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)
I couldn’t wait to learn more, and to teach my new bed thrall in turn. The knowledge that such learning and teaching must come through disciplining her sweet body and then using it thoroughly to make my cock feel good added greatly to my eagerness, of course, but I could also feel something else.
Ilsa had captivated me as I had never been captivated before.
* * *
Ilsa
My forehead creased very hard. Wildly, irrationally, I thought of my aunt telling me not to frown so much, because I would get wrinkles. My aunt had never been chained naked between iron posts while a huge man with a Northern accent ran his hands over her body. I felt fairly confident about that.
His palms moved across my shoulders with a slow, assessing warmth, and I heard him make a low sound of approval that vibrated somewhere in my chest against my will.
“So soft,” he murmured. The words seemed addressed to himself, as though he had made an entry in a ledger. His big hands traveled down my sides, tracing the narrowing of my waist, the flare of my hips, and the sound he made deepened into something that stripped away every remaining pretense that this was anything other than what it was. “Beautiful. Everything I look for in a thrall.”
Thrall. Not columba. Not initiate. I noted the difference from Giovanna’s Latin vocabulary, and I felt my breath change as I wondered what it meant, and what if anything it had to do with his Nordic accent.
His right hand came around my hip and found the front of me, fondling the newly bare skin of my pussy with a frankness and a deliberateness that made my knees buckle, my feet straining against the ankle cuffs. I heard myself make a mortifying, breathy sound as his fingers explored what Giovanna had prepared for him.
“Ah,” he said softly. “Very well done.”
He didn’t speak to me. He spoke about me, about the preparation of me for his use, the way a craftsman might admire another’s preliminary work before taking over the project.
The man’s fingers moved with a patient, evaluative thoroughness that made my hips rock forward helplessly, awakening the ache in my arms from the restraints binding me to the iron poles.
“So wet already. So ready for the reðr.”
His lips were close to my ear, so the shudder that went through me at the sound of the Old Norse word for penis felt like the effect of the very vibration of his vocal cords. I felt my whole body go cold, and then flare with heat.
“You have been kept waiting, haven’t you? Made to want and not have. Your mistress is very skilled.”
I bit my lip and tried to think about the Younger Futhark. I tried to think about the mineral composition of volcanic stone. I tried to think about literally anything else but what his hand had begun to do.
I failed.
“Please,” I whispered. I hadn’t meant to say it.
“Please,” he repeated, tasting the word with all-too-obvious satisfaction. His fingers stopped moving, not withdrawing but simply pausing, which felt somehow worse. “You will have everything you need, columba. In good time.”
He withdrew his fingers. Both hands came to my bottom then, and I felt him part my cheeks with a slow, deliberate care that made heat surge into my face so violently I thought I might faint. The air found the place Giovanna had prepared there, the tiny bud she had anointed and told me so much about. I pressed my lips together into a tight line, breathing desperately through my nose.
His fingertip touched the little ring. Just once, just lightly, a single exploratory contact that seemed assessing, evaluative in its intention.
“Beautiful,” he said again, quietly. “Ready to receive a man. Your mistress has prepared you perfectly, lille en.” Little one. Danish. Reðr… cock… Old Norse. My mind raced, but I couldn’t find any intellectual purchase over the ideas roiling in my head. “This sweet place, so soft and clean and ready.” His thumb traced a slow circle that made my whole body shudder. “Bellatrix Hestiaea knows her work.”
He stepped back. I heard him draw a slow breath, as if he had to force himself to take his time with me. The thought brought a fresh wave of heat to my face, and to my dismay down there as well.
“And these.” His hands moved to the backs of my thighs, and his fingertips traced the welts with a careful attention that was almost reverent. I heard genuine appreciation in his voice, but something else as well—a connoisseur’s assessment. “The mastix,” he said. “Roman. Clean lines. Very pretty.” A pause. “The Viking punishment strap leaves a different sort of mark.”
My stomach flipped.
From the things Giovanna had said, I had felt certain that this ‘master’ must be an initiate of the Pretorian Guard she had told me about. A man descended, culturally at any rate, from the Roman legions with their Mithras cult and their drive to impose their idea of civilization on the world.