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)
“Your face goes there,” she said, pointing to the cushion in the depth of the alcove, “with your hands to either side. Your knees here, spread. Your bottom raised.” She looked at me. “The position gives your mistress full access to your cunt and your bottom, to prepare you to serve your master’s pleasure.”
My throat had closed.
Master. She and her nymphobus had used the word before, but it hadn’t truly registered until this moment, here where Giovanna would, it seemed, prepare me in the most shameful ways for some shadowy masculine figure. A man I didn’t know, who would apparently have my body at his command.
I looked at the bench, and at the rings set into the stone at intervals along its sides, and at the D-rings on my own cuffs and belt, and I understood the geometry of what was about to happen. A wave of heat surged into my face.
“Place yourself, columba,” Giovanna said.
CHAPTER 12
Ilsa
I knelt on the cushion. How could I have done anything else?
I’m terrified, I told myself, trying desperately not to examine the idea too closely. I’m terrified of…
Of her… of the horrible mastix… of…
Master. She said master… oh, God…
The leather felt softer than I expected on my knees, giving slightly under my weight. It felt warm, too, in a way that made me notice the warmth of the air in this underground chamber. It made me think of Sicily’s volcanoes and their elemental heat, and then of my grandmother’s pendant, still in my mistress’s pocket, as if she had taken custody of my Scandinavian heritage while she worked upon me in Roman ways.
I bent forward, feeling as if I had fallen under a spell, or entered a trance state. I walked my hands along the bench’s surface and into the alcove, lowering my face toward the cushion there.
The scent of the leather reached me before my face reached the surface of the cushion.
I stopped for a moment, my face an inch or two from the leather. What I smelled seemed so intimate and so old that it took control of my nervous system for a moment as my brain tried to come to terms with the fragrance.
Salt. Tears, certainly. This cushion leather had absorbed tears across what might, I thought, be centuries. But underneath the salt, something else: the different sort of brine that I had smelled when I had ridden the Viking bride saddle… had tasted when Nymphobus Oceanus had begun to train my mouth with the vibrator my mistress had used in my pussy.
Arousal… humiliation… and the particular helplessness of being positioned and held and made to wait.
Centuries of columbae had rested their faces on this cushion, maybe. They had wept into this leather as I knew I would soon weep, at their own body’s shameful needs. They, like me, had breathed this same dark, complicated smell while their mistresses worked behind them.
I lowered my face to the cushion and breathed.
Giovanna’s hands found the rings on my ankle cuffs first. She clipped them to the bench with small, decisive sounds, and I felt the meaning of my posture become ever more clear: my knees spread to the width the bench dictated, my weight settled onto the kneeling cushion, my face pressed into the alcove. Then the rings at my thighs. Then the ring at the back of my belt, clipped to something above and behind me so that my bottom was drawn upward, the angle of my hips adjusted to a degree of exposure that I could feel without being able to see.
I could feel everything, though. The air moved freely over the backs of my thighs, over the welts that Giovanna’s mastix had left, over the cleft of my bottom and the soft heat of my pussy, still covered in the fur whose loss it seemed now I couldn’t stop contemplating. All of it visible to whoever stood behind me. All of it, as Giovanna had said, accessible.
I pressed my lips together and breathed in the smell of old tears and old arousal and tried not to add to either.
I heard Giovanna move to a shelf, or maybe a cabinet, behind me. I heard metal creaking and pinging softly, the way a metal vessel does when it’s heated.
Hot wax. I understood. To bare me. Make me smooth, like my mistress. Ready me for…
My face blazed as I heard a whimper emerge from my throat.
“The organization I, and my whole order, serve,” Giovanna said, in a tone so conversational it took me a moment to understand she was actually speaking to me, “is called the Pretorian Guard.”
I said nothing. My face was pressed into the leather of the alcove and I was bound to an ancient stone bench with my bottom in the air, and she was telling me, in the same voice she might use to describe the history of a building to a tourist, about the people who had done this to me.