Page 19 of Her Viking Guardian

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—”

“And in the chambers?” Giovanna’s voice was very quiet now. The quiet of someone who already knows the answer and is simply waiting for the courtesy of confirmation.

“I rode it.” A sob broke through the words. “I rode the… the saddle. The bride saddle. I found it and I… I took my clothes off and I mounted it and I⁠—”

“Did you experience orgasm?”

The clinical phrasing made me want to disappear through the table. “Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, I… please. Please, Mistress, please let me⁠—”

The vibrator pressed harder against the shameful, shockingly sensitive place it had found, and the climax rose and rose and crested at a height that felt like the upper branches of the tree itself. Giovanna held it there, held me there, on the exact precipice of the thing I needed most, and I heard myself making sounds I had no words for.

“Please,” I sobbed. “Please, I’ll tell you anything, I’ll… please, I need to come, please⁠—”

Then, from somewhere in the building, a chime sounded. Clear and single and businesslike: the sound of a phone, a door, or some internal signal I had no context for.

Giovanna’s hand stilled.

I made a sound of pure, wretched despair.

She withdrew the vibrator entirely. I heard her stand, heard the small sounds of her straightening her jacket, and then she appeared at the edge of my vision, composed and unhurried, and held the vibrator out toward the nymphobus.

“Hold her here,” she said to him. “I won’t be long.”

She left. The door clicked shut.

Nymphobus Oceanus stood somewhere at the periphery of my vision, a large, quiet presence. The hum of the vibrator had ceased. The room was very still. I lay on the table with my legs spread and my whole body one long, unresolved ache. I stared at the ceiling trying to remember who I was.

“Please,” I said. I hadn’t intended to speak, but the word came out anyway, stripped of any academic dignity I might once have possessed. “Please, can you… the straps? You could just undo the straps? Or—” I stopped. Gathered myself. Tried once more. “Please. I need… I can’t stay like this. Please just⁠—”

“No.” His voice sounded low and unhurried. Not unkind, but with the quality of a door that is simply closed; not locked against me personally, just closed.