Page 34 of Her Viking Guardian

“Oh, God…” I whispered.

“Please what?” my master murmured.

The words that came next horrified me even as I heard myself say them, even as I understood with absolute, mortifying clarity that I meant every one.

“Please… take me. Please. I want you to… I need you to…”

His fingers returned. My hips bucked against his hand and I let out a desperate sob.

“Please what?” Herra Henrik repeated.

“Oh, God… please… please fuck me, Herra,” I moaned.

The silence that followed had the quality of the moment before lightning, when the air changes, the hair rises, and the world seems to hold its breath.

In that silence, with my face against the stone floor of a cell beneath a Sicilian city and my bottom raised in offering, I understood to my distress that this man had in fact already begun to make me his. Something about his patience… something about the way he clearly had no intention of violating me except to the extent that apparently, crazily I craved violation…

I was falling for him.

The thought arrived with the clarity and the terrible inconvenience of a finding that overturns an entire theoretical framework: all at once, the way the right translation of a difficult inscription sometimes arrives—suddenly obvious, suddenly the only reading that makes sense of every element, and completely, irreversibly true.

I was falling for Henrik Magnusson, my master, my appointed Herra. The man whose hand worked my pussy relentlessly, preparing me still further for my true initiation as his submissive sexual servant… his bed thrall… his kneppetøj… his fuck toy.

Oh, I thought. Oh, no.

CHAPTER 17

Henrik

I had the urge to deflower Ilsa that instant. If my own pleasure had been the only thing at stake, I certainly would simply have bestrode her and plunged my rigid cock into the tight, pink, inviting cunt that glistened between the girl’s spread thighs. But Ilsa’s gift demanded better of me than my own pleasure. I had to understand what she had seen.

Even more important, I had to ensure that she would see it again, and more clearly. This extraordinary young woman had begun to develop her vǫlva’s powers: I had no doubt of that, given the relationship I had already observed between her submissive sexuality and her obvious intelligence. The chance existed, indeed, that she possessed talent beyond that of any vǫlva the Sons of Odin had trained in perhaps centuries—perhaps ever.

I kept the fingers of my right hand moving between her thighs, working her gently, milking the pleasure from her sweet fisse as I crouched a little lower at her side. I had my left hand on her back, exerting just enough pressure to make Ilsa feel that my bodily restraint represented her bondage just as decisively as the cuffs and the iron posts. Both my hands could feel the marvelous, arousing quivers of involuntary submissive need that traveled through her nervous system, over and over, readying her for her master’s use… making her need my cock a little more urgently each time.

I waited until she let out a small, desperate sound, pressing back helplessly against my hand, trying to draw my fingers deeper into the sweet, hot sheath of her vagina.

“Tell me about the vision,” I said. I kept my voice level, though my cock ached with urgency. “What did you see on the bride saddle?”

“But… I… I told… I told Giovanna…” She gasped as my thumb moved. “I told her… the… the… bellatrix. I told her… please, Herra…”

“I know you did,” I replied, making my voice a growl and feeling her body arch at the sound of my authority. “Now you will tell your Herra, if you want his tól inside this pretty little cunt of yours.”

“Oh… oh, God… I… please, Herra…”

I stilled my hand. Ilsa gave a sob of frustration.

“The tree…” she gasped. “Roots and branches. Coolness… soothing… almost cold.”

“Yes.” I eased the pressure of my touch just enough to give her mind room to work alongside her body. The elders had always said that a vǫlva’s gift lived in that tension—the space between thought and sensation where a submissive bed thrall’s creative imagination can take hold. “And something else. You told her there was another girl.”

Her breathing caught. On her face, in profile to me as she gazed down at the smooth stone between her hands, I saw an adorable frown of deep concentration come over her face.

“She was on the tree too… or… I don’t know, Herra. It was confusing… maybe she was on a different tree that was also the same tree? But… she was… she was like me, I thought. A girl, paddled so… so hard by the man, and… he… he used her… her poor bottom… and she went to her tree the way I went to mine and they were the same, and I saw her in the branches below, and she looked up at me. I thought… she looked Chinese to me?”

I considered that, feeling a frown of my own emerge onto my forehead. Having a vǫlva vision without a Son of Odin present was remarkable enough. But the other girl, on the other tree… a Chinese tree…

I had messaged Sven to ask if any of the records held an account of a vǫlva seeing another vǫlva on the tree. He had replied that none of the materials we’d digitized over the past decade seemed to contain anything of the sort. Those records, though, only included a little more than half the annals stored in the archive beneath Rouen.