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)
The heat I felt at Giovanna’s words had nothing to do with the volcanic stone or even the residual sting of the waxing. It had been building since the rowing bench, since the bride saddle, since the first moment I had understood what the iron rings were for. It moved through me from my face downward, and it settled where everything settled now: in the newly smooth, bare, exposed center of my body, which clenched around nothing, as if in humiliating search of the rigid penis of my unknown master.
I pressed my forehead harder into the leather and breathed through my nose.
“Who?” I said.
I heard a sort of a clacking sound. I didn’t realize that it represented my mistress picking up a mastix from whatever surface it had rested on until the stroke landed across my bottom cheeks, atop the earlier welts that had already mapped their horrid geography. The cry that came out of me sounded raw and ragged as it echoed off the stone walls of the chamber.
“You know the only question you may ask,” Giovanna said. Her voice had not changed at all.
I sobbed into the leather. The welt across my bottom burned with a specific, layered intensity, new pain finding the memory of old pain and compounding it. My hips tried to pull forward and found the restraints, and the restraints held me precisely where I was, bottom raised and burning, pussy bare and slick and aching with need.
“I’m sorry,” I managed. “I’m sorry, Mistress. I—”
“You’ll learn,” she said, which was neither forgiveness nor its absence, simply a statement of fact that she seemed to find entirely unremarkable.
Then her fingers found me from behind, and I stopped thinking about the mastix entirely.
She worked my pussy with the same expert knowledge she had demonstrated on the table in the intake room. This position, though… down instead of up, changed the sensation. Face down, bottom up: I couldn’t see her, couldn’t anticipate the angle or the pressure, couldn’t prepare myself for anything. I could only receive it. Her fingers moved with a deliberateness that told me she knew exactly how close I had already gotten, and intended to bring me precisely to the boundary of that place and hold me there.
I cried. Not from pain, though the welts still burned. I cried from the need, from the specific degradation of needing something so badly while being able to do absolutely nothing to obtain it, while the woman who controlled whether I obtained it worked at her own pace, unhurried and proprietary, as if my body were a project she was managing to a schedule I had no access to.
“Please,” I sobbed. The leather was wet under my cheek. The old tears and the new ones. “Please, Mistress. Please, I need—”
“I know what you need,” Giovanna said.
Her fingers slowed. Stilled. Withdrew.
I made a wordless, desperate sound. It had no relationship to any version of myself I had constructed over twenty-four years of determined intellectual ambition.
“Not yet,” she said. “Not until you’re ready, columba.”
I breathed. I pressed my face into the wet leather and I breathed, I thought about the women who had breathed here before me, and I understood, in a way that distressed me terribly, that this was exactly what she meant. Readiness, my mistress wished me to understand, was not a fixed point I could reach by wanting it badly enough. She… or, I realized with a jolt centered in my desperate pussy, my master… would determine when I had arrived there, and I would have no vote in the matter.
The sound of the wax pot, heating its contents, returned.
“The crack of your bottom now,” Giovanna said. “This is important. Perhaps the most symbolically important preparation I will perform for you today.”
I felt her hands on my whipped bottom cheeks, parting them even further, with a matter-of-fact firmness that made me whimper and tighten instinctively.
“Don’t,” she said. A single word. I unclenched.
The wax went on warm and precise, applied with the spatula. I felt it moving in slow strokes. I pressed my forehead into the leather and tried to find something to think about that was not what was happening to me.
“The act of anal congress,” Giovanna said, as the brush moved with the same unhurried expertise that characterized everything she did, “is not merely a physical act for the Guard. It is a ritual act. A civilizing act, in the most literal sense.”
CHAPTER 13
Ilsa
Giovanna applied more wax. I felt the little spatula trace a path so close to the tiny ring of my anus that my breath came shorter.
“The Roman legions brought order to the world,” she told me, her voice instructional. “Roads, aqueducts, law. They imposed structure on chaos. They took what was wild and gave it form.” The cloth strip went down. I gripped the alcove’s sides with both hands and tried to prepare. “When a master takes a columba’s bottom, opening her there on his thrusting manhood, he performs the same act. He imposes civilization on the most private wilderness of her body. He makes her his, in the way that Rome made the provinces hers.”