I love you, Nathan. I always will.

He jerked up out of the bed and immediately bent double, cursing as the stitches tore and blood leaked onto his fingers. Looking down, he saw the blood drip and land on his bare groin, the skin of his cock. He had piercings. Why hadn’t he noticed that before? Jesus Christ, piercings all over the place. Barbells up the bottom, a ring in the tip, a ring in his ball sac. His fingers touched the ladder, explored it, even as the blood wet his fingers and his genitals, mixing with the metal. A canvas of pain and memory, tormenting him as badly as his nightmares.

Her voice. He’d heard her voice. Who was she? His life depended on it, he was certain.

It was three months before he’d recovered enough mentally and physically to the satisfaction of the doctors to be released from the hospital. By then, he’d remembered who he was and why the police treated him with such hostility, doing the bare minimum for a prisoner who was in jail for aiding someone who’d tried to kill two cops. He found out he had six months left on his sentence.

Was it a dream? Was all of it some type of twisted retelling of A Christmas Carol to get him to change his ways? No and yes. Because that night had happened to Scrooge. It was a dream, but it was real as well.

It’s illusion and reality both…

“Aarrgghhh…” Back in his cell, he snarled into his pillow, pressing his face against the scratchy surface. He wanted to beat his fists on the concrete walls until they were bloody to assuage this gnawing inside. “Who are you? Who are you?”

* * * * *

He kept quiet, kept to himself during those six months. He began to write letters.

Letters that he tore up and rewrote again and again, until he was regularly bartering for more packs of notebook paper. When he finally got one right, he’d carefully address it and put it on the shelf above his bunk, never mailing a single one, though the stack grew. It wasn’t time to mail them. He didn’t know how he knew that, just that it felt right. He was following his intuition. Lauren, Narcissa, Lady Jane… Even Mac Nighthorse.

His mother…then Eliza. The hardest one of all, a letter he would have to put on her grave because he had no ability to change what he’d done to the first person who’d ever truly loved him. He had to discard at least two versions because the tears he couldn’t manfully control made the ink run and stain.

When he wasn’t doing that, he did laundry duty or walked around the yard by himself. He paced by the portion of the fence that let him see the highway coming from the east. Keeping his eyes focused there the whole time, he felt like a tiger in a cage, waiting for release to go in that direction.

A red car…a woman with dark hair…

The other inmates gave him no more trouble. He didn’t think to question it until Mario stated it baldly to him one day while they pulled laundry out of one of the carts.

Mario was in for life and had been at the prison over twenty years.

“You got the ‘Come to Jesus’ look, the look of a man who know what Hell be like,” he stated matter-of-factly. “The others don’t want no part of that. Our boy Jonathan, he know what true fear is now.”

“Nathan,” he corrected automatically, and started folding.

Studying himself in the mirror in his cell, he saw it. A disturbing, haunting quality, something apparently so uncomfortable that many of the inmates never met his gaze now. In fact, most gave him a wide berth entirely.

That was fine, because nothing but that name he couldn’t remember could ease the loneliness inside him. He couldn’t face his own haunting expression for long either. It reminded him of too many things. Horrors that shifted in his mind like lingering shadows, too elusive to hold on to, but dogging him nevertheless. Particularly in his dreams, to the extent he slept as little as possible. He needed her healing touch…her love. Had he lost it? Or had he never had it, and he was making her up entirely, a hallucinatory side effect of his near-death experience, as the doctor suggested? Why couldn’t he remember her name, otherwise?

But the only thing that gave him the courage to close his eyes at night was the occasional visit from her. She was worth any terror…

* * * * *

He was on his knees, naked, in a room where the fire glowed warm and comforting, the heat sensual on the skin. Not searing or punishing. She was there, sitting in a wing-backed chair, her legs crossed, hands lying slim and graceful on the arms. She wore a short blue silk dress that clung to her breasts, showed him the high proud set of them, the points of her nipples. The indentation of her waist, flare of her hips, the line of her thigh. Her feet were bare. It was odd, the small toes painted a cherry red, curling into the carpet, when the rest of her looked so intimidating, so in control. Her sable hair waved around her face in a Twenties starlet type of way, accentuating those incredible lips. Her dark eyes seared his soul in a way that would make him gladly crack open his chest for her to brand it completely.

He had to approach her or he would simply die from the pain of not being near her.

She granted his wish.

“Come here.”

Moving forward on his knees, he kept his head down until he reached her feet. He groaned with relief when her fingers brushed his jaw, curved under his chin and lifted it so he could look into her face.

