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)
Giovanna led Ilsa to the bench. The leash drew taut in a small, telling way as they crossed the room, Ilsa’s bare feet slowing without quite stopping, her body registering what the bench was before her mind had apparently finished working out how to respond. Giovanna waited, her patience making clear to me that she had waited out considerably more determined resistance than this, and Ilsa’s feet resumed their movement.
“On your back,” Giovanna said, when they reached it. Her voice carried no cruelty and no warmth; purely professional, the voice of a woman giving a direction she expects to be followed. “Lie down.”
Ilsa shook her head. The motion was small and almost involuntary, accompanied by a sound through her nose that was not quite a whimper and not quite a protest. Her hands came together before her, the wrist cuffs clicking softly as her fingers found each other.
Giovanna’s hand moved to Ilsa’s bottom with a precise, unhurried placement. Not a blow. Simply a reminder, the palm resting against the marks from the mastix with a pressure that communicated clearly what it did not need to say aloud, cupping the pert cheeks at the center to tell my bed thrall that her master had authorized the use of her body this way, by others.
“Do you need me to fetch the mastix, columba?”
* * *
Ilsa
I realized that at some point I had started to cry. The tears came without warning, the way so many new realities had come into my life since the café.
I lay down on the bench because Giovanna’s palm on my bottom had told me I would, and because some part of me that had been awake since I had laid eyes on the mosaic of the Worldtree understood that lying down was simply what happened next. The leather surface received me, cool against my shoulder blades, and I stared up at the curved stone ceiling and let the tears run sideways into my hair.
Giovanna moved with the efficiency of someone who had done this many times. She unclipped the leash from my collar and hung it from a hook on the wall. Then she went to a cabinet set into the far wall. She returned with a by-now-familiar array of sturdy leather straps, dark and supple with use. She set them on the table, near the bench, without looking at me.
Then she began to bind me, as her nymphobus had bound me on the coffee table the previous day—though it felt now like an age of the world had elapsed since then. With the straps, my mistress anchored the rings already attached to my leathers: she bound my belt to the top of the bench first, and then she drew my wrists up and out to the corners above my head, pulling the straps taut until my arms lay extended and useless.
She folded my calves and bound my ankles to my thighs with short straps, only two or three inches in length. Then she moved to my thighs, raising my knees toward my chest and spreading them wide, so that I fell open with a thoroughness that made me close my eyes in mortification. Fresh tears spilled onto my cheekbones.
Then she put a firm cushion behind my head, so that I couldn’t turn my face away at all—couldn’t look anywhere but up and slightly forward, down the length of my own body.
I lay motionless, spread, and displayed, and I was crying, and I couldn’t stop.
“There,” Giovanna said, to the men who had observed my binding in silence. She stepped back to survey her work with the expression of a woman checking a column of figures.
I heard the leo’s footsteps moving around the bench. I felt his attention before I saw him come into my field of vision—a prickling awareness on the exposed skin between my thighs, at the small, bared ring of my anus, everywhere that the position Giovanna had arranged me in offered up for inspection. He stood at the foot of the bench and looked, taking his time about it, with his hands clasped behind his back. His amber eyes moved over me with a quality I could only describe as professional appreciation.
“Magnusson,” he said to Henrik, in a voice that carried a note of genuine acknowledgment beneath its habitual precision. “You are a lucky man. That’s a very pretty little cunt, and the anus looks just like a bud ready for plucking.”
The heat that went through my body at those words was so complete and so immediate that it seemed to arrive everywhere at once: in my face, in my chest, between my thighs, in the soles of my feet. I chewed my lower lip, stared at the ceiling, and felt the tears continue their sideways course into my hair.
I heard the sound of a zipper.