Page 26 of Her Viking Guardian

She worked my pussy with the same expert knowledge she had demonstrated on the table in the intake room. This position, though… down instead of up, changed the sensation. Face down, bottom up: I couldn’t see her, couldn’t anticipate the angle or the pressure, couldn’t prepare myself for anything. I could only receive it. Her fingers moved with a deliberateness that told me she knew exactly how close I had already gotten, and intended to bring me precisely to the boundary of that place and hold me there.

I cried. Not from pain, though the welts still burned. I cried from the need, from the specific degradation of needing something so badly while being able to do absolutely nothing to obtain it, while the woman who controlled whether I obtained it worked at her own pace, unhurried and proprietary, as if my body were a project she was managing to a schedule I had no access to.

“Please,” I sobbed. The leather was wet under my cheek. The old tears and the new ones. “Please, Mistress. Please, I need⁠—”

“I know what you need,” Giovanna said.

Her fingers slowed. Stilled. Withdrew.

I made a wordless, desperate sound. It had no relationship to any version of myself I had constructed over twenty-four years of determined intellectual ambition.

“Not yet,” she said. “Not until you’re ready, columba.”

I breathed. I pressed my face into the wet leather and I breathed, I thought about the women who had breathed here before me, and I understood, in a way that distressed me terribly, that this was exactly what she meant. Readiness, my mistress wished me to understand, was not a fixed point I could reach by wanting it badly enough. She… or, I realized with a jolt centered in my desperate pussy, my master… would determine when I had arrived there, and I would have no vote in the matter.

The sound of the wax pot, heating its contents, returned.

“The crack of your bottom now,” Giovanna said. “This is important. Perhaps the most symbolically important preparation I will perform for you today.”

I felt her hands on my whipped bottom cheeks, parting them even further, with a matter-of-fact firmness that made me whimper and tighten instinctively.

“Don’t,” she said. A single word. I unclenched.

The wax went on warm and precise, applied with the spatula. I felt it moving in slow strokes. I pressed my forehead into the leather and tried to find something to think about that was not what was happening to me.

“The act of anal congress,” Giovanna said, as the brush moved with the same unhurried expertise that characterized everything she did, “is not merely a physical act for the Guard. It is a ritual act. A civilizing act, in the most literal sense.”

CHAPTER 13

Ilsa

Giovanna applied more wax. I felt the little spatula trace a path so close to the tiny ring of my anus that my breath came shorter.

“The Roman legions brought order to the world,” she told me, her voice instructional. “Roads, aqueducts, law. They imposed structure on chaos. They took what was wild and gave it form.” The cloth strip went down. I gripped the alcove’s sides with both hands and tried to prepare. “When a master takes a columba’s bottom, opening her there on his thrusting manhood, he performs the same act. He imposes civilization on the most private wilderness of her body. He makes her his, in the way that Rome made the provinces hers.”

She pulled the strip away.

I cried out, and the cry bounced off the volcanic stone and came back to me. Somewhere underneath the sharp bloom of pain I felt the unmistakable, mortifying throb of arousal that I had no more capacity to deny than I had capacity to free my wrists from their rings.

“Hold still,” she said, the sharpness returning to her tone.

I held still. I breathed. The pain faded as it had before, into a heat that spread inward and downward. I lay there with my face in the old tears of the women who had come before me and I thought, they felt this too. All of them. They lay here and they were afraid and ashamed.

Their bodies must have betrayed them exactly as mine was betraying me, and eventually their masters came for them and civilized them in the way Giovanna is describing. They became whatever a columba becomes, and I am going to become it too, and there is nothing in me that can stop that from happening now.

I wasn’t sure when I had known that. Perhaps since the café. Perhaps since the cavern.

Perhaps since the bride saddle, when the voice had said be still, and I had felt my body trying to obey it.

Giovanna worked, taking the hair from the most private part of my body. She was thorough. I wept quietly and held still and let her bare me in that final, most intimate place. When she was finished, she smoothed something cool over the skin there, as she had over my pussy, and I shivered at the contrast of temperature.

Then I heard her set down the spatula and pick something else up.

The oil with which my mistress proceeded to anoint me had a scent I couldn’t fully identify at first: olive oil at the base, of course, but infused with something warm and resinous and a floral undertone that the air of the chamber complicated into something even richer. She spread it across my shoulders first, working down my spine with long strokes that had the quality of a ritual preparation rather than a massage, though the distinction blurred quickly as the warmth of the oil and of her hands moved through my muscles and found the tension that had been living in me since the café and began, methodically, to address it.

I made a sound that had nothing in it of distress. I clenched my jaw to keep it in but it escaped anyway, low and involuntary, absorbed by the leather cushion in the stone alcove.

She oiled my sides, my waist, the curve of my hips, as if she were caring for a recently domesticated animal. She worked down the backs of my thighs. Over the welts there her hands were careful and deliberate, the oil cooling the lingering sting in a way that made the sting feel, paradoxically, more present rather than less. I became much too aware of every place the horrid mastix had found me.