Chapter 28
Ilsa
The third lash fell.
It seemed to arrive from nowhere and from everywhere at once, a bright, slicing line of pain across the heated ruin of my bottom. In that exact instant my whole awareness seemed to swing backward, as if the blow itself had turned my body into an instrument tuned toward the man behind me.
I felt my master there without seeing him.
I felt his gaze on the naked place Giovanna had just marked again.
I remembered, with a vividness so immediate it made me struggle a little around the nymphobus’s cock, the pressure of Henrik’s hand in my hair in the refectory, the heavy thrust of him into my mouth while people talked over breakfast.
The thought came unbidden and complete: was my Herra hard now? Again, so soon? From watching?
From watching me kneel naked with another man’s penis held obediently in my mouth while a woman whipped me and taught me what I was?
The idea should have horrified me, I knew.
Instead it divided me. My rational mind recoiled, scrambling to name the degradation, to restore categories, to insist that wanting such a thing meant damage or coercion or some syndrome I could have cited with chapter and verse under other circumstances.
But below that, lower and older, something in me lifted its face like an animal scenting rain.
I hoped my master’s manhood had gotten hard.
For a second I nearly lost track of my mouth’s service to the other man’s penis. My lips tightened instinctively around him. Heat surged between my thighs so sharply that the pain in my bottom seemed to feed it rather than interrupt it.
I hoped—not truly believed, because I knew better, because I already knew the quality of Herra Henrik’s control and the way he husbanded his appetites like resources in wartime—but hoped anyway, in a frantic and shameful flash, that he had one hand in his trousers, that he was stroking himself while he watched Giovanna whip me and watched me serve the nymphobus like a proper little columba.
He would never. Or almost certainly never. The certainty of his self-command was part of what made him terrifying, and part of what made him… my whole body answered the thought before I could finish it.
Hotter. Sexier. More arousing.
Because if my master stood there, his manhood rock hard, and did nothing—if he merely watched, allowing himself the pleasure of my being displayed and disciplined, naked and degraded, without needing to gratify himself immediately—then the lesson felt even greater.
I must learn that I truly was a thing being looked at… a fuck toy being assessed, being enjoyed and possessed by a man whose self-mastery exceeded my own by so much it made me clench under my mistress’s lashes.
I made a broken sound around the cock of Nymphobus Oceanus. He shifted his hips once, not to punish me, but to settle the head of himself more securely on my tongue.
“There,” Giovanna said behind me. Her voice had regained its cool exactness. “Now perhaps the lesson will remain.”
The lesson. The leathers in my heart.
And suddenly, absurdly, devastatingly, I understood what she meant at a deep level, a level at which my mind refused to think.
My obedience had not actually imposed itself on me from outside.
The leather had not created it. The cuffs and collar and belt had only named, outlined, called forth something that had already existed in me in some dormant and deeply hidden form.
Something that had been waiting with humiliating patience.
Waiting for my Herra to find it.
Waiting for Giovanna to discipline it into visibility.
Waiting, perhaps, through all the years I had spent calling myself independent and rational and modern, for someone to show me that what I had mistaken for freedom included a hunger to be bound correctly.
The thought was so total that tears spilled down my face afresh. I held the penis in my mouth as gently and steadily as I could and felt, with a kind of inward shudder, that the bellatrix was right.
I did wear the leathers in my heart.
Perhaps I always had.
“Enough,” Giovanna said.
Her fingers came to my shoulder. Her attendant withdrew slowly from my mouth, and the little wet pop of my lips releasing him seemed indecently loud in the stone room.
I bowed my head at once, breathing through my nose, saliva cooling on my swollen lips.
My bottom burned in three separate bands that seemed to pulse in time with my heartbeat.
Giovanna took me under my left armpit and brought me upright.
My legs trembled badly enough that for a moment I thought I might collapse anyway, but I stayed on my feet.
I kept my eyes lowered. I could not have looked at Henrik even if I had been ordered to.
I felt too exposed in this new way, with nothing on my body at all and the marks of the mastix speaking for me in fresh fire.
“Bene factum,” Giovanna murmured. It is well done. To my dismay, the words comforted me.
