Page 29 of Her Viking Guardian

“You have been kept waiting, haven’t you? Made to want and not have. Your mistress is very skilled.”

I bit my lip and tried to think about the Younger Futhark. I tried to think about the mineral composition of volcanic stone. I tried to think about literally anything else but what his hand had begun to do.

I failed.

“Please,” I whispered. I hadn’t meant to say it.

“Please,” he repeated, tasting the word with all-too-obvious satisfaction. His fingers stopped moving, not withdrawing but simply pausing, which felt somehow worse. “You will have everything you need, columba. In good time.”

He withdrew his fingers. Both hands came to my bottom then, and I felt him part my cheeks with a slow, deliberate care that made heat surge into my face so violently I thought I might faint. The air found the place Giovanna had prepared there, the tiny bud she had anointed and told me so much about. I pressed my lips together into a tight line, breathing desperately through my nose.

His fingertip touched the little ring. Just once, just lightly, a single exploratory contact that seemed assessing, evaluative in its intention.

“Beautiful,” he said again, quietly. “Ready to receive a man. Your mistress has prepared you perfectly, lille en.” Little one. Danish. Reðr… cock… Old Norse. My mind raced, but I couldn’t find any intellectual purchase over the ideas roiling in my head. “This sweet place, so soft and clean and ready.” His thumb traced a slow circle that made my whole body shudder. “Bellatrix Hestiaea knows her work.”

He stepped back. I heard him draw a slow breath, as if he had to force himself to take his time with me. The thought brought a fresh wave of heat to my face, and to my dismay down there as well.

“And these.” His hands moved to the backs of my thighs, and his fingertips traced the welts with a careful attention that was almost reverent. I heard genuine appreciation in his voice, but something else as well—a connoisseur’s assessment. “The mastix,” he said. “Roman. Clean lines. Very pretty.” A pause. “The Viking punishment strap leaves a different sort of mark.”

My stomach flipped.

From the things Giovanna had said, I had felt certain that this ‘master’ must be an initiate of the Pretorian Guard she had told me about. A man descended, culturally at any rate, from the Roman legions with their Mithras cult and their drive to impose their idea of civilization on the world.

When this man had begun to speak, I had told myself that the Northern accent and the Nordic words that slipped through represented simply an accident of origin—the Guard was global, Giovanna had told me.

But the way he had noted the Roman origin of the mastix… He had said it as if making a comparison. He had said it the way a person says it who has a different tradition entirely, who stands outside the system looking in with the eye of a peer rather than a member.

And the way he had said the other thing… the Viking punishment strap. Those words had borne a tone that told of his familiarity with the thing he referred to… more, a preference for it, as a part of his own culture.

My throat tightened. The cavern. The ship. The carvings in the limestone, the broad-shouldered warriors with their leather straps, their kneeling women, their bride saddles, and their rowing benches with iron rings. The inscription in Younger Futhark in a Roman mosaic: an inscription that had never made sense to me as a product of a single tradition, that had always seemed like a meeting point, a seam between two different worlds.

It suddenly seemed clear to me that this master did not come from the Pretorian Guard, despite everything Giovanna had made me expect.

“The cavern,” I said. The words came out before I could stop them, and I heard my own voice with the same horror I always felt when my mouth produced something my brain hadn’t properly authorized. “At Capo Zafferano. The ship. You… who are you?”

His left arm came around my waist.

I had perhaps a half second of understanding what was about to happen before it happened. He positioned my bottom with that arm, a single efficient adjustment that tilted my hips, drew my cheeks slightly apart, and presented the fullness of my bottom at exactly the angle he apparently required. Then his right hand came down.

The crack of the first spank echoed off the curved stone walls of the cell like a thunderclap. The pain was intense and immediate. It felt very different from the mastix: broader and more total, a blaze of heat across my whole bottom that seemed to radiate inward.

I cried out.

The second spank landed before the sound had finished leaving my throat.

The third followed so quickly that my cry for the second became the cry for the third, merged into one ragged, broken sound that I did not recognize as mine until it had already escaped.

I hung from the iron posts and sobbed. The pain spread through my bottom in waves that matched my heartbeat, humiliating and to my abject dismay not entirely unlike the warmth from the bride saddle, from the pendant, from the deep roots of the tree.

“How may I please you, Master?” The words came out broken and wet with tears. I meant every one of them in a way that would have horrified me this morning at the café. They came from the same place the warmth came from. From somewhere far below the part of me that had three years of graduate school, two journal publications, and a firm opinion about the methodology problems in Bronze Age Scandinavian scholarship.

He released my waist. For a moment there was only the sound of my crying and the torchlight through the barred window and the pain in my bottom.

“I may be from elsewhere, but I endorse your mistress’s idea that for a columba like you, questions are useless,” he said, and his voice had changed—softer now, something in it that I couldn’t name, some quality of patience that felt different from Giovanna’s instruction. “You will be told what you need to know, lille en. I promise you that.” A pause. “In good time, when I decide you are ready.”

I heard him move. His footsteps went around me, unhurried, and I tracked the sound with every nerve I had, my wet face turning instinctively even though the posts allowed me almost no movement.

He came to stand before me.