Page 36 of Her Viking Guardian

The tree’s roots came further down. A branch moved somewhere in my peripheral vision, above and to the left, stirring in a wind I couldn’t feel on my skin.

I was going to tell him.

I wasn’t going to tell him.

His fingers found that angle again. The one I had never known existed… that Giovanna had found in the intake room… that he had found twice already in this cell… the one angle that made my breathing come in keening gasps. I felt the orgasm rise from where it had been suspended for what felt like hours of accumulated, merciless patience.

He squeezed my other nipple, harder, and the tree was simply there—fully there, not at the edges but present in the cell the way the iron posts were present, rooted in the stone with a permanence that made the cell itself seem temporary by comparison. The roots went down past the aquifer, past the volcanic rock, past whatever bedrock underlay Sicily itself. The branches went up through the dome and beyond it into a cold sky I couldn’t see but could feel, vast and indifferent and beckoning all at once.

“I can see it,” I heard myself say. My voice broke on the last word. “Herra Henrik, I can… the tree is here. The roots are…” A sob. “I can see Yggdrasil.”

His hand stilled between my thighs, and I made a desperate, wordless sound of protest, my hips pushing my spanked bottom back against his palm, in search of him.

“Good,” he said softly. The single syllable carried something I hadn’t heard from him before—not the assessor’s satisfaction or the master’s authority, but something rawer and quieter. “Good, lille en. I thought you might.” His thumb moved, a single slow pass that made my whole body shudder. “The strength of it. To see the tree here, without the saddle, without…” He seemed to stop himself. “The strength of your gift is remarkable.”

I pressed my forehead against the stone and breathed.

“I’m going to test that strength now,” he said. His voice had returned to its careful, deliberate register, but something underneath it had changed. “I need you to tell me more about what you see. Describe it to me. Everything.”

His right hand withdrew from between my thighs, and the deprivation was so sudden and so total that I let out a sob that echoed off the curved walls. But his left hand remained at my breast, his thumb still resting against my nipple, and then I felt his right hand move. Not to where I needed it. Higher. Further back.

I went very still.

His fingertip found the tiny ring Giovanna had bared and prepared, slick with my mistress’s anointing. My master touched it with the same exploratory delicacy he had used when he had stood behind me at the iron posts.

I moaned from deep in my chest.

“Oh, no…” I whispered. “No… please…”

CHAPTER 18

Ilsa

“Tell me about the tree,” he said. His finger moved in a slow circle, not pressing inward, simply mapping the exterior of my untried anus with a deliberateness that seemed designed to make the distinction between inside and outside feel very significant. “Tell me what you see. The branches. The roots. What does it feel like to be there?”

“I—” I swallowed. His finger continued its slow, maddening circuit. “The roots go very deep. Past the stone. Past everything. I can feel them… the… the way you can… you know… feel something… something… um… vibrating… oh, God… through a… a… a floor.” I gasped as his thumb and forefinger pressed my nipple with greater firmness. “The branches are… they’re… it’s… it’s cold, there. Not… you know… painful? Like on a mountain, maybe… when you’re wearing warm clothes… high… um… high altitude. Like standing on a mountain before the sun has reached the upper slopes.” I sobbed. “Herra Henrik, please…”

“Keep going,” he said. The finger at my anus pressed inward, very slightly, with a steadiness that communicated both absolute intention and absolute patience. He didn’t breach me, but he made it very clear that he would, when he chose. “What else do you see?”

“I don’t…” I couldn’t think. I tried to form ideas, find concepts. The Worldtree was there, his finger was there, his other fingers were on my nipple, and the orgasm that had never fully receded was building again from its endless suspension. “Branches… so many branches. I can’t see where they end. They go beyond… I… I can’t see the top.”

“Can you see the other girl?” His voice carried a quality of focused attention that cut through the haze of sensation. “The Chinese girl. Can you find her?”

I looked. I genuinely looked, trying to do it the way I had learned to look at an archaeological site when something felt present but hadn’t revealed itself yet, not staring directly but letting the peripheral vision do its work, letting the pattern assemble, trying to allow my ‘intuition’ to take over.

The branches moved. The cold light between them shifted. I traveled along a bough with whatever part of me traveled on the tree, going lower and then higher, following the logic of the growth.

She wasn’t there.

I looked harder, my forehead creasing against the stone. I thought of her eyes looking up at me from her version of the bride chamber… the special place with the dais on which her master had paddled and taken her. I thought of the specific quality of her gaze—recognition, surprise, and something that had looked like understanding. I thought of the Chinese man, her master, and of the way his rigid penis had looked as it had thrust in and out of her little bottom.

“I can’t find her,” I gasped, feeling like I’d failed. “She was there before. He had paddled her… the man, I mean. He paddled her bottom. Very hard, with a long wooden paddle… and then he…” Heat surged into my face even with my cheek resting against the cold stone. “He… he took her… there. In her bottom hole. I watched it, and then she looked up at me and I thought she could see me, and then the vision ended.”

Henrik’s finger pressed inward, just a tiny bit further, and my whole body contracted around the intrusion with a shudder that was equal parts reflex and helpless arousal. I told myself that Giovanna’s careful preparation had planted that response, with the knowledge of what this meant, what it would mean, and what it was building toward. I knew with a hot surge to my cheeks, though, that she had only made visible what nature itself had planted somewhere deep down in me.

“She was on her tree as you were on yours, perhaps,” Henrik said, his voice very low, “with her master’s tól in her tight little røvhul. And I think the trees were the same tree.”

His finger moved again in a slow, shallow rhythm that made coherent thought nearly impossible.