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)
“Get in, columba,” she said. “The leathers are made to be bathed in.” She glanced at me over her shoulder, and something in her expression suggested she had given this explanation before and found it necessary each time. “A columba doesn’t remove them. Not ever, until her initial training is complete. The leather is cured for this purpose. The water won’t harm them, and you will be instructed in how to care for the skin beneath them.”
I looked down at the cuffs at my wrists, the belt at my waist. They did look different from ordinary leather, now that she mentioned it—a quality to the surface that didn’t quite look matte or quite look glossy, something treated and sealed.
I stepped down into the bath, using submerged steps carved into the rock, with a surface pattern slightly raised so that my feet didn’t slip.
The water was deeper, and hotter, than I expected. Not unpleasantly so—it was the heat of a bath drawn by someone who understood that the body needs to be convinced to relax, not merely invited. As I descended, I felt the water rise past my knees, my thighs, the welts on my bottom, which stung sharply as the heat found them, and then up to my hips.
At the end of the steps the water came to my waist. I lowered myself slowly. The jade color of the water came from something dissolved in it, I thought—some mineral or concentrated herb preparation—and my skin tingled faintly as it submerged.
The leathers did something unexpected when they met the water. They seemed to settle against my skin more completely, conforming to every curve. The collar at my throat felt, if anything, more present. It made me think of my pendant, and I had to force back a sob of confused emotion at the thought of how much had apparently changed about me in the past twenty-four hours… or perhaps, rather, what had been revealed to me about myself.
Giovanna crouched at the bath’s edge. She held a white washcloth, reaching it out to me.
“You will cleanse yourself thoroughly,” she said. She offered the cloth, and I took it. “Every part of you. Take your time with your cunt and your anus. I will be watching, and if I find you have been careless, you will learn what carelessness costs.”
My face felt hot, in a way that had nothing to do with the bath water, at her casual use of what I couldn’t help, with my traditional upbringing, thinking of as the c-word. I had been naked in front of this woman for hours, had been touched by her in places that still made my thoughts skitter sideways when I approached them directly. And yet the instruction to wash myself… my pussy and my bottom… in her presence, with her watching, produced a fresh surge of mortification so acute that I had to chew on the inside of my cheek and look at the water rather than her face.
CHAPTER 11
Henrik
I watched over the Guard’s crystal-clear surveillance feed, intrigued as much as aroused by Bellatrix Hestiaea’s preparation of Ilsa for initiation.
“Giovanna is good at this, no?” asked her master, Leo Aetnaeus.
“Very,” I responded. I meant it: Giovanna could teach our mødre—the matrons who cared for the Sons of Odin’s bed thralls—a thing or two about bringing out a girl’s submissive nature.
The control room sat two levels below the preparation chamber, Bruno—as Leo Aetnaeus had encouraged me to call him—had brought me to. The illumination from the impressive array of monitoring equipment showed, just as incongruously as the fluorescent lights of Huginn’s Eye in Rouen, a chamber carved from the same volcanic stone as the ritual bath.
There, Giovanna watched Ilsa bathe with a born trainer’s critical eyes. Here, Bruno and I observed, seated at the bank of monitors that covered the wall in front of us. Leo Aetnaeus had his arms folded as he studied the center screen, watching the feed from the preparation chamber with the focused stillness of a gifted accountant conducting an audit.
He had the look of someone who had been born to give orders and had spent sixty years confirming that instinct was correct. Compact, watchful, with his salt-and-pepper hair trimmed to a precision that suggested it had never been permitted to grow a millimeter past regulation. The ancient Sicilian coin on his tie pin caught the monitor’s light when he breathed.
“She’s extraordinary,” I said, because it was true and because it was a less complicated opening than one that addressed the heart of the situation.
“She is,” Bruno agreed. His eyes didn’t leave the screen. “She is also on my territory.”
There it was. I leaned forward, my eyes fixed on the scene unfolding above us, though the appearance of the bath and the nature of the activity I observed made it seem like the preparation chamber belonged far below us. All the way down, really, at the roots of the Worldtree.