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)
We lay still for a moment. His arm remained around me, his palm flat against my sternum, and I could feel his heartbeat returning to something like its ordinary pace against my back.
“Good girl,” he murmured. The words were simple and stripped of ceremony, and they brought warmth to my chest. “The pleasure your cunt gives is remarkable.” A pause, his lips brushing my temple. “Even now, when your poor fisse is so raw. Remarkable.”
I pressed my face into the furs and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wouldn’t reveal too much of what was happening inside me.
His arm tightened briefly, and then he shifted, and I felt the patient quality return to his movements as he drew back from me and sat up. The loss of his warmth was immediate and unwelcome in a way I couldn’t help resenting.
“I must speak with Leo Aetnaeus about your dream, and also confer with the first of the Sons of Odin, my chief,” he said. His voice had regained its measured authority, that of a scholar and a master in equal proportion. “What you’ve told me about it… the men on the longship, speaking of the East… the Worldtree at the horizon.”
I heard him move, the furs shifting, small sounds of a strong man gathering himself for the day ahead.
“And the fact that you saw Yggdrasil from the rowing bench, lille en. Not from a mountain, or from a village… but from the drake—the longship. I think it’s important.”
I rolled carefully onto my back, wincing at the deep interior ache, and looked up at him. My brow furrowed as I tried to discover his meaning. In the torchlight filtering through the barred window, his face had the quality of the carved warriors—settled and entirely without pretense about his Viking nature… his right to rule over my body precisely as he chose.
“What does that mean?” I asked, and this time I braced for the consequences of asking, my body remembering the handprint across my bottom with a vividness that seemed to have become a permanent feature of my nervous system.
But he didn’t reach for me. He looked at me for a moment with the expression I had seen once before. I felt my lips curl into a tiny, helpless smile as I read it as appreciation.
“It means,” he said, “that I think I need to take you to the cavern and break you there.” He did put out his hand, then, but not to position me for a lesson in obedience, or to reinforce the terrifying word break in any straightforward way. He touched my chin, his thumb moving along my jaw, tilting my face up slightly. “I will whip you properly, and then have your sweet bottom, on the bride saddle.”
CHAPTER 22
Ilsa
The word whip arrived in my stomach, alongside break, as a cold drop of fear, mixed with something warmer. The bride saddle seemed to find a place directly below it, in the specific region that was not my stomach at all, as a heat that contradicted the cold completely.
I stared up at him and tried to find something to say that would not constitute either a question or a plea, both of which seemed equally dangerous and equally inevitable. He gazed down at me, his brow slightly furrowed as if he had equations to think through. At last he spoke, slowly.
“Leo Aetnaeus and Bellatrix Hestiaea will certify that you have received your first initiation at my hands and upon my phallus.”
The way he said it—certify—made the academic part of my brain flinch even as the rest of me registered the lewd implications. He meant to present me. To show me to Giovanna and her master, and thus to provide the evidence of what he had accomplished here in this initiation cell.
I understood, with a clarity that came with a fresh wave of heat to my face, that my body represented the evidence.
“Yes, Herra,” I whispered.
He donned his red robe. I watched him from the furs and tried not to make it obvious that I was watching him, though I felt certain I failed completely. He didn’t appear to notice, though, or perhaps he noticed and found it appropriate, as a simple confirmation of his ownership of me.
Then he turned to me with a leash in his hand, undoubtedly left by Giovanna for the convenience of my new master. My master… my leash. I shuddered as he reached the end down toward me. He clipped it to the ring at my collar’s front with a small, definitive sound.
“On your feet, lille en.”
I got up. The ache between my thighs announced itself with every movement, a deep interior soreness. I chewed the inside of my cheek to quell the whimper that threatened to emerge, and I stood as straight as I could manage. The cuffs at my wrists and ankles caught the torchlight. The collar seemed to press against my throat.