the nightclub’s bar. His upper body slammed down on the countertop. Dona held the back of his neck in one hand, the tether between his collar and arms drawn taut in the other, putting pressure on his windpipe. Now Aliyah had his cock leash as she kicked his legs more widely apart. The snakes from the floor returned, restraining him from ankle to thigh. He thought he could feel the flicker of the damn things’ tongues at the base of his testicles.

“Hush. Tell me a slave’s first responsibility.” Dona’s grip was merciless, her nails biting into his skin. “Tell me the answer, or it will get much worse.” He wanted to scream at her to let him go, but something penetrated his panic.

Under her merciless hold, one of her fingertips was playing with the curve of his ear.

Stroking it in a way that suggested if he’d had hair, she’d be curling it around her finger in a soothing, almost maternal way. When he managed to glance up at her face, his own pressed to the bar, he saw it in her eyes. She would take care of him, get him through this. He just had to trust her. He, who hadn’t trusted a woman since he could barely walk away from one. Nothing about this situation suggested that should change. But as her finger stroked him, a liquid warmth like baby’s milk spilled into his chest, down into his stomach, coating the panic with an odd reassurance.

Surrender.

“To submit to the Will of his Mistress.” His body strained helplessly, his mind resisting the idea even as his heart fought to take hold of it. “Because it’s your right to use me as you wish.”

“Yes.”

Why not surrender to her? After all, she seemed to know everything, anticipated every potential strategy to take control before he attempted to execute it. No, not entirely. She hadn’t anticipated the words he’d lashed at her a few moments ago. He had the power to hurt her. Normally, that would have made him feel exultation, knowing he had a vulnerability to exploit. He wanted to know her vulnerabilities, didn’t he?

Of course he did. But did he want to know the pathway to her soul to tear it apart or to dwell there, instead of inside himself? Would he find the sense of security there only hinted at by that tiny reassuring caress at his ear?