They captured his ankles in a similar fashion and pulled them out to flank the outside of the woman’s legs so his full weight lay upon her and his cock was even more aware of the creases of her most private areas. Though he could not see her eyes, tears ran from beneath her blindfold. Her quivering lips pressed hard against the gag, small muffled sounds escaping from behind it, the only thing she could do since the gag prevented her from screaming. She smelled of blood, sweat and sex, a potent combination to his cock.

“What do you want, Nathan?” Dona had picked up the whip and it flicked around her, reached out to sting his ankles. “Do you want this punishment? Will you take the lash for her?”

“I’ll take it from you. I want it from you.” He tried to sound unaffected, but noted the hoarseness of his own voice when Dona stepped forward to curl her hand around his now bare testicles, squeezed. “I don’t know why you bother with the jeans if you’re just going to keep taking them off me.”

“Because I can’t decide which way I like your ass better. In or out of them. So I’m enjoying both. My own little indulgence.”

Indulgence was the right word for it. Nathan had a firm, perfect ass, one of the best Dona had ever seen. It was a testament to his ferocity and determination that he hadn’t been raped in prison far more often. She wished the moment called for a paddle, because she would have liked to make those muscular cheeks turn red with her strokes, watch him get harder at the stimulus. His buttocks would clench as he rubbed his cock against the woman beneath him involuntarily until the stimulation from Dona’s spanking and the woman’s bare skin made him spill his seed on her. Dona could imagine the way his shoulders would flex, the trembling strain of his powerful thighs, the taut rebellion in his face as his Mistress nevertheless made him come at her command.

Then again, she liked watching him walk in jeans. The way he’d looked when she picked him up, the denim holding him with just the right snugness at his ass and groin, the long thighs. He had a confidence when he walked. That casual sexiness that said he was aware he was packing a cock that no sane woman would refuse, because he knew exactly how to use it.

The true bad boy… Her bad boy.

She stroked one of the cheeks, following the curve with her fingers, the tight line between his buttocks. When he relaxed at her touch, her pussy clutched at the evidence that he was making himself open to her.

“You’d be such a wonderful sub if you just let yourself.” His head shifted as much as he could move it. She saw one blue eye staring cautiously at one of the mirrors to see her better. “Maybe I just need the right Mistress.

You said as much.”

“The right Mistress who knows when you’re bullshitting her with charm and when you’re not. I think you’re angling for a spanking.” He raised a brow, and that wryness passed through his expression again. “There’s a difference between bullshit and teasing, Mistress. I submit to your judgment.” Dona felt her lips quirk despite herself. Nathan had a dry sense of humor that his Jonathan side had never displayed, so the evidence of it now both amused and pleased her. Progress.

When his Mistress gave him an arch look, Nathan thought she did that well, going from intense emotion and pain to flirtation in a blink. Used to extremes of pain, he had enough room in his brain despite his present circumstances to appreciate it. So he growled, lifting his hips when she reached between his legs and pricked his cock with those sharpened nails. With Dona’s hands on him, her thighs brushing the back of his, he saw his body in the mirrors, stretched out over the captured woman’s in a deceptively protective pose, self-sacrificing. He looked powerful, but here he was, helpless to the woman who circled them, whom he outweighed and towered over, but who dominated his vision and his mind as he strained to see her. As he watched her lift another whip, a simple quirt, he felt his cock harden to pre-orgasmic rigidity, knowing what was coming.

Dona’s breath left her, the sound she’d made when she brought his lips to her cunt at the oasis. As if all her nerves had drawn up in excitement. Damn if his cock didn’t leak at the sound of her arousal, even as his back flinched when the whip came down, a stinging blow.

She didn’t stop with that one stroke. His confidence at looking in the mirrors increased, for all he saw was her, wielding the quirt as his cock throbbed against the firm ass beneath him, that aroused organ all too cognizant of the bound woman’s pussy and anal passage so close, so accessible. However, it was the pussy and ass of the woman behind him that captivated his attention as she shifted to land the strikes. He wanted to kneel between her legs again and run his tongue over the slick material, seduce her into peeling it off, letting him plunge into the soft folds behind it. Grip her buttocks and squeeze, holding her to his mouth.

