If he genuinely smiled, teased her without malice, she knew she’d do anything to rescue him from himself.

Fiona had returned to Dona’s side. Dona felt the leopard press against her back. She reached back, found his chin and gave him a passing scratch, though her gaze remained on Nathan.

“He’s having an endorphin rush. That’s what’s making him so loopy and disjointed,” Fiona observed.

Dona touched her fingers to the raw corners of his mouth. “Tell me what’s going through your head, Nathan. Is she right? Is it all just the rush?”

“No,” he said with sudden fierceness. “You think… You look around and think, why can’t I feel like them? Laugh like them. You only feel when you hurt someone.

That just makes you want to hurt the next one even more.” He strangled on a harsh laugh. “How are you doing this to me? A spell? This place?”

“The way you desire to hurt others is a drug. You have to give it up to find what you really want,” she replied softly. “You have to face what caused you to become addicted to it in the first place. That means you need to stop talking in third person and face yourself.”

He stared at her and she waited, watching his mind process her words. “Once you do that, what’s left?” he asked at last.

She found her voice suddenly not steady, as the look in his eyes took her back to a place she didn’t want to go. “You may find there’s nothing left. Nothing real.” He closed his eyes. “This pain…is clean. Do it all over again, Mistress. Over and over, again and again. The way you hurt me…it’s different. Just keep hurting me like that and maybe that will become what’s real.”

The trembling in his hand increased, the stress overtaking him. Fiona might think he was incoherent, but every word made too much sense to Dona. He made her ache.

Reaching up, she closed her hand on his forearm, holding her grip there to steady him.

How could she not, when the painful perplexity and the rage warring in his heart were making her heart break? She’d hoped she didn’t have a heart anymore.

“I like you adorned like this for me. I like you suffering for me. But I have plans for you.” The indifference she summoned up in her own eyes almost faltered before the uncertainty in his, because it pierced straight through the block of ice around her heart.

“So now I’ll take all the pain away as I promised. The bad kind of pain.” Feeling his hand slide naturally to a place at the back of her neck under her hair, she leaned forward over his left nipple. He tensed, his fingers curling, but he did not impede her as she closed her mouth over the tender area.

Nathan sucked in a breath and then released it, his eyes widening as her tongue laved the jewel, the abused nipple. She knew the raw, throbbing pain had disappeared at the touch of her mouth, replaced with heightened sexual intensity that nipples experienced once the piercing was well healed. His ragged breath spoke of pleasure instead of pain as she continued to nibble on him, nuzzle, tug on the loop. When he grunted in distress, she saw his cock had started to rise, those piercings not having had the benefit of the healing agents in her mouth. She moved with leisurely deliberation to the other nipple, attending him there, watching him alternately squirm and writhe.

Heard him curse as the pain of his cock warred with the pleasure she was providing his nipples.

Dona moved down his belly. Tracing her tongue over each of those well-cut stomach muscles, enjoying the taste of his hot, smooth skin, she summoned the organic bindings to shorten the tether on his arms, so that she moved out of the range of his touch. She saw his hands dig into the grass as her breath touched his erection. When he groaned, it made her wet. Wetter. The power of giving him so much pleasure and pain at once made her feel almost drunk with it. She wanted to nuzzle and torment him for hours, see and feel that body buck, hear his voice cry out for her, plead. Blowing on him, she watched the red skin fade. As the bruises vanished, she stroked her tongue up that ladder. He uttered an animal sound. She sampled his pre-cum trickling down his rigid staff, the flavor mixed with surgical steel, the residue of blood and musky skin.

“Mercy, Mistress. God, please…”

She had no interest in mercy now that she had his taste, his heat in her mouth. She wanted to ride him, feel that ring that had pierced the thin skin of the urethra flick against her inside like moth wings while the ladder stroked her with the primitive roughness she liked. She wanted to pull on his nipple rings as she rode him, see him flinch. Have him hoarsely beg her to let him come, let his hard cock spurt into her, bathing her with heat where she’d been cold so long.

She loved his eyes. How evil could grow in a soul that shone so beautifully through those blue irises, she couldn’t begin to understand. His blond brows were thickly feathered, low, so the deep set of his eyes beneath them gave him a depth of intensity that could pull her inside him. Though she saw many things she didn’t like there, there were shades of other things hiding in the dark jungle his soul had become, asking to be saved. Asking her to bring in light and make the blue sparkle with the facets of precious gems. A light that could drive out his demons and help her forget.

