Page 12 of Her Viking Guardian

“There is only one question you may ask now. In a moment I will tell you what it is.”

At first I couldn’t see what she had in her hands as she moved back toward me and the enormous, silent man who held me down over the chair. Then Giovanna moved in front of me, and held the thing out.

To my horror, I recognized it. It was a mastix.

The Roman disciplinary implement… the thing that had been used to correct slaves and servants and anyone else who required correction in the frequently brutal ancient world. Made of braided leather, about thirty centimeters long. Giovanna held it with an ease that spoke, dismayingly, of long practice.

I recognized it academically, as she displayed it to me. My mind refused to recognize it in any other way.

“I’ll hold her down, nymphobus,” Giovanna said, stepping around me, out of my view, and at the same time putting her left hand atop my back, between my shoulder blades.

Nymphobus. It rang a distant bell, somewhere in the wilderness of my jumbled memories of nearly forgotten college courses. Ritual, I thought: definitely some kind of ritual title.

The nymphobus let go of my arms and I could sense him stepping back toward the door. Not leaving, I realized with dismay; staying there to make sure Giovanna could handle me as she did whatever she intended to do.

Instinctively I moved my now free hands to my backside, covering my bottom cheeks, defending them.

“Elbows on the chair seat,” Giovanna commanded, her soft voice taking on the slightest edge of authority—a subtle change in tone that nevertheless made my heart jump.

I turned my head and craned my neck until I could just make out her beautiful, dispassionate face.

“No,” she said. “You will face forward when you are disciplined.”

Oh, no. The word… that word.

“But,” I said, tears pricking the corners of my eyes. “But… I didn’t…”

“I can have my nymphobus place you as I want, Ilsa, but if I have to do that you will regret it.”

She raised her right arm. She had started to bring it down before I understood what she was doing.

The stroke landed across the back of my thighs, under my defensive, out-turned palms. Fire blossomed there. I cried out and jerked forward against the back of the chair.

“Please,” I gasped. “Please, I need to understand what’s happening. Who sent you? Is this about the cavern? Is this about⁠—”

“Questions are useless,” Giovanna said, her voice still soft despite the growing note of command. “I’ve told you that already.”

Another stroke. I made a sound I had never made before in my life, something between a sob and a gasp, and my knees bent involuntarily.

“Please,” I said again. “Please just tell me⁠—”

Giovanna sighed. “Elbows on the seat, Ilsa. Face forward. I won’t tell you again.”

Her voice was still patient though it sounded less patient each time she repeated a command. I lay there bent over the chair with my hands still uselessly covering my bare bottom, my thighs burning from the two strokes she had already delivered, and I knew—I knew with absolute clarity—that I should obey. That obedience represented the path that led to less pain. My body understood this. My rational mind understood this.

I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t make my hands move from where they were. I couldn’t make my elbows find the seat cushion, my face turn forward, and my body arrange itself into the posture of a girl accepting this degrading kind of discipline. Something in me—the same stubborn, reckless thing that had driven me through the opening in the cliff and onto the bride saddle—simply would not yield. Not because I felt brave in any way, but because I was terrified, and terror had locked my joints as surely as if they’d been set in iron.

“I can’t,” I whispered. “I can’t, I’m… I’m… sorry, I⁠—”

“Nymphobus,” Giovanna said. Just that strange title. Nothing else.

I sensed the huge man moving again, back from the door toward me. I cried out as his hands found my wrists and drew them forward, not cruelly but definitely roughly, with a totality of force that made my resistance feel like a child pushing against a stone wall.

He placed my elbows on the leather seat cushion, one and then the other, with a precision that seemed almost architectural. Then one broad palm settled on the back of my neck, pressing my face gently but irrevocably forward, and his other hand moved to the small of my back, pinning me in the correct posture with the same matter-of-fact competence with which he had held my arms earlier.

I was positioned. The nymphobus—whatever kind of ceremonial attendant that was supposed to be—had positioned me the way you position an object that needs to be in a specific place for a specific purpose, and the nymphobus held me there with an ease that told me he could keep me there for as long as the woman who obviously commanded his own obedience decided he should.