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)
“You will learn to welcome the phallus and its dominion over your bottom, columba. You will learn to welcome him inside you just as he desires, and not as you wish.”
“Yes, Mistress,” I whispered, because I had no choice. I had no choice but to say that, as I would have no choice but to belong to my master—whoever he might be—in that terrible, shameful way. I had seen it in the Viking carvings, felt it on the bride saddle, and I had heard it from a bellatrix of the Order of Ostia. I still had no idea what the connection between the two might be, but how could I possibly resist their dismaying, mortifying, shared idea of how a strong man claims a girl who has come into his power?
Giovanna’s finger stilled. I felt her hands move to the clips at my ankles.
The sounds of my release came in the same sequence as my binding: ankles, thighs, the ring at my belt’s back. The spell she had apparently put me under continued; when my mistress’s hands came under my arms and drew me upward, I let her do it without protest.
Standing felt strange. The blood moved back through my legs in a way that made me swallow hard, and then bite my lip. I had to grip Giovanna’s forearm for a moment while the chamber steadied around me. She permitted my grasp with the patience she seemed to bring to everything, waiting until I had my feet properly under me before she stepped back and reached for the leash on its hook.
I blinked as I watched the leash’s clip come toward me, then disappear under my chin, finding the ring at my collar’s front. I heard it close.
Giovanna didn’t speak. She simply turned and walked toward the door, and the leash drew taut against the ring at my throat. With a helpless little whimper, I followed her. There was nothing else to do. I was oiled and bared and still aching with the need she had cultivated so carefully and given me no satisfaction for. The leash seemed like a simple fact, and Giovanna’s back was a simple fact.
The volcanic stone corridor beyond the preparation chamber received us in its cool, old silence.
My mistress led me deeper, further into the rock, through a passage that narrowed and then opened again into a corridor. The mosaic here was different from the preparation chamber’s: simpler, more geometric, the tesserae worn very smooth. Torches in iron brackets gave out light, real fire though it seemed like the flames didn’t smoke. The shadows they threw moved against the stone in a way that made the corridor feel as though it existed outside of time.
Four doors opened from the corridor. Stone, each with an iron handle and a small barred window set into it at eye height.
Giovanna stopped at the second one. She produced a heavy iron key from the pocket of her robe. She unlocked the door and swung it outward.
The cell beyond the door was small and round. The stone walls curved up to meet a low dome. The floor was smooth, worn in a circle at the room’s center where I understood, in an instant of cold clarity, that many feet had stood. And from the floor itself, in that circle, rose two posts of dark iron, set perhaps a meter and a half apart, each with a ring at its top, its middle, and its base.
To the side I saw a bench similar to the one in the preparation chamber, but larger and furnished with what looked like furs in addition to the same kind of leather cushions I had already seen and lain upon.
My mistress unclipped the leash from my collar and hung it on a hook just inside the door. Then she took my wrists in turn and clipped the rings of my cuffs to the upper rings of the posts, left to right, so that I stood between them with my arms extended, facing the curved stone wall of the cell.
My back was to the door, I realized, my eyes widening at the knowledge of the sheer helplessness of my position. I was oiled from shoulders to ankles. I was freshly bared in my most private places. The welts from the mastix mapped themselves across my bottom and the backs of my thighs in a language I couldn’t read but someone else apparently could.
Giovanna clipped my ankle cuffs to the lower rings, so that my feet were spread at slightly more than shoulder width. Then she straightened, and I heard her step back, and for a moment there was only the torchlight from the corridor and the sound of my own breathing.
“You await your master, columba,” she said.
The door swung shut. The key turned in the lock. I could just make out her footsteps receding down the mosaic corridor until the stone swallowed them entirely, and I was alone in the round cell with the torchlight filtering through the barred window and my own heartbeat very loud in my ears.