Page 48 of Her Viking Guardian

“Magnusson,” he said. “Your permission?”

Henrik was quiet for a moment that lasted approximately a thousand years.

“Come on the leo’s cock, Ilsa,” he said. “Come for us.”

The orgasm broke over me with a completeness that made the ceiling of the control room seem to tilt. I cried out to the stone in a voice that sounded more ancient than the mithraeum or the cavern… older than books, older than ships, and older than anything except the Worldtree itself, growing from the severed parts of Ymir’s slain body.

I felt my own body close around the cock inside me with long, rhythmic pulses, I felt him withdraw with a sharp, decisive movement, and then the warmth of him landed on my stomach in several quick, spreading pulses. I lay in my straps and breathed and let the tears run down into my hair.

I felt my Herra’s hands releasing my wrists. I thought for a moment that it represented an act of kindness, a reward even. Then he spoke.

“Rub the leo’s seed into your skin,” Herra Henrik said in a quiet voice. “It is a gesture of respect and gratitude, lille en. For the pleasure the leo has given you and for the privilege of serving his reðr with your fisse.”

My hands shook as I brought them to my stomach.

The warmth of him… of Leo Aetnaeus… Bruno, apparently… the man who had just used my body with such complete authority… his scalding seed had already begun to cool against my skin. The act of spreading it, though, seemed to renew the heat—in my face, above all—with each slow, circular pass of my palms. I watched myself do it, because the cushion behind my head still held me in place, still aimed my gaze forward and slightly down the length of my own body, and what I saw seemed worse than anything I had seen yet.

Henrik stood to my left, observing closely. His expression held the familiar quality of note-taking, assessing, cataloguing. Bruno had stepped back from the bench. He had already begun to adjust his trousers with the brisk efficiency of a man returning to his day, but his amber eyes hadn’t left me.

Giovanna stood a little further back, perfectly composed again, her dark gaze moving over my face and hands, narrowing slightly as she measured my obedience. And on the monitor—the large central screen that Giovanna’s repositioning of the bench had put in full view—Sven Hallstrom’s pale eyes regarded me from the stone chamber in Rouen with an expression that I couldn’t read, though I knew it must conceal deep consideration of my performance as a fuck toy.

Four of them. All clothed. All watching me rub a man’s seed into my belly with my own obedient hands.

I took my upper lip between my teeth and kept moving my palms. The tears had stopped, or nearly. Something drier and warmer replaced them—a heat that began at my sternum and radiated outward, taking in my throat, my cheeks, the backs of my hands. I understood that I should feel degraded, and I did feel degraded. But I also thought of my grandmother’s pendant, with its wunjo rune, and of the heritage it implied, realized here in the strangest, most thrilling, most shameful way.

The point, as my Herra had made clear, lay in the submission itself… a specific, mortifying act of obedience witnessed by people who would enter it in their own mental records, their own long institutional memory of girls bound to benches and made to demonstrate what they had become.

I smoothed my palms over the skin of my lower belly, and then further up toward my ribs where a few drops had reached, and I looked at the ceiling and breathed.

“Are you satisfied, Leo Aetnaeus,” Henrik said, “with what you’ve seen of her progress?”

He spoke with the collegial quality that brought the blood to my cheeks. I saw his gaze move to the monitor, too, where Sven’s expression hadn’t changed at all.

The Guardsman made a small sound, a considered little grunt. “The fisse is responsive. Tight.” A pause. “She wept throughout, but she obeyed. She asked for permission before she climaxed.” He seemed to weigh something, as if running figures. “She is progressing. Bellatrix, how did you find the mouth?”

My eyes went to Giovanna, my tummy lurching at the arch, satisfied look on her face.

“Certainly more pleasurable than it was yesterday. Henrik has gentled her nicely.”

I couldn’t keep a little sob of humiliation from emerging. They took no notice.

All their eyes turned to the screen, where Sven remained quiet for a moment. His pale eyes had not moved from me, and I had the uncanny sensation—one I was becoming more familiar with than I found comfortable—that he could read in my face things I hadn’t finished writing yet.

“From the perspective of the North, she is more than progressing,” he said at last, in a formal register that seemed to mark pronouncements rather than observations. “She saw Yggdrasil from the longship in her dream. That is not the dream of an ordinary vǫlva-in-training.” His gaze shifted to Henrik, and then to the others. “If a girl sees the Worldtree at all, in her first night’s dreams, she sees it on land, outside a village… or more frequently atop a mountain.”

“What does that mean?” asked Leo Aetnaeus, frowning. “We know enough now to trust your vǫlur’s visions, but your paradoxical belief in certain… symbols… such as where a girl sees the tree… that continues to confuse us—to put it mildly.”

I thought I could perceive in the Guardsman’s words an iron fist clad in a velvet glove. To put it mildly… in this Bruno’s amiable voice, couched in amiable words, I thought I sensed something that didn’t seem mild at all. I shivered as something that extended from below the level of my conscious mind seemed to make its way into my rational brain. I could almost feel the fault lines between two clandestine organizations who possessed real geopolitical power—the more impressive because of how deeply hidden their operation upon the world had obviously been, apparently over the course of centuries.

“May I?” my Herra asked his chieftain.

“Of course, brother,” Sven replied from the monitor.

Herra Henrik turned to the leo. I felt another shiver go through me at the mere sight of his face, wearing an expression of such gravity that I felt a perverse, distressing surge of pride that I belonged to him.

CHAPTER 25

Ilsa