Page 51 of Her Viking Guardian

When I opened the door, a lovely dark-haired young woman waited in the corridor, naked but for leathers almost identical to the ones in which Giovanna had bound Ilsa. I thought I could tell that her collar was slightly narrower than Ilsa’s, though, and I wondered what it meant, even as I took in the beauty of the girl’s shapely breasts and the moving bareness of her pussy’s cleft with my customary Nordic frankness.

“Ave, domine,” she murmured in an Italian-accented voice, her eyes downcast to my feet. “I am Nupta Julia. May I guide you to the refectory?”

* * *

Ilsa

After she had released me from the bench in the control room, Giovanna helped me to my feet. My knees nearly buckled. The events of the last hour had left my limbs feeling boneless, and I experienced the constriction of the cuffs, collar, and belt acutely.

The soreness between my thighs announced itself the moment I bore my own weight again. Giovanna’s hand came to my elbow, firm and economical rather than kind, and with the other she clipped my leash back onto the ring in the front of my collar.

“Stand properly,” she said with quiet severity. “It does not befit a columba to slouch after serving her masters with her body so well.”

The compliment—if it even was a compliment—sent a humiliating warmth through my chest. I straightened. My wrists still wore the cuffs. My collar still pressed at my throat. I could feel Leo Aetnaeus’s seed still cooling on my skin in places I had apparently not rubbed quite dry enough. The awareness of the now-dark monitor, of Sven somewhere far away, of Herra Henrik having watched all of it, clung to me like a layer of imaginary clothing that only made me more conscious of my nudity.

Giovanna tugged slightly on the leash.

“Come,” she said.

I followed her.

The corridor outside the control room felt cooler than my skin. My bare feet padded almost silently on the stone. My mistress walked ahead of me in her heels and immaculate jacket, and I followed because the leash required it and because some more troubling, more inward thing required it too. We passed through the old stone passages of the mithraeum with their dim, smokeless torches and their Roman severity, and I tried not to think about where we were going.

The scents reached me, though, and I couldn’t keep my mind off our destination: food. Warm bread, roasted meat, coffee, citrus, olive oil. Human voices, too, layered over the smell in a low communal murmur that made my stomach contract with sudden, almost painful hunger.

The refectory lay beyond a pair of heavy doors standing open beneath an arch of dark stone. It was much larger than I had expected, with long tables and benches arranged in disciplined order beneath a vaulted ceiling. Lamps cast a warm, flattering light that made the old stone look golden.

Men in suits sat at some of the tables with women at their feet or beside them. At other tables sat only women. Some of the girls wore nothing but their leathers, their collars catching the light.

Others wore exquisite dresses—silk, satin, clinging things in jewel tones and pale neutrals—over which their collars somehow looked even more shocking. A few had their hair beautifully arranged. A few looked like they had wept very recently. I swallowed hard as I noticed that one nearly nude girl, who was just putting a cup of coffee in front of a man in a suit, bore the marks of the mastix across her backside, just as I did.

The room quieted, not entirely, but enough for me to feel the shift. Eyes moved to me. So many eyes.

Giovanna stopped just short of the threshold. The leash tightened.

“Down,” she said.

I looked at the floor, then at her shoes, then up at her face. “Here?”

Her expression altered so slightly that another person might not have noticed. I had spent enough time under her hand already to understand that it meant I had asked a foolish question.

“Yes,” she said. “On all fours. You are not even a full columba, and so you are not ready to enter among full initiates the way a true person does.”

Heat flooded my face. Behind us the corridor felt empty and exposed. Before us the refectory seemed to glow with the promise of observation. For one absurd second I thought of refusing. The thought had no weight: it was simply a flare of old selfhood, academic and upright and indignant.

Then I knelt. The stone bit coolly into my knees, and I lowered my hands to the floor as well. My braid slipped over my shoulder. The leash hung down from Giovanna’s fist to my throat in a graceful curve that made the reality of the thing look decorative rather than absolute. I hated that. I hated more that some part of me thrilled to it.

“Good,” she said.

She led me, that way, into the hall.

The sounds changed at once. Conversations resumed, but altered, and I could tell they had shaped themselves around me. I could hear the murmurs, mostly in Italian but a few in English, as Giovanna guided me along the side of the room toward a lower section, almost like an annex, where several younger-looking women knelt or sat on cushions at floor level beside shallow trays and bowls.

“The new one Bellatrix Hestiaea…”

“So blonde.”

“Very pretty.”