Chapter 6
Ilsa
“Absolutely not,” I told Giovanna. I took a step toward the door. “I don’t know what kind of agency this is, but—”
“Ilsa.” My name in her mouth stopped me. “You came here because you wanted to. You know that.”
“I came here because you invited me.”
“You came here,” she said gently, “because you saw my collar.”
The silence in the room seemed absolute.
She watched me patiently. I knew somehow that she had had this conversation before, and that she knew precisely how it would end. The many different endings my imagination offered, though, all made my stomach churn.
I thought about saying something sharp, academic, and hopefully sufficient. The words in my head, though, arranged themselves into a configuration that didn’t quite function. My hand was on the door handle.
“I’m leaving,” I said.
“You can try,” she said, still gently.
She crossed to the door and opened it. The corridor from which we had just come now held a very large man in a dark suit.
My lips parted, and then I swallowed hard as I watched him come through the door.
He didn’t seem big in the way of the Viking warriors in the carvings; he was simply large in the ordinary way of men who are very tall, broad-shouldered, and quiet-faced.
He made me think of the Chinese man I had seen paddling the girl in my bizarre vision.
He moved to stand between me and the door he had entered through—the one I had been about to use to make my escape.
He had a matter-of-fact expression on his face that suggested he had done this as many times as Giovanna had.
“I don’t want to do this unpleasantly,” Giovanna said. “That’s genuinely true. But we are going to do it.”
“Do what?” My voice had gone to a place I didn’t entirely recognize, something thin and badly controlled. “What is this? Who are you people?”
“Questions are useless.” She nodded to the man, and he moved behind me and took hold of my wrists, not roughly but with an absolute certainty of grip that made struggling feel immediately pointless, though I struggled anyway.
He held me with both arms drawn back and my chest forced slightly forward.
Then, to my horror, I watched Giovanna crouch in front of me in the same unhurried way she had handled all the previous terrifying things she had done.
“What… wh—”
She started to unbutton my jeans.
A desperate sound emerged from my throat as I looked down at her and she looked at the area below my waist, slowly but with obvious skill undoing the fastening.
“No,” I whispered. “Please… stop?” I said. “Stop, please… you need to tell me—”
She had the button open. She raised her eyes to look at me, and the blood rushed to my cheeks in a wave of scalding heat.
I could see in Giovanna’s gaze that I could do absolutely nothing to stop whatever would happen here.
I had no idea what that would be, except that I knew for certain it would be terribly, terribly embarrassing.
“Questions are useless,” she repeated.
Giovanna returned her attention to what she was doing with my lower body. I let out a humiliating little whimper as she lowered my fly, then started to draw my jeans down.
Reflexively, I tried to kick out.
“No,” she told me, and at the same time I yelped as I felt the huge man behind me bend my arm just a little bit in a direction it wasn’t meant to go. It seemed almost polite, as violent warnings go. I stilled my legs.
“Better,” said Giovanna. She drew my jeans down to just above my knees. Her hands rose again, and her fingers took hold of the waistband of my panties.
“No, please,” I whispered. I felt my forehead crease hard at her touch there, on the soft skin underneath.
Giovanna ignored me. She pulled my panties, standard-issue gray cotton, down to rest atop my jeans.
The air, moving freely down there while I stood in the grip of a big man in a dark suit, with a beautiful woman in a collar crouching in front of me, looking at my virgin pussy, made me feel faint with mortification.
“We’ll wax you here later today,” Giovanna told me. “That will help you understand.”
“Oh, God,” I gasped. “Understand what?”
I knew exactly what she would say before she opened her mouth.
“Questions are useless.” I had started to get used to that response, as alarming as it seemed. Much more frighteningly, though, Giovanna rose and looked behind me, obviously making eye contact with the man who held me immobilized with my jeans and panties down.
“Over the chair, please,” she said simply, and immediately I was propelled toward the chair, and the man bent me over its low back until my face made contact with the leather-covered seat cushion.
I felt my grandmother’s pendant swing free, bouncing between the fabric of my shirt and my breastbone.
I had an obscure wish to hold it, to press it against my skin.
I felt sure it would seem warm to me, though I didn’t know why—neither why it would feel warm, nor why I would suppose it might.
I heard Giovanna moving around. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her opening something—a panel in the wall, maybe—and taking something out.
“There is only one question you may ask now. In a moment I will tell you what it is.”
At first I couldn’t see what she had in her hands as she moved back toward me and the enormous, silent man who held me down over the chair. Then Giovanna moved in front of me, and held the thing out.
To my horror, I recognized it. It was a mastix.
The Roman disciplinary implement… the thing that had been used to correct slaves and servants and anyone else who required correction in the frequently brutal ancient world.
Made of braided leather, about thirty centimeters long.
Giovanna held it with an ease that spoke, dismayingly, of long practice.
I recognized it academically, as she displayed it to me. My mind refused to recognize it in any other way.
“I’ll hold her down, nymphobus,” Giovanna said, stepping around me, out of my view, and at the same time putting her left hand atop my back, between my shoulder blades.
Nymphobus. It rang a distant bell, somewhere in the wilderness of my jumbled memories of nearly forgotten college courses. Ritual, I thought: definitely some kind of ritual title.