She stilled abruptly. She couldn’t forget. That was a crazy thought. How could she erase a pain so intense she’d wanted to stop breathing?

“Something I can do for you, Mistress?”

She looked back toward his face. In the light of the sun, fanned by the shadow of the palm fronds rustling in the breeze above them she caught it, just the barest flicker.

Calculation. The evil had felt her coming. It was whispering in his ear that the vulnerability she was demonstrating through her desire was giving him the upper hand, that soon he would have control. Control was the most important thing.

It was as Lucifer had said. Nathan had so far to go. It wasn’t like the movies, where in two hours a person could change his life around. Save the world, get the girl. Live happily ever after.

It made her angry at him, at Lucifer, at herself. She’d let down her guard because he was her other half. Soul mates. Romantic, mortal nonsense that had turned out to be cosmically true. She felt sure that it was true specifically to bedevil her in a place that had plenty of devils and demons already.

She rose, towering over him, knowing it would increase his sense of helplessness and subjugation to her.

“The pain’s breaking you down,” she observed with a coolness not matched by the fire roiling in her blood. A fire that demanded she take him into her body as much as it demanded that she scream at him, hurt him. “I can’t believe you fooled so many women. Now I understand the arrogance and the confidence you keep trying to exercise even here, in a place where your every action is transparent. Work a bitch on Earth, work a bitch in Hell, what does it matter? We can all be played.” She bent, making sure he couldn’t help but be tortured by the sight of her breasts trembling above the tight hold of her corset. She slid one long fingernail through the ring on his left nipple.

He was a hard-core Mistress’s dream, aroused by pain and torment, hungering for the contrast of a tender touch at unexpected moments. She could see that sweet, submissive part of his soul so clearly that he could not. For the other souls she’d redeemed, having that clarity had been a roadmap to the final destination. With him, it was the shine of gold treasure, obliterating the path entirely. She just wanted to make him serve her. Keep him forever. Torture and tease him, bring him to climax in ways he couldn’t even imagine.

His lips curled back from his teeth as she tugged hard enough to make him arch up against the pain. She held him that way, his upper torso in a crescent that he had to hold unless he wanted the ring torn out. “With one blink—” She closed her lashes, reopened them and watched his expression transform from discomfort to outright agony as she brought back the raw pain of the newly done piercings. When she blinked again, he froze, his expression confused as the pain vanished just as quickly. “I can make everything change for you. I’m running the orchestra here. You’ll sing and play exactly as I wish.

“Our lives are lives of self-illusion, Jonathan. We create mirrors, surround ourselves with them. Those mirrors hide the real images of our lives, of who we are.” As she brought her face even closer, she could tell he didn’t know whether to be fascinated by her proximity or terrified. “When you were under the water before, when they were bathing you, what mirror did you see?”

“What?” The confusion increased. “Mirror, I didn’t see—”

“Who did you see?” She twisted hard, her finger now threaded through that D-ring up past the first knuckle. The nipple screwed into a smaller point. Even as his upper body stayed as still as possible for his self-preservation, his hips bucked the small amount allowed against his restraints.

Oh yes. It made her throb, watching the fascinating fight between his soul’s desire to give her everything, surrender totally, and his frightened ego’s attempt to hold on to control. She could imagine the way he would beg if his soul won. The way his blue eyes would fire with lust, those hard muscles straining, just for her. Her name a gasp on his lips, his cock hard inside her, driving deeper as she urged him on. He’d talk dirty to her, say things to make her come, because she’d get absorbed in watching the words form on his perfect lips.

Her anticipation was too sharp, interfering with her focus. She needed to release her tension, or at least spill some of the boiling water out of the pot to keep it from overflowing altogether. Well, why not? There was no rule against it, though it was something she’d never done with her assignments before. It was going to shock Fiona and the others. The moment she gave herself permission for it regardless, a hard shudder went through her.

“We’ll go back to the question later. You think about it.” She released him abruptly, straightening. “Right now, I’m going to fuck you.”

Chapter Six

Nathan couldn’t keep up with her. Couldn’t follow one thought before she had him chewing on another. The mirror reference brought back that hated face below the water, but Dona drove that and everything else away with that one electrifying announcement. Since she’d come back, there was a feverish quality to her that made him wonder what had happened. Who she’d met and why she seemed to have a razor-sharp edge of hunger honing her words, her touch.