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)
Which was, I realized, not the same as proceeding slowly.
“Please,” I said, my voice cracking entirely. “Please, I need… please just…”
His fingers moved from the small of my back, tracing downward with a patience that seemed designed to make language impossible. They traveled over more and more shameful territory until they found the slick, aching center of me. The sound I made against the stone floor had nothing scholarly in it at all.
My Herra began to work me. He fondled and rubbed and pressed inside me with the same knowledge he had demonstrated before, sure and steady and entirely without hurry. The orgasm that had been building since Giovanna’s intake room, the jade-colored bath, and the preparation bench gathered itself from its long, maddening suspension and began to rise. The tree came back to the edges of my vision. The roots went down. The cold between the roots and the branches seemed to move through me in waves that alternated with the heat from my master’s touch.
“Please,” I heard myself say, but it sounded different now. The word had turned itself inside out somewhere between the first time I had said it and this time. It no longer meant please stop or please wait or please give me back some portion of myself that I recognize.
This please meant something else entirely, something that the women in the carvings had known and that the cushion in the alcove had absorbed across however many centuries, something that my body had apparently been oriented toward since long before I had found the mosaic with its inscription in Younger Futhark.
“Please, Herra Henrik,” I whispered, my forehead pressed against the volcanic stone, my bottom raised, my back arched, and his fingers moving with their terrible, patient knowledge.
“Please what, Ilsa?” he asked, his voice a low growl as he crouched over me like a ferocious beast set to devour its prey.
“Please…”
He took his hand away, and again I felt how cruel patience could be.
“Oh, God…” I whispered.
“Please what?” my master murmured.
The words that came next horrified me even as I heard myself say them, even as I understood with absolute, mortifying clarity that I meant every one.
“Please… take me. Please. I want you to… I need you to…”
His fingers returned. My hips bucked against his hand and I let out a desperate sob.
“Please what?” Herra Henrik repeated.
“Oh, God… please… please fuck me, Herra,” I moaned.
The silence that followed had the quality of the moment before lightning, when the air changes, the hair rises, and the world seems to hold its breath.
In that silence, with my face against the stone floor of a cell beneath a Sicilian city and my bottom raised in offering, I understood to my distress that this man had in fact already begun to make me his. Something about his patience… something about the way he clearly had no intention of violating me except to the extent that apparently, crazily I craved violation…
I was falling for him.
The thought arrived with the clarity and the terrible inconvenience of a finding that overturns an entire theoretical framework: all at once, the way the right translation of a difficult inscription sometimes arrives—suddenly obvious, suddenly the only reading that makes sense of every element, and completely, irreversibly true.
I was falling for Henrik Magnusson, my master, my appointed Herra. The man whose hand worked my pussy relentlessly, preparing me still further for my true initiation as his submissive sexual servant… his bed thrall… his kneppetøj… his fuck toy.
Oh, I thought. Oh, no.
CHAPTER 17
Henrik
I had the urge to deflower Ilsa that instant. If my own pleasure had been the only thing at stake, I certainly would simply have bestrode her and plunged my rigid cock into the tight, pink, inviting cunt that glistened between the girl’s spread thighs. But Ilsa’s gift demanded better of me than my own pleasure. I had to understand what she had seen.
Even more important, I had to ensure that she would see it again, and more clearly. This extraordinary young woman had begun to develop her vǫlva’s powers: I had no doubt of that, given the relationship I had already observed between her submissive sexuality and her obvious intelligence. The chance existed, indeed, that she possessed talent beyond that of any vǫlva the Sons of Odin had trained in perhaps centuries—perhaps ever.
I kept the fingers of my right hand moving between her thighs, working her gently, milking the pleasure from her sweet fisse as I crouched a little lower at her side. I had my left hand on her back, exerting just enough pressure to make Ilsa feel that my bodily restraint represented her bondage just as decisively as the cuffs and the iron posts. Both my hands could feel the marvelous, arousing quivers of involuntary submissive need that traveled through her nervous system, over and over, readying her for her master’s use… making her need my cock a little more urgently each time.