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 closed my eyes and breathed through my nose as the enormous artificial penis had its way with my mouth, and I waited for Giovanna to come back.
She came back perhaps five minutes later, though it felt longer. The door clicked open, her footsteps crossed the marble floor, and Nymphobus Oceanus withdrew the vibrator from my mouth without ceremony and straightened up. I closed my mouth and stared at the ceiling.
Giovanna appeared above me. She looked at my face for a moment with the same assessing quality she had brought to everything, and then she said, in a tone entirely different from any she had used in the last hour, “Did you discover anything unusual about yourself while you were in the sanctuary?”
I opened my mouth to say no. The word was right there. It was a perfectly good word, a short word, a word that might close this particular line of inquiry and give me back some small portion of the self I had arrived in Palermo with this morning.
“I had a vision,” I said instead.
CHAPTER 10
Ilsa
The quality of the room changed. It was not dramatic; Giovanna did not move, nor did her expression shift in any obvious way. But something altered in the air between us, some fine calibration of attention that had already been very precise becoming somehow more so.
She remained quiet for a moment.
“Thank you,” she said. She spoke the words as though I had given her something of genuine value. As if in this room where she had stripped me, bound me, disciplined me, interrogated me, brought me to the edge of orgasm and then denied it, I had nonetheless just managed to give her something that the rest of it had not. “Thank you, Ilsa. That was honest of you.”
I blinked at the ceiling. The sudden, perverse warmth in my chest had nothing to do with the pendant, which still lay in my new mistress’s pocket. How could I feel proud in this moment?
“Nymphobus,” Giovanna said. “Release her, please.”
The clips came free in sequence: ankles, thighs, waist, wrists. The straps retracted into the table with small mechanical sighs. I lay still for a moment after the last one released, my body uncertain what to do with the sudden freedom of its own limbs.
“You may sit up, columba,” Giovanna said, not unkindly.
I sat up. The room swam slightly, then settled. I was still naked, still wearing the columba’s leathers, the collar… the cuffs at my wrists, ankles, and thighs… the stout belt at my waist. I could feel the welts on my bottom as I shifted my weight, and the arousal that had never fully subsided pulsed with dull insistence at my center.
Giovanna stood before me. She had straightened her jacket and her hair remained immaculate. She looked at me with an expression I hadn’t seen from her yet; not the appraising look of the café or the hard look of the intake room, but something more considered. Something that seemed to acknowledge that I presented a more complicated problem than she had initially estimated.
“My name,” she said, “is Bellatrix Hestiaea. That is the title and the rank by which you will address me, or you may simply call me Mistress, as you have already learned.” A pause. “You are to be fully initiated as a columba of the Order of Ostia. The collar and the leathers you wear are the beginning of that. What follows will complete it.”
I opened my mouth. Several questions presented themselves simultaneously, jostling for priority. What is the Order of Ostia? Why me? What does a columba actually do, beyond obeying mortifying orders and suffering humiliating ‘discipline’ and ‘training’? What the hell is going on?
“The vision,” I said instead. “I need to understand what the vision was. Whether it’s connected to the mosaic, to the inscription, to the—”
“There will be time,” Giovanna said, which I recognized as a version of questions are useless but with a different quality; not a door closed but a door deferred.
“But the other woman,” I said. “In the vision. There was… in the tree… she… she was on the tree as well. She saw me. That means—”
“Ilsa.” Giovanna’s voice did not rise. Her eyes narrowed, a fraction of a degree, and my stomach lurched so violently that the words simply stopped.
The silence stretched. The welts on my bottom seemed to pulse more insistently.
“How may I serve you, Mistress?” I whispered.
The narrowing of my mistress’s eyes eased into something else—the faintest suggestion of satisfaction, the way a teacher’s expression changes when a student finally produces the correct answer after a long and painful session of getting it wrong.
Then she turned away from me. From the same recessed panel that had held the mastix and the leathers she produced another length of black leather. A leash. The clip at its end caught the light as she returned to me, and she attached it to the ring at the front of my collar with a small, decisive sound that seemed to me the loudest thing that had happened in this room, including all my cries and sobs.