“You warmed up, sweet thing?” Dona straddled his bare thigh, rubbing her crotch slowly up and down the length. Bending down, she let her hair brush his warmly smarting bare ass as her lips touched his left buttock, nipped him. “You want to fuck her, tied up helpless beneath you? It’s the only control you’ve got. I suggest you stick that big, hard cock into her now, because in about thirty seconds you’re only going to know pain. Maybe the suck of her cunt on your hard dick will distract you.” He gritted his teeth and refused to move, though he could feel how it would take him in, her hot wetness. He was sure it was more of Dona’s sorcery, how vividly he was imagining it.

“No?” Her voice softened, just a minute amount, but his sharpened senses caught it.

He’d pleased her and that was worth anything. Had to be. “Faithful slave. Your choice, then.”

She picked up the cat, tossed the quirt away. He’d never been struck by a metal-tipped flogger, but he knew the quirt would feel like a feather in comparison. He took a shallow breath, his hands starting to curl into fists. Then he stopped, made them relax.

Let her see he would take her punishment. Welcome it. Pressing his face into the woman’s hair, he heard her whimper as he set his teeth to a stranger’s shoulder to keep from crying out.

The whip tore flesh on its very first strike. Dona brought it whistling down with strength on the length of his back, licking at his shoulder. It snagged, pulling skin and telling him the tips had been barbed. He was wrong. He hadn’t anticipated this level of pain. Holy God, that hurt. Because the bindings held him so taut, he was denied even the minute relief of thrashing. The woman had gone rigid in fear and his cock was trapped in the channel between her buttocks, feeling the quivering clench of her ass.

He’d used a metal-tipped, barbed cat before. Not expertly. He’d flogged Detective Mac Nighthorse with one at the S&M Killer’s behest. As he’d torn open the man’s back, he’d rationalized that he was making superficial cuts, just a little more over the top than a flogging with more commonly used BDSM tools.

What the hell had he been thinking?

Another lash fell. Another. Pain was fire, sweat and blood beginning to burn across the field of his skin. The woman beneath him shuddered as he bit down, reacting to each strike.

Staccato flashes of thought strobed through his mind, adding to the agony. Was Dona right? Was he like the S&M Killer? Had he hated Nighthorse that much? Had there been a moment he’d wanted her to kill the cop? Maybe that’s why he’d gotten five years when his attorney estimated three. The judge had sensed it in him, the potential.

As the pain built into a roaring crescendo, drowning out everything else, he began to wonder. Maybe he was evil… He never thought of his very last Mistress by her given name because it brought back images of other things they’d shared. Things that hadn’t been about death and mayhem…

Stop it. That’s bullshit. But the pain drove everything but the most horrible possibilities from his mind.

Mac Nighthorse had not cried out, but then the murderess had told him up front it would be ten strikes. Mac hadn’t been in some surreal dream of Hell where the strikes could conceivably fall forever, with the torment building and building, no oblivion promised or hoped for.

Still, Nathan took some grim satisfaction in the fact he held out past fifteen before he cried out, when Dona started crisscrossing the same open flesh. At thirty he was screaming, his hands clenched into hard fists as he pulled against his restraints with enough strength to dislocate his bones. The gargoyles were implacable, not giving even a millimeter of relief as it continued and continued. He stopped wanting. He just became a creation of pain, wanting to pass out, knowing he wouldn’t.

Please, Mistress. Have mercy… How much torture could he bear for her pleasure? To win her gentlest touch, the kiss of her lips…

“Look at the mirrors.” Dona was suddenly at his head, grabbing his chin and jerking it up, making him look. He blinked through tears, tasting the blood of his bitten tongue. The shadows were back, just as he knew they would be, flirting at the edges.

Oh God, his back and ass were in agony, his shoulders. He was almost grateful not to see images of himself, because he didn’t think he could handle seeing his back stripped of skin. Whatever was left had to be hanging off the altar in gruesome ribbons. He hurt so much he wanted to throw up, loose his bowels, but he knew that wouldn’t happen.

The inability of his body to function as it naturally would under extreme duress underscored how long she could keep doing this—forever if she wanted to do so.

The mirrors swam with colors and Mistress Lauren materialized in the mirror directly in front of him. Quietly serene and so temptingly strong. Hair like golden wheat and eyes like the summer sky, just like the books said. The one that hadn’t been in the dance crowd, because she was different, just as Dona said.

“The others you decimated in three or four months. You probably could have done it sooner, if you didn’t enjoy taunting and playing with your prey so much. With Lauren, you had to play the game a hundred percent for almost a year. Couldn’t jerk her chain the way you did with so many others, running hot and cold from day to day, playing with their baggage. First time you tried, she almost left you. So you realized to win this round you’d have to be the perfect sub in all ways. No gratifying little torments.”