Page 13 of Her Viking Guardian

The first real stroke landed across the center of my bottom.

I screamed. The sound came out of me without my permission, raw and shocked, because the previous strokes across my thighs had been—I understood now with sickening clarity—warnings. Preliminary. This was the mastix applied in earnest, the braided leather finding the fullest part of my bare bottom with a crack that echoed off the white walls of the little room. The pain was extraordinary; not merely sharp but deep, radiating outward from the point of impact.

The second stroke landed just below the first.

“When you tell me,” Giovanna said, her voice carrying over my sobbing with perfect calm, “that you can obey me… that you can hold the proper posture on your own, and that you can take off your clothes when you are told to take them off… Nymphobus Oceanus will step back.”

Another lash.

Even as I sobbed and struggled, my mind tried to take itself off the pain, following Giovanna’s words through a maze of possible meanings.

Nymphobus Oceanus. Not his real name, of course. A title.

As the pain from the mastix built, I bucked against his hands and went nowhere. The leather cushion had gotten wet with my tears, and I could feel the specific shape of each welt forming across my bottom, a map of pain that Giovanna was drawing with methodical patience.

“When he steps back,” she continued, “I will whip you only six more times. And then your initiation can proceed.”

The next stroke caught the crease where my bottom met my thighs, and the sound I made was not a scream but something lower and more broken. It came from deep in my chest. My fingers gripped the front edge of the seat cushion. My knuckles had gone white. I sobbed with my face pressed into the leather, and I thought about the carvings in the cavern—the women’s faces in the capture scenes, the voyage scenes, and the homecoming scenes. I saw them: the way their expressions had moved past resistance into something more settled, more undone—and I hated myself for thinking about it.

Another lash landed across my burning bottom.

“I’ll obey,” I sobbed. The words came out muffled against the seat cushion, broken by hitching breaths. “I’ll obey, I can—please—I’ll hold still, I’ll take my clothes off, I’ll⁠—”

“Say it clearly,” Giovanna said.

CHAPTER 7

Ilsa

I lifted my face from the leather. My cheeks were soaked. My nose was running. I was bent over a chair in a room in Palermo with my jeans and panties around my knees, welts rising across my bare bottom, and a man’s hand on my neck, and I choked out words in a voice that sounded nothing like the voice of a doctoral candidate with two journal publications.

“I can obey you. I’ll stay in position. I’ll take off my clothes when you tell me to.”

Nymphobus Oceanus’s hands lifted. He stepped back. I heard the soft sound of his shoes on the floor as he returned to his station by the door, and then there was only Giovanna behind me and the air moving across the burning terrain of my punished bottom.

I stayed in position. My elbows on the seat. My face forward. I held still because I had said I would hold still, and because some part of me—a part I was going to have to reckon with at some point, when I could think again—understood that this was the only path through.

“Good,” Giovanna said. There was no warmth in it, exactly, but her voice did hold acknowledgment. My body responded to that acknowledgment with a shameful rush of heat down where I least wanted to be warm at that moment.

“Now,” she said. “You will learn the only question that is not useless.”

The mastix landed. I gasped, my fingers clawing at the cushion, but I held position. I held.

“The only question,” Giovanna said, “that you may ever ask…”

The second stroke. My breath left me in a shuddering cry.

“…while I am training you…”

The third. I sobbed openly now, my shoulders shaking, my face wet, the welts layered atop welts in a geography of fire that I could feel with excruciating specificity.

“…is How may I serve you, mistress?”

The fourth stroke landed, and through my sobbing I heard the words settle into the room like something that had always been there, waiting to be spoken.

“…or, sometime soon…”

The fifth stroke followed with the same measured spacing, and I understood at a bodily level, deeper than anything to which my mind consented to know it, that she had not merely told me a phrase. She meant to install it inside me. To embed it in the same neural pathways that the mastix seemed to rewrite with each stroke, so that the words and the pain and the lesson would be fused together in my memory, inseparable.