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)
My Herra looked at me for a moment with that assessing quality, the ledger expression. Then a different kind of light came into his eyes, something I couldn’t name and wasn’t sure I was meant to see—something that made my chest warm though I couldn’t have said why.
“Come,” he said. He turned and the leash drew taut.
The corridor outside the cell received us into its old, torch-lit silence. My bare feet padded over the worn mosaic floor and I followed my master’s broad back across the geometric patterns, past the other doors with their barred windows, back toward the chamber of preparation and whatever lay beyond it.
Giovanna waited at the end of the corridor. She stood with her hands clasped before her, dressed again in the tailored jacket and dark trousers of her public self, as if the robe and the oil and the mastix had been a costume she had simply set aside. With a lurch of my tummy, though, I suddenly wondered if I had it the wrong way around: if this fashionable woman represented the costume, and her persona as my exacting mistress, preparing me for my master’s pleasure, was who Giovanna really was. She examined me as I emerged from the cell, her dark eyes moving over my face and body with the professional thoroughness I had come to understand as simply how she looked at everything.
“Well,” she said, to Henrik rather than to me. “The night has agreed with her. She served you well?”
“She did. Very well indeed,” my master said. “I need to meet with Leo Aetnaeus in the control room, if that can be arranged.”
Giovanna’s brow arched, a fraction. “Now?”
“Now.”
She turned without further comment and walked ahead of us, her heels sounding on the mosaic. I followed, drawn by the leash, and tried to think about something other than the fact of my nudity and the contrast it made with Herra Henrik’s robe and Giovanna’s business attire… of what was written on my backside in pink and red… of the bareness of my pussy… of the illogical idea that anyone looking at me could tell I had lost my virginity with my face against the floor and my master astride me.
I failed at that too.
The control room took me by surprise, though I instantly chastised my mind for having any expectations at all of this insane situation. It occupied a chamber even deeper in the mithraeum than the cells and the preparation chamber, carved from the same volcanic stone, but furnished in a way that belonged entirely to the present century.
Banks of monitors lined one curved wall, their screens showing camera feeds I recognized with a lurch of my stomach: the preparation chamber, the corridor, the cells themselves. A long table of dark wood occupied the center of the space, surrounded by chairs that managed to look both expensive and ancient, as if they had been selected to bridge whatever gap existed between a Roman mystery cult and a modern intelligence operation.
A man in a charcoal business suit was already there. Somehow I could tell from the moment I laid eyes on him that he must be Leo Aetnaeus. He stood before the monitors with his hands clasped behind his back, the subtle red of his pocket square catching the blue light of the screens as he turned at our entry, and his sharp, hawkish face moved over me with an expression I couldn’t read, but that made me blush anyway. I saw appreciation in his eyes, but of a purely masculine, frankly dominant kind.
“Good morning, Magnusson,” he said. Something in his tone made it perfectly clear that he had become accustomed to being addressed first in any room he entered, and found it mildly irritating if that didn’t happen.
“Leo Aetnaeus.” Henrik’s voice carried its own authority, and I thought I could feel a tension between the two men. “I need to request access to a secure link to Huginn’s Eye… our control room in Rouen.”
The leo’s eyes moved to me again, briefly. “I gather you’ve initiated her?”
“I have. She performed exceptionally.” Henrik said it the way he said so much—as a simple notation of fact. “Which is why I need to talk to Rouen.”
Giovanna had moved to one of the chairs and seated herself. She crossed her legs and watched the two men with an expression of polite attention that I understood, by now, concealed considerably more than it revealed.
Leo Aetnaeus considered Henrik for a long moment, with a kind of calculating stillness.
“Are you willing to let us inspect this columba and assess the degree of her initiation according to our standards?” he finally asked. “Are you willing to share her mouth and cunt with us, as specified by our laws for that certification?”
My heart raced and my breathing came in little puffs that flared my nostrils. I couldn’t look anywhere but the stone floor.