Chapter 26
Henrik
I returned to the leo’s quarters Bruno had placed at my disposal and headed into the lavish bathroom, stripping off my robe as I entered.
I felt some reluctance to admit it to myself, but I wanted to get to the refectory as soon as I could.
I told myself it had more to do with my curiosity—and the need to build our knowledge of the Pretorian Guard’s customs—than with my growing interest in Ilsa.
I knew the truth, though: I wanted to watch over my bed thrall, and I wanted to see how her mistress fed and watered her.
The chamber, like everything in the Palermo mithraeum, had been arranged to communicate both luxury and command: volcanic stone, severe lines, excellent fixtures, linen with a thread count that would have pleased any guest in a Mayfair hotel.
I stood under the shower and let the hot water run over my shoulders and chest, washing away the last residues of sleep and the subtler residues of what I had done with Ilsa in the night.
I found myself thinking, as the water struck the back of my neck, about the way she had looked up at Sven’s image on the screen.
The tears drying on her face. The stubborn, intelligent set of her mouth.
The little flicker of pride she had not managed to conceal when she understood that the men in the room considered her unusual.
That pride would be useful in training her as a v?lva and a bed thrall, and in the end, whatever the destiny of this affection for her that it seemed I couldn’t push down, it would help me bring her to her full potential.
A girl like Ilsa could not simply be overpowered.
Of course she could be overpowered physically, but the more important issue lay at the conceptual level.
I would have to persuade her mind to accept the hierarchy, and her submission to it, not as an interruption to her intellect, but as the proper frame for it.
The Guard understood the need to subjugate gifted young women in their Roman way.
They sought to impose civilization upon feminine wildness.
We understood it differently, but perhaps not so as to create real conflict.
Giovanna’s methods had a rigor I respected, and the idea of Ilsa wearing her columba’s leathers in her heart intrigued me greatly.
Above all, my new kneppet?j’s Order of Ostia mistress had not a whit of sentimentality about her. In my judgment, honed by my service to the spirit of the North as a son of Odin, sentimentality was where many handlers of submissive young women failed.
I shut off the water, dried myself, and dressed with care.
Dark trousers, soft enough to read as informal but tailored close.
A pale shirt, open at the throat. A charcoal jacket with structure enough in the shoulders to flatter the body beneath it.
Loafers. Watch. No tie. The effect, in the mirror, was exactly what I intended: a man at ease in expensive surroundings, who did not need formality to establish rank.
A knock came just as I finished buttoning my cuffs.
When I opened the door, a lovely dark-haired young woman waited in the corridor, naked but for leathers almost identical to the ones in which Giovanna had bound Ilsa.
I thought I could tell that her collar was slightly narrower than Ilsa’s, though, and I wondered what it meant, even as I took in the beauty of the girl’s shapely breasts and the moving bareness of her pussy’s cleft with my customary Nordic frankness.
“Ave, domine,” she murmured in an Italian-accented voice, her eyes downcast to my feet. “I am Nupta Julia. May I guide you to the refectory?”
* * *
Ilsa
After she had released me from the bench in the control room, Giovanna helped me to my feet. My knees nearly buckled. The events of the last hour had left my limbs feeling boneless, and I experienced the constriction of the cuffs, collar, and belt acutely.
The soreness between my thighs announced itself the moment I bore my own weight again. Giovanna’s hand came to my elbow, firm and economical rather than kind, and with the other she clipped my leash back onto the ring in the front of my collar.
“Stand properly,” she said with quiet severity. “It does not befit a columba to slouch after serving her masters with her body so well.”
The compliment—if it even was a compliment—sent a humiliating warmth through my chest. I straightened.
My wrists still wore the cuffs. My collar still pressed at my throat.
I could feel Leo Aetnaeus’s seed still cooling on my skin in places I had apparently not rubbed quite dry enough.
The awareness of the now-dark monitor, of Sven somewhere far away, of Herra Henrik having watched all of it, clung to me like a layer of imaginary clothing that only made me more conscious of my nudity.
