Chapter 23
Henrik
The sharing of a bed thrall always provoked conflict in me. From Sven I had learned the wisdom of our elders: that such conflict, in the end, tempered both a warrior’s natural dominance and a girl’s natural submission.
On the screen, Sven’s pale eyes had moved from me to Ilsa and back again.
“You are right to do this,” he said. His voice carried the solemn quality it always had in making pronouncements for the men who followed him.
“To share her certifies the claim. Every warrior who has seen his bed thrall serve another man of the brotherhood has done what the longship demanded of him. He has demonstrated that his claim is not a weakness but a strength. That he has trained her well enough to give her away and take her back.” He paused.
“Leo Aetnaeus is a leo of the Guard. Bellatrix Hestiaea serves the Guard’s purposes.
They are not of our brotherhood, but the principle holds across traditions.
” His eyes found me again. “You know this.”
“I know it,” I said.
“I did it myself,” Sven said, “with my Mary. In the Central Mithraeum in New York. I shared her with Leo Marmareus himself, before the pit and the eternal fire, with the full rite observed.” A pause.
“She came back to me afterwards more fully mine than she had been before. That is always the way of it, when the girl is truly a bed thrall… a v?lva even… and not merely a possession.”
Bruno, at the head of the table, made a small, growling sound deep in his chest that might have been agreement or merely acknowledgment. Giovanna said nothing, but her dark eyes seemed to focus more intently, as if she had moved from anticipation to preparation.
I looked at Ilsa. She had her gaze fixed on some point on the stone floor between her bare feet, and her hands were clasped before her.
Her fetching braid had loosened somewhat in sleep, and strands of platinum hair fell across her cheek.
The collar sat at her throat. The belt girded her at her waist. She was breathing with a careful shallowness that told me she had heard and understood every word, and that her scholarly mind was at this moment engaged in a ferocious and entirely futile attempt to reason its way out of the helpless mix of pleasure and discomfort that her body already knew would soon befall her.
I looked at Giovanna. “Bind her for the sharing, Bellatrix, if you would.”
Giovanna rose from her chair in a single fluid movement, smoothing her jacket.
She crossed to the far wall of the control room, where I had noted on my initial inspection that a bench had been positioned flush against the stone—not the kind of bench from the chambers above, carved into the stone, but something purpose-built for this room’s more specific requirements.
Movable, narrower, lower. With fittings at each corner and along its length that required no explanation.
She took hold of it and drew it away from the wall, positioning it at a deliberate angle to the center of the room—to the table, to the monitors, to Sven’s watchful face on the large screen. A practical angle. An angle that served multiple audiences simultaneously.
I held the leash out toward her, watching Ilsa’s face as I did it.
My fuck toy’s brow furrowed, and I saw a wave of pink come and go in her face.
Giovanna took the leash from my hand without ceremony, and the transfer felt, as it always did, like a special kind of statement… indeed, a demonstration.
Giovanna led Ilsa to the bench. The leash drew taut in a small, telling way as they crossed the room, Ilsa’s bare feet slowing without quite stopping, her body registering what the bench was before her mind had apparently finished working out how to respond.
Giovanna waited, her patience making clear to me that she had waited out considerably more determined resistance than this, and Ilsa’s feet resumed their movement.
“On your back,” Giovanna said, when they reached it. Her voice carried no cruelty and no warmth; purely professional, the voice of a woman giving a direction she expects to be followed. “Lie down.”
Ilsa shook her head. The motion was small and almost involuntary, accompanied by a sound through her nose that was not quite a whimper and not quite a protest. Her hands came together before her, the wrist cuffs clicking softly as her fingers found each other.
Giovanna’s hand moved to Ilsa’s bottom with a precise, unhurried placement.
Not a blow. Simply a reminder, the palm resting against the marks from the mastix with a pressure that communicated clearly what it did not need to say aloud, cupping the pert cheeks at the center to tell my bed thrall that her master had authorized the use of her body this way, by others.
“Do you need me to fetch the mastix, columba?”
* * *
Ilsa
I realized that at some point I had started to cry. The tears came without warning, the way so many new realities had come into my life since the café.
I lay down on the bench because Giovanna’s palm on my bottom had told me I would, and because some part of me that had been awake since I had laid eyes on the mosaic of the Worldtree understood that lying down was simply what happened next.
The leather surface received me, cool against my shoulder blades, and I stared up at the curved stone ceiling and let the tears run sideways into my hair.
Giovanna moved with the efficiency of someone who had done this many times.
She unclipped the leash from my collar and hung it from a hook on the wall.
Then she went to a cabinet set into the far wall.
She returned with a by-now-familiar array of sturdy leather straps, dark and supple with use.
She set them on the table, near the bench, without looking at me.
Then she began to bind me, as her nymphobus had bound me on the coffee table the previous day—though it felt now like an age of the world had elapsed since then.
With the straps, my mistress anchored the rings already attached to my leathers: she bound my belt to the top of the bench first, and then she drew my wrists up and out to the corners above my head, pulling the straps taut until my arms lay extended and useless.
She folded my calves and bound my ankles to my thighs with short straps, only two or three inches in length.
