Page 20 of Her Viking Guardian

“She’s been gone a minute,” I said. My voice had taken on a quality I recognized with shame as pleading. “She won’t know. You could just⁠—”

“She would know.” A pause. “She always knows. Much more important, if you think you’re entitled to an orgasm, you have a great deal to learn, columba.”

I pressed my eyes shut. The warmth between my legs was maddening. The welts on my bottom throbbed with my pulse. “Please,” I said, hating myself, “please just… it would only take a second for the vibrator. You could just let me… I just need…”

He moved. I heard him come around the table toward my head, and I turned to look at him with what I suspected was a terribly transparent expression of hope, which quickened when I saw that he held the artificial phallus.

Instead of bringing it over my body and lowering it between my thighs as I expected, though, the huge man crouched beside the table and brought the matte black tip of the thing to my lips.

“Open,” he said.

I stared at him. “That’s not⁠—”

“Open your mouth, columba.” Still the same unhurried quality. “You’ll need to learn to do this properly, and soon. You may as well begin now. Taste yourself, and start to learn how to please your master.”

The blunt tip pressed against my lower lip, and I understood that this was what I had instead of what I wanted. The choice between compliance and refusal was not really a choice at all, not with my wrists clipped to my belt and my ankles spread by the table’s straps. I opened my mouth.

The silicone was smooth, faintly cool, and tasted of my helpless, mortifying need: the flavor of the naughty scent I had added to the air of the Viking bridal chamber. My cheeks burned as the huge man guided the plastic phallus past my lips slowly until I had it atop my tongue, pressing down.

“Wider,” he said. “Relax your jaw. You’ll need to learn to accommodate more than this.”

I made a sound against the thing in my mouth that expressed, I hoped, something of my opinion of this instruction. He seemed not to notice.

“A man’s cock will be more demanding,” he said, in the same tone with which one might say a man’s handshake will be firmer or a man’s stride will be longer. “Considerably more demanding, depending on the master who chooses you. You will be expected to receive him without difficulty.” A brief pause. “You should begin practicing your breathing now.”

I breathed through my nose with my jaw stretched around the vibrator’s girth and thought about the carvings in the cavern, the women on their knees with their heads guided forward by patient Viking hands, and the specific expression on their carved faces that I had spent an hour refusing to name, and I understood with a lurch of my stomach that I was now on that side of the image. I was the woman on her knees. I was the woman with her head guided, her mouth occupied, and her expression doing the thing I had refused to name.

I closed my eyes and breathed through my nose as the enormous artificial penis had its way with my mouth, and I waited for Giovanna to come back.

She came back perhaps five minutes later, though it felt longer. The door clicked open, her footsteps crossed the marble floor, and Nymphobus Oceanus withdrew the vibrator from my mouth without ceremony and straightened up. I closed my mouth and stared at the ceiling.

Giovanna appeared above me. She looked at my face for a moment with the same assessing quality she had brought to everything, and then she said, in a tone entirely different from any she had used in the last hour, “Did you discover anything unusual about yourself while you were in the sanctuary?”

I opened my mouth to say no. The word was right there. It was a perfectly good word, a short word, a word that might close this particular line of inquiry and give me back some small portion of the self I had arrived in Palermo with this morning.

“I had a vision,” I said instead.

CHAPTER 10

Ilsa

The quality of the room changed. It was not dramatic; Giovanna did not move, nor did her expression shift in any obvious way. But something altered in the air between us, some fine calibration of attention that had already been very precise becoming somehow more so.

She remained quiet for a moment.

“Thank you,” she said. She spoke the words as though I had given her something of genuine value. As if in this room where she had stripped me, bound me, disciplined me, interrogated me, brought me to the edge of orgasm and then denied it, I had nonetheless just managed to give her something that the rest of it had not. “Thank you, Ilsa. That was honest of you.”

I blinked at the ceiling. The sudden, perverse warmth in my chest had nothing to do with the pendant, which still lay in my new mistress’s pocket. How could I feel proud in this moment?

“Nymphobus,” Giovanna said. “Release her, please.”

The clips came free in sequence: ankles, thighs, waist, wrists. The straps retracted into the table with small mechanical sighs. I lay still for a moment after the last one released, my body uncertain what to do with the sudden freedom of its own limbs.

“You may sit up, columba,” Giovanna said, not unkindly.

I sat up. The room swam slightly, then settled. I was still naked, still wearing the columba’s leathers, the collar… the cuffs at my wrists, ankles, and thighs… the stout belt at my waist. I could feel the welts on my bottom as I shifted my weight, and the arousal that had never fully subsided pulsed with dull insistence at my center.

Giovanna stood before me. She had straightened her jacket and her hair remained immaculate. She looked at me with an expression I hadn’t seen from her yet; not the appraising look of the café or the hard look of the intake room, but something more considered. Something that seemed to acknowledge that I presented a more complicated problem than she had initially estimated.