“You’re my soul mate. I’m yours, you’re mine. That’s why I asked to be your Mistress in Redemption.” She said it flatly, giving him a hint of the roiling sea of emotions going on behind the tone. “We can’t help but want to be together, protect each other.” He thought he heard a faint smile in her voice, but it had the cold desolation of a ghost. “You should take that as a sign of hope. The soul is so pure in its love that no matter what wrong paths we take, it has the ability to guide us.” When she began to draw away from him, he reached out, clamped his hand down on her wrist, holding her. “If you never leave here… Am I worth redeeming but not loving?”

The lights returned on dim mode so he could see her face. She wore the corset again. In stunned shock, he saw she’d been crying. The Goth makeup was smeared and running, turning her face into a mask.

“I don’t know, Nathan. Are you worth it? Do I deserve you?” The question punched him in the gut. All the crimes he’d committed flashed through his head, bringing back his despair. He’d been accused of so many things, but no one had ever asked him to pass sentence on himself. Not like this, where there was no way out of the answer.

Even with her makeup messed up she was beautiful. Her sin had been that she’d loved someone so much it had compelled her to commit a horrible crime of passion. He didn’t feel worthy of even touching her now, so he withdrew his hand, folded it in his lap. He was still in the tux and wished he could be naked again, her slave rather than a boy playing dress-up, pretending to be a man who deserved to sit by her side.

“No, I’m not worth it. But you are. You’re worth everything.” The seconds ticked away as she regarded him in silence. He could tell nothing of her reaction from her streaked face.

“I know you’re my soul mate,” she said in that non-emotive tone. “When you touch me, when our eyes meet, I know it, but I’m not ready for it. I may never be ready to make myself that vulnerable again.”

“You would if you could believe in me. If you could believe in yourself. You’re worth loving, Dona. Don’t give up on that. Any man… I’d…” He stumbled to a halt, not sure where he was going. For the first time in his life he didn’t want to say the perfect thing. He wanted to say the honest thing. The truth was he didn’t deserve her. If he was her soul mate, the person supposed to keep her from feeling that deep-in-the-dark desolate loneliness, she was screwed, because he wasn’t worth the shit on her shoe.

“It’s time to face the rest of your mirrors.” She spoke at last. “Can you do it? Shatter them and face what’s left?”

“I…I don’t know.”

Her expression shifted. His terrifying Mistress was back, and the look in her eyes turned his bowels to water.

“It’s not a choice. It’s time, whether you think you’re ready or not.”

Chapter Eight

The next setting for his merry-go-round was, appropriately, a circular chamber, a place that looked as if it were designed for performing rituals. Everything of earth or stone, torches in sconces on the walls. Dozens of mirrors were embedded in the rock stratum so it was hard to separate Dona and the other features of the room from their reflections. The odd wall treatments were not as distracting as what lay in the center of the room, however.

“Look at her.” Dona moved around a large block of stone, her fingertips touching the bare back of the woman bound and bent over it, her legs manacled to the floor.

“Spread before you. Helpless. Deserving punishment. You may strike her until you draw blood, make her scream. She’ll have to tolerate it until you stop, for there’s no other choice. There is no loss of consciousness, no death. In the cycles that are considered time down here, eventually she’ll be given a moment of no pain, her back smooth as if she’d never been struck. Then it begins anew.”

“A pain that’s reality and illusion both,” he murmured. Like his Mistress’s tears that had streaked her makeup. In the transition to this chamber, the evidence of that had been wiped away. While she was as perfect and intimidating as if the moment had never existed, he didn’t doubt the reality of that moment as he’d doubted some of the others.

“It will continue until she hears the message that the pain delivers.” He was unable to look away as Dona traced the bumps of the woman’s spine. He could imagine it as his own spine, her fingers caressing him a moment before she would strike with a whip. The thought of that sent a shiver through him, brought a tightening to an already overtaxed groin. His testicles had permanently drawn up in pre-ejaculation mode and he wasn’t sure if they’d ever drop again. Even in the most frightening moments, he’d stayed aroused, as if the ability to fuck was a male’s most basic proof that he was alive, capable of action and meaning. Dona’s proximity had done nothing to discourage that constant state of need.

“What’s the message?”

