Her hand curved over the back of his head, caressing the base of his skull. He wondered that anyone would think that heaven was north when dealing with Dona’s well-built body. When she guided his mouth over her right nipple, her voice was the answer to a prayer.

“Suck on me.”

As he fastened on her eagerly, the reality changed, the pain and restraint on his groin area gone. They were no longer at the tablet that had reminded him uneasily of a sacrificial altar. The mirrors turned, showing Dona stretched out on a luxurious fainting couch, tossed with velvet throws. One of her knees was bent, allowing her leg to lean against the side of the back cushion so her legs in the tight pants were spread wide, taunting his peripheral vision with the lazy rock of that knee. The fabric at her crotch creased with the back-and-forth movement as he knelt on the floor next to her, his head beneath her hand. His hands were bound behind his back as he nursed her eagerly, wishing he could palm the full roundness of the breast in his two hands. She had such large nipples, like the sweetest of pale pink marshmallows, gone firm as gumdrops beneath his tongue and lips.

He was skilled at pleasing a woman and yet he’d never done it as he did it now, to prove to her that he was worth having at her side…

Daring to look up, he saw her lips were parted, color flushed. Her breath whispered from her in an excited cadence. He wanted his hands free, wanted to have her permission to touch those slick, soft lips between her legs, the globes of her buttocks so well defined but not revealed. If he could, he could make her writhe. Feel her softness…

Make her lose control… Taste those gumdrop nipples… She’d be his then, and he’d have the upper hand… He could make her beg. Even in Hell he could win.

Do you want your candy now?

He jerked back, his head rising at the insidious whisper, the taste of gumdrops on his tongue. The mirrors turned and a shadow became that hated image again, a woman of enormous size, three hundred pounds encased in tight stretch pedal pushers and a sweatshirt with the Disney Siamese cats from Lady and the Tramp on it. She held out a handful of candy in her hand. She had nails as long as steak knives, as they’d been in his childish memory.

Stumbling away from the couch, he spat, trying to get rid of the sickly sugar taste.

He told himself if he’d been close enough he would have tried to hit Dona with the spittle. He would have dared it, no matter the consequences.

“So did you taste like that on purpose?” He made it an accusation, but the anger was already slipping away. His heart wasn’t in it. He’d been so close to something…different. Hadn’t he? She’d duped him.

“No. That was you, Jonathan. Your desire to manipulate me was about to rise, driving away your joy in the simple act of pleasing me. This is another of your mirrors, called at your behest. Pity, because you were pleasing me quite well.” Dona rose, every hair and item of clothing in place, and drew his attention to the turning mirrors. “Foster mother number one…” she observed, touching the glass. The image rippled as if it were water she had disturbed. Pieces of the woman were picked up on all the mirrors around them. A profile, a close-up of her ear, her mouth, a fat thigh, a meaty hand, all flashing at him, making him feel sick, disoriented. “She thought you ate too much.”

“She fucking tried to starve me.” The words scraped in his throat. “When I tried to steal food from the kitchen, she caught me at it. After that, she’d throw my food in the backyard, make me eat it on my hands and knees like I was a dog. It was a rural area, no close neighbors. Sometimes she’d chain me out there with a collar, tell me if I took it off I wouldn’t get any dinner at all.”

He stood upright, alone. Sweating, trembling, facing that image. As the mirrors kept turning, moving, he lost sight of Dona. Anger rose up in him at that hated face, all the horrible, disgusting features. Dona had known what she was doing, slashing him open with Lauren and then pouring his worst foster mother like salt into that wound.

But she wouldn’t defeat him. None of them would.

“So I learned. Learned what drove her. She was going to throw some candy out in the yard one day, one measly piece for me when she had a whole box. I told her I wanted to eat it out of her lap, like a good dog would. Eat only from the hand of his Mistress. You should have seen the light that rose in her eyes.” His lip curled up in an almost canine snarl, remembering how it quickly became a daily routine.

“Little boys are just hound dogs.” She nodded, studying him with green eyes the color of institutional walls. “Your dinner’s buried in the backyard. Go find it, eat every bite and come back to get dessert.” She opened her pants, dropped the candy down and wiggled until it became a lumpy expanse at her crotch. “You’ll get your dessert then. Teach you to waste food and sass me. Chain you up in the yard if you don’t behave.” It disgusted him, not just because it was a horrible memory, but because he’d figured out the solution by twisting a compulsion he’d had, even so young. There was something beckoning to him, a desire to serve a woman, be her slave, but in an entirely different way… He’d used it to defend himself. Just as Dona used her undeniable need to be a Mistress to serve the purposes of Redemption, he’d used his undeniable craving to be a submissive to make it through the foster care system.

