Page 10 of Her Viking Guardian

“Have you ever considered modeling?” she asked.

I blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“Modeling.” Her mouth curved. “You have extraordinary bone structure. The coloring is unusual—very striking, especially here in Sicily, of course. I work with an agency here in Palermo and I occasionally approach women I think would be of interest.”

I was twenty-four years old, five feet ten inches, and had spent the last three weeks in cargo pants with soil under my fingernails. I had also, I remembered, washed my hair this morning and I had put on the one good shirt I had brought to Sicily, because I had needed to feel like a normal human being after the previous afternoon’s events. I was trying to decide whether this represented coincidence or the universe’s poor taste in timing when I noticed it.

The collar around the woman’s neck.

It was so subtle that I had almost missed it entirely—a thin band of dark leather, fitted close to her throat, with a small fastening at the back that her upswept hair nearly concealed. Not really a fashion accessory, I thought, since not a choker in the style that had been recurring on runways for the past several years. It seemed like something deliberate and specific, worn against the skin with the familiarity of an accoutrement she never removed.

My mouth went slightly dry. To my distress, I found myself thinking about the carvings on the cavern wall. I thought about the phrase bed thrall. I thought about the expression on the faces of the women in those carvings, the settled, undone quality of it, and I thought: stop it, Ilsa.

“Do you have a card?” I asked. My voice came out steadier than I felt.

She tilted her head slightly. “I could give you a card,” she said. “Or you could simply come with me. The agency is five minutes from here. You could see it, meet some of the staff, have a sense of whether it might interest you.” A small pause. “I think it would interest you.”

I should have asked for the card. I knew, in the part of my brain that had navigated three years of graduate school, two field seasons, and the particular social minefield of academic conferences, that I should have taken the woman’s card and put it in my pocket… and then of course done nothing with it.

At the very least, even if I did find the situation rather intriguing, I should have done some appropriate due diligence before going anywhere with a stranger who had approached me at a café.

But she had a collar on. And I had spent the previous evening in a limestone cavern having an experience that had rearranged something fundamental in my understanding of my own body. Sitting here in the morning sun pretending to be a normal person was not, it turned out, something I could do for more than about forty-five minutes.

“All right,” I said.

She stood. I blinked up at her for one crucial moment. I let the moment pass; I stood. I left money on the table and followed the beautiful woman in the collar down the street.

Agenzia Ostia—the Ostia Agency—occupied the ground floor of a building on a quiet side street, behind a facade of pale stone that gave nothing away. Inside, though, the reception area had the kind of atmosphere that communicated money without displaying it: clean lines, good art, a marble floor that had been there for a hundred years and polished until it reflected the light from the tall windows like still water. The air had a floral scent that reminded me of a five-star hotel, from the very few times I’d ever entered one.

The woman behind the reception desk looked up when we entered. She smiled at my companion with the ease of long familiarity, and then she looked at me with the same professional appraisal I had already received on the street. I noticed, because I was already looking for it, that she too wore a collar. The receptionist’s appeared slightly wider than my companion’s, and made of a different shade of leather, but unmistakably the same category of thing.

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“This is Ilsa,” said the woman who had brought me here. I realized I didn’t know her name. “We’ll use room three.”

“Of course, Giovanna,” said the receptionist, and her eyes moved back to me with an expression I couldn’t quite read.

Room three lay down a short hallway, past two closed doors. It was small and very clean with white walls. It held a low-backed chair upholstered in black leather, a black leather-covered coffee table, and nothing else of note. Giovanna—I had her name now—came in behind me and closed the door. The click of the latch seemed louder than it should have.

“So,” I said, turning to face her. “How does this work? Do I fill out a form, or⁠—”

“Take your clothes off, please,” Giovanna said.

The pleasantness of her tone seemed at first like the most alarming thing about it. She said it the way you say, please take a seat… the way you say, can I get you something to drink? As though the request were entirely ordinary. As though the only reasonable response was compliance.

“I’m sorry?” My voice had gone very flat.

“Your clothes.” She gestured, a small and unhurried movement. “All of them, please. I need to assess your figure properly before we proceed.”

CHAPTER 6

Ilsa

“Absolutely not,” I told Giovanna. I took a step toward the door. “I don’t know what kind of agency this is, but⁠—”

“Ilsa.” My name in her mouth stopped me. “You came here because you wanted to. You know that.”

“I came here because you invited me.”