Note: illustrations will appear only in the Microsoft version of this book. Crystal is completely devoted to her Mistress - mind, body and soul. Even the cruel tests of endurance and loyalty that her Mistress subjects her to leave her fidelity unshaken. During a Summer outing, however, Mistress proposes a simple game of hide and seek that turns deadly serious when Crystal becomes lost in the forest. Hunters - rough, backwoods brutes find her naked in the woods and Crystal believes she's been saved. But her rescuers quickly reveal that they are really cruel abductors, bent on brutally using her body until they break her. Planning to sell her as a sex slave, she's held captive in a crude cellar, abused over a sawhorse, forced to take their beatings and perform on command - faced with the choice of grieving for her lost love or embracing life as the sexual toy of her new owners. "My final descent into slavery has required only one small final step toward the abyss. It is as though the last year has been a prologue to this moment. Below the surface, under my desperate terror, is a sort of acceptance, a feeling of inevitability and calm. Mistress taught me to enjoy the simple pleasures that come my way, and accept them with gratitude. In this level of hell I have found the true heart of masochism, where the pain becomes the end and not the means."