Page 62 of Her Viking Guardian

I knew what was happening. I knew this place, this posture, this specific man, these witnesses. All of it had become part of the unconscious constellation through which my body now reached altered states. I knew they had conditioned and trained my arousal in a way that a behaviorist might explain with ease.

And still it felt like being among the roots of a tree that moved under the world, and moved the world. Like having branches of possible futures loom above me.

Henrik leaned over me, chest to my back for one hard moment, and bit the side of my neck. “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me what this place does to you.”

I sobbed. His fingers did not relent. I felt the wunjo pendant swing slightly with my body’s struggle.

“It—” Another thrust broke the sentence apart. “It makes me…” I tried again, gasping. “It makes me know…”

“What?”

“That I need more.” The words came out like a confession wrung from somewhere below thought. “I need to go farther. I need…” I cried out as his fingers circled in a way that made my whole body lock. “I need you to break me on the saddle. I can feel the tree… I can almost see it…”

He went still for the briefest instant inside me, and in that instant I understood I had said the exact thing some part of him had been waiting to hear.

Behind us, no one spoke.

Then Henrik withdrew in one decisive motion that left me empty and desperate and shaking. Before I could protest, he hauled me upright by the arm and gathered me against him, naked body to clothed body, his cock still hard against my whipped bottom. He kissed me once, roughly, swallowing the little broken sounds I kept making, and then he turned and lifted me into his arms.

I wrapped myself around him automatically. My face pressed to his shoulder. My torn dress lay somewhere behind us on the stone.

He carried me toward the bridal chamber.

The air changed slightly there, closer and older and somehow more concentrated. I could feel Giovanna and Mateo following, their footsteps different on the stone, measured and watchful. Ahead of us waited the space where I had once knelt alone and touched myself on the saddle, half unbelieving, still pretending I could remain an observer of my own responses.

My master had stripped that pretense from me as efficiently as he had ripped off my clothes. The saddle received me almost before I understood he had reached it. Henrik set me astride the carved, leather-padded seat with a confidence that made me feel the thing’s history: how it had been designed and built by men who had long ago understood exactly what a woman’s body could be made to confess and to receive.

My thighs fell open around the saddle’s curve. I gasped at the immediate pressure between my legs, the terrible intimacy of contact with the wood beneath the leather… the surface against which I had already brought myself to so many shameful, self-willed climaxes before any of this had truly begun. His right hand pressed on the small of my back, bending me forward, opening me more fully, until I felt like a jockey atop a racehorse, my grandmother’s pendant swinging freely below my collarbone.

Then my master’s hands moved. I felt more leather slide over my skin. As I turned my head frantically from side to side, Herra Henrik’s fingers brought out hidden fittings from the carved sides and underside as if the thing had grown them. He drew one strap over each thigh, fastening me down so that the spread of my most private parts became fixed. Another caught at my waist. More controlled my wrists where he had placed them, on either side of the saddle’s front. Their texture felt older somehow, thicker, heavier than my columba’s leathers.

I looked down, breathless, and saw only fragments of the straps disappearing into the workmanship of the saddle. I had been here before and had not seen them. That fact did something strange to me. It felt as if the chamber had withheld things even from my hyperattentive mind until I had grown ready to understand what they meant.

Henrik gave the strap at my hip a final pull, making me cry out softly as the pressure of the wood against my sex, through the leather, increased.

“These are not your Ostia leathers, lille en,” he said. His voice had settled into its grave, rough register. He put one palm on my bottom and held me still there, as if to emphasize the distinction.

“Those leathers are to quiet a girl. To civilize her and to teach her not to struggle. These…” His hand moved to the leather binding my thigh, then to the curve of my breast, then back down between my spread legs where he let one finger brush the wetness he himself had made worse. “These serve a different purpose. A bed thrall is bound here not to suppress her wildness, but to hold it in place so her master may enjoy it as he likes.”

The words sent a fresh pulse of need through me, deep and humiliating. My body answered them before my mind could parse their implications. I tugged once, involuntarily, against the leather and discovered immediately that he had spoken the truth. The restraints did not flatten me into passivity. They held me in a state of heightened, throbbing helplessness, preserving every movement I wanted to make and denying its completion.

He turned away from me then, and I followed him with my eyes in a kind of panic made of need. In the corner of the chamber stood a stool I had not noticed before, ornate and heavy, carved in the same visual language as the ship and the saddle. I had been in this room and had not seen it, either. He brought it forward and set it directly before me, at the precise distance where a seated man could position his lap beneath my face.

To my mortification, my mouth instantly began to water.

He removed his clothes without haste. Jacket first. Shirt. Trousers. The shedding of modern fabric in that room seemed to turn my master once more into exactly what the carvings had prepared me to recognize: not a man role-playing antiquity, but a man in whom antiquity remained fully alive. The scar above his brow. The broad chest. The heavy cock already hard, flushed darker at the head, still glossy with traces of me.

I stared at it, my heart beating. I felt obedient… respectful… reverential… but I also knew I couldn’t have looked away even if I hadn’t feared punishment for meeting my master’s eyes.

He crossed to the wall and took down a strap from a hook there. Something else my mind, it seemed, had failed to take in when I had come here before. I began to suspect that my unconscious had a great deal more up its sleeve than I had ever supposed.

The strap looked simpler and crueler than the Roman mastix; an authoritative length of old leather, shaped for a warrior’s hand. He tested its weight once in the air and the tiny sound it made cut straight through me.

Then he sat.

The simple fact of our relative positions sent a clench through my core so strong that I thought I might come before he even touched me again. I lay bound and spread on the bride saddle, naked and throbbing and already half ridden by the pressure of the leather and the wood under me, while my master sat similarly naked but, crucially, in comfort and at his leisure before me on the ornate stool. He had his punishment strap in one hand and his cock in the other, its hard shaft jutting toward my face like a command that had always existed.

“Attend to your Herra,” he said simply.