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)
“Attend to the nymphobus,” Giovanna said. “Pain is not an excuse for negligence.”
I tried to breathe through my nose. Tears flooded my eyes at once.
“It is the heart that obeys,” she said.
The second stroke came lower, biting across the tender flesh where thigh became bottom. I sobbed around the hard phallus in my mouth. Its owner’s hand came to rest atop my head, as if to warn me that if he wished to enforce my service he could, but at the same time to tell me, wordlessly, that my obedience must be of my own free will.
CHAPTER 28
Ilsa
The third lash fell.
It seemed to arrive from nowhere and from everywhere at once, a bright, slicing line of pain across the heated ruin of my bottom. In that exact instant my whole awareness seemed to swing backward, as if the blow itself had turned my body into an instrument tuned toward the man behind me.
I felt my master there without seeing him. I felt his gaze on the naked place Giovanna had just marked again. I remembered, with a vividness so immediate it made me struggle a little around the nymphobus’s cock, the pressure of Henrik’s hand in my hair in the refectory, the heavy thrust of him into my mouth while people talked over breakfast.
The thought came unbidden and complete: was my Herra hard now? Again, so soon? From watching?
From watching me kneel naked with another man’s penis held obediently in my mouth while a woman whipped me and taught me what I was?
The idea should have horrified me, I knew. Instead it divided me. My rational mind recoiled, scrambling to name the degradation, to restore categories, to insist that wanting such a thing meant damage or coercion or some syndrome I could have cited with chapter and verse under other circumstances. But below that, lower and older, something in me lifted its face like an animal scenting rain.
I hoped my master’s manhood had gotten hard.
For a second I nearly lost track of my mouth’s service to the other man’s penis. My lips tightened instinctively around him. Heat surged between my thighs so sharply that the pain in my bottom seemed to feed it rather than interrupt it.
I hoped—not truly believed, because I knew better, because I already knew the quality of Herra Henrik’s control and the way he husbanded his appetites like resources in wartime—but hoped anyway, in a frantic and shameful flash, that he had one hand in his trousers, that he was stroking himself while he watched Giovanna whip me and watched me serve the nymphobus like a proper little columba.
He would never. Or almost certainly never. The certainty of his self-command was part of what made him terrifying, and part of what made him… my whole body answered the thought before I could finish it.
Hotter. Sexier. More arousing.
Because if my master stood there, his manhood rock hard, and did nothing—if he merely watched, allowing himself the pleasure of my being displayed and disciplined, naked and degraded, without needing to gratify himself immediately—then the lesson felt even greater.
I must learn that I truly was a thing being looked at… a fuck toy being assessed, being enjoyed and possessed by a man whose self-mastery exceeded my own by so much it made me clench under my mistress’s lashes.
I made a broken sound around the cock of Nymphobus Oceanus. He shifted his hips once, not to punish me, but to settle the head of himself more securely on my tongue.
“There,” Giovanna said behind me. Her voice had regained its cool exactness. “Now perhaps the lesson will remain.”
The lesson. The leathers in my heart.
And suddenly, absurdly, devastatingly, I understood what she meant at a deep level, a level at which my mind refused to think.
My obedience had not actually imposed itself on me from outside. The leather had not created it. The cuffs and collar and belt had only named, outlined, called forth something that had already existed in me in some dormant and deeply hidden form. Something that had been waiting with humiliating patience.
Waiting for my Herra to find it.
Waiting for Giovanna to discipline it into visibility.
Waiting, perhaps, through all the years I had spent calling myself independent and rational and modern, for someone to show me that what I had mistaken for freedom included a hunger to be bound correctly.
The thought was so total that tears spilled down my face afresh. I held the penis in my mouth as gently and steadily as I could and felt, with a kind of inward shudder, that the bellatrix was right.
I did wear the leathers in my heart.
Perhaps I always had.
“Enough,” Giovanna said.
Her fingers came to my shoulder. Her attendant withdrew slowly from my mouth, and the little wet pop of my lips releasing him seemed indecently loud in the stone room. I bowed my head at once, breathing through my nose, saliva cooling on my swollen lips. My bottom burned in three separate bands that seemed to pulse in time with my heartbeat.