She crossed to a tall narrow cabinet set into the wall and opened it.
I thought I heard hangers moving across a bar and perhaps the slide of fabric.
I felt my brow crease in confusion: I had, it seemed, become so accustomed to my new status as a naked sexual servant that the sounds seemed almost jarring.
When my mistress turned back to me, she held a bundle in her arms that looked, at first, impossibly soft and civil after everything that had just happened.
A sundress.
I blinked at it. The fabric was light, some fine summer cotton or silk blend, pale and lovely and feminine in a way that seemed almost obscene in contrast to the chamber.
It had a fitted bodice and a skirt that would fall loosely around my knees, printed with small flowers in shades of blue and coral over ivory.
Draped over Giovanna’s arm as well was a lacy pink bra and matching panties—delicate, pretty, almost girlish.
In her other hand she had a pair of simple sandals with fine straps.
The effect was so disorienting that I simply stared.
“We are not taking you to Capo Zafferano naked,” Giovanna said, a sardonic smile on her face.
The bra came first. She handed it to me and I fumbled with the clasp behind my back, as if I had never put one on before. It lifted my breasts into soft cups of pink lace that made me feel more naked in some emotional sense even as they covered me.
Then the panties. My hand trembled as I took them from Giovanna’s hand.
Their lace brushed the cleft between my thighs, and I sucked in a breath at the tenderness there and behind, where I’d just been whipped.
To my dismay, I had a fleeting feeling of wrongness, as if something in me knew that my master’s sight of my pussy, bared for his use, shouldn’t be impeded this way.
I shouldn’t be permitted to hide the fisse where his reer took its pleasure, when he chose to enjoy his bed thrall.
On the other hand, Giovanna had hidden that part of me, but she had also marked it out with the pink lace, as a place worthy of adornment… the decoration not for me but for Herra Henrik, to increase the aesthetic value of the cunt he owned.
My brow furrowed again at the strangeness of it. Clothing no longer restored me to independence, let alone innocence. It merely dressed me up for the next time I would serve my master’s hardness.
Giovanna lowered the sundress over my head.
The fabric slid down my body in a cool rush, settling over my breasts and waist and hips with a grace that made me think absurdly of department stores and summer holidays and women having lunch on terraces.
Yet beneath it my bottom stung fiercely, and my mouth still tasted of two men. The dissonance made my head swim.
She knelt to put the sandals on me herself, fastening the little buckles at my ankles with evident care. The intimacy of it—my first captor dressing me, as if I were a child or a doll or a bride—sent a fresh flush through my whole body.
“There,” she said, rising and smoothing the skirt once over my thighs. “You can pass in public.”
I stood in the middle of the room in my sundress and pink underwear and sandals, my platinum hair loosened and disordered, my bottom striped beneath the pretty cotton, and I felt the nymphobus’s green eyes on me and Herra Henrik’s gaze from behind.
I had the uncanny sense that being dressed had become another stage of the ritual rather than its end.
I risked a glance at my master then.
He stood where he had stood before, broad and composed in charcoal and pale linen, one hand in his trouser pocket, the other relaxed at his side.
His expression was unreadable. His eyes moved over me once, slowly.
His gaze had a proprietary attention that made the space inside the dress feel too warm.
I wondered again, suddenly, about my pendant.
I looked down at once.
“She wears civilization prettily,” he said, and though I couldn’t look at my master I could hear the smile in his voice. My chest warmed, and I tried to feel anger about that warmth. I failed.
Giovanna moved behind me and began to gather my hair with quick, competent fingers. “A girl who understands that the restraints are internal can be trusted in cotton,” she said. “One who does not must remain in leather until she learns. She held Mateo well.”
Henrik came closer. I saw his shoes stop a foot from my sandals.
“Do you understand better, lille en?” he asked quietly.
My throat tightened. I could not pretend not to understand. Not after the whip. Not after the way my body had answered the thought of him watching. Not after the sick, grateful certainty that the dress did not undo any of it.
“Yes, Herra,” I whispered.
He was quiet for a moment. I felt, rather than saw, that tiny crinkle at the corners of his eyes.
