The left snake that held his nipple ring released it briefly to rethread herself through an eyebolt screwed into the surface of the bar and then reclamped on his D-ring. He felt the snake on the right do the same thing, which allowed Dona to ease her grip on his neck. He was firmly fastened to the wood now by his nipple rings.

“I’m afraid, Mistress.” His anger was accomplishing nothing.

“I know that.” Her lips touched his spine as he felt the two small tails of the thing wrap themselves around his testicles as she’d indicated. Shadows reflected back at him in the bar mirror. A large woman with a cruel face, piglike eyes that narrowed, calculated, deceived. He remembered the suffocating smell of her crotch as she’d pushed his face into it and crooned. Such a pretty boy…

He squeezed his eyes shut, ducked his head.

“I’m with you.” Dona’s voice.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil… Words he remembered from a brief time when he thought religion could provide him a safe haven. “You’re not real. I can’t believe in you.” He made it a statement, but it was a question, made flat by terror.

“I’m the only thing you have to believe in,” his Mistress said.

The thick body of the main phallus slid away from his testicles, moving between his thighs and up toward its goal. Its skin felt oily, slick, as if it secreted lubrication in its fluid skin. He wondered what department of Hell was in charge of creating such fantastical animated instruments of torture. Shaking under Dona’s touch, he felt her hands slide down to his buttocks, caress him.

“Relax for your Mistress.”

As if that would happen with the vision of what was about to happen exploding in his head. Dona kissed the small of his back, near where the device was. As she had said, those moist, soft lips, her warm breath and gentle touch, were his only anchors amid terror.

I’m the only thing you have to believe in.

Somehow, he had to make himself unclench. It was going to happen whether he wanted it to or not. It was her Will and he didn’t want to fight it. He wanted to please her.

Closing his eyes, he visualized her sitting on the bar. Twining her arms and legs around him, she put her hands on his hips, catching the belt loops of his jeans to playfully tug him closer, rub against his crotch. He’d kiss her, long and deep, burying his fingers into her hair as her mouth opened to him and she took him inside her in every way he’d ever wanted to be inside a woman. Ways he hadn’t remembered wanting until a red Mercedes came over a hill.

Dona could plant thoughts in the minds of her assignments, but she typically wasn’t given the ability to read their minds in full, vivid detail. So she knew it was Lucifer’s diabolical decision that she could suddenly see these images in Nathan’s head, feel them. His hands were on her, cradling her face as they kissed, his thumbs sweeping up her throat, his body pushing against her. Her lower body heated and strained for his, wanting him to thrust deep inside her, his breath whispering on her face, those blue eyes closer than the promise of Heaven’s tranquil touch.

He was using a fantasy about her to obey her commands. It was impossible not to be aroused by that, not to be distracted by it.

“Because it’s your right to use me as you wish.” He’d known that part of the answer, but he didn’t realize there was another part to it. Because a Mistress takes care of her slave.

Because he could trust her to get him through anything, anything she devised to heighten his pleasure or, in this case, to force him to face things he didn’t want to face.

She almost missed her cue when he took a deep breath and let it out, relaxing his muscles.

Her fingers still resting on the curve of one buttock, she guided the device’s broad head to the proper position. His ass was already well-lubricated and conditioned by Fiona’s earlier invasion, so it did not take much effort to get the phallus pushed through. When his body stiffened, she teased the opening with her fingertips. His thigh muscles were cords that stood out, encouraging her to rub her leg against his, move her hand up the middle of his back, tracing a path back down the spine. She wanted to lay down on him, curve her hips over his and add pressure to the invasion, as if it were attached to her body and she was fucking him, making him feel pleasure.

It gave her some interesting pictures and ideas, but it also warned her that she was getting too caught up in this. As a mortal Mistress, her focus could be on bringing him pleasure while she pleased herself. A Mistress of Redemption’s goal was different. She needed to remember that.

Stop fucking with my head, Lucifer.

As the device went even deeper, Nathan jolted at the searing wave of arousal that stroked through him when the flexible substance went to work on the sensitive channel.

It felt as if it was squeezing his prostate. The snakes at his nipples were increasing the strength of their tugs. Suddenly terror was mixed with spiraling, roaring, intense lust.

He shuddered, his ass pumping against the side of the bar in a shameless humping he couldn’t stop, his breath rasping hard out of him.

