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)
Now, kneeling on a leather mat in a volcanic stone cell with a Viking’s hands on my hips, I felt the idea arrive with a force so immediate and so physically located that I couldn’t pretend it was abstract at all.
His child. A son with those broad shoulders and those pale gray eyes and the patient, absolute certainty of him. Or a daughter who would grow up knowing more than I, her curiosity gratified earlier, her learning deeper.
I thought of the bed thralls in the carvings. I had studied those images so intently, cataloguing the details of the limestone’s preservation, noting the stylistic conventions of the anonymous artist. I had looked at the women on their knees and told myself I was documenting an artifact.
But they had been real women. Real women who had knelt as I was kneeling, or who had ridden the rowing benches of the longships. They had felt what I was feeling… had been claimed by strong men in bride chambers… and had carried those men’s children afterward. And perhaps that had been—I couldn’t stop the thought—perhaps it had been a consolation. The strong child of a powerful man, in a world where strength was the only reliable currency. Perhaps it had been more than consolation. Perhaps it had been, for some of them, the thing they had wanted most.
I clenched my teeth shut very hard and failed to keep the small, desperate sound from escaping anyway.
Both of Henrik’s hands took hold of my hips, and he thrust forward, very hard.
The pain arrived before I had finished bracing for it, and it was nothing like what I had anticipated, in my cautious academic imagination. It felt total. It was a tearing brightness that began at the center of me and radiated outward to the tips of my fingers and the soles of my feet. I screamed.
I could hear how the sound left the cell immediately, bouncing off the curved stone walls and then escaping through the barred window into the mosaic corridor beyond, and I knew—I knew with a certainty as complete as any scholarly conviction I had ever held—that it could be heard out there. That Giovanna was somewhere in that corridor, or in one of the other stone rooms, and that she had heard it. That my mistress Bellatrix Hestiaea had heard the exact moment of my defloration, the specific pitch and timbre of the cry that announced what I was now and had never been before: a man’s possession… a Viking’s bed thrall… my Herra’s naughty fuck toy…
The thought sent a wave of heat through me so acute and so mortifying that it seemed to compound the pain rather than displace it, and then compound the heat again in return, until I couldn’t separate the two, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“Breathe,” Henrik said, above me. He held himself at full length as I squirmed beneath him, my spanked bottom burning against his firm lap. His right hand moved from my hip to my shoulder, the same steadying pressure that restrained me too, keeping me where he wanted me, impaled on his manhood. “Breathe, lille en. The pain is true. Let it be true, as a sign that you belong to a warrior who knows how to use his new bed thrall.”
CHAPTER 19
Ilsa
I breathed. The pain pulsed with my heartbeat, deep and present and—I found, to my considerable surprise—not entirely unwelcome. It felt like something being resolved. Like a question that had been building since the café, since the mosaic border, since the moment I had run my hand along the worn surface of the rowing bench and understood with my body before my mind caught up that I had been meant to find this place. The pain felt like an answer.
I welcomed it. I pressed back against the lap of my deflowerer, very slightly, and Henrik made a low sound above me. His hands tightened on my shoulder and on my hip.
The tree remained. Yggdrasil’s roots came down through the volcanic stone, solid and vast and indifferent to the pain or the heat or the tears falling from my face onto the floor. I was near those roots, very near; I could feel the enormous, cold presence of the trunk above me, the roots spreading out beneath me like the fingers of a hand that had been reaching for me for a very long time.
But I couldn’t rise. I couldn’t find the lower branches. I lay amid the roots and I felt the pain and the building, impossible warmth that was beginning to replace it. The branches, though, lay somewhere above me, stirring in their cold upper wind, and I couldn’t reach them.
“Herra,” I sobbed. “I can’t… I can see the roots. I’m at the roots. But I can’t rise. The branches… I can’t get to them.”