“I love you,” he said. “I’ll always love you. I’m so sorry.” Tears ran down his cheeks, over her fingers. Taking her hand to her mouth, she pressed the salt of him to her lips, keeping her eyes on him. Then she put her hands on his shoulders. “Lift me. Lay me down on the carpet and take off my clothes.” His hands trembled as he slid one arm around her back and scooted her forward to position the other hand under her knees. He picked her up. As he rose to his feet, he’d never felt anything as perfect as holding her in his arms, looking down into her face.

Feeling her body relaxed, trusting his strength to hold her, take her where she commanded. Turning, he stepped before the fire and dropped to one knee to gently lay her down on the soft rug there. Her arms left his shoulders, drifting out to either side of her so she could grip the long strands of the carpet.

“Rough, Nathan. Take my dress off rough. I want to feel your power wash over me, knowing it’s all mine to command.”

It was a simple truth. All she had to do was say it and he would obey. It rose in him, savage and pure. He laid his hands on the neckline of that perfect, formfitting dress with its array of sparkles and rhinestones that followed the upper curves of her breasts and moved in a serpentine line around her hips. That design gave him a flash of some other memory, terrifying and arousing at once, gone before he could identify it.

He didn’t pause though, because his Mistress had ordered him to do something.

Tearing the fabric from the point of the neckline to just below her mound, he found she was completely bare beneath it. She arched up when he froze, holding the fabric tightly in his fists. He stared down at her, the pink nipples, the delicate point of her bare sex, the graceful curves of her woman’s body.

“Tear it all the way open.”

He did, and now the dress spread out on either side of her, flaring out like a cape.

When she lifted her slender white legs, her heels touched the small of his back, the upper curve of his buttocks. A soft, playful smile touched her lips as she exerted a slight, nudging pressure to bring him forward, angling up her hips with a mouthwatering display of flexibility.

“Inside me. Now.”

Letting go of the dress, he laid hot, hungry hands on either side of those hips. Her fingers dug into the hard muscle of his biceps as he found her with his broad head.

Slowly he pushed into wet heat, watching her undulate, her mouth open. Her breasts rose on a shuddering breath, her eyes sparkling with a passionate heat rivaling the fire.

He knew if he could hold that gaze, he would never fear the touch of fire again. Not if this was the prize.

“Mistress.”

“My name. Please, between us here and now, let me hear you say my name.” She spread her thighs wider so he sank deeper.

“Oh, God…you feel…” Like heaven, heaven found in the depths of Hell.

“Nathan…” She was rippling, though he’d barely just entered her. As her muscles clamped on his cock, she dragged him down with her, making his vision gray, the grip of his hands become bruising as he sought to drive into her so deeply it would be like a fatal wound, keeping them linked through all eternity. Her throat was bared to him, pale, her tongue moist and pink as she opened her mouth on a scream.

“Dona…”

* * * * *

Dona. His eyes sprang open, stared into the dark, wide awake. That was her name.

It washed over him, everything coming in a jumble of images and thoughts that would take time to sort out, but she was real. He knew it now for sure, knew it the way he’d always known those nightmares were real, his literal trial by fire to earn her.

While identifying that name gave the gnawing fear within him an almost painful level of relief, she had another name. One he held on to, the name he called her in his soul.

Mistress.

It would make the nightmares and loneliness bearable. He would use it to remember that every action and every thought had to be with the intention of earning her love.

Reaching up in the darkness, he touched the letters, made sure they were still there.

Please. I don’t deserve her and I’ll do what I have to do, but if I could only have her beside me while I do it, I won’t ever take her for granted. I’ll never doubt her love, never cause her pain…please, please, please… Give her back to me.

Dona. Mistress. As he fell asleep again, the nightmares for once sullenly stayed in the shadows.

* * * * *

“You’re still moving like an eighty-year-old gimp.” Jerry, the dayshift guard, made the observation as he processed his effects.

“Yeah, well, getting downed in a knife fight and dying for ten minutes will do that for you,” Nathan responded dryly.

Today he would be released. All that quiet sense of waiting and tension that had been building in him like a coiled spring emanated from him like an engine revving. It got exponentially stronger as they put him through the checkout process, as he carefully bathed and shaved, dressed himself in his outside clothes he’d ordered for this day. A pair of tight jeans, a dark heavy cotton T-shirt, not so heavy that you couldn’t see the bump of the nipple rings he wore. Most of the prisoners and the guards couldn’t look at the piercings on his cock without wincing. They didn’t hurt anymore, but if he barely touched himself there, he remembered her touch and became instantly erect from the sensation. For six months, he’d forced himself to wash without jacking off, despite his aching desire to do so. He wouldn’t, not until she commanded it.