Page 18 of Her Viking Guardian

“None of this is Roman,” I heard myself say, and only realized as the words left my mouth that I had been thinking this since the moment Giovanna had sat down across from me at the café. “The agency’s name is Roman. Ostia. The nymphobus title is Roman. But the cavern isn’t. The cavern is Norse. The inscription was Norse. The ship is Norse.” I was rambling, I knew, in the way I rambled when I was genuinely confused about something and the confusion was more urgent than the social discomfort of displaying it. “Why does a Roman organization have a Norse sanctuary? How does⁠—”

“Questions are useless,” Giovanna said, but she said it differently this time: not as a command but as something closer to an observation, and I thought—though I couldn’t see her face from where I lay—that there might have been a fraction of something else in her voice. Consideration, perhaps. Or assessment.

Her fingers returned. They stayed this time, working with a slow, thorough knowledge of my body that seemed unfair given that she had known me for less than three hours. I felt the orgasm beginning to build from a very long way down, the same gathering pressure I had felt on the bride saddle, and I bit the inside of my cheek and tried to think about the Younger Futhark and the inconsistency that had been bothering me since the café and that I still could not resolve, because the Romans and the Norse had not overlapped in any way that would explain⁠—

Giovanna’s fingers withdrew.

“No,” I heard myself say, raw and unguarded, and then I pressed my lips together and hated myself.

“Nymphobus,” Giovanna said. A short pause. “The girl trainer, please.”

CHAPTER 9

Ilsa

I heard Nymphobus Oceanus move across the room. I heard the panel in the wall open with a soft mechanical sound, undoubtedly the same panel from which Giovanna had retrieved the mastix and the leathers. I heard him take something out. I couldn’t see what it was from my position between my terrifying mistress’s legs.

Giovanna rose from above me and took a step backwards. The air was cold on my wet face and I blinked at the ceiling, trying to regulate my breathing, trying to reassemble a composed self from the wreckage of the last hour.

The nymphobus came into my field of vision and handed the object to Giovanna.

Blood rushed to my cheeks, driving away the momentary cool. It was a huge, hard, black penis. It looked enormous. Matte black and shaped with an anatomical frankness that left no room for ambiguity either about its function or about its inspiration. The proportions of it made my throat close. I thought, with the hysterical precision of a mind grasping for scholarly footing, of the Viking warriors in the carvings. I wondered, crazily, how much observational work the artists of the cavern—or whoever had crafted this terrifying artificial phallus—had done.

“She’s withholding,” Giovanna said, not to me. She moved back into my peripheral vision, and I noticed that she had straightened her linen skirt. “She found the passage, of course: we knew that. She found the chambers, which we also knew. She’s telling me only what she assumes I already know.”

I said nothing. My eyes had moved back to the ceiling as my heart raced and my whole body surged with heat.

“I think,” Giovanna continued, with the tone of someone stating a mild professional hypothesis, “that something happened to her in there.”

The silence that followed felt very deliberate. I kept my face still.

Giovanna did something with the dildo. I heard rather than saw the motion, because an instant later a soft hum arose, low and steady, and I realized with a tiny whine that the thing was also a vibrator. The noise changed the quality of the air in the room in a way that I couldn’t have articulated… any more than I could have ignored it and its mortifying implications.

She moved further around the coffee table, to its foot, and then her hand and the horrid toy had gone between my legs. The hum was no longer in the air but right up against my most sensitive place, and I made a sound that I had been trying not to make since the moment I had begun to understand what would happen here at the baffling, terrifying Ostia Agency.

The sensation felt nothing like Giovanna’s fingers. Her fingers had been precise and knowing and occasionally maddening in their lightness. This sensation was relentless. It didn’t pause to ask questions. It didn’t withdraw to punish omissions. It simply continued, pressing against my clit with a stimulation that made my hips rock against the tension of the straps clipped to my belt, in a humiliating rhythm I couldn’t control.

“Tell me what happened in the chambers,” Giovanna said.

“I looked at them,” I managed. “I told you. The furniture. The preservation⁠—”

“Did you touch anything?”

My jaw tightened. “I examined the construction. Structurally. The joinery was⁠—”

“Did you sit on the… furniture?”

The vibrator moved. It shifted its angle, found a different point of pressure that made the first one feel like a rehearsal. My vision went briefly white at the edges. A low moan emerged from my chest.

“I sat on the—” I stopped. I had been about to say rowing bench. I recalculated. “I sat down. In the main cavern. To rest. I’d been on my feet for⁠—”

“On the ship?”

The word landed with a precision that told me she knew. She knew I had been on the ship. Had the sensors told them that, or could she just guess that about me? The thought that Giovanna, my new mistress, could intuit the naughty things I had done made my pussy clench around the horrid, teasing knob at the tip of the vibrator.

“Yes…” I gasped. “Only… only b-briefly…”

The artificial penis moved again. Inside my vagina, back and forth a little. Then lower. It touched the dark, forbidden place my own trembling fingers had found in the cavern, the place I had been trying not to think about since the moment Giovanna had first mentioned the bridal chambers.