Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
The sensation felt nothing like Giovanna’s fingers. Her fingers had been precise and knowing and occasionally maddening in their lightness. This sensation was relentless. It didn’t pause to ask questions. It didn’t withdraw to punish omissions. It simply continued, pressing against my clit with a stimulation that made my hips rock against the tension of the straps clipped to my belt, in a humiliating rhythm I couldn’t control.
“Tell me what happened in the chambers,” Giovanna said.
“I looked at them,” I managed. “I told you. The furniture. The preservation—”
“Did you touch anything?”
My jaw tightened. “I examined the construction. Structurally. The joinery was—”
“Did you sit on the… furniture?”
The vibrator moved. It shifted its angle, found a different point of pressure that made the first one feel like a rehearsal. My vision went briefly white at the edges. A low moan emerged from my chest.
“I sat on the—” I stopped. I had been about to say rowing bench. I recalculated. “I sat down. In the main cavern. To rest. I’d been on my feet for—”
“On the ship?”
The word landed with a precision that told me she knew. She knew I had been on the ship. Had the sensors told them that, or could she just guess that about me? The thought that Giovanna, my new mistress, could intuit the naughty things I had done made my pussy clench around the horrid, teasing knob at the tip of the vibrator.
“Yes…” I gasped. “Only… only b-briefly…”
The artificial penis moved again. Inside my vagina, back and forth a little. Then lower. It touched the dark, forbidden place my own trembling fingers had found in the cavern, the place I had been trying not to think about since the moment Giovanna had first mentioned the bridal chambers.
I didn’t come, much as part of me simply wanted to give in to the degradation and the need and the sheer pleasure. Something else happened, though: a sound in the back of my skull, like a frequency too low to be heard becoming briefly audible.
The warmth of the pendant against my breastbone, though I was no longer wearing the pendant; I had given it to my terrifying mistress. The warmth was there anyway, because it was not the pendant’s warmth, I understood in a flash of terrible clarity, it had never been the pendant’s warmth, it was something else entirely—
The roots going down. The branches going up. The cold between them that was not unpleasant.
“Oh, no,” I whispered.
“Tell me what happened,” Giovanna said.
The tree was there. It was there the way it had been in the bride chamber; not replacing the room but overlaid upon it, the white walls visible through the immensity of the trunk, the ceiling lights visible through the canopy. I was on it. I was moving along its branches, propelled somehow by the lingering pain from the mastix and the abject degradation of the pleasure from the vibrator against my anus. I was on the tree, and the tree was everywhere, and Giovanna’s voice came from a very great distance.
“Tell me what happened on the ship.”
The branches moved around me with a cold and patient indifference to my need, to the vibrator pressed against my most private place, to the straps that held me open on the leather table. I was in two places at once: spread and bound and burning in a white room in Palermo, and also moving along a bough of something so vast that Palermo, Sicily, the whole Mediterranean basin seemed like a detail in its bark.
“I—” The word came out broken. “I touched things.”
“What things?”
The vibrator shifted. The low hum found a new register against my anus and the tree lurched sideways in my vision, the branches swaying, I felt the orgasm gathering at the base of my spine with a terrible inevitability, and I understood with sudden, absolute clarity that Giovanna would not let me have it. She would bring me to the very edge and hold me there until I told her everything, then she would perhaps bring me to the edge again, the tree would come back each time, and eventually I would give her what she wanted because I was twenty-four years old and had never been touched by anyone until this afternoon and my body had apparently been waiting its entire existence for this specific, humiliating circumstance to undo it completely.
“On the ship,” I gasped. “On the rowing bench. I—I lay down on it.”
“And?”
The hum intensified. My hips rocked against the strap. The tree was still there, overlaid on the white ceiling, its canopy spreading beyond the walls.
“I touched myself,” I said. The words came out in a rush, academic composure finally and entirely gone, my face so hot I thought the leather beneath my head must be scorching. “On the bench. I touched myself and I—I nearly—”