Chapter 7
Ilsa
I lifted my face from the leather. My cheeks were soaked.
My nose was running. I was bent over a chair in a room in Palermo with my jeans and panties around my knees, welts rising across my bare bottom, and a man’s hand on my neck, and I choked out words in a voice that sounded nothing like the voice of a doctoral candidate with two journal publications.
“I can obey you. I’ll stay in position. I’ll take off my clothes when you tell me to.”
Nymphobus Oceanus’s hands lifted. He stepped back. I heard the soft sound of his shoes on the floor as he returned to his station by the door, and then there was only Giovanna behind me and the air moving across the burning terrain of my punished bottom.
I stayed in position. My elbows on the seat. My face forward. I held still because I had said I would hold still, and because some part of me—a part I was going to have to reckon with at some point, when I could think again—understood that this was the only path through.
“Good,” Giovanna said. There was no warmth in it, exactly, but her voice did hold acknowledgment. My body responded to that acknowledgment with a shameful rush of heat down where I least wanted to be warm at that moment.
“Now,” she said. “You will learn the only question that is not useless.”
The mastix landed. I gasped, my fingers clawing at the cushion, but I held position. I held.
“The only question,” Giovanna said, “that you may ever ask…”
The second stroke. My breath left me in a shuddering cry.
“…while I am training you…”
The third. I sobbed openly now, my shoulders shaking, my face wet, the welts layered atop welts in a geography of fire that I could feel with excruciating specificity.
“…is How may I serve you, mistress?”
The fourth stroke landed, and through my sobbing I heard the words settle into the room like something that had always been there, waiting to be spoken.
“…or, sometime soon…”
The fifth stroke followed with the same measured spacing, and I understood at a bodily level, deeper than anything to which my mind consented to know it, that she had not merely told me a phrase.
She meant to install it inside me. To embed it in the same neural pathways that the mastix seemed to rewrite with each stroke, so that the words and the pain and the lesson would be fused together in my memory, inseparable.
“…How may I serve you, Master?” Giovanna intoned, and the sixth and final stroke fell.
Master. Sometime soon. Oh… oh, no…
I lay over the chair and wept. The pain seemed a living thing across my bottom and thighs, pulsing with my heartbeat, but—and this was the thing I could not look at directly, the thing that terrified me more than the whipping itself—beneath it lay the warmth.
The same warmth I had felt over the rowing bench and the bride saddle and…
and in my grandmother’s pendant. It spread from the welts inward.
It settled low in my belly, and I recognized it because I had spent an evening in a limestone cavern learning its precise character.
Giovanna set the mastix down somewhere. I heard the small sound of it being placed on a surface with care.
“Say it,” she said.
My lips moved against the leather. I tasted salt.
“How may I serve you, Mistress?” I whispered.
The silence that followed had a different quality from the silences that had preceded it.
Something in the room had changed. I could feel the huge man still standing by the door, a quiet presence, I could feel Giovanna behind me, I could feel the welts on my bottom cooling very slightly in the air, and I could feel—God help me—the slickness between my thighs that had nothing to do with tears.
“Stand up,” Giovanna said. “Face me.”
I pushed myself up from the chair. My arms shook. I turned, and the movement of my jeans and panties bunched around my knees made me stumble slightly. I caught myself and stood there, looking at Giovanna through wet lashes. I felt the pendant settle against my chest, and it did feel warm.
Her face was beautiful and completely composed. She studied me the way she had studied me at the café, but the appraisal had changed. It was no longer speculative. It had become proprietary.
“Now,” she said. “Take off your clothes.”
I took off my clothes.
I didn’t take them off in the slow, careful, self-deceiving way I’d stripped in the cavern, to ride the Viking bride saddle for what I’d somehow managed to persuade myself would be research purposes.
This time I took them off because Giovanna had told me to, and because the welts across my bottom had made the meaning of my obedience very clear.
I pushed my jeans and panties the rest of the way down and stepped out of them. I pulled my shirt over my head. I reached back and unhooked my beige bra with fingers that only trembled slightly. I stood in front of Giovanna and the silent nymphobus and let them look at me.
Giovanna gazed for a long moment. Her expression remained proprietary, even acquisitive.
“Is the pendant special?” she asked, the gentleness of her voice surprising me.
I nodded, feeling my brow furl as I wondered what the question, and my answer, implied for the pendant and for me.
“Give it to me,” Giovanna said. “I promise to take care of it and to return it to you when you may wear it again.”
I swallowed hard. I didn’t know why I trusted her, and yet I did. I reached behind my neck and undid the clasp. The little ivory disk with its rune did feel warm as I handed it to the gorgeous woman into whose power it seemed I’d come.
She examined it, a little smile playing across her lips.
“A Viking rune,” she murmured. “How appropriate.”
A chill went down my spine. I had known, deep down, that my meeting with this woman and the insane, humiliating, terrifying, painful things that had followed must have something to do with my crazy visit to the Norse cavern.
This confirmation, without any indication of what on earth, or on Yggdrasil, it meant, sent my mind reeling.
Something about the sheer incongruousness of the moment, or perhaps about my utter incomprehension, made me babble.
“It’s the Elder Futhark,” I told her. “It was my grandmother’s, though she never told anyone how she got it. It’s… the rune, I mean… it’s wunjo, kind of a W, or sometimes a V…”
“Shh,” Giovanna said. “As I said, it’s appropriate that you have come wearing it, and it is appropriate that I have made you remove it.”
“Why…” I started, but the look in my new mistress’s eyes told me of the danger before I could reach a second word.
Questions are useless.
I watched her drop my grandmother’s pendant into her pocket.