The nymphobus let go of my arms and I could sense him stepping back toward the door. Not leaving, I realized with dismay; staying there to make sure Giovanna could handle me as she did whatever she intended to do.
Instinctively I moved my now free hands to my backside, covering my bottom cheeks, defending them.
“Elbows on the chair seat,” Giovanna commanded, her soft voice taking on the slightest edge of authority—a subtle change in tone that nevertheless made my heart jump.
I turned my head and craned my neck until I could just make out her beautiful, dispassionate face.
“No,” she said. “You will face forward when you are disciplined.”
Oh, no. The word… that word.
“But,” I said, tears pricking the corners of my eyes. “But… I didn’t…”
“I can have my nymphobus place you as I want, Ilsa, but if I have to do that you will regret it.”
She raised her right arm. She had started to bring it down before I understood what she was doing.
The stroke landed across the back of my thighs, under my defensive, out-turned palms. Fire blossomed there. I cried out and jerked forward against the back of the chair.
“Please,” I gasped. “Please, I need to understand what’s happening. Who sent you? Is this about the cavern? Is this about—”
“Questions are useless,” Giovanna said, her voice still soft despite the growing note of command. “I’ve told you that already.”
Another stroke. I made a sound I had never made before in my life, something between a sob and a gasp, and my knees bent involuntarily.
“Please,” I said again. “Please just tell me—”
Giovanna sighed. “Elbows on the seat, Ilsa. Face forward. I won’t tell you again.”
Her voice was still patient though it sounded less patient each time she repeated a command.
I lay there bent over the chair with my hands still uselessly covering my bare bottom, my thighs burning from the two strokes she had already delivered, and I knew—I knew with absolute clarity—that I should obey.
That obedience represented the path that led to less pain.
My body understood this. My rational mind understood this.
I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t make my hands move from where they were.
I couldn’t make my elbows find the seat cushion, my face turn forward, and my body arrange itself into the posture of a girl accepting this degrading kind of discipline.
Something in me—the same stubborn, reckless thing that had driven me through the opening in the cliff and onto the bride saddle—simply would not yield.
Not because I felt brave in any way, but because I was terrified, and terror had locked my joints as surely as if they’d been set in iron.
“I can’t,” I whispered. “I can’t, I’m… I’m… sorry, I—”
“Nymphobus,” Giovanna said. Just that strange title. Nothing else.
I sensed the huge man moving again, back from the door toward me. I cried out as his hands found my wrists and drew them forward, not cruelly but definitely roughly, with a totality of force that made my resistance feel like a child pushing against a stone wall.
He placed my elbows on the leather seat cushion, one and then the other, with a precision that seemed almost architectural.
Then one broad palm settled on the back of my neck, pressing my face gently but irrevocably forward, and his other hand moved to the small of my back, pinning me in the correct posture with the same matter-of-fact competence with which he had held my arms earlier.
I was positioned. The nymphobus—whatever kind of ceremonial attendant that was supposed to be—had positioned me the way you position an object that needs to be in a specific place for a specific purpose, and the nymphobus held me there with an ease that told me he could keep me there for as long as the woman who obviously commanded his own obedience decided he should.
The first real stroke landed across the center of my bottom.
I screamed. The sound came out of me without my permission, raw and shocked, because the previous strokes across my thighs had been—I understood now with sickening clarity—warnings.
Preliminary. This was the mastix applied in earnest, the braided leather finding the fullest part of my bare bottom with a crack that echoed off the white walls of the little room.
The pain was extraordinary; not merely sharp but deep, radiating outward from the point of impact.
The second stroke landed just below the first.
“When you tell me,” Giovanna said, her voice carrying over my sobbing with perfect calm, “that you can obey me… that you can hold the proper posture on your own, and that you can take off your clothes when you are told to take them off… Nymphobus Oceanus will step back.”
Another lash.
Even as I sobbed and struggled, my mind tried to take itself off the pain, following Giovanna’s words through a maze of possible meanings.
Nymphobus Oceanus. Not his real name, of course. A title.
As the pain from the mastix built, I bucked against his hands and went nowhere. The leather cushion had gotten wet with my tears, and I could feel the specific shape of each welt forming across my bottom, a map of pain that Giovanna was drawing with methodical patience.
“When he steps back,” she continued, “I will whip you only six more times. And then your initiation can proceed.”
The next stroke caught the crease where my bottom met my thighs, and the sound I made was not a scream but something lower and more broken.
It came from deep in my chest. My fingers gripped the front edge of the seat cushion.
My knuckles had gone white. I sobbed with my face pressed into the leather, and I thought about the carvings in the cavern—the women’s faces in the capture scenes, the voyage scenes, and the homecoming scenes.
I saw them: the way their expressions had moved past resistance into something more settled, more undone—and I hated myself for thinking about it.
Another lash landed across my burning bottom.
“I’ll obey,” I sobbed. The words came out muffled against the seat cushion, broken by hitching breaths. “I’ll obey, I can—please—I’ll hold still, I’ll take my clothes off, I’ll—”
“Say it clearly,” Giovanna said.