Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Her voice was still patient though it sounded less patient each time she repeated a command. I lay there bent over the chair with my hands still uselessly covering my bare bottom, my thighs burning from the two strokes she had already delivered, and I knew—I knew with absolute clarity—that I should obey. That obedience represented the path that led to less pain. My body understood this. My rational mind understood this.
I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t make my hands move from where they were. I couldn’t make my elbows find the seat cushion, my face turn forward, and my body arrange itself into the posture of a girl accepting this degrading kind of discipline. Something in me—the same stubborn, reckless thing that had driven me through the opening in the cliff and onto the bride saddle—simply would not yield. Not because I felt brave in any way, but because I was terrified, and terror had locked my joints as surely as if they’d been set in iron.
“I can’t,” I whispered. “I can’t, I’m… I’m… sorry, I—”
“Nymphobus,” Giovanna said. Just that strange title. Nothing else.
I sensed the huge man moving again, back from the door toward me. I cried out as his hands found my wrists and drew them forward, not cruelly but definitely roughly, with a totality of force that made my resistance feel like a child pushing against a stone wall.
He placed my elbows on the leather seat cushion, one and then the other, with a precision that seemed almost architectural. Then one broad palm settled on the back of my neck, pressing my face gently but irrevocably forward, and his other hand moved to the small of my back, pinning me in the correct posture with the same matter-of-fact competence with which he had held my arms earlier.
I was positioned. The nymphobus—whatever kind of ceremonial attendant that was supposed to be—had positioned me the way you position an object that needs to be in a specific place for a specific purpose, and the nymphobus held me there with an ease that told me he could keep me there for as long as the woman who obviously commanded his own obedience decided he should.
The first real stroke landed across the center of my bottom.
I screamed. The sound came out of me without my permission, raw and shocked, because the previous strokes across my thighs had been—I understood now with sickening clarity—warnings. Preliminary. This was the mastix applied in earnest, the braided leather finding the fullest part of my bare bottom with a crack that echoed off the white walls of the little room. The pain was extraordinary; not merely sharp but deep, radiating outward from the point of impact.
The second stroke landed just below the first.
“When you tell me,” Giovanna said, her voice carrying over my sobbing with perfect calm, “that you can obey me… that you can hold the proper posture on your own, and that you can take off your clothes when you are told to take them off… Nymphobus Oceanus will step back.”
Another lash.
Even as I sobbed and struggled, my mind tried to take itself off the pain, following Giovanna’s words through a maze of possible meanings.
Nymphobus Oceanus. Not his real name, of course. A title.
As the pain from the mastix built, I bucked against his hands and went nowhere. The leather cushion had gotten wet with my tears, and I could feel the specific shape of each welt forming across my bottom, a map of pain that Giovanna was drawing with methodical patience.
“When he steps back,” she continued, “I will whip you only six more times. And then your initiation can proceed.”
The next stroke caught the crease where my bottom met my thighs, and the sound I made was not a scream but something lower and more broken. It came from deep in my chest. My fingers gripped the front edge of the seat cushion. My knuckles had gone white. I sobbed with my face pressed into the leather, and I thought about the carvings in the cavern—the women’s faces in the capture scenes, the voyage scenes, and the homecoming scenes. I saw them: the way their expressions had moved past resistance into something more settled, more undone—and I hated myself for thinking about it.
Another lash landed across my burning bottom.
“I’ll obey,” I sobbed. The words came out muffled against the seat cushion, broken by hitching breaths. “I’ll obey, I can—please—I’ll hold still, I’ll take my clothes off, I’ll—”
“Say it clearly,” Giovanna said.
CHAPTER 7
Ilsa
I lifted my face from the leather. My cheeks were soaked. My nose was running. I was bent over a chair in a room in Palermo with my jeans and panties around my knees, welts rising across my bare bottom, and a man’s hand on my neck, and I choked out words in a voice that sounded nothing like the voice of a doctoral candidate with two journal publications.