“Mercy, he has a fine ass,” someone murmured near him. Perhaps Mariah. He didn’t know. Dona had not let him come earlier, had driven him near insanity, and here she was doing it again, bringing him into a realm of sensation more intense than any orgasm he’d ever experienced. So close and yet he couldn’t release, the vise of the two extensions on his balls and the cock harness keeping him helpless.

“Please, Mistress…” he begged. “Please let me come for you.” No artifice or calculating, just raw male need, a growl of desire, incoherent words. Glasses on the bar shook, fell over as his frenetic movements became more powerful, the muscles in his thighs bunching as he slammed against the bar again and again.

Her hand brushed the opening to his ass, her hand wrapped around the body of the surreal sex toy, letting him feel how stretched he was, letting him feel her touch.

“God, please… Goddamn…” He pumped harder and several glasses tumbled to the floor, shattering as he wished to do.

“Now,” she murmured at last, reaching beneath him to loosen the harness at the same moment the vise on his balls eased, even as the head deep inside increased the fervor of its stimulation.

He roared with the force of the climax that crashed over him. Hot seed jetted from his cock in such a thick stream it was almost painful, splashing against the side of the bar and onto his knees. Warm cum ran down his legs and over the bodies of the snakes on his thighs, making their slight movements on him even more slippery.

Even if her teasing hadn’t goaded him to such a high pitch, his body had been ready for this for five long years, saving up. He came long and hard, groaning, continuing to pump against the wood as her touch goaded him, an aftershock almost as hard as the orgasm taking him as she gripped his buttocks in both hands and kneaded them as he moved. The way she would if he was driving into her, her arms wrapped around him…

As he came, as his release poured out of him, something else rose in him, an emotional response bound to the physical, the way that chain was bound to his cock.

“Please…” The pitiful supplication was coming out of his mouth, but he didn’t know what he was begging for. Or maybe he did. Oblivion. Peace. A chance to go back to the beginning and become the person a Mistress would truly want, not one who crafted a way to use her. But he had no clue how to do or be anything else than what he was now. How did he exorcise or heal a part of himself that seemed beyond his control?

A part that seemed stronger than any other part of himself?

Chapter Seven

The snakes were gone, as was the surreal sex toy and all his bindings. He slid down the side of the bar, only it wasn’t a bar at all now. It was a tree. A tree in a quiet glade in the forest, the place he used to go when he was a boy. He’d buried a box of treasures in the roots, tangible things that could never be taken away, unlike hopes and dreams.

Those types of illusions had been taken away from him by masters at dream stealing.

He’d learned well, becoming exactly like them. Do unto me and I shall do unto you, unto everyone that crosses my path. If he dug into that box, would he find the dreams he had stolen from Narcissa, Lady Jane and the others? At the lifting of that lid, would those dreams fly away like souls, back to their Mistresses?

He tore away the grass covering and dug his fingers into the earth, the dirt pushing under his nails. Grunting at the exertion, he clawed deeper, flinging aside the handfuls of soil he dislodged.

It wasn’t there. If he dug to China, he knew it still wouldn’t be there. When he felt Dona put her hand on his back, the sobs rose up as hard and fast as the orgasm. He didn’t cry. He was a man and men didn’t cry. He turned, pressing his forehead into her legs, not daring to wrap his arms around her as he wanted to do. Dona had shaken everything loose with the pain and pleasure and he had nothing but despair now, despair at what he was.

For so long, the only emotions he’d shown to others had been calculated. The faces necessary to get what he thought he wanted. Now he knew why dolls were so often hollow molds. Nothing of substance inside.

At this moment, he thought he’d never wanted anything more than to belong, to be loved by a woman like her, but he had become something so far from that he had no hope left for being anything of worth at all.

Dona knew she didn’t want to hear his raw thoughts. She’d had her heart shattered once before by a man. Her response at that time had been to pick up the shards and stab him with them. She knew everything Jonathan had done and the road and choices that had brought Nathan there. She knew the difference between repentance from cowardice and true remorse.

His soul was reaching out, groping for what he’d once thought he could be. The kid in the Superman cape standing on the street curb, imagining it was a building’s edge, the world below depending on him to save it. Just as once she’d dreamed that she’d be the princess in the fairy tale, deserving of love, living happily ever after with the prince who would always adore her.