Chapter 9
Ilsa
I heard Nymphobus Oceanus move across the room.
I heard the panel in the wall open with a soft mechanical sound, undoubtedly the same panel from which Giovanna had retrieved the mastix and the leathers.
I heard him take something out. I couldn’t see what it was from my position between my terrifying mistress’s legs.
Giovanna rose from above me and took a step backwards. The air was cold on my wet face and I blinked at the ceiling, trying to regulate my breathing, trying to reassemble a composed self from the wreckage of the last hour.
The nymphobus came into my field of vision and handed the object to Giovanna.
Blood rushed to my cheeks, driving away the momentary cool.
It was a huge, hard, black penis. It looked enormous.
Matte black and shaped with an anatomical frankness that left no room for ambiguity either about its function or about its inspiration.
The proportions of it made my throat close.
I thought, with the hysterical precision of a mind grasping for scholarly footing, of the Viking warriors in the carvings.
I wondered, crazily, how much observational work the artists of the cavern—or whoever had crafted this terrifying artificial phallus—had done.
“She’s withholding,” Giovanna said, not to me. She moved back into my peripheral vision, and I noticed that she had straightened her linen skirt. “She found the passage, of course: we knew that. She found the chambers, which we also knew. She’s telling me only what she assumes I already know.”
I said nothing. My eyes had moved back to the ceiling as my heart raced and my whole body surged with heat.
“I think,” Giovanna continued, with the tone of someone stating a mild professional hypothesis, “that something happened to her in there.”
The silence that followed felt very deliberate. I kept my face still.
Giovanna did something with the dildo. I heard rather than saw the motion, because an instant later a soft hum arose, low and steady, and I realized with a tiny whine that the thing was also a vibrator.
The noise changed the quality of the air in the room in a way that I couldn’t have articulated…
any more than I could have ignored it and its mortifying implications.
She moved further around the coffee table, to its foot, and then her hand and the horrid toy had gone between my legs.
The hum was no longer in the air but right up against my most sensitive place, and I made a sound that I had been trying not to make since the moment I had begun to understand what would happen here at the baffling, terrifying Ostia Agency.
The sensation felt nothing like Giovanna’s fingers.
Her fingers had been precise and knowing and occasionally maddening in their lightness.
This sensation was relentless. It didn’t pause to ask questions.
It didn’t withdraw to punish omissions. It simply continued, pressing against my clit with a stimulation that made my hips rock against the tension of the straps clipped to my belt, in a humiliating rhythm I couldn’t control.
“Tell me what happened in the chambers,” Giovanna said.
“I looked at them,” I managed. “I told you. The furniture. The preservation—”
“Did you touch anything?”
My jaw tightened. “I examined the construction. Structurally. The joinery was—”
“Did you sit on the… furniture?”
The vibrator moved. It shifted its angle, found a different point of pressure that made the first one feel like a rehearsal. My vision went briefly white at the edges. A low moan emerged from my chest.
“I sat on the—” I stopped. I had been about to say rowing bench. I recalculated. “I sat down. In the main cavern. To rest. I’d been on my feet for—”
“On the ship?”
The word landed with a precision that told me she knew.
She knew I had been on the ship. Had the sensors told them that, or could she just guess that about me?
The thought that Giovanna, my new mistress, could intuit the naughty things I had done made my pussy clench around the horrid, teasing knob at the tip of the vibrator.
“Yes…” I gasped. “Only… only b-briefly…”
The artificial penis moved again. Inside my vagina, back and forth a little. Then lower. It touched the dark, forbidden place my own trembling fingers had found in the cavern, the place I had been trying not to think about since the moment Giovanna had first mentioned the bridal chambers.
I didn’t come, much as part of me simply wanted to give in to the degradation and the need and the sheer pleasure. Something else happened, though: a sound in the back of my skull, like a frequency too low to be heard becoming briefly audible.
The warmth of the pendant against my breastbone, though I was no longer wearing the pendant; I had given it to my terrifying mistress.
The warmth was there anyway, because it was not the pendant’s warmth, I understood in a flash of terrible clarity, it had never been the pendant’s warmth, it was something else entirely—
The roots going down. The branches going up. The cold between them that was not unpleasant.
“Oh, no,” I whispered.
“Tell me what happened,” Giovanna said.
The tree was there. It was there the way it had been in the bride chamber; not replacing the room but overlaid upon it, the white walls visible through the immensity of the trunk, the ceiling lights visible through the canopy.
I was on it. I was moving along its branches, propelled somehow by the lingering pain from the mastix and the abject degradation of the pleasure from the vibrator against my anus.
I was on the tree, and the tree was everywhere, and Giovanna’s voice came from a very great distance.
“Tell me what happened on the ship.”
The branches moved around me with a cold and patient indifference to my need, to the vibrator pressed against my most private place, to the straps that held me open on the leather table.
I was in two places at once: spread and bound and burning in a white room in Palermo, and also moving along a bough of something so vast that Palermo, Sicily, the whole Mediterranean basin seemed like a detail in its bark.
“I—” The word came out broken. “I touched things.”
“What things?”
The vibrator shifted. The low hum found a new register against my anus and the tree lurched sideways in my vision, the branches swaying, I felt the orgasm gathering at the base of my spine with a terrible inevitability, and I understood with sudden, absolute clarity that Giovanna would not let me have it.
She would bring me to the very edge and hold me there until I told her everything, then she would perhaps bring me to the edge again, the tree would come back each time, and eventually I would give her what she wanted because I was twenty-four years old and had never been touched by anyone until this afternoon and my body had apparently been waiting its entire existence for this specific, humiliating circumstance to undo it completely.
