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)
Herra Henrik crouched. His hands were under me, one arm behind my knees and one behind my back, and before I had fully understood his intention, he had lifted me from the mat entirely. I made a startled sound and gripped his shoulder with both hands, my fingers finding the warm, solid fact of him.
He carried me across the cell at a slow, certain pace. I kept my face turned toward his chest, because looking up at his expression from this position felt like more than I could manage.
A thrill of fear went through me as in my head I reconstructed the layout of the little cell as I had absorbed it when my mistress had led me to the iron posts.
“Oh… Herra… please… not the bench?” I begged, sure that my master meant to position me as Giovanna had, with my face in the alcove, so as to take my final virginity immediately.
“The sleeping alcove,” he corrected quietly. “It looks a little like the bench where Bellatrix Hestiaea prepared you, but its purpose is quite different.”
I felt the texture of the air change as we reached the enclosed space: a warmer, enclosed space, perhaps heated by the same fires that warmed the pool in the chamber of preparation. My Herra set me down with care, lowering me onto a surface that received me with a softness I hadn’t expected after the volcanic stone and the thinly padded leather mat.
Furs? Deep and warm and carrying the faint, complex scent of something animal and old and preserved. I sank into them slightly and my body, which had been held at a pitch of tension for so many hours that I had forgotten what ordinary felt like, simply released. All at once, as if it had been waiting for permission.
Henrik settled behind me. He was warm—warmer than the furs, warmer than the stone. His big body seemed to generate its own climate. He drew me against his side with a naturalness… a matter-of-factness, even… that somehow made it easier to accept than a more tentative gesture would have been, as naughty as it felt to feel the length of his still semi-hard penis against my bottom. His left hand found the curve of my throat, holding me gently there and making it very difficult to think.
“The Pretorian Guard and the Sons of Odin,” he murmured softly into my ear, as his voice in his chest vibrating soothingly against my back, “share a few values. One of them is a preference for sleeping in fur.”
CHAPTER 20
Henrik
I felt Ilsa’s body tense a bit under my left arm as I caressed the soft skin of her neck. A shudder in her hips told me that her submissive nature had truly awoken as I had fucked her into full womanhood. It sent a jolt of arousal to my cock, and I felt her sweet little bottom push back, helplessly, against me, as if to beg for more of my hardness.
The shudder moved through her like a wave settling after a storm, and I gathered her more firmly against me, my palm moving from her throat to her hair, finding the practical braid Giovanna had left intact and smoothing it softly.
“You will dream tonight,” I said. I kept my voice low, in the register that seemed to reach her most directly, bypassing whatever remained of her academic resistance. “I want you to know that before you sleep. What you dream may be different from anything you have dreamt before.”
She stirred against me. I felt her trying to form a question and I pressed my lips to her temple, which quieted it.
“The vǫlur dream,” I said. “All of them do, it seems, after their first breeding. The records are consistent on that point across four centuries of documentation.” I paused, letting my thumb move in the slow arc across her hair. “But I don’t want you to misunderstand what the dreaming is. The Sons of Odin have debated this for a very long time.”
“Debated what?” Her voice came out small and rough with tears and exhaustion, and something about the smallness of it did something to my chest that I did not entirely welcome.
“Whether the vǫlva can truly go to Yggdrasil in her sleep.” I felt her go still against me, with the particular quality of stillness she produced, I gathered, when her scholar’s mind engaged with something. “We don’t believe she does. The tree is not a place you travel to, as I told you. It is the shape your mind makes when it works at its deepest level.” I let the silence settle for a moment, the way I had learned to let silences settle with bed thralls whose intelligence was their primary gift. “In sleep, that working continues without the body’s interruption. You may glimpse the tree. Its roots, perhaps. A branch or two. But you won’t be in it the way you were today, let alone rise the way you will when I break you.”