Reflected Desire

Neve lifted her eyebrows, feeling lost as well as foggy. “I’m sorry…take care of who?”

Morgan shook her head, an inviting smile replacing the irritation of a moment before. “Never mind.” She tilted her head to regard Neve, her eyes piercing. “Hmm. Let me see. Battered, but not broken. Brave and strong beneath the wounds. A good heart—that’ll be a switch for him. And of course, lovely. You’ll be just his type, not that I’ll get any thanks for it. No wonder you were drawn here. The Fates always know, meddling old biddies that they are.”

Neve swayed on her feet, beginning to drift into sleep. “What?”

“Oh, pardon me,” Morgan said, quickly withdrawing her hand. “I haven’t had a customer in a bit. Not one who I’d sell to, at least. I sometimes forget that a little goes a long way.” She turned her head, glanced toward the shadowy back corner of the shop.

“Come with me, Neve Logan. I’ve got just the thing for you.”

And despite the fog enveloping her thoughts, Neve was strangely certain that Morgan did.

Chapter Two

Adrian did not know how long he’d slept, but he knew the moment he awakened that he had a new master. Shifting his naked body in the tangle of silken sheets, he opened his eyes and looked drowsily, resentfully, at the glow now emanating from the floor-length mirror on the wall opposite. The magic mirror, bane of his very long existence.

Adrian groaned low in his throat and sat up, looking around the tower room he’d been confined to for more than a thousand years. He’d stopped keeping track at three hundred. At that point, it had been too depressing to continue counting.

The slide of silk against his newly awakened body had his cock stirring in wasted arousal. Adrian gritted his teeth and tried to ignore it, the rush of need he’d never fully been able to get rid of. After so long alone, he’d thought he might simply lose all interest in sex, in the thought of pumping into a willing woman’s softness until he spent himself. But if anything, his need had only grown keener. And it was dangerous, so dangerous for a slave to allow himself to want.

It had nearly been his downfall once already. He’d sworn never to let that happen again. He couldn’t, or he would become nothing but a shattered mind trapped in this miserable glass.

He got to his feet, glancing at the flickering candles that never went out, and were never spent. Adrian let his gaze wander over the familiar trappings of his long life, feeling deep in his bones that he had slept much longer than usual this time even though nothing had changed here. That was no measure: nothing ever changed here. Books were stacked haphazardly in a bookcase, gifts from various masters and all read hundreds of times. A comfortable chair, a table covered in various implements useful to a mage like himself—or rather, useful in keeping him in the good graces of those he was forced to serve. A small table with a single chair, where he could dine on anything he liked with nothing more than a spoken request. A massive tub. A darkened fireplace. And tall, thin windows barely more than slits in the stone through which he could look out on the illusion of an endless night in a world that had once been his.

And of course, there was the bed: massive, sumptuous…and something his first mistress had enjoyed making use of. She had used him so much, and so poorly, that he had appeared to every master since as nothing more than an inhuman spirit at the glass. It had, at least, allowed him some measure of peace in this wretched, enchanted place. The few women he had served since had simply used his power to draw other unfortunates to their beds. But he had known that eventually, one would ask to breach the glass barrier again. And he would be forced to let her in.

To be a slave in every sense, to serve her physically whether he wished to or not.

Pushing aside the dark thoughts, Adrian padded across the rug to the glowing glass, pausing only to draw on a simple robe that he’d draped over the back of his reading chair. He didn’t want to look: he’d served so many masters and mistresses, and all had been greedy, violent creatures, consumed with gathering more power and crushing others beneath it. For a long time, he’d watched in fascinated horror, able to see out, though they could not see in. Eventually, he’d had to turn away.

Nothing good ever came of those he served. Fitting, as he was so very cursed himself.

With a feeling of dread deep in his stomach, Adrian touched the glass, and the curling mist beyond cleared. What would he be doing this time, he wondered? Murdering enemies? Corrupting innocents? He expected to look out and see nothing more than the human embodiment of more cruelty, which was all he had known for ages.

But what he saw stopped him cold.

Hair of raven black. Lips as red as the rose. Skin as white as snow.

Adrian watched, fascinated, as a woman whose beauty could only be called exquisite examined the other side of the glass, seemingly without a single clue he was within. She was dressed strangely to him, though he had come to expect such things. He liked these clothes, the breeches that hugged slim curves, the fitted shirt that clung to a generous pair of breasts and a long, slender waist. Loose waves of midnight hair tumbled over her shoulders, and she shoved it back with one hand while she examined something, some carving in the frame beyond. Big, thickly lashed eyes of deep sapphire-blue looked at the glass, looked through him.

Still, in the brief moment her gaze touched his, Adrian felt heat suffuse his body in one dizzying rush. What fresh torment was this to be? She was bound to be as bad as the rest. An enchantress, probably, like Melisande, his first mistress. The one who had bound him to this accursed place. But Melisande was nothing but a pale shadow of this woman, a cruel and artificial beauty who had gone to extreme and bloody lengths to keep her looks.