“That crime has punishment. This is the punishment. After that, the debt must be paid, three times. That’s karma and one of the reasons for reincarnating.” The vulnerability she’d shown him was gone. She was dispassionate, almost cruel.

He’d found a key to her in watching the stage play, though. The more she felt, the less she revealed in her face. She didn’t want to be his soul mate, but she hadn’t denied she felt something for him. She’d said she wasn’t ready.

Even in the midst of this, not knowing what awaited him except the certainty that it would be awful, he felt the wonder of that realization. If soul mates were a real thing,then it meant Dona was his Mistress. Now, forever, this life or the next. Whether she wanted him or not. So they’d always feel this connection to one another.

He realized abruptly that he was grasping something. Dropping his gaze, he found a whip there, a metal-tipped cat-o’-nine with a six-foot reach, his knuckles white on the handle. He lifted his attention to the small of the woman’s back, her naked buttocks and thighs. Her eyes were blindfolded, a gag in her mouth. Her nose was running, her body rising and falling with quick breaths, showing her nervousness and anticipation of pain, either because she’d been here before or she could hear Dona’s words.

His Mistress completed her circle to stand behind him. Now that long-nailed hand was running up the smooth skin of his back. She had him back in jeans only, so she played with the waistband, dipping her fingers just beneath the snug fit, teasing the crease of his ass. “Pain administered the right way shatters mirrors, so we can peer into the darkness of our souls with no tricks and see who we really are. What makes us evil.”

Nathan’s gaze lifted as light caught the mirrors. The woman still lay before him trembling, her fingers clenched helplessly into fists and the manacles holding her taut on the stone tablet, but all around them the mirrors were rising from the walls. No longer embedded, they were suspended in the air and rotating on their axes. It seemed they moved together as well as individually, giving the impression the room was moving. Disorienting him.

Dona pressed her full breasts against his back, her hands on his hips steadying him as he lurched. When her hand reached under his arm and closed on his wrist holding the whip, he tensed.

“You’ve never struck a woman. I find that intriguing, considering how much you hate us. Would you be able to bring this whip down if it were me helpless as she is? My legs spread so you could whip my cunt, mark my back until there was only blood?”

“No… No. I don’t…hate women.”

“I know that.” Her touch dropped, her palm stroking over him. “But we make you very angry. We frighten you.”

She lifted up on her toes, whispered in his ear. “What you really want is to be the one lying on this altar, waiting for my lash. For me to bring you the pain, deliver it to you like a gift. Ah… You got harder the moment the words left my mouth.” When she closed her hand over him as much as the pants allowed, he couldn’t help moving forward, pressing against her hand. “You need to look into the other mirrors.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Yes, you do. You’ve never known what it means, Mistress and slave, but you’ve wanted to, so much. You’ve made it about vengeance and denied yourself true submission. That’s what will help you find what you really want. Look into the other mirrors.”

He kept his gaze stubbornly glued to the reflection of her face in that one mirror directly before them. “Whether you want a soul mate or not, tell me you care about me.

I know I’m not goddamned imagining it.”

He needed to know there was someone at his back, even if he didn’t deserve to have her there. Even if the idea that someone could guard his back in Hell was laughable, like asking for a glass of ice water and expecting to quench the fire. But there it was. He didn’t see any other way he was going to find the courage to do what she commanded.

“Yes,” she said at last. “I care about you. Nathan.” She said his name softly. It was as if she had kissed him, held her lips to his for that never-long-enough feeling of acknowledgement, completion. “But love isn’t about seeing someone with blinders on, though we all wish it was. Nothing is easy about love. As your Mistresses found out.

You made them dependent with your games and tore them down piece by piece.” He wasn’t prepared when she reached down, seized his wrist and snapped it forward. The flogger struck the pale skin of the woman’s ass and she jumped, whimpering.

Nathan wrenched his arm away, dropping the weapon, but Dona shoved him.

Stumbling forward, he fell full across the bound woman, his hips and cock against her ass, his stomach and chest pressed into the contours of her back. The broad set of his shoulders sheltered her neck. Gargoyles of stone at each corner of the stone table came to life. Before he could yell or jerk back in startled horror, they’d seized his wrists in their jaws, stretched him out so his nose was pressed into the crown of the woman’s head. Their teeth bore down on his skin with painful pressure.