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)
“Please,” I said instead, “tell me who you are. What this organization is. The agency, the—the titles you use. The collar you wear.” I had nothing to lose by asking, I thought. The worst she could do was withhold her fingers again, which she was already doing.
Or she could whip me again, said another voice, and I felt my forehead crease at the dismaying clench the thought had brought, right where Giovanna would see. Desperate to distract her, I went on speaking.
“None of this is Roman,” I heard myself say, and only realized as the words left my mouth that I had been thinking this since the moment Giovanna had sat down across from me at the café. “The agency’s name is Roman. Ostia. The nymphobus title is Roman. But the cavern isn’t. The cavern is Norse. The inscription was Norse. The ship is Norse.” I was rambling, I knew, in the way I rambled when I was genuinely confused about something and the confusion was more urgent than the social discomfort of displaying it. “Why does a Roman organization have a Norse sanctuary? How does—”
“Questions are useless,” Giovanna said, but she said it differently this time: not as a command but as something closer to an observation, and I thought—though I couldn’t see her face from where I lay—that there might have been a fraction of something else in her voice. Consideration, perhaps. Or assessment.
Her fingers returned. They stayed this time, working with a slow, thorough knowledge of my body that seemed unfair given that she had known me for less than three hours. I felt the orgasm beginning to build from a very long way down, the same gathering pressure I had felt on the bride saddle, and I bit the inside of my cheek and tried to think about the Younger Futhark and the inconsistency that had been bothering me since the café and that I still could not resolve, because the Romans and the Norse had not overlapped in any way that would explain—
Giovanna’s fingers withdrew.
“No,” I heard myself say, raw and unguarded, and then I pressed my lips together and hated myself.
“Nymphobus,” Giovanna said. A short pause. “The girl trainer, please.”
CHAPTER 9
Ilsa
I heard Nymphobus Oceanus move across the room. I heard the panel in the wall open with a soft mechanical sound, undoubtedly the same panel from which Giovanna had retrieved the mastix and the leathers. I heard him take something out. I couldn’t see what it was from my position between my terrifying mistress’s legs.
Giovanna rose from above me and took a step backwards. The air was cold on my wet face and I blinked at the ceiling, trying to regulate my breathing, trying to reassemble a composed self from the wreckage of the last hour.
The nymphobus came into my field of vision and handed the object to Giovanna.
Blood rushed to my cheeks, driving away the momentary cool. It was a huge, hard, black penis. It looked enormous. Matte black and shaped with an anatomical frankness that left no room for ambiguity either about its function or about its inspiration. The proportions of it made my throat close. I thought, with the hysterical precision of a mind grasping for scholarly footing, of the Viking warriors in the carvings. I wondered, crazily, how much observational work the artists of the cavern—or whoever had crafted this terrifying artificial phallus—had done.
“She’s withholding,” Giovanna said, not to me. She moved back into my peripheral vision, and I noticed that she had straightened her linen skirt. “She found the passage, of course: we knew that. She found the chambers, which we also knew. She’s telling me only what she assumes I already know.”
I said nothing. My eyes had moved back to the ceiling as my heart raced and my whole body surged with heat.
“I think,” Giovanna continued, with the tone of someone stating a mild professional hypothesis, “that something happened to her in there.”
The silence that followed felt very deliberate. I kept my face still.
Giovanna did something with the dildo. I heard rather than saw the motion, because an instant later a soft hum arose, low and steady, and I realized with a tiny whine that the thing was also a vibrator. The noise changed the quality of the air in the room in a way that I couldn’t have articulated… any more than I could have ignored it and its mortifying implications.
She moved further around the coffee table, to its foot, and then her hand and the horrid toy had gone between my legs. The hum was no longer in the air but right up against my most sensitive place, and I made a sound that I had been trying not to make since the moment I had begun to understand what would happen here at the baffling, terrifying Ostia Agency.