Chapter 22
Aksel
Lorna’s biometrics had shown a spike of stress hormones and adrenaline, but she was alive.
More important, she’d successfully triggered the security shutdown exactly as her visions had shown her, which had led to what amounted to a broadcast in the clear not just of the data from her implant but of a stunning amount of information about what lay under the permafrost at the site.
With three keystrokes, I activated the strike team.
A squad of Pretorian Guard agents who had flown in from Rome, with Henrik, one of my brothers in the Sons of Odin, as a liaison, had been in position for the past eighteen hours, waiting in a reinforced shelter just beyond my best guess at Horakovsky’s sensor range.
With the data that the drones had captured and sent to me, I could provide the team’s operations officer with exactly what he needed to jam the station—Berkut Station, as it seemed to call itself.
The strike force would need time, especially given what I could see about the depth of Horakovsky’s lair beneath the tundra, but they would be able to get in undetected.
“Operation Ymir initiated,” I said into the encrypted comm channel, my voice steady despite the rage burning in my chest at what the surveillance feed from the station was showing me from the past few hours.
I adjusted the video so that it unfolded at 3x speed, but, even so, watching my v?lva endure such degradation represented a severe trial of the evenness of my temper.
Knowing I’d commanded her to submit to it made it worse despite my certainty that she could endure and triumph.
The sight of her tied to the bed, violated again and again, simply tested my control in ways I hadn’t anticipated.
You love her, said the calm, simple voice in my head. You’ve never loved anyone this way.
“Primary breach in four minutes.” Henrik’s voice seemed so clear in my ears that I could scarcely believe he was hundreds of kilometers away, in the frozen wastes.
As I had programmed them to do, three micro-drones had traveled at supersonic speed the moment the signal had popped up, to penetrate the station’s ventilation system.
Now their feed popped up on my screen: they had found Lorna, tied to a wooden punishment frame in what was all-too-obviously an interrogation chamber.
I watched Horakovsky take an implement from a cabinet and walk around the frame to show it to Lorna, who trembled at the sight.
With fury rising in my chest, I recognized it instantly as a Russian knout, one of the cruelest instruments of punishment man had ever devised.
But fury without precision was useless. I compartmentalized the emotion, filing it away for later.
In the feed from the drones still outside the facility, the strike team moved like ghosts across the frozen landscape, their thermal signatures masked by specialized suits developed in my own laboratory.
Through their helmet cameras, I watched the facility’s exterior defenses fail to respond. Lorna had bought us our window.
I pulled up her vitals again. Heart rate 165.
Blood pressure elevated but not critical.
The neural discipline implant showed signs of activation—Horakovsky’s detector must have picked it up.
I cursed myself for not anticipating that possibility, though the technology to detect Freya’s Bridle was supposedly limited to a handful of intelligence agencies.
“Breach team in position,” came Henrik’s report through my earpiece. “Awaiting final authorization.”
The drones had managed to hack the station’s own security now.
I glanced at a secondary screen showing Takken passed out in what appeared to be guest quarters.
The man’s blood alcohol content, extrapolated from his biometric readings, suggested he wouldn’t wake for hours. One less variable to manage.
“Execute,” I commanded.
Lorna
I heard Horakovsky’s footsteps circling behind me, the soft whisper of leather against his palm making my whole body tense against the wooden frame.
The knout. I’d seen illustrations in history books during my university days—nine leather thongs braided together, each one capable of intense pain.
The tsars had used them to break revolutionaries, to extract confessions, to destroy spirits.
“Such an elegant tool,” Horakovsky said conversationally, trailing the leather across my exposed backside.
The touch was almost gentle, a lover’s caress that made the threat all the more terrifying.
“The knout has a long history in my homeland. It teaches lessons that modern methods simply cannot match. This one is designed not to break the skin, in order not to damage a beautiful piece of ass like you, but I think you’ll find it painful enough. ”
I tried to control my breathing, tried to find that place of calm my Herra had shown me, but terror made my heart hammer against my ribs. The manacles bit into my wrists and ankles as I instinctively tried to pull away from the leather’s touch.