“On the ship,” I gasped. “On the rowing bench. I—I lay down on it.”
“And?”
The hum intensified. My hips rocked against the strap. The tree was still there, overlaid on the white ceiling, its canopy spreading beyond the walls.
“I touched myself,” I said. The words came out in a rush, academic composure finally and entirely gone, my face so hot I thought the leather beneath my head must be scorching. “On the bench. I touched myself and I—I nearly—”
“And in the chambers?” Giovanna’s voice was very quiet now. The quiet of someone who already knows the answer and is simply waiting for the courtesy of confirmation.
“I rode it.” A sob broke through the words. “I rode the… the saddle. The bride saddle. I found it and I… I took my clothes off and I mounted it and I—”
“Did you experience orgasm?”
The clinical phrasing made me want to disappear through the table. “Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, I… please. Please, Mistress, please let me—”
The vibrator pressed harder against the shameful, shockingly sensitive place it had found, and the climax rose and rose and crested at a height that felt like the upper branches of the tree itself.
Giovanna held it there, held me there, on the exact precipice of the thing I needed most, and I heard myself making sounds I had no words for.
“Please,” I sobbed. “Please, I’ll tell you anything, I’ll… please, I need to come, please—”
Then, from somewhere in the building, a chime sounded. Clear and single and businesslike: the sound of a phone, a door, or some internal signal I had no context for.
Giovanna’s hand stilled.
I made a sound of pure, wretched despair.
She withdrew the vibrator entirely. I heard her stand, heard the small sounds of her straightening her jacket, and then she appeared at the edge of my vision, composed and unhurried, and held the vibrator out toward the nymphobus.
“Hold her here,” she said to him. “I won’t be long.”
She left. The door clicked shut.
Nymphobus Oceanus stood somewhere at the periphery of my vision, a large, quiet presence. The hum of the vibrator had ceased. The room was very still. I lay on the table with my legs spread and my whole body one long, unresolved ache. I stared at the ceiling trying to remember who I was.
“Please,” I said. I hadn’t intended to speak, but the word came out anyway, stripped of any academic dignity I might once have possessed.
“Please, can you… the straps? You could just undo the straps? Or—” I stopped.
Gathered myself. Tried once more. “Please. I need… I can’t stay like this. Please just—”
“No.” His voice sounded low and unhurried. Not unkind, but with the quality of a door that is simply closed; not locked against me personally, just closed.
“She’s been gone a minute,” I said. My voice had taken on a quality I recognized with shame as pleading. “She won’t know. You could just—”
“She would know.” A pause. “She always knows. Much more important, if you think you’re entitled to an orgasm, you have a great deal to learn, columba.”
I pressed my eyes shut. The warmth between my legs was maddening. The welts on my bottom throbbed with my pulse. “Please,” I said, hating myself, “please just… it would only take a second for the vibrator. You could just let me… I just need…”
He moved. I heard him come around the table toward my head, and I turned to look at him with what I suspected was a terribly transparent expression of hope, which quickened when I saw that he held the artificial phallus.
Instead of bringing it over my body and lowering it between my thighs as I expected, though, the huge man crouched beside the table and brought the matte black tip of the thing to my lips.
“Open,” he said.
I stared at him. “That’s not—”
“Open your mouth, columba.” Still the same unhurried quality. “You’ll need to learn to do this properly, and soon. You may as well begin now. Taste yourself, and start to learn how to please your master.”
The blunt tip pressed against my lower lip, and I understood that this was what I had instead of what I wanted. The choice between compliance and refusal was not really a choice at all, not with my wrists clipped to my belt and my ankles spread by the table’s straps. I opened my mouth.
The silicone was smooth, faintly cool, and tasted of my helpless, mortifying need: the flavor of the naughty scent I had added to the air of the Viking bridal chamber. My cheeks burned as the huge man guided the plastic phallus past my lips slowly until I had it atop my tongue, pressing down.
“Wider,” he said. “Relax your jaw. You’ll need to learn to accommodate more than this.”
I made a sound against the thing in my mouth that expressed, I hoped, something of my opinion of this instruction. He seemed not to notice.
“A man’s cock will be more demanding,” he said, in the same tone with which one might say a man’s handshake will be firmer or a man’s stride will be longer.
“Considerably more demanding, depending on the master who chooses you. You will be expected to receive him without difficulty.” A brief pause.
“You should begin practicing your breathing now.”
I breathed through my nose with my jaw stretched around the vibrator’s girth and thought about the carvings in the cavern, the women on their knees with their heads guided forward by patient Viking hands, and the specific expression on their carved faces that I had spent an hour refusing to name, and I understood with a lurch of my stomach that I was now on that side of the image.
I was the woman on her knees. I was the woman with her head guided, her mouth occupied, and her expression doing the thing I had refused to name.
I closed my eyes and breathed through my nose as the enormous artificial penis had its way with my mouth, and I waited for Giovanna to come back.
She came back perhaps five minutes later, though it felt longer. The door clicked open, her footsteps crossed the marble floor, and Nymphobus Oceanus withdrew the vibrator from my mouth without ceremony and straightened up. I closed my mouth and stared at the ceiling.
Giovanna appeared above me. She looked at my face for a moment with the same assessing quality she had brought to everything, and then she said, in a tone entirely different from any she had used in the last hour, “Did you discover anything unusual about yourself while you were in the sanctuary?”
I opened my mouth to say no. The word was right there. It was a perfectly good word, a short word, a word that might close this particular line of inquiry and give me back some small portion of the self I had arrived in Palermo with this morning.
“I had a vision,” I said instead.