You had to twist a gift a woman should treasure into a hideous weapon. It helped destroy your soul, your faith in women entirely. You were an innocent then. You can’t blame yourself for that one. You were a survivor, Nathan, and you used the only tool you had. Instinct.

He wasn’t an innocent victim. Things had happened later…

At that point you were innocent. The rest happened later.

He shook his head, shook the words away from him as if he were scattering the shards of the mirror Dona had broken earlier. “It clicked then. Every woman had a weak side, a darkness. I just had to figure out her light switch, turn her on and off, and then I could have anything I wanted from her.” He glared defiantly at that image. “I ate good after that. She let me sleep on the floor by her bed, instead of out in the yard. Until social services found out about her and moved me on again.” Before prison, he’d considered himself fit. He’d taken martial arts, self-defense courses, had owned and known how to use a gun on a practice range. Once in prison, he’d realized he knew nothing about the level of fitness required for survival versus show. But adaptability had gotten him through the foster care system, drove him to learn about table manners and dressing well so he could appear like a well-to-do stockbroker who had never experienced anything but private schools and church on Sunday. That adaptability had allowed him to change again. Suffering through the beatings, what passed for “routine” rape and a couple of serious gang rapes, he’d found out how to turn fitness into dangerous strength and agility, both of mind and body.

Which was why now he didn’t hesitate to take two strides forward and plunge his fist into the glass, shattering his foster mother’s face. The glass cut but the blood flowed out clean from his knuckles, a purification. The shattered pieces were there for one satisfying moment. Then they were gone, the mirror remade around his plunged fist.

Sucking him in, it seized his other wrist when he punched at it to make it let him go.

Now he was held fast. The shadows in the mirror shifted like the face of a Grim Reaper in the cowl of His robe, elusive but dreadful.

“Dona…” He despised himself for the panic in his voice, but those shadows were coming closer and he knew what had to be behind them. “Dona!”

“I’m here.” Her hands, cool and almost gentle in their ruthless implacability, closed on his waist. Though he couldn’t turn and see her, she was naked. Her bare breasts mashed lightly against his skin. The length of her smooth thigh was soft against his. Her pubic mound brushed the seam of his buttocks. Just a beautiful woman, simple and pure against his own nakedness.

“It won’t let me go.”

“I know. You want to break the mirror, but you won’t let go of what created it.

You’re holding yourself.”

“There are more…”

“Six foster mothers. The last one who had you took in ten children and only had time to make sure you were dressed and sent off to school each day. That was probably the best of the lot.”

The shadows started to form images. “No.” He jerked, but the glass held fast.

Dona’s arms circled his waist, her fingers playing absently along the top of his cock.

Now he was face-to-face with the obscenely layered images of all of them. There was a reason six was considered an evil number. Violence, apathy, gluttony, indifference, greed and perversity. Six creative ways to rip away the outer shell of a child and thrust a man out of the remains, leaving him shivering and unformed to face the world.

He had to calm down. Dona’s hands were devastatingly tender. Somehow that made it both better and worse.

“They destroyed the perfect human being you would have become. That’s what you think, don’t you? In the deepest part of your heart, the only place you don’t lie to yourself, you think you’re garbage because you came from garbage. Because you were abandoned like garbage.”

“Please, stop.” He hated begging. Not the mocking kind he did to win a Mistress’s favor, not even the kind he’d done in reaction to his physical passion for her, but the true, bottom-of-his-gut pleading for something to take away the pain, the hurt. That kind of begging was an admission that someone had been able to hurt him, that he would have to rely on someone else. He hated it. Hated anyone who made him feel it, except he seemed incapable of hating Dona. He just wanted her to stop. “Don’t do this.”

“Sshhh. Look.”

He’d rather have been boiled alive. He looked at the new image, his foster mothers gone as if they’d never been, except they were imprinted on his own life in ways it was getting hard to deny.

This woman was younger than he’d remembered her. She wasn’t more than nineteen. Limp blonde hair, the sunken cheeks of an addict, hopeless blue eyes the color of his own. She’d taken him to a homeless shelter, told him to stay there. Not even that she’d be back. Just, “stay here”. In about an hour one of the men who stayed in the shelter had noticed him, taken him to the priest, who in turn called the police and social services. The cogs of the machine began to turn, to grind him up. He could still remember the confusion, the desperation of having no control. Of wishing, forever it seemed, that she would come back and give him the chance to be better.