Then she moved to my thighs, raising my knees toward my chest and spreading them wide, so that I fell open with a thoroughness that made me close my eyes in mortification. Fresh tears spilled onto my cheekbones.
Then she put a firm cushion behind my head, so that I couldn’t turn my face away at all—couldn’t look anywhere but up and slightly forward, down the length of my own body.
I lay motionless, spread, and displayed, and I was crying, and I couldn’t stop.
“There,” Giovanna said, to the men who had observed my binding in silence. She stepped back to survey her work with the expression of a woman checking a column of figures.
I heard the leo’s footsteps moving around the bench.
I felt his attention before I saw him come into my field of vision—a prickling awareness on the exposed skin between my thighs, at the small, bared ring of my anus, everywhere that the position Giovanna had arranged me in offered up for inspection.
He stood at the foot of the bench and looked, taking his time about it, with his hands clasped behind his back.
His amber eyes moved over me with a quality I could only describe as professional appreciation.
“Magnusson,” he said to Henrik, in a voice that carried a note of genuine acknowledgment beneath its habitual precision. “You are a lucky man. That’s a very pretty little cunt, and the anus looks just like a bud ready for plucking.”
The heat that went through my body at those words was so complete and so immediate that it seemed to arrive everywhere at once: in my face, in my chest, between my thighs, in the soles of my feet.
I chewed my lower lip, stared at the ceiling, and felt the tears continue their sideways course into my hair.
I heard the sound of a zipper.
My eyes moved before I could stop them, drawn by the sound the way the eye is drawn by movement in peripheral vision, by pure animal reflex.
Leo Aetnaeus stood at the foot of the bench.
He had his right hand at the front of his trousers and he drew his cock free with matter-of-fact ease, as if he had done it in professional contexts before and found nothing remarkable about the setting.
His penis was large and already fully hard.
The sight of its rigid length made my breath come in a sharp, audible pull through my nose.
“Keep your eyes on the leo’s tól, Ilsa.” Henrik’s voice came from my left, measured and calm. “It is an essential sign of respect in a bed thrall. Look at the manhood that rules over you.”
I looked. I had no choice—the cushion held my head in a position that made looking away a physical impossibility.
Even if it hadn’t, though, I understood from my master’s tone that this was not a direction I could afford to disobey.
I would be punished if he caught me trying to move my eyes elsewhere, or even closing them for too long.
So I looked at the huge, jutting thing. The tears kept falling as Leo Aetnaeus stepped forward, brandishing his phallus in his hand.
The realization that my Herra’s command rendered me unable to see what the leo was looking at sent a new blush to my face; I didn’t even know whether it seemed more shameful for him to look at my face as he used me, or only down at the place where his hardness would enter me.
Then the blunt, warm head of him moved down between my inner lips with a slow, deliberate stroke that made my hips try to shift and find that they couldn’t.
He did it again. And again. The motion seemed assessing and exploratory, as if he meant to learn the topography of my pussy before he committed to using it for his pleasure.
I watched him do it, because the cushion and my master’s instruction left me no alternative, and the watching made everything worse and better simultaneously, in the strange way that everything in this place seemed designed to make things at once more abjectly degrading and more helplessly pleasurable.
Sven’s voice reached me from the monitor, then.
He spoke in what I recognized, with the part of my mind that never entirely stopped being a scholar, as a slightly more formal register than his ordinary one—measured, deliberate, with the quality of someone giving voice to a tradition rather than a personal preference.
“Make the slut beg, brother Henrik,” he said. “Make her ask for what her little fisse needs.”
Henrik came to stand beside the bench, close enough that I could see him in my peripheral vision without moving my eyes from where he had directed them. “What do you need, Ilsa?” he asked in a voice that seemed to have gravel in it.
The question was so simple. So direct. And so entirely, devastatingly unanswerable, because the only true answer was the one I had to give, the one my body had been building toward since the leo’s first slow stroke between my wet, spread lips.
“I need—” My voice broke.
I felt the heat of the Guardsman’s cock against me, present and insistent and waiting with the same terrible patience my master had applied to everything.
“I need… please, Herra… I… I need…”
The head of it pressed against the wrinkled hood that felt like the center of my being. I cried out.
“I need the leo’s cock inside my fisse!”
The words bounced off the curved stone ceiling and came back to me sounding like someone I barely recognized.
Leo Aetnaeus placed his right hand flat on my inner thigh, steadying himself, and with his left he positioned himself.
He pressed forward just enough to lodge the broad head of his penis at the entrance to my vagina, and I felt my whole body contract around the point of contact with a helpless, shuddering welcome.
Then he moved his left hand to my right thigh, and he thrust hard.
I cried out, wordlessly this time. The soreness from the night—from the two times my master had used me, and from the virginity I had given up against the cell’s stone floor—met the leo’s hard entry.
The two sensations folded together into something that my nervous system processed as pain and as a compounding, mortifying arousal in equal measure.
His manhood felt huge, perhaps as large as Henrik’s, and the stretch of accommodating him renewed every shameful awareness I had been carrying since the morning.
“Tight,” the leo said, above me, to my master. His voice had lost some of its precision, roughened at the edges. “Very tight.” He thrust again, settling deeper, and I arched against the straps with a sob. “Thank you for the loan of this cunt, Magnusson. I am in your debt.”