Chapter 15
Ilsa
My jaw slackened, and my lips parted. No sound emerged.
He didn’t wait for sound. His hands came to my face first, cradling it as if he meant to measure it for something.
My breath sped up until I felt certain I would hyperventilate.
He either didn’t notice or more likely didn’t care; his thumbs traced the lines of my cheekbones with a quality of attention I could only have described as proprietary.
Taking inventory. Learning the dimensions of what belonged to him now.
Then, to my dismay, his hands moved downward.
He cupped my breasts with both palms, and a terribly humiliating sound emerged from me.
He weighed the little mounds, lifting them slightly.
His thumbs passed over my nipples with a slow, circular pressure that made my arms pull against the cuffs at my wrists and my fingers curl around the iron posts for something more substantial to grip.
“Beautiful,” he said, and the word carried the same quality it had when he had spoken it behind me, assessing and appreciative at once.
He wasn’t flattering me. He was making a record.
“These are just as I like them.” His thumbs moved again and I made the sound again, shorter and more helpless. “Responsive. Perfect.”
I swallowed hard and stared at the curved stone wall above his shoulder. I tried to quiet my breathing.
He spent a long time on my breasts. Long enough that I began to understand that patience can be cruel, that a man who has decided to know every part of what he owns before he proceeds can use that decision as a form of harsh discipline.
The gorgeous blond man’s hands shaped and reshaped me, his fingers learning the weight and the sensitivity of me with a thoroughness that made my eyes fill again, not from pain but from the sheer, concentrated intimacy of being so entirely examined.
“You understand,” he said softly, his thumbs still moving, “that I am very pleased. That I consider myself fortunate.”
My fingers tightened on the posts.
“True, I would rather not initiate a new bed thrall here,” he continued. His right hand left my breast and traveled down the center of my stomach, and my muscles contracted involuntarily under his palm. “In a Roman cell, with Roman implements.”
His fingers found the newly bare skin of the little hill above the tender cleft of me, and I made a sound against my closed lips that escaped anyway.
“I would have preferred to bring you to our sanctuary, the one you found. Or even better to bring you North, to what is surely your homeland as it is mine. There I could break you in properly as a kneppet?j, on the bench and then on the bride saddle, with the longship and the fire and the proper rites.”
His fingers moved, exploring me with the same terrible patience with which he had done everything else since the moment he had entered my cell. I cried out, and my hips rocked forward against his hand in a way I couldn’t stop.
“I find, though, that I am not displeased with what your mistress has made of you with her very Roman preparation.”
“Please,” I whispered, even as my intellect raged at my body’s weakness.
“You are very wet,” he said, not as a reproach but as an observation, another thing to enter in his ledger.
His fingers moved with a particular, knowing pressure that made my knees buckle so deeply that for a moment the cuffs at my wrists held my full weight.
“Very ready. Very eager, even though I know your mind resists the idea.”
He withdrew his hand and I heard my whine… the small, humiliating sound of my body’s reluctance to do without even that light contact.
“That defiance of your own nature… it makes you extraordinary. And Bellatrix Hestiaea has enhanced that, just as I might have done in Rouen. She has readied you for your submission to your Herra.”
Again my mouth opened with a burning question, but the lingering handprints on my sore bottom stopped my speech. His words, though… Rouen and Herra. The Normans… the Norsemen…
And had he said our sanctuary? Was that in Rouen, of all places?
He crouched, and the sight of his powerful, naked body bending that way made my breathing speed up again. I watched him through wet lashes as he checked the ankle cuffs, ran his palms up the outsides of my calves, my thighs, as if satisfying himself about some structural question.
Then he rose again. I blinked, frowning, as he made his way to my right, where in a corner I hadn’t examined he found a small piece of furniture and picked it up. As he brought it back toward me, I understood it must be a very low stool of some kind, its top padded.
He set the thing down just in front of me. His gaze met mine as he rose, and I watched him evaluate my expression. I felt him assessing my curiosity, my acuity. The little crinkle that arose in the corners of his eyes, of unmistakable satisfaction, made a horribly unwelcome warmth rise in my chest.
How could that make me happy? I demanded of myself, and found no answer.
Then his hands went to the post on my right, adjusting something. He did the same thing on the left. As I blinked up at him, he moved those massive hands on my shoulders, and he pressed down.
“On your knees,” he said simply. With a hard swallow, I understood: a kneeling stool. The kind of thing found in religious places, where people worship.
You will worship him, here, won’t you? said the awful voice in my head. If you don’t, he will spank you, won’t he? Or he will use the mastix, as distasteful as he finds it…
Or does he have a Viking punishment strap with him?
I had no choice. The cuffs at my wrists slid down the posts as I descended, the iron rings to which Giovanna had clipped them free now, allowing the movement.
I understood that the posts had been designed for this, as well as to keep a girl standing with her arms raised; for a columba to kneel between them with her wrists still secured to the iron at her side, her hands able to grip the posts at whatever height her position required.
I knelt on the little stool and my fingers found the posts and gripped them.