Giovanna tugged slightly on the leash.
“Come,” she said.
I followed her.
The corridor outside the control room felt cooler than my skin.
My bare feet padded almost silently on the stone.
My mistress walked ahead of me in her heels and immaculate jacket, and I followed because the leash required it and because some more troubling, more inward thing required it too.
We passed through the old stone passages of the mithraeum with their dim, smokeless torches and their Roman severity, and I tried not to think about where we were going.
The scents reached me, though, and I couldn’t keep my mind off our destination: food. Warm bread, roasted meat, coffee, citrus, olive oil. Human voices, too, layered over the smell in a low communal murmur that made my stomach contract with sudden, almost painful hunger.
The refectory lay beyond a pair of heavy doors standing open beneath an arch of dark stone. It was much larger than I had expected, with long tables and benches arranged in disciplined order beneath a vaulted ceiling. Lamps cast a warm, flattering light that made the old stone look golden.
Men in suits sat at some of the tables with women at their feet or beside them. At other tables sat only women. Some of the girls wore nothing but their leathers, their collars catching the light.
Others wore exquisite dresses—silk, satin, clinging things in jewel tones and pale neutrals—over which their collars somehow looked even more shocking.
A few had their hair beautifully arranged.
A few looked like they had wept very recently.
I swallowed hard as I noticed that one nearly nude girl, who was just putting a cup of coffee in front of a man in a suit, bore the marks of the mastix across her backside, just as I did.
The room quieted, not entirely, but enough for me to feel the shift. Eyes moved to me. So many eyes.
Giovanna stopped just short of the threshold. The leash tightened.
“Down,” she said.
I looked at the floor, then at her shoes, then up at her face. “Here?”
Her expression altered so slightly that another person might not have noticed. I had spent enough time under her hand already to understand that it meant I had asked a foolish question.
“Yes,” she said. “On all fours. You are not even a full columba, and so you are not ready to enter among full initiates the way a true person does.”
Heat flooded my face. Behind us the corridor felt empty and exposed. Before us the refectory seemed to glow with the promise of observation. For one absurd second I thought of refusing. The thought had no weight: it was simply a flare of old selfhood, academic and upright and indignant.
Then I knelt. The stone bit coolly into my knees, and I lowered my hands to the floor as well.
My braid slipped over my shoulder. The leash hung down from Giovanna’s fist to my throat in a graceful curve that made the reality of the thing look decorative rather than absolute.
I hated that. I hated more that some part of me thrilled to it.
“Good,” she said.
She led me, that way, into the hall.
The sounds changed at once. Conversations resumed, but altered, and I could tell they had shaped themselves around me.
I could hear the murmurs, mostly in Italian but a few in English, as Giovanna guided me along the side of the room toward a lower section, almost like an annex, where several younger-looking women knelt or sat on cushions at floor level beside shallow trays and bowls.
“The new one Bellatrix Hestiaea…”
“So blonde.”
“Very pretty.”
“She’s an archaeologist, apparently.”
I kept my eyes lowered, but not so low that I couldn’t see shoes, ankles, the hems of dresses, the bare calves of girls in cuffs, the polished leather of men’s loafers.
One pair of stiletto heels paused near me, and a woman’s voice, amused and soft, said in accented English, “Poor little bottom. She’s obviously been used nicely. ”
Laughter, not cruel exactly, but not kind either.
Giovanna brought me to an open place near the wall where a low leather mat had been laid out.
Beside it stood two bowls of dark ceramic on the floor, smelling of delicious food, and a third smaller one with the distinct scent of water full of minerals.
A folded cloth napkin lay nearby on a little wooden stand, inaccessible except by permission, I presumed.
“This section is for new columbae,” Giovanna said, loud enough for the nearby girls to hear. “Girls who still need their defiant, wild instincts corrected.”
My throat tightened. She gave a small, efficient tug on the leash and I settled where she wanted me, my knees on the mat, my hands just in front of them.
