Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
And, frankly, we valued the occasional Mediterranean beach vacation. I would have felt very differently about the heat, I knew, under different circumstances.
Indeed, since two years ago, when we had formed our alliance with the Pretorian Guard, circumstances around our Sicilian sanctuary had changed greatly. The Guard’s reach extended further than ours did, and as a group that followed the ways of the Roman Empire, they kept their Sicilian mithraeum as an important outpost.
My driver, surely an initiate of the Guard—a corax, perhaps, if I remembered my briefing about the Guard’s convoluted rank system correctly—had not offered his name and did not make eye contact in the rearview mirror. That suited me perfectly. I had not come to Sicily to make friends; the entrance of the young woman into our ship sanctuary presented serious jurisdictional issues that I needed to negotiate cordially but firmly.
The drive into Palermo took forty minutes. I watched the landscape through tinted glass: the motorway giving way to the older roads, the limestone escarpments rising golden-white in the late morning light, the sea appearing and disappearing between headlands.
I had been to Sicily twice before, both times on business of the financial kind—the Magnusson Group had interests in the port infrastructure at Palermo that required periodic attention. I hadn’t seen the ship sanctuary here, though; the last visit of brothers had taken place a year before I had joined the Sons of Odin. My familiarity with the city, though, made me the obvious choice to come deal with the Guard here.
The Sons of Odin and the Pretorian Guard maintained what Sven called a productive détente. That meant we cooperated when our interests aligned and watched each other carefully when they didn’t. I hadn’t had any personal experience with them thus far, and I had to admit to having felt some skepticism about Sven’s embrace of the alliance.
The cooperation over the past two years, though, had proven the value of intelligence sharing: the Guard watched over the Americas and the Mediterranean while the Sons of Odin kept a very close watch on what we called the Global North. In the rapidly thawing subarctic, the inevitable energy wars in the wake of the economic collapse had already started to take shape.
Here in the South, things still looked more or less as they had for the past few decades, but that veneer had become thinner and thinner. This incident with our medieval ship sanctuary—more specifically the presence of this girl, Ilsa Matthews, who had seen the sanctuary—deep in Guard territory could come to nothing, certainly. It could also precipitate events that reached far beyond this ancient island.
When the car pulled up in front of Agenzia Ostia, it took me a moment to remember that the high-end modeling agency served as the Pretorian Guard’s elegant, apparently respectable presence in the business world. The agency occupied the ground floor of a pale stone building on a quiet side street that I could not have found without the driver.
Nothing about the facade suggested anything other than a fashionable storefront. I noticed a discreet camera above the door, though, as well as the quality of the lock, and the way the ground-floor windows had been glazed with something that I could tell wasn’t ordinary glass. Then the door opened, and I saw that the gorgeous young receptionist had a subtle collar around her neck.
“Signore Magnusson,” she said, with a practiced smile. “Welcome to Palermo. Leo Aetnaeus is waiting for you in the control room.”
“And the girl?” I asked, as she ushered me into the marble lobby and closed the door behind us.
“Bellatrix Hestiaea and her nymphobus are questioning our new columba in an intake room right now. You’ll be able to observe.”
* * *
Ilsa
I sobbed into Giovanna’s wet, moving pussy as she sought her pleasure by means of obscene friction against my face.
Her fingers returned to my own private lips, and the complicated topography of the hood that sheltered the burning nub of my clit. The alternation of the two sensations—her warmth above me, her touch below—made coherent thought nearly impossible. Nearly, but not entirely, I realized. The PhD candidate in me, stubborn and apparently indestructible, kept assembling words in my head, rehearsing the answer I would give when she lifted herself again and repeated her question.
She rubbed firmly against my lips, letting out a breath through her nose that sounded rough with enjoyment. Then she raised her hips a little and spoke.
“Tell me how you found the cavern,” she said again, as if she had simply paused to consider a minor point and was now returning to the matter at hand.
I gasped in the fresh air. “A… a mosaic,” I managed. “At my team’s dig site. There was an inscription in the border… Latin, but in… in Younger Futhark.” I heard how professional my words sounded and felt a wild, absurd pride in it, given that my legs were spread and restrained, while a gorgeous, terrifying woman rode my face for her pleasure. “I followed the directions to the… cliff… Capo Zafferano. The entrance was nearly invisible from any approach.”