Page 55 of Her Viking Guardian

Then Henrik’s hand tightened at the back of my head in a way I had already learned to recognize.

He drove deeper. I gagged. He held me there for a beat, then another, and his breath left him in a rough burst.

“Swallow for your Herra.”

He came with a low growl that seemed dragged up from somewhere older than language. Warmth flooded my throat in quick, forceful pulses. I swallowed because there was no alternative and because he had told me to, and because some dreadful part of me wanted to prove that I could take him properly in any room, under any eyes, according to any custom he named.

He stayed in my mouth a moment longer after he had finished, breathing hard. Then he withdrew.

I bowed my head automatically, swallowing again, my lips wet, my face blazing. He tucked himself back into his trousers with the same matter-of-factness with which he had exposed himself.

“Better,” I heard him say, perhaps to Giovanna, perhaps to the room. “She’s learning. A girl should know how to thank the warrior who feeds her.”

Giovanna made a small sound through her nose that might have been contempt or acknowledgment or both.

“Come,” she said to me. “You will remain on all fours until we reach the Room of Separation.”

She took up the leash and I put my hands out to crawl, unsteady, tasting my master at the back of my mouth. Henrik fell in behind us as we left the refectory. I could feel him there without looking. That proved far worse than if I had been allowed to see him.

Because now I knew he was behind me.

I knew what that meant visually. My belt still framed my waist. The collar still pressed at my throat. The cuffs still circled my wrists and ankles and thighs. And beneath those remaining signs, my body was naked where it mattered most. As Giovanna led me down the corridor and around the turn toward the stair that rose to the Ostia office above, I became hideously aware of the movement of my own hips and thighs. Of the air on my bare sex. Of the fact that from behind Henrik could see everything.

My pussy. The cleft of it, probably still glossy from all my humiliations. The no-longer-virgin entrance to my already-needy-again sheath. And above it, much worse, the small, exposed ring he had spoken of with such patient certainty, the place he had promised to take when I was ready and which I knew, with the irrational certainty of prey, that he was looking at now.

I crawled carefully and failed completely not to think about how I looked. Each movement seemed to display me afresh. The knowledge made my stomach tight and hot. It also sent a pulse of impossible need into the very place I dreaded his eyes upon.

At the bottom of the stairs, Giovanna opened a narrow door I hadn’t noticed before. She drew me into a small room furnished more sparsely than the others: stone walls, a bench, a cabinet, a drain in the floor, and Nymphobus Oceanus waiting in black clothes that fit his lean body too well for my comfort.

His green eyes found me and took in everything in one swift, professional glance.

“Nymphobus,” Giovanna said.

“Bellatrix.” Then he looked to Henrik. “Our Rite of Deligature involves a nymphobus occupying the girl’s mouth with his manhood while she is unbound. Will you give permission?”

The phrasing alone made my knees weaken.

Herra Henrik’s answer came at once. “Yes. Use her as you wish.”

Giovanna tugged upward on the leash and positioned me in front of her huge attendant. “Kneel up.”

I obeyed, my mouth watering despite the humiliation of it, or, worse, because of the thrills of embarrassment that shot through my body.

The nymphobus unfastened his trousers and drew out his cock. It was already hard, scarred hand wrapping around it once as he looked down at me. Not tender. Not cruel. Merely intent.

“Hands behind my knees,” he said.

I obeyed. The backs of his knees were warm beneath my palms, the tendons moving subtly under skin as he adjusted his stance. The position brought my face very close to his cock before I had even opened my mouth.

I rolled my eyes, searching desperately for my master, but he had taken a stand somewhere behind me. The idea that he had granted permission for this ceremony to unfold brought a deep crease to my forehead and a mortifying clench between my thighs.

“Gently,” Giovanna said from behind me. “You are not here to devour him. You must hold his penis in your mouth, to show your subservience and your availability to men who understand what you are.”

I opened and took his rigid manhood into my mouth. He hissed in a small breath through his teeth, his thighs tightening under my hands, but he did not thrust. He let me hold him there, lips closed around the shaft, while the room seemed to hold its own breath around us.

Then I felt Giovanna’s fingers at the buckle of my collar.

“By this rite,” she said, in the instructive tone I had come to dread, “a columba learns, and signifies that she has learned, that bondage is not leather. Leather is merely the symbol of it. What matters is the bondage of your heart.”