Page 21 of Her Viking Guardian

“My name,” she said, “is Bellatrix Hestiaea. That is the title and the rank by which you will address me, or you may simply call me Mistress, as you have already learned.” A pause. “You are to be fully initiated as a columba of the Order of Ostia. The collar and the leathers you wear are the beginning of that. What follows will complete it.”

I opened my mouth. Several questions presented themselves simultaneously, jostling for priority. What is the Order of Ostia? Why me? What does a columba actually do, beyond obeying mortifying orders and suffering humiliating ‘discipline’ and ‘training’? What the hell is going on?

“The vision,” I said instead. “I need to understand what the vision was. Whether it’s connected to the mosaic, to the inscription, to the⁠—”

“There will be time,” Giovanna said, which I recognized as a version of questions are useless but with a different quality; not a door closed but a door deferred.

“But the other woman,” I said. “In the vision. There was… in the tree… she… she was on the tree as well. She saw me. That means⁠—”

“Ilsa.” Giovanna’s voice did not rise. Her eyes narrowed, a fraction of a degree, and my stomach lurched so violently that the words simply stopped.

The silence stretched. The welts on my bottom seemed to pulse more insistently.

“How may I serve you, Mistress?” I whispered.

The narrowing of my mistress’s eyes eased into something else—the faintest suggestion of satisfaction, the way a teacher’s expression changes when a student finally produces the correct answer after a long and painful session of getting it wrong.

Then she turned away from me. From the same recessed panel that had held the mastix and the leathers she produced another length of black leather. A leash. The clip at its end caught the light as she returned to me, and she attached it to the ring at the front of my collar with a small, decisive sound that seemed to me the loudest thing that had happened in this room, including all my cries and sobs.

“Stand up,” she said.

I stood. The floor felt cool under my bare feet.

“Walk with me,” Giovanna—Bellatrix Hestiaea—said, and she moved toward the door and the leash drew taut and I followed her, because the alternative was being dragged, and I had already exhausted my reserves of futile resistance for one afternoon.

The nymphobus did not follow us into the corridor. I registered his absence with a complicated mixture of relief and a mortifying heat that I did my best to push away with a crease of my brow.

The corridor beyond the intake room looked like the rest of what I had seen of the agency’s ground floor: marble, pale walls, good art. But Giovanna led me in the other direction from the entrance, through a door that required an actual, old-fashioned key she produced from her jacket pocket, and then we seemed to have arrived somewhere else entirely.

A stairway descended in a tight spiral. The walls were stone—only partially the dressed stone of a renovated building… mostly something older, rougher; limestone that men’s hands had dug into long before any twentieth-century modeling agency had set up its elegant facade above it.

The air changed immediately: cooler, denser, carrying something of the same complex, ancient scent I recognized from the cavern at Capo Zafferano. Salt and cold stone and something underneath it that my mind simply labeled ancient.

Naked and leashed, I descended a winding stair cut into ancient rock. I followed a beautiful woman who had whipped me, interrogated me, and ridden my face for her pleasure. I told myself over and over that I had no choice. I told myself that I feared my ‘mistress’—this bellatrix.

Bellatrix: warrior woman. The idea made me swallow very hard.

Despite myself, though, as I regarded her elegantly dressed back, with its terrible contrast to the nudity she had enforced on me, I realized that Giovanna had somehow managed to make me feel her approval was worth having. I thought, briefly, about what my dissertation committee would make of this. Then I stopped thinking about my dissertation committee, because the stairway ended.

The chamber was not large, but it felt large in the way that carefully proportioned spaces sometimes do, the way I had always thought certain Romanesque chapels felt larger inside than their external dimensions suggested. The walls looked like volcanic stone, dark and smooth.

The floor was mosaic tile in a pattern that my eye wanted to follow and my academic brain wanted very badly to document. The image, which I could see was in a style very different from the one that had led me to the cavern, featured motifs of flame alongside armed, Mediterranean-complexioned men with naked women at their feet.

I swallowed as despite myself I contemplated the analogy between this mosaic, here, and the carvings in the cavern. To my dismay, I had the sudden, naughty, mortifying wish that I could see these Romans in armor without their tunics on, so I could compare the size of their manhoods to those of the Norse warriors from the carvings.

The centerpiece of this chamber, though, was a bath—rectangular, sunk into the floor, its water the color of pale jade and smelling of herbs I could almost identify: rosemary, certainly, and something astringent that reminded me of the maquis scrub on the hillside above the cavern. Steam rose from it in thin threads.

“The chamber of preparation,” Giovanna said.

I blinked at her as she unclipped the leash from my collar and hung it on a hook next to the doorway. Then, as my eyes went wide, she began to undress, her eyes fixed on mine as if to ensure that I didn’t miss a moment of my mistress’s self-revelation. Her linen jacket, and then her lovely blue silk blouse. Her skirt.

I bit my lip when I saw her standing only in her gorgeous, lacy black bra—because of course she had taken off her panties to use my face, which now burned at the memory as well as the sight of Bellatrix Hestiaea revealed. She reached back and unfastened the clasp of the bra, and shrugged it off.

As naked as I was… more naked, because I wore the terribly confusing leathers… but also less, really, because my mistress seemed to have a presence that clothed her even when her gorgeous, full-breasted, and wide-hipped body lay fully revealed.

With a little smile Giovanna broke the eye contact so that she could fold her clothes and place them on a shelf carved into the stone wall. Next to that shelf I saw, set into the rock, was another hook, from which my terrifying mistress took a robe of a deep red color: something between a ceremonial garment and a dressing gown, with a sash she fastened firmly so that she looked somehow like a priestess and a model at once.

She moved to the edge of the bath and stood looking down at it. On her face I saw the proprietary ease of someone surveying a piece of furniture she used regularly and trusted completely. The steam rose between us. The herbs in the water smelled stronger now that I was closer.