Page 28 of Her Viking Guardian

He didn’t speak for a long while. I heard the door close behind him. I heard him stop, and I understood somehow from the quality of the silence that he was looking at me.

The back of my neck felt very warm.

“There.” His voice was deep and low and carried an accent I couldn’t place immediately, especially from a monosyllable. I could tell my new master wasn’t Italian, but my mistress had told me that the Pretorian Guard had global reach, so I supposed he might have come from anywhere. “There you are, columba.”

The way he said columba… it made me wonder, suddenly, if this man wasn’t as conversant with the apparently ancient ways of the Order of Ostia and the Pretorian Guard as Giovanna and her nymphobus were. And that made me wonder in turn whether the accent I heard in his words might have something Northern about it.

His hand touched my shoulder blade. It felt deliberate, as though he meant to test the temperature of an object he intended to handle.

“Good,” he said softly. “Very good.”

CHAPTER 14

Henrik

My cock had gotten as hard, I thought, as it had ever been. I took half a step back and shrugged the crimson robe from my shoulders.

On loan to me from Bruno, the robe—he had told me—of a leo, it brought a certain very special, very welcome kind of Roman ceremony to the proceedings. Perhaps it didn’t differ much from the traditional long shirts worn by the Sons of Odin when breaking in their bed thralls, but I couldn’t help but appreciate the magisterial hue of its heavy fabric, and the way it slid gracefully to the floor.

Standing naked in this initiation cell, with this lovely girl, produced in me a surge of animal dominance that I hadn’t anticipated. I felt my cock twitch in the sheer aggression of my urgent lust for the young woman who had found our hidden cavern and, it seemed, felt irresistibly drawn to the rowing bench and then the bride saddle.

Who, it seemed, had had a vǫlva’s prophetic vision without a Son of Odin present to discipline and to enjoy and to guide her to the tree. I had messaged Sven the moment I heard Ilsa claim to have had a vision on the bride saddle. He had confirmed that centuries ago the researchers of the brotherhood had debated whether a girl could have a true vision without a warrior present—as opposed to merely sighting the tree: one of them had claimed that a bed thrall of his had done so. The idea, however, Sven had told me, had never received much attention.

I studied Ilsa Matthews’ lovely back, pert bottom cheeks, and slim thighs, so piquantly marked by the pink and red tracery left by the mastix. The cuffs, collar, and belt set off the whole of her nubile beauty in a way I found strongly, exotically arousing. The Sons of Odin bound girls with leather, certainly, when we wished to keep them from interfering with our pleasure—but not in this elegant, enduring way, whereby it seemed very clear a girl like Ilsa must find herself reminded from moment to moment of her body’s primary purpose as a vehicle of her master’s pleasure.

Such a brilliant, creative young woman, too, this one. If any new bed thrall could muster the unconscious mental acuity that produced the vǫlur’s prophecies, it would be a girl like Ilsa Matthews. She might even have the capacity truly to understand what had befallen her.

It had undoubtedly felt supernatural to Ilsa, at least at first. As an academic archaeologist, though, she might also be able to grasp how a vǫlva’s vision in truth represented only a quasi-magical psychological process.

The Sons of Odin had determined centuries ago that such prophetic scenes came from the submissive mind’s quasi-magical capacity to notice the subtlest details of the phenomena of the world around her. Ilsa, having found a mosaic that depicted Yggdrasil, must have processed her memories into what she had seen in her mind’s eye.

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.