No, he had only seen this woman’s equal once, long ago. That one had never known he even existed, which was just as well…considering his power had been used to attempt her murder.

As he watched her look over the mirror, frowning lightly, he noted that she looked…confused. Displeased. And still, she made no attempt to call him. Biding her time, he supposed. Making him wait.

Finally, she settled her hands on her hips, shook her head and turned away.

When she began to take her clothes off, Adrian’s mouth went dry.

She doesn’t know I’m here, he thought, then shook off the forgiving notion. Of course she knew. She was playing with him. And though it shamed him, angered him, he was ripe to be played in such a way.

Adrian watched her pull the shirt over her head, the thin material sliding up to reveal more porcelain skin marred only by a thin black strap across her back. The strap was quickly hidden by that mass of shining hair. Her shirt was tossed onto the bed beyond, a simple piece of furniture not at all suited to the sorts of things he found himself wanting to do to this woman. For the first time in centuries, his thoughts drifted to the chest at the foot of the bed, to the silken ties and velvet whips…and the sharper things. The heavy chains. The cat-o’-nine-tails.

His blood went cold, even as his cock rose to full attention, throbbing insistently. His body had betrayed him at first with Melisande, too, he remembered. But not for long. Not once her pleasure could only be achieved through his pain.

Gods, he was a fool.

His new mistress slid the pants she wore down shapely legs, leaving an intriguing scrap of black silk that covered…very little. Adrian braced one hand against the wall, gritting his teeth. He had to look. He had to master this temptation before it got out of hand. In all his years as the mirror slave, only Melisande had tried to use his body to destroy his soul. It would not happen again. He would feel nothing when he looked at this wench. Nothing.

Then she turned back, and he forgot to breathe. The blood pounded in his ears. One hand fisted at his side. Seemingly unaware, she turned this way and that, examining her perfect form with a critical eye. Then she skimmed her hands up her waist, beneath breasts pushed up by the fascinating, lacy undergarment that he wanted to remove with his teeth.

Adrian hitched in a single breath. Enchantress. She had to be. Desire nearly took him to his knees, a position he had sworn never to be in again. Adrian swallowed back a soft moan, hating that anyone was still capable of making him feel like this, want like this. Knowing she would walk away while he spent himself, alone in the dark.

Then her ruby-red lips moved, and the words he both wanted and dreaded echoed from her world into his.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”

Chapter Three

“This mirror looks like something out of the Wicked Queen’s castle,” Neve muttered, then smirked to herself. It had to be the ugliest mirror she had ever seen with the freakish woodland creatures frolicking around the ornate silver frame. The way it dwarfed everything else in her bedroom in both size and sheer, unabashed hideousness. And there was also something creepy about looking in the glass, even though it was just her looking back out at herself. And now, because of a series of events that seemed to grow hazier the more she tried to remember them, the mirror was hers. Had, in fact, been chosen for her by the aptly named Morgan le Fay.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” Neve repeated.

The line seemed appropriate. The response, however, had her yelping and stumbling backward.

“You are, of course, mistress fair,” came the disembodied voice, echoing, it seemed, from the glass itself.

Her heart thudded in her chest as she raced from the room on a short, sharp scream, ice in her veins. She nearly fell face first onto the carpet in the living area, just managing to stay upright as she fumbled around the coffee table. Then she was standing in the middle of the room, hand over her mouth, blood pounding in her head. The mirror. The freaking mirror had…

No. No way. You’re finally losing it.

Her heart beat against her rib cage like a trapped butterfly as she stood there, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. An auditory hallucination? A haunting? Some kind of sick joke?

Terror turned quickly to embarrassment as she realized what had probably just happened. Her heart slowed, the adrenaline rush fading.

“A trick mirror. Has to be,” she breathed. This was some kind of piece-of-crap haunted-house mirror, rigged to talk back when you said the right words. She’d pegged the Wicked Queen’s castle thing just right. This monstrosity was going in the trash at first light, because her nerves were bad enough without living with an ugly talking mirror with hidden batteries and no discernible off-switch. Morgan had probably been just waiting for the right person to unload this “gift” on.

But she wasn’t going to be forced out of her room by some cheap trick. And she wasn’t sleeping on the couch in her underwear.

Steeling herself, Neve stepped back into the bedroom, talking out loud to calm the jitters that wouldn’t quite go away.

“I’ll just put a blanket over it,” she said. “A really big, really thick blanket. And if it talks again, I am sleeping on the couch.”

This time, when the mirror spoke, it gave her a jolt but didn’t send her running.

“What is your command, mistress?”

Neve managed not to jump this time. And it was, once again, a pretty generic response. Still, she gave the mirror a wide berth as she went to the dresser to get out her pajamas. The mirror fell silent, the glass still reflecting nothing but the room. Neve shook her head and wondered where on earth the so-called Morgan had found this thing.