“Now then,” he continued, moving to stand where I could see him in my peripheral vision.
“Let’s discuss what you’re carrying inside that pretty body of yours.
My detector doesn’t lie, Lorna. There’s sophisticated electronics embedded in your pelvic region.
Quantum-encrypted transmission capability. Military-grade bio-integration.”
He paused, letting the implications hang in the air. “So I’ll ask you one more time, and I suggest you answer truthfully. Who. Sent. You?”
“No one,” I gasped, my voice breaking. “I swear, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe it’s medical? Maybe my husband had something—”
The first strike of the knout cut off my desperate lie.
Fire exploded across my thighs, nine lines of agony that made me scream in terror.
The sensation was unlike anything I’d experienced—not the focused burn of a strap or even the cruel sting of his flogger, but something that seemed to reach into my very bones.
“Wrong answer,” Horakovsky said calmly.
The second strike landed higher, right across my bottom.
The third caught me diagonally, across my thighs again.
I lost count after the seventh strike. Each one sent fresh agony cascading through my nervous system, the nine braided thongs leaving trails of fire that overlapped and merged until my entire backside felt like one enormous ball of fire.
Tears streamed down my face, pooling against the wooden frame.
“Stop, please,” I sobbed between gasps. “I’ll tell you anything, just stop—”
“You’ll tell me anyway,” Horakovsky interrupted, but his voice had changed somehow. The cold calculation remained, but beneath it I heard something else—something darker and more primal. “But I confess, there’s a problem.”
He circled around to where I could see his face. His gray eyes had taken on a predatory gleam, and I saw the unmistakable bulge in his trousers. The sight made my insides lurch with horror.
“You see, Lorna, I’m torn,” he continued, setting the knout down on a table.
“Part of me wants to whip the truth out of you. But another part…” He adjusted himself through his pants with casual vulgarity.
“I’ve been denying you orgasms for hours now.
Watching you writhe and beg, seeing your body respond despite your mind’s resistance. ”
He folded his arms over his chest, regarding me with such calculated savagery that it made me dizzy.
“I find myself genuinely curious as to what would happen if I pushed you over that edge while inflicting such exquisite pain. The way you climaxed during our meeting last week… well, I suppose it’s why you’re here.
I wanted to see whether I could create a true masterpiece of my own particular kind of performance art.
And now I have what we might call an unexpected sort of opportunity. ”
My whole body went rigid as I understood his intention. “No. Please, not that. Just ask your questions, I’ll—”
“Oh, I’ll still get my answers,” he assured me, moving to the cabinet I couldn’t see, from which he had taken the knout earlier. I heard metal scraping, the jingle of something against something else. “But why not enjoy the process?”
He returned with an object whose curve immediately struck me as thoroughly obscene, even before I understood what it must be—a saddle-like attachment that he began fixing to the lower portion of the frame, between my opened thighs.
The device had a prominent ridge running along its center, and I could see a telltale gleam of lubricant already coating its surface.
“This is adjustable of course,” he explained with the casual tone of a mechanic discussing car parts.
“I can position it exactly where it needs to be.” His hands gripped my hips, and I felt him manipulating the frame somehow.
My body shifted lower until I felt the ridge press against my swollen, hypersensitive clit.
The contact sent an unwanted jolt through me, and I whimpered at the sensation. After hours of denial, even this impersonal touch threatened to undo me.
“There we are,” Horakovsky said with satisfaction. “Now, here’s what will happen. You’re going to ride that while I continue our conversation with the knout. If you want to come, you’ll have to work for it—grind yourself like the desperate whore you are while I mark that pretty skin.”
“I can’t,” I gasped, though my hips had already started to move involuntarily, seeking friction against that terrible ridge. “Please, this is insane—”
The knout struck again before I could finish my protest, this time lower down, just above my knees.
The agony merged with the shameful pressure against my clit, and something inside me fractured.
My hips jerked forward involuntarily, grinding against the ridge, and a sob tore from my throat—half pain, half desperate need.
“That’s it,” Horakovsky murmured, his voice thick with arousal. “Show me what you really are.”