“Good.”
Giovanna finished with my hair and I thought she would step back. Instead, I felt her hands come around in front of me, and then I felt a familiar chain and a familiar weight against my breastbone. Warm—from her pocket, of course.
Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes.
“Thank you, Mistress,” I said, meaning it very deeply.
“What rune is that, lille en?” Henrik asked, stepping forward and reaching into the front of the sundress with such arrogant possessiveness that I whimpered, and worse, clenched inside my new pink panties.
He pulled the pendant out, and I saw his eyes widen, then crinkle at the edges as he met my own wide-eyed gaze.
“Wunjo,” he said, his voice carrying a weight that instantly made me see it, and then want to slap my forehead for not having realized before.
Wunjo… W, which was the same as V…
The first sound of v?lva.
“We’ll go up through the office,” Giovanna said, apparently oblivious to what had just passed between me and my master. “The car is waiting.”
My Herra’s arms, strong and massive, came around me, and his left hand held my head, my cheek against his chest so that I could feel his mighty heart beat warmly. I felt as if it shook my whole body.
“My v?lva,” he murmured. He kissed the top of my head, and then he held me away from him and turned to Giovanna.
“We’re ready,” Henrik told her, and I felt control of me pass back into the middle ground between North and South, Nordic and Roman. “This columba is yours to command, Bellatrix.”
For a moment I thought Giovanna would lead me on a leash again, or perhaps just grip my arm, but neither happened.
The absence of any palpable restraint struck me harder than if she had buckled my collar back on.
I stood in the little room in my sundress, free to move—to try to run, even—and I knew with dreadful clarity that I would follow anyway.
Wear the leathers in your heart.
Yes. I did.
Giovanna opened the door. “Walk properly,” she said. “You represent the Ostia Agency now, however provisionally.”
I went out ahead of them into the corridor. My sandals made soft noises on the stone. The skirt moved around my legs. Every step made the welts on my backside sting beneath the lacy panties.
When we reached the stairs toward the Ostia office, I became acutely aware of my own body in this new costume.
The sundress brushed my knees. The pink lace at my breasts felt too pretty, too intimate.
The panties hid the cleft that had been on display moments earlier, and that concealment did not feel like innocence regained but like a secret held under cotton. I climbed carefully.
I felt my master behind me again, and I wondered again if his cock were hard at the sight of me, knowing that if he chose he could rip my lovely clothes off and fuck me right there on the stairs.
The office above seemed, when we entered it, almost offensively normal. Glass, chrome, white walls, tasteful art, cool conditioned air. A receptionist in an immaculate blouse glanced up, saw Giovanna, then me, then Henrik, and let not a flicker of surprise cross her face.
If she noticed that my lips were swollen, or my braid disheveled, or that I walked with the faint care of a woman whose bottom had just been whipped, she gave no sign. Her composure unnerved me more than curiosity might have.
We crossed the office and entered an elevator. The doors closed on mirrored steel. For a second I found myself staring at my own reflection and almost didn’t recognize the woman there.
I looked like myself. That was the worst of it. My own face, flushed and pale by turns. My own blue eyes, a little reddened from crying. My own platinum hair, though now tidied. My own body in a tasteful summer dress.
Only now I knew what sat under the dress. Under the lace. Under the skin, even.
Henrik caught my eye in the mirror. I dropped my gaze at once, feeling a rush of heat to my cheeks at the thought I might be whipped again.
I swallowed hard, because I suddenly remembered that I would be whipped again. And then…
The lift opened into a private garage. A dark sedan waited with a driver beside it.
The Sicilian sunlight beyond the ramp made my eyes narrow.
After the stone and the office and the lift, the real day looked almost fictional, as if the world outside ought to have paused while all this happened and had inconsiderately continued instead.
The driver opened the rear door. Giovanna gestured me in first.
I slid onto the leather seat with an involuntary wince as the welts met the upholstery.
Henrik got in beside me. Giovanna and her nymphobus—Mateo, she had called him, I remembered suddenly—took the facing seat, and then the door shut, sealing us into cool air, expensive leather, and the faint smell of cologne.
The car began to move.