Page 25 of Her Viking Guardian

My face blazed as I heard a whimper emerge from my throat.

“The organization I, and my whole order, serve,” Giovanna said, in a tone so conversational it took me a moment to understand she was actually speaking to me, “is called the Pretorian Guard.”

I said nothing. My face was pressed into the leather of the alcove and I was bound to an ancient stone bench with my bottom in the air, and she was telling me, in the same voice she might use to describe the history of a building to a tourist, about the people who had done this to me.

“The Guard traces its origins to ancient Rome,” she continued, “though the current organization was founded after what they called, so quaintly, the War to End Wars. It considers itself the custodian of civilization.”

I heard the wax warmer’s small sound change. My ears strained to hear every little noise as if I could somehow use my knowledge to defend myself. I heard stirring, I thought, and then a shudder went through me as I felt the first application of warm wax against the crease of my left thigh, much too close to the center of my helpless, humiliating need.

“The women who serve the Guard belong, as I’ve said, to the Order of Ostia,” she said. “As I told you, I am a bellatrix of the Order. A warrior.” A pause in which I felt the wax being spread with the same methodical patience she brought to everything. “You are a columba. A dove. The lowest rank. The newest. The most in need of instruction.”

The cloth strip went down. I braced myself.

The strip came away and the pain was sharp and bright and immediate. I cried out into the leather, and my hips tried to pull forward. The restraints held me in position with a totality that reminded me, horribly, of the nymphobus’s hands.

“Hold still,” Giovanna said, her voice suddenly sharp.

I held still, thinking of the mastix with a thrill of fear. I breathed. The sting faded into a heat that was not entirely unpleasant, and I didn’t like that I’d noticed that.

“The Guard operates throughout the world,” she continued, applying fresh wax with the same unhurried efficiency. “In politics, in finance, in intelligence. Its members occupy positions of considerable power.” Another strip. Another bright, sharp removal. I whimpered and held still. “The Order serves the Guard’s male members. In various capacities. Some of them administrative. Some of them domestic.” A pause that I thought might have contained a fraction of something almost like amusement. “Above all, though, in more intimate ways: the women of the Order of Ostia are the submissive sexual servants of their Guard masters.”

She worked methodically, and the picture that emerged between the applications of wax was one of an organization so thoroughly embedded in the structures of the world I had been living in that it seemed impossible I had not encountered it before. But of course I hadn’t. That was the point of it. The Guard’s power depended on invisibility, on the elegant facade of the modeling agency and the tailored suit and the beautiful woman at the café who looked like she belonged in the pages of a fashion magazine.

The wax reached the center of my pussy and I stopped thinking about the Guard’s institutional history.

“Easy,” Giovanna said, in a tone that was almost gentle. “Be still, columba.”

I tried to be still. I tried with every effort of will I possessed, my face pressed into the leather that smelled of the women who had been still before me, and I breathed through the heat and the vulnerability of being bared in this way, stripped of the last little bit of my grown-up thatch.

“You may consider me your mistress,” Giovanna said, when she had finished with my pussy and I was crying quietly into the cushion as much from relief than pain. “For I am your mistress, and you will address me and obey me as such.” She smoothed something cool over the newly bare skin, a soothing pass of her palm that made me shiver. “But I am not the only authority over you, Ilsa. And I am not the most important one. Very soon you will have a master.”

So simple, and so anticipated, and yet the confirmation of it, and very soon… made my heart race and my stomach lurch with fear, even as in my newly bare pussy another helpless clench betrayed me.

“A master,” I repeated, into the leather. My voice came out muffled and very small.

“A powerful man,” Giovanna said, “to whom you will belong. You will still be in my service, but you will belong to him.” She moved behind me, and I heard the wax warmer’s soft metallic sound again, but she didn’t touch me yet. “I am your mistress. I will always be your mistress, in the sense that I began your training. But a mistress prepares. A master civilizes.”

I took my lower lip between my teeth. The word civilizes was doing something to me that I couldn’t account for inside any framework I possessed.

“That means,” Giovanna said, with an untiring patience that seemed to have some hypnotic effect on me, “that he will use your body for his pleasure. Systematically. With increasing sternness, as you learn to meet each previous demand and become ready for the next.” A pause. “He will train you to please him more and more, columba. That is what civilization is, at its root. The refinement of a thing into its best and most useful form.”

The heat I felt at Giovanna’s words had nothing to do with the volcanic stone or even the residual sting of the waxing. It had been building since the rowing bench, since the bride saddle, since the first moment I had understood what the iron rings were for. It moved through me from my face downward, and it settled where everything settled now: in the newly smooth, bare, exposed center of my body, which clenched around nothing, as if in humiliating search of the rigid penis of my unknown master.

I pressed my forehead harder into the leather and breathed through my nose.

“Who?” I said.

I heard a sort of a clacking sound. I didn’t realize that it represented my mistress picking up a mastix from whatever surface it had rested on until the stroke landed across my bottom cheeks, atop the earlier welts that had already mapped their horrid geography. The cry that came out of me sounded raw and ragged as it echoed off the stone walls of the chamber.

“You know the only question you may ask,” Giovanna said. Her voice had not changed at all.

I sobbed into the leather. The welt across my bottom burned with a specific, layered intensity, new pain finding the memory of old pain and compounding it. My hips tried to pull forward and found the restraints, and the restraints held me precisely where I was, bottom raised and burning, pussy bare and slick and aching with need.

“I’m sorry,” I managed. “I’m sorry, Mistress. I⁠—”

“You’ll learn,” she said, which was neither forgiveness nor its absence, simply a statement of fact that she seemed to find entirely unremarkable.

Then her fingers found me from behind, and I stopped thinking about the mastix entirely.