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)
“I can obey you. I’ll stay in position. I’ll take off my clothes when you tell me to.”
Nymphobus Oceanus’s hands lifted. He stepped back. I heard the soft sound of his shoes on the floor as he returned to his station by the door, and then there was only Giovanna behind me and the air moving across the burning terrain of my punished bottom.
I stayed in position. My elbows on the seat. My face forward. I held still because I had said I would hold still, and because some part of me—a part I was going to have to reckon with at some point, when I could think again—understood that this was the only path through.
“Good,” Giovanna said. There was no warmth in it, exactly, but her voice did hold acknowledgment. My body responded to that acknowledgment with a shameful rush of heat down where I least wanted to be warm at that moment.
“Now,” she said. “You will learn the only question that is not useless.”
The mastix landed. I gasped, my fingers clawing at the cushion, but I held position. I held.
“The only question,” Giovanna said, “that you may ever ask…”
The second stroke. My breath left me in a shuddering cry.
“…while I am training you…”
The third. I sobbed openly now, my shoulders shaking, my face wet, the welts layered atop welts in a geography of fire that I could feel with excruciating specificity.
“…is How may I serve you, mistress?”
The fourth stroke landed, and through my sobbing I heard the words settle into the room like something that had always been there, waiting to be spoken.
“…or, sometime soon…”
The fifth stroke followed with the same measured spacing, and I understood at a bodily level, deeper than anything to which my mind consented to know it, that she had not merely told me a phrase. She meant to install it inside me. To embed it in the same neural pathways that the mastix seemed to rewrite with each stroke, so that the words and the pain and the lesson would be fused together in my memory, inseparable.
“…How may I serve you, Master?” Giovanna intoned, and the sixth and final stroke fell.
Master. Sometime soon. Oh… oh, no…
I lay over the chair and wept. The pain seemed a living thing across my bottom and thighs, pulsing with my heartbeat, but—and this was the thing I could not look at directly, the thing that terrified me more than the whipping itself—beneath it lay the warmth. The same warmth I had felt over the rowing bench and the bride saddle and… and in my grandmother’s pendant. It spread from the welts inward. It settled low in my belly, and I recognized it because I had spent an evening in a limestone cavern learning its precise character.
Giovanna set the mastix down somewhere. I heard the small sound of it being placed on a surface with care.
“Say it,” she said.
My lips moved against the leather. I tasted salt.
“How may I serve you, Mistress?” I whispered.
The silence that followed had a different quality from the silences that had preceded it. Something in the room had changed. I could feel the huge man still standing by the door, a quiet presence, I could feel Giovanna behind me, I could feel the welts on my bottom cooling very slightly in the air, and I could feel—God help me—the slickness between my thighs that had nothing to do with tears.
“Stand up,” Giovanna said. “Face me.”
I pushed myself up from the chair. My arms shook. I turned, and the movement of my jeans and panties bunched around my knees made me stumble slightly. I caught myself and stood there, looking at Giovanna through wet lashes. I felt the pendant settle against my chest, and it did feel warm.
Her face was beautiful and completely composed. She studied me the way she had studied me at the café, but the appraisal had changed. It was no longer speculative. It had become proprietary.
“Now,” she said. “Take off your clothes.”
I took off my clothes.
I didn’t take them off in the slow, careful, self-deceiving way I’d stripped in the cavern, to ride the Viking bride saddle for what I’d somehow managed to persuade myself would be research purposes. This time I took them off because Giovanna had told me to, and because the welts across my bottom had made the meaning of my obedience very clear.
I pushed my jeans and panties the rest of the way down and stepped out of them. I pulled my shirt over my head. I reached back and unhooked my beige bra with fingers that only trembled slightly. I stood in front of Giovanna and the silent nymphobus and let them look at me.
Giovanna gazed for a long moment. Her expression remained proprietary, even acquisitive.
“Is the pendant special?” she asked, the gentleness of her voice surprising me.