Page 43 of Her Viking Guardian

Henrik went very still for just a moment, his fingers stilling as well, and I made a desperate sound of protest that I couldn’t contain.

“The Chinese, perhaps,” he said.

“I didn’t see the girl… the one from… from before.”

Henrik’s fingers resumed, and the orgasm that had been building since I had first felt his hand between my thighs gathered itself from its foundations with a totality that I recognized as what a dominant man, a Viking, could bring out in my body.

“But the tree was there. At the horizon. Over the sea. I could see it from the… the… the bench.”

The words came apart at the end of the sentence, because my body had stopped permitting me to use language. I felt my master’s cock harden again inside me, still further. I felt the careful gentleness in his rhythm give way to something rougher and more fully itself: a warrior taking his pleasure in a woman who belonged to him, moving with the hard, fast, thorough claim of someone who intended to enjoy every part of what he had taken as his own property. The soreness in my pussy had become something I couldn’t categorize as only pain anymore. It had dimensions that pain alone didn’t account for.

“Herra…” I gasped. “I’m going to⁠—”

“Yes,” he said, and his voice had gone fully wild again, the way it had the night before, nothing constructed left in it. “Yes, lille en. You may come for your Herra. Come on my reðr while I use this sweet pussy of yours.”

The orgasm broke over me in a long, rolling wave that seemed to begin at the roots of me, whatever they were, and move upward through my whole body. I cried out into the furs, my fingers clenching in the warm, animal softness of them, and I felt my master’s arm come around me, pulling me hard against his chest, his rhythm losing its last careful quality entirely as my body clenched and shuddered around him.

He came too, with a low, guttural sound that he issued into my hair, his hips pressing tight against my bottom as the warmth of him filled me again. I felt a sob tear out of me at the sheer, perverse gratitude I felt. I didn’t want to examine what it meant and couldn’t stop examining it: thankfulness that he had finished fucking me… that he had given me the gift of his seed, to breed me if the Norns allowed… that he had taught me to know myself in a way I had always forbidden my own mind to attempt.

We lay still for a moment. His arm remained around me, his palm flat against my sternum, and I could feel his heartbeat returning to something like its ordinary pace against my back.

“Good girl,” he murmured. The words were simple and stripped of ceremony, and they brought warmth to my chest. “The pleasure your cunt gives is remarkable.” A pause, his lips brushing my temple. “Even now, when your poor fisse is so raw. Remarkable.”

I pressed my face into the furs and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wouldn’t reveal too much of what was happening inside me.

His arm tightened briefly, and then he shifted, and I felt the patient quality return to his movements as he drew back from me and sat up. The loss of his warmth was immediate and unwelcome in a way I couldn’t help resenting.

“I must speak with Leo Aetnaeus about your dream, and also confer with the first of the Sons of Odin, my chief,” he said. His voice had regained its measured authority, that of a scholar and a master in equal proportion. “What you’ve told me about it… the men on the longship, speaking of the East… the Worldtree at the horizon.”

I heard him move, the furs shifting, small sounds of a strong man gathering himself for the day ahead.

“And the fact that you saw Yggdrasil from the rowing bench, lille en. Not from a mountain, or from a village… but from the drake—the longship. I think it’s important.”

I rolled carefully onto my back, wincing at the deep interior ache, and looked up at him. My brow furrowed as I tried to discover his meaning. In the torchlight filtering through the barred window, his face had the quality of the carved warriors—settled and entirely without pretense about his Viking nature… his right to rule over my body precisely as he chose.

“What does that mean?” I asked, and this time I braced for the consequences of asking, my body remembering the handprint across my bottom with a vividness that seemed to have become a permanent feature of my nervous system.

But he didn’t reach for me. He looked at me for a moment with the expression I had seen once before. I felt my lips curl into a tiny, helpless smile as I read it as appreciation.

“It means,” he said, “that I think I need to take you to the cavern and break you there.” He did put out his hand, then, but not to position me for a lesson in obedience, or to reinforce the terrifying word break in any straightforward way. He touched my chin, his thumb moving along my jaw, tilting my face up slightly. “I will whip you properly, and then have your sweet bottom, on the bride saddle.”

CHAPTER 22

Ilsa

The word whip arrived in my stomach, alongside break, as a cold drop of fear, mixed with something warmer. The bride saddle seemed to find a place directly below it, in the specific region that was not my stomach at all, as a heat that contradicted the cold completely.

I stared up at him and tried to find something to say that would not constitute either a question or a plea, both of which seemed equally dangerous and equally inevitable. He gazed down at me, his brow slightly furrowed as if he had equations to think through. At last he spoke, slowly.

“Leo Aetnaeus and Bellatrix Hestiaea will certify that you have received your first initiation at my hands and upon my phallus.”

The way he said it—certify—made the academic part of my brain flinch even as the rest of me registered the lewd implications. He meant to present me. To show me to Giovanna and her master, and thus to provide the evidence of what he had accomplished here in this initiation cell.

I understood, with a clarity that came with a fresh wave of heat to my face, that my body represented the evidence.

“Yes, Herra,” I whispered.

He donned his red robe. I watched him from the furs and tried not to make it obvious that I was watching him, though I felt certain I failed completely. He didn’t appear to notice, though, or perhaps he noticed and found it appropriate, as a simple confirmation of his ownership of me.