I tried to resist. God, how I tried. But my body had been trained too well, denied too long, and the combination of pain and stimulation created a feedback loop I couldn’t control. My hips began to move in small, shameful circles, seeking friction even as the knout fell again across my shoulders.
The pain should have stopped me. The humiliation should have killed any possibility of pleasure.
But somehow the agony amplified everything, making each nerve ending sing with terrible intensity.
When the leather struck again, I ground harder against the ridge, my body chasing the release it had been denied for so long.
“Filthy little whore,” Horakovsky growled, and I heard the satisfaction in his voice. “Look at you, fucking yourself while I give you the knout.”
Shame burned hotter than the welts rising on my bottom and thighs, but I couldn’t stop.
My hips developed their own rhythm, independent of my conscious mind.
Each strike of the knout sent fresh fire across my skin, and each burst of pain somehow pushed me closer to that edge I’d been hovering near for hours.
I was going to come. Despite everything, despite the horror of my situation, I was going to climax while this monster whipped me like an animal. The realization made me sob even as my movements became more desperate, more wanton.
The knout fell again, catching me across the place where my bottom curved into my upper legs, so close to the terrible saddle.
The pain bloomed, and in that moment of white-hot agony, the pressure building inside me crested.
My orgasm hit like a freight train, ripping through me with an intensity that made my previous climaxes seem like pale shadows.
I screamed, my whole body convulsing against the restraints as pleasure and pain merged into something transcendent and terrible.
The silver branches materialized instantly, more vivid than they’d ever been.
I shot upward through Yggdrasil’s canopy with such speed that I felt dizzy, the world tree’s infinite expanse spreading before me in crystalline clarity.
And there—I could see them. The strike team, Henrik—I knew his name, even—in the lead, moving through corridors with military precision.
They were close, so close. Thirty seconds, maybe less, until they reached this room.
I crashed back into my body, still shaking with aftershocks, my back on fire from Horakovsky’s punishment. He had paused, breathing hard, and I realized with sick certainty that he was aroused beyond reason by what he’d just witnessed.
“Magnificent,” he whispered, setting down the knout to move closer. “I’ve never seen anything so erotic.”
His hand ran down my welted bottom with a possessiveness that made me want to scream for my Herra to come rescue me.
And he will. In ten… nine…
“But there’s still the matter of the information, isn’t there?” Horakovsky said, stepping back again and picking up the horrid whip.
I forced my trembling voice to steady, gasping out the words between ragged breaths. “Wait. Stop. I’ll… I’ll tell you everything.”
Horakovsky paused, the knout dangling from his hand. I could hear his labored breathing, feel the heat of his arousal radiating toward my exposed back. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said, moving closer. “What are you carrying?”
“It’s…” I let my voice drop to barely a whisper, forcing him to lean in. “I need to… can’t speak louder…”
He stepped right up to the frame, his scarred face inches from mine as he bent to hear my confession. His breath reeked of vodka and cigars. “Tell me,” he commanded.
I turned my head slightly, my lips nearly brushing his ear. “You’re fucked.”
The confusion that flashed across his face would have been comical in any other circumstance. “What did you—”
The door exploded inward with a deafening crash.
The heavy steel buckled as if it were paper, and suddenly the room filled with black-clad figures moving with terrifying efficiency.
I caught a glimpse of Henrik’s face beneath his tactical helmet, his expression carved from stone as he raised his weapon.
“Down! Down! Down!” The commands came in multiple languages as the strike team flooded the space.
Horakovsky’s hand went for the pistol at his waist, but he never completed the motion. Two suppressed shots—barely louder than coughs—and he crumpled to the concrete floor, blood spreading from wounds in his shoulder and thigh. Non-lethal shots. They wanted him alive for interrogation.
“Clear left!”
“Clear right!”
“Secondary target secured!”
The tactical chatter washed over me as my vision swam. Strong hands worked at the manacles binding my wrists, and I felt Henrik’s presence beside me even before I saw him.
“Easy now, sister,” he murmured in Norwegian, his fingers surprisingly gentle as he freed my right wrist. “We’ve got you.”