Then she turned to the panel in the wall from which she had taken the mastix.
I hadn’t understood what it was when she’d first opened it to retrieve the horrid whip, but now I watched her work a recessed latch and remove what looked like a series of black leather belts of varying lengths.
“Arms out a bit,” she said, “and your feet at shoulder width.”
My eyes went wide enough that I could feel them bulging a little as I began to understand.
I would get a collar, yes… but I counted at least a half dozen strips of leather in Giovanna’s hands, each with a buckle.
My chest heaved as I tried to keep myself from bolting toward the door and earning myself more punishment.
I bit my lip to keep from asking a question, because my certainty had only grown that saying anything but How may I please you, Mistress posed just as great a threat to my poor bottom as trying to escape.
Tears of humiliation and overwhelm started to run from my eyes even as down below I felt myself clench, mortifyingly, at the very sight of the restraints my terrifying new mistress held.
I held my body as she’d instructed, and I had to suppress a whimper as Giovanna began to buckle the cuffs around my wrists.
“These are columba’s leathers,” Giovanna said, as she buckled the first cuff around my right wrist. It was about an inch and a half wide and very stout, with a black metal D ring fitted into it.
I swallowed hard as I thought of the iron rings on the rowing bench of the longship in the cavern.
The beautiful, frightening woman’s touch felt impersonal and expert.
“You’ll wear these until your initial training is complete. ”
I didn’t ask what columba meant. I knew Latin well enough. Columba. Dove. I had to work very hard not to think about what the word implied—what it said about the category into which I had been placed, the category of the small, mild, domesticated thing that belonged inside someone’s hands.
She put cuffs on my wrists and ankles, then around my thighs just above my knees.
Then a belt with D rings at either side went around my waist. Despite my attempts to think of Latin quotations I had learned in college that featured the word columba, my mind instead wanted to imagine how the rings on the cuffs and the belt could be used to keep me positioned in various absolutely humiliating postures—positions in which I could be…
None of the verbs that came to mind reassured me. Worse, each of them brought a fresh wave of heat both to my cheeks and down there, between my legs, where Giovanna had already promised, in her matter-of-fact way, to bare me.
Positions in which I could be used… enjoyed… punished…
Fucked.
At last she stood before me, holding what I knew must be my collar.
“This is a special moment for you, columba,” she said, “though you still understand so little. Remember the feeling, and cherish it as you learn about your new life and your new duties.”
I couldn’t keep back the sob that rose in my chest as she reached the black leather collar, so much less elegant than her own, but functionally the same symbol of submission, toward me.
I smelled the spice of her perfume, and to my distress I smelled my own mineral scent, too—the same shameful fragrance I knew I had left in the Viking bride chamber.
Giovanna buckled the collar at the back of my neck, and then she stepped back.
“Nymphobus,” she said quietly.
The man she had called Oceanus moved to the coffee table. With a swallow I noticed something about the table I hadn’t seen before: it had fittings, clips attached to retractable straps that the huge man drew out a little way and then clamped in place.
He turned to me and rose. His hands were on me an instant later, not unkindly but with the same expertise with which he had positioned my elbows on the chair seat.
I cried out as he hoisted me into the air with no apparent effort, and then I found myself on my back on the low leather-covered table with my legs raised and held apart by the cuffs at my ankles and thighs that the nymphobus had quickly connected to the table’s straps and clips.
He secured my waist to the table with more straps, clipped to my belt, and then my wrists to the belt.
I stared at the ceiling. My legs were spread and raised and I could feel the air everywhere that air had never been, in any context involving another person’s presence, in the entire twenty-four years of my life.
The welts on my bottom, my virgin pussy, even my cringing anus, all so visible that hot waves of mortification seemed to travel from my toes to my scalp.
I blinked, and my lips parted without a sound as above me, upside down in my vision, Giovanna hiked up the narrow skirt of her linen suit and reached below the hem.
Her movements were calm and unhurried. I heard myself let out a tiny, whining noise from the back of my throat as she drew her lacy black panties down.
She stepped out of them and set them aside, and I had one moment of absolute incomprehension before she moved over the table and lowered herself onto my face.
She was waxed smooth, down there. That was the first thing I understood, in the sudden, total intimacy of her warm, wet pussy settling against my mouth and nose. I couldn’t breathe except through her, and the sound I made against her—muffled, involuntary—seemed to cause her no particular concern.
Giovanna’s pussy smelled and tasted so… so naughty that it made me feel faint.
Dark and briny… it reminded me again of the Viking cavern, and my own scent mingling with the air from the sea.
The wrinkly lips felt so warm on my tongue that I knew with a needy clench of my own sheath that she had gotten aroused when whipping me and restraining me.
Then her hand found its way between my legs.
Even through the shock of my position and the pressure of her above me, the touch of her fingers against my pussy made my hips jerk against the restraints.
She explored with the same impersonal expertise she had brought to the fitting of the leathers, and I heard her make a small sound of what I could only interpret as professional satisfaction.
“Lovely,” she said conversationally, as though commenting on the quality of an objet d’art.
Her fingers moved with a lightness that was almost worse than pressure would have been.
“Completely intact. And so very responsive.” A pause in which I felt her shift her weight slightly above me.
“You’re very pretty here, columba. The master who fucks this little cunt first will find extreme pleasure inside you. ”
Then she ground herself against my face, slowly and thoroughly, and the world contracted to the leather of the table beneath my back and the warmth above me and her fingers, still tracing their light, maddening path.
She lifted. Just enough. The air came back.
“Tell me,” she said, her voice entirely unchanged from its normal register, as though she were asking me about my research interests at an academic reception, “how you found the cavern.”