I was eye level with his enormous, rigid penis. I refused to look at it. I looked up at his face instead. I tried to hold his gaze with every shred of dignity I still possessed, which I estimated at approximately none.
He looked down at me with an expression that I could only describe as satisfied. Not smug. Not cruel. The expression of a man who has arrived at a place he has been moving toward for some time, and finds it exactly as it should be.
Then he took his hardness in his right hand and began to use me.
The first contact was the blunt, warm head of him against my left cheekbone.
I flinched at the obscene contact and my fingers tightened on the posts.
He moved the big knob slowly, deliberately, as if mapping my face.
Across my cheek. Along my jaw. The bridge of my nose.
My forehead, tilting my face back slightly with the pressure of it.
My other cheek. My closed eyelids, which fluttered at the warm weight of the touch.
My face burned so hot that I wondered how the penis could still feel warm to me. I had never been so close to a man’s private parts, let alone felt a man leave trails of his lubricating moisture across my eyelids.
I breathed through my nose and thought about nothing, because thinking had become impossible.
“The Sons of Odin,” he said, his voice unhurried, as though he were beginning a lecture, “have kept the old ways for a very long time.” The head of his cock traced the line of my jaw again, downward toward my chin.
“Longer than the Pretorian Guard has kept theirs, though they would dispute this.” He paused.
I felt the pressure of him against my lower lip, not insistent yet, simply present.
“We are not Romans. We do not speak of civilization and its impositions.” A soft sound from his chest. “We speak of the sea. Of the tree. Of what a man takes and what a woman yields.”
My lips had parted again. I wasn’t sure when that had happened.
“Open further,” he said. Quietly. As if it were the most reasonable request in the world. “Put out your tongue. You will receive your Herra now.”
I opened my mouth with a whining whimper. With a surge of helpless need between my thighs at the sheer submissiveness of the childish gesture, I stuck my tongue out and curled it over my lower lip.
He introduced his manhood slowly, a degree of consideration in it that I hadn’t expected and wasn’t sure how to receive.
He laid the knob on my tongue and left it there.
My jaw stretched around the blunt head of him and I remembered what Nymphobus Oceanus had told me about breathing.
I breathed through my nose, my fingers gripping the iron posts hard enough that I could feel the cold of the metal in my knuckles.
“Good,” he said. His hand came to the back of my head, not forcing, simply resting there with a weight that communicated direction without coercion. “That’s very good, lille en. I am your Herra. I am Henrik Magnusson. You will call me Herra Henrik.”
I tried to think about breathing.
“The Sons of Odin were founded,” he continued, his voice carrying the slight roughness of a man making an effort at composure, “in the way that all brotherhoods of consequence are founded. By men who understood that something essential was being lost.”
Herra Henrik moved, a shallow, slow push over my tongue and into my mouth that made my eyes sting at the corners.
“In our case, the old understanding of what men are and what women are, and what passes between them that makes both of them more fully themselves.”
His hand on the back of my head held me still.
He thrust his hips forward, though with a gentle pressure.
I took him in better than I had supposed I might, because the posts under my hands were steady and I could grip them and breathe and receive him.
To my intellect’s horror, some part of me that had been building toward this since the bride saddle found the motion almost natural, though the stretch of my jaw and the weight of him on my tongue remained extraordinary.
“We have kept the sanctuaries. The longships. The bride saddles.” A pause in which his breathing changed, just slightly.
“The knowledge of what a v?lva is, and what she can do, when a warrior is there to discipline her and to use her fisse and her r?vhul properly, and to guide her that way to her true potential.”
He withdrew enough to let me breathe, and I drew a long, grateful pull of air through my nose. I felt him rest the head of his penis against my lower lip. The heat from his manhood radiated against my wet mouth.
“You had a vision on the bride saddle,” he said.
His thumb moved along the line of my jaw, tilting my face up toward his.
I looked at him. His eyes were pale, I realized; a gray that in the torchlight looked almost silver.
The scar above his eyebrow caught the light.
“Without a Son of Odin present to witness it—let alone to fuck you up into the branches of the Worldtree. Without anyone to hold you through it.” Something moved in his expression that seemed very different from the possessiveness I had seen a moment before.
Compassion? Care? “That tells me something very important about you.”
“What?” I whispered. The word came out before I could stop it, and I braced for his response.
But he didn’t reach down and around me to spank my bottom, as I had instantly feared. He looked at me for a long moment, the head of his cock resting warm against my lips, my hands gripping the cold iron posts, my knees on the kneeling stool of an ancient cell beneath a Sicilian city.
“That you were already looking for the tree,” he said.
“Before you ever found the cavern. Before you found the mosaic. You were already listening for it.” His thumb moved along my cheekbone.
“And the tree was listening back. So you will remain with us. We have arranged a prestigious fellowship for you at a Danish university. Your dig team and your doctoral advisor have been notified. Your advisor was very understanding, and congratulates you.”
Then his hand pressed gently at the back of my head, and I opened my mouth again. He pressed forward more deliberately this time, past the point he had reached before, and the sound I made around him had no scholarly content whatsoever.