Page 42 of Her Viking Guardian

I could not reach it. Not from here. Not with my wrists bound to the bench’s iron rings and the horizon between us. But I understood, with the same below-threshold certainty that had been assembling strange pictures in me since the café, that the distance was not the point.

The point was that I could see it, there, looming over my dreamscape.

I woke with salt on my lips, and it took me long moments to remember that that brine must have come from my tears at my brutal defloration on my new master’s cock, rather than the brine of the sea.

CHAPTER 21

Ilsa

I kept my eyes closed, trying to hold onto the details of the dream. The longship. The three men. The tree at the horizon.

I tried to hold onto it, the way I always tried to keep dreams that felt significant—staying very still, eyes closed, breathing shallowly as if the images were something that might startle and scatter at the first wrong movement. The salt smell. The gray sky. The worn smoothness of the bench against my belly. The way the tree had stood at the edge of the world and simply waited.

The East. Something stirring in the East. Ymir’s body.

I pressed the details flat against the inside of my closed eyelids and tried to fix them there, as if I were pressing rubbing paper against an inscription in the field—firm, patient, hoping the impression would hold.

Then my new master’s hand moved between my thighs, and the dream dissolved entirely.

His fingers worked with a slow, careful knowledge. The idea came to me that he had been awake long enough to decide exactly how he wanted to ready my body for his use. I understood, in that first confused moment of real waking, that his hand had already been there for some time—that the slickness he was finding on his fingertips, rubbing up and down my sensitive inner lips, was at least partly his doing, accomplished while I had slept through the last edges of the dream. The realization brought heat to my face so acute it seemed to radiate off the furs.

“Herra—” I started.

“Shh.” His lips found the back of my neck, a slow press that silenced me even more effectively than the word had. His fingers kept moving. “The need is urgent upon me, lille en. I’ve lain here long enough.” A pause, and his breath was warm against my nape. “It will hurt again. I know that. I’ll try to be gentle.”

The sob that came out of me had no obvious meaning. It didn’t mean yes, it didn’t mean no, it didn’t mean please stop, and it didn’t mean please don’t stop. It seemed to contain all of those things layered over one another in some ratio I couldn’t have calculated. I felt my hips move, pressing my bottom… the bottom he had spanked and told me so much about… pressing that too-important part of me back against him. I understood with a renewed blush that my body had made its own assessment of the situation while my mind was still trying to assemble a vocabulary.

Henrik made a low sound of what I could only describe as satisfaction. I felt him move the head of his manhood up and down, then back and forth. I felt him find the passage he had opened with such authority, the grotto where his rigid penis had thrust in as he bestrode me between the iron posts, so as to make me his. Then he pressed forward with a steady movement of his sinewy lap, and I cried out softly into the furs as I felt my sore vagina taken again by my master’s hardness.

He was gentle. He tried to be.

I could feel the deliberateness of it in the way he moved—the careful, controlled rhythm, the hand that had shifted from between my thighs to my hip to hold me steady rather than to grip me with the urgency he had shown the night before. The pain was there, duller than the first time but present, an ache laid over the deeper soreness already residing at my center, and I pressed my face into the fur and breathed through it.

Then I felt him harden further inside me, and I couldn’t suppress the piteous whimper of alarm and discomfort that rose from my throat.

It was not a decision he had made. I understood that instinctively, the way I had understood the bench, the way the below-threshold part of me understood things before the rest of me caught up. The sheer physical fact of my newly opened pussy around him was doing something to his restraint that his intentions apparently couldn’t fully contain. I felt it in the way his hand tightened on my hip, in the way his breath changed against the back of my neck, in the way the careful rhythm developed a quality that was no longer purely deliberate.

“God,” he murmured, very low, in a voice stripped of its careful construction. “You feel…” He stopped. He made the effort, I could feel it, to slow himself. His hand moved from my hip to my front, his fingers finding the small, aching bud at the crest of me and beginning to work it with a patient attention that seemed designed to apologize for what the rest of him was doing. “You feel so good that I want to take my time with you,” he said, and his voice had recovered some of its patience, though only some. “I want to feel every part of your sweet fisse, lille en.”

I whined into the furs. The pain and the pleasure had begun their familiar, impossible negotiation, the way they had the night before, each one making the other more present rather than less.

“Tell me about your dream.” His fingers moved with the steady, knowing pressure that had undone me so completely in the cell. “Tell your Herra what you saw.”

I almost laughed. His huge phallus moved inside me, filling me to a point that made coherent thought a project requiring significant effort, and he wanted a scholarly report on my unconscious activity. The absurdity of it reached me through the haze, and then the absurdity dissolved, because his fingers moved in a specific way and I lost my grip on irony entirely.

“A longship,” I managed. “I was on a longship… or the longship, maybe… the one… the one from the cavern. Bound to the bench.” My breath caught. “There were men. Three of them. They… they… they…”

I pressed my lips together into a tight line as I tried to keep the rising pleasure at bay. My hips had begun to move, small rocking motions that I hadn’t consciously initiated, pressing back against my master’s unhurried thrusts and then forward against his fingers, caught between the two of them in a way that felt automatic… tidal, even.

“They all… they all used me… f-fucked my… my… my mouth, and… and my… my… my fisse.” The word came out small and hot. “All three of them. While they talked.”

“What did they talk about?” His voice had roughened again, but he was listening. I could feel that he was listening with the attention I had begun to expect from him—total and evaluative, as if everything I said went directly into the same ledger where he had entered beautiful and responsive and very wet.

“The East.” I sobbed as his fingers shifted. “Something stirring in the East. They said… they talked about Ymir’s body. That someone in the East understood the old knowledge, not the same knowledge, but the same root… or… or something like that.”

I had started to cry again, I realized, not from pain and not entirely from the building pleasure, but from a place that seemed to exist between the two, where it suddenly felt as if revelations about myself and about the universe might lie.

“They said if whatever it was learned to use what Ymir’s body holds—the tree would suffer. Yggdrasil would suffer.”