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)
“Stand up,” she said.
I stood. The floor felt cool under my bare feet.
“Walk with me,” Giovanna—Bellatrix Hestiaea—said, and she moved toward the door and the leash drew taut and I followed her, because the alternative was being dragged, and I had already exhausted my reserves of futile resistance for one afternoon.
The nymphobus did not follow us into the corridor. I registered his absence with a complicated mixture of relief and a mortifying heat that I did my best to push away with a crease of my brow.
The corridor beyond the intake room looked like the rest of what I had seen of the agency’s ground floor: marble, pale walls, good art. But Giovanna led me in the other direction from the entrance, through a door that required an actual, old-fashioned key she produced from her jacket pocket, and then we seemed to have arrived somewhere else entirely.
A stairway descended in a tight spiral. The walls were stone—only partially the dressed stone of a renovated building… mostly something older, rougher; limestone that men’s hands had dug into long before any twentieth-century modeling agency had set up its elegant facade above it.
The air changed immediately: cooler, denser, carrying something of the same complex, ancient scent I recognized from the cavern at Capo Zafferano. Salt and cold stone and something underneath it that my mind simply labeled ancient.
Naked and leashed, I descended a winding stair cut into ancient rock. I followed a beautiful woman who had whipped me, interrogated me, and ridden my face for her pleasure. I told myself over and over that I had no choice. I told myself that I feared my ‘mistress’—this bellatrix.
Bellatrix: warrior woman. The idea made me swallow very hard.
Despite myself, though, as I regarded her elegantly dressed back, with its terrible contrast to the nudity she had enforced on me, I realized that Giovanna had somehow managed to make me feel her approval was worth having. I thought, briefly, about what my dissertation committee would make of this. Then I stopped thinking about my dissertation committee, because the stairway ended.
The chamber was not large, but it felt large in the way that carefully proportioned spaces sometimes do, the way I had always thought certain Romanesque chapels felt larger inside than their external dimensions suggested. The walls looked like volcanic stone, dark and smooth.
The floor was mosaic tile in a pattern that my eye wanted to follow and my academic brain wanted very badly to document. The image, which I could see was in a style very different from the one that had led me to the cavern, featured motifs of flame alongside armed, Mediterranean-complexioned men with naked women at their feet.
I swallowed as despite myself I contemplated the analogy between this mosaic, here, and the carvings in the cavern. To my dismay, I had the sudden, naughty, mortifying wish that I could see these Romans in armor without their tunics on, so I could compare the size of their manhoods to those of the Norse warriors from the carvings.
The centerpiece of this chamber, though, was a bath—rectangular, sunk into the floor, its water the color of pale jade and smelling of herbs I could almost identify: rosemary, certainly, and something astringent that reminded me of the maquis scrub on the hillside above the cavern. Steam rose from it in thin threads.
“The chamber of preparation,” Giovanna said.
I blinked at her as she unclipped the leash from my collar and hung it on a hook next to the doorway. Then, as my eyes went wide, she began to undress, her eyes fixed on mine as if to ensure that I didn’t miss a moment of my mistress’s self-revelation. Her linen jacket, and then her lovely blue silk blouse. Her skirt.
I bit my lip when I saw her standing only in her gorgeous, lacy black bra—because of course she had taken off her panties to use my face, which now burned at the memory as well as the sight of Bellatrix Hestiaea revealed. She reached back and unfastened the clasp of the bra, and shrugged it off.
As naked as I was… more naked, because I wore the terribly confusing leathers… but also less, really, because my mistress seemed to have a presence that clothed her even when her gorgeous, full-breasted, and wide-hipped body lay fully revealed.
With a little smile Giovanna broke the eye contact so that she could fold her clothes and place them on a shelf carved into the stone wall. Next to that shelf I saw, set into the rock, was another hook, from which my terrifying mistress took a robe of a deep red color: something between a ceremonial garment and a dressing gown, with a sash she fastened firmly so that she looked somehow like a priestess and a model at once.
She moved to the edge of the bath and stood looking down at it. On her face I saw the proprietary ease of someone surveying a piece of furniture she used regularly and trusted completely. The steam rose between us. The herbs in the water smelled stronger now that I was closer.