One of the bowls held a thick stew with beans and chunks of meat in it. The other contained torn bread, olives, and slices of orange. The smell made me sway very slightly.
“Eat,” said Giovanna.
I looked up before I could stop myself. “Without…”
Her gaze sharpened.
I swallowed. “Yes, Mistress.”
I bent down toward the bowl. The position itself was enough to make my face burn: collar at my throat, wrists cuffed, breasts hanging, hair threatening to dip into the food.
I tried to manage it with as much dignity as possible, which turned out to be very little.
I took the stew first, because hunger overrode strategy, and discovered almost at once that there was no graceful way to lap from a bowl on the floor.
My lips and tongue found the broth. A piece of bean touched my chin and I pulled back, mortified. I heard one of the girls nearby make a tiny sympathetic noise.
“More slowly,” Giovanna said. “You are being fed, not eating from a trough.”
Another pulse of laughter moved around a nearby table.
I wanted the earth to open beneath this hidden sanctuary and swallow me into some deeper archaeological layer where no one would ever find me. Instead I lowered my face again and obeyed.
The water came next. I lapped it from the small bowl and understood, with a strange jolt, why animals drank the way they did: because there was no alternative, and because thirst made questions of self-image seem strangely secondary.
Giovanna stood over me while I ate, one hand keeping a light tension on the leash.
“You have intelligence,” she said. Her voice had gone into the instructive register I had begun to fear almost more than outright anger. “That is obvious. But intelligence in an untamed woman is not civilization. It is merely energy. Cleverness. Restlessness. The same is true of desire.”
I lapped at the broth and tried to keep my breathing even.
“The Guard civilizes women by teaching them their place within order. Men rule. Women serve. A trained woman does not become less herself under discipline. She becomes useful. Legible. Beautiful in the ancient Roman taste—shaped, contained, refined.”
I reached for a piece of bread with my mouth and nearly lost it to the floor before catching it awkwardly between my lips. More murmurs. My cheeks ached with blushing.
“You came here wild,” Giovanna continued.
“Not in the childish sense. In the more dangerous sense. A woman with a powerful mind who believed that her naturally submissive instincts must be repressed… that she must seek a way out of hierarchy. A way to escape from the obedience her very nature yearns for. Such women become feral under stress. They bite the hand that gives them shelter and call it independence.”
I chewed.
“I imagine you think the North understands you because it flatters your wildness. Perhaps it does. But even your Viking master values taming. Do not imagine otherwise.” A slight pause.
“Your Herra speaks of claiming the wildness in you. We speak of disciplining it. The practical result is not so different as either side likes to pretend.”
That, annoyingly, sounded true enough to lodge in my mind immediately.
I drank again, carefully this time.
“To wear your leathers in your heart,” she said, “means that eventually I should be able to remove every visible sign of your bondage and still trust your behavior. You should kneel because kneeling is correct, not because a strap compels it. You should lower your eyes because you understand rank, not because you fear being struck. Fear is useful in beginners. It is not the final product.”
I thought about the leash. About the bench. About how quickly my body had learned to seek instruction in the tone of her voice and Herra Henrik’s. About the fact that none of this felt abstract anymore.
“Do you understand me, columba?” she asked.
I lifted my face from the bowl. A drop of broth had apparently made its way onto my chin. I could feel it cooling there.
“Yes, Mistress.”
“Better. Continue.”
I obeyed. By the time I had licked the last of the water from the bowl, the first edge of my hunger had softened into something more human. I sat back on my heels automatically. Giovanna noticed.
“Better posture,” she said.
The approval, mild as it was, did something embarrassingly direct to the center of my chest.
Then a subtle change moved through the room. Not silence, exactly, but a kind of recalibration. Heads turned. Men who had been eating looked up. A pair of women at a nearby table straightened almost imperceptibly.
I knew somehow before I looked, and part of me understood that the knowledge came from the same place as my strange v?lva’s visions. My heart thrilled at that idea, as well as at what I had just discovered thanks to these senses I was learning to trust.
My Herra had entered the refectory.