Chapter 14 #2
The crack of the first spank echoed off the curved stone walls of the cell like a thunderclap. The pain was intense and immediate. It felt very different from the mastix: broader and more total, a blaze of heat across my whole bottom that seemed to radiate inward.
I cried out.
The second spank landed before the sound had finished leaving my throat.
The third followed so quickly that my cry for the second became the cry for the third, merged into one ragged, broken sound that I did not recognize as mine until it had already escaped.
I hung from the iron posts and sobbed. The pain spread through my bottom in waves that matched my heartbeat, humiliating and to my abject dismay not entirely unlike the warmth from the bride saddle, from the pendant, from the deep roots of the tree.
“How may I please you, Master?” The words came out broken and wet with tears.
I meant every one of them in a way that would have horrified me this morning at the café.
They came from the same place the warmth came from.
From somewhere far below the part of me that had three years of graduate school, two journal publications, and a firm opinion about the methodology problems in Bronze Age Scandinavian scholarship.
He released my waist. For a moment there was only the sound of my crying and the torchlight through the barred window and the pain in my bottom.
“I may be from elsewhere, but I endorse your mistress’s idea that for a columba like you, questions are useless,” he said, and his voice had changed—softer now, something in it that I couldn’t name, some quality of patience that felt different from Giovanna’s instruction.
“You will be told what you need to know, lille en. I promise you that.” A pause.
“In good time, when I decide you are ready.”
I heard him move. His footsteps went around me, unhurried, and I tracked the sound with every nerve I had, my wet face turning instinctively even though the posts allowed me almost no movement.
He came to stand before me.
I had thought I understood what I feared, coming into this cell.
I had catalogued my anxiety with the systematic thoroughness of a researcher: the unknown organization, the leash, the restraints, the punishment, the master Giovanna had promised me.
I had thought I had prepared myself for the sight of a man.
I had not prepared myself for this man.
He was naked but for an iron bracelet on his left wrist, dark metal engraved with runes I recognized with a lurch of my scholarly heart as Elder Futhark, like the wunjo on my pendant: older than the inscription in the mosaic, older than the cavern’s carvings, the original alphabet of a world that had been ancient when the Normans had come to Sicily.
The bracelet sat on his wrist with the ease of something worn so long it had become part of the body.
I couldn’t read the runes, but I felt certain they carried some heavy meaning.
The rest of him—I tried to look at his face first, I genuinely tried, and I managed it for perhaps two seconds before the sheer bodily fact of him overwhelmed my intentions.
Broad-shouldered like the warriors in the limestone carvings, as if their artist had worked from life to depict a direct ancestor of the man before me.
Close-cropped blond hair. A neatly trimmed beard. A scar above his right eyebrow that gave his face a quality the carved warriors had also possessed: not cruelty exactly, but the absolute absence of any pretense about what kind of man he was.
His cock.
I had gotten too good a look at the vibrator Giovanna had used on me, and I had understood it as a preparation, a training tool, an introduction to scale. I understood now that it had been merely a shadow of my new master’s endowment.
My mouth went dry. My eyes went wide. Something happened in the very center of my body that was equal parts terror and a helpless, shameful, liquefying want that had no relationship to any decision I had ever consciously made.
I flicked my eyes upward and saw that he was studying my face as I looked at him. I saw in his expression something that wasn’t cruelty or amusement, but rather the knowing confidence of a man who had seen this exact expression before and found it entirely appropriate.
I thought of the carvings. The women kneeling. The women on the saddles. The women’s faces with their expressions I had refused to name.
I thought of one of the warriors carved in the limestone opposite the longship chamber’s entrance, his shoulders exactly as broad as this man’s shoulders, his hand extended in the gesture of claiming.
I had stood before that carving with my phone raised and my academic detachment firmly in place and told myself I was documenting an artifact.
I felt like the artifact now. I understood it with a clarity so absolute it seemed to ring in the stone around me like a struck bell.
He stepped forward. He raised his right hand and with two fingers he brushed the tears from my left cheek, a gesture so unexpectedly gentle that fresh tears immediately replaced the ones he had cleared immediately.
“There,” he said softly. “There you are. My new bed thrall. My kneppet?j.”
I wasn’t completely sure of my Danish, but the context told me I had it correct. Kneppet?j… fuck toy.