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)
The orgasm that had been building in me since the leo’s first thrust was no longer a distant thing. It had become immediate and it felt seismic, a pressure that seemed to occupy the same space as the soreness and the shame and the particular, impossible warmth that my body had seemed to manufacture in response to all of this since the morning. I felt the straps at my thighs and wrists and the cushion behind my head as a single fact about my position in the world. To acknowledge that fact seemed to compound the pressure rather than relieve it.
“Please,” I said, in that new, reversed sense, the only meaning it had left… please do with me as you will. “Please… please, I need to… I need…”
The Guardsman’s rhythm deepened, and the sound he made was not the controlled sound of a professional.
“Magnusson,” he said. “Your permission?”
Henrik was quiet for a moment that lasted approximately a thousand years.
“Come on the leo’s cock, Ilsa,” he said. “Come for us.”
The orgasm broke over me with a completeness that made the ceiling of the control room seem to tilt. I cried out to the stone in a voice that sounded more ancient than the mithraeum or the cavern… older than books, older than ships, and older than anything except the Worldtree itself, growing from the severed parts of Ymir’s slain body.
I felt my own body close around the cock inside me with long, rhythmic pulses, I felt him withdraw with a sharp, decisive movement, and then the warmth of him landed on my stomach in several quick, spreading pulses. I lay in my straps and breathed and let the tears run down into my hair.
I felt my Herra’s hands releasing my wrists. I thought for a moment that it represented an act of kindness, a reward even. Then he spoke.
“Rub the leo’s seed into your skin,” Herra Henrik said in a quiet voice. “It is a gesture of respect and gratitude, lille en. For the pleasure the leo has given you and for the privilege of serving his reðr with your fisse.”
My hands shook as I brought them to my stomach.
The warmth of him… of Leo Aetnaeus… Bruno, apparently… the man who had just used my body with such complete authority… his scalding seed had already begun to cool against my skin. The act of spreading it, though, seemed to renew the heat—in my face, above all—with each slow, circular pass of my palms. I watched myself do it, because the cushion behind my head still held me in place, still aimed my gaze forward and slightly down the length of my own body, and what I saw seemed worse than anything I had seen yet.
Henrik stood to my left, observing closely. His expression held the familiar quality of note-taking, assessing, cataloguing. Bruno had stepped back from the bench. He had already begun to adjust his trousers with the brisk efficiency of a man returning to his day, but his amber eyes hadn’t left me.
Giovanna stood a little further back, perfectly composed again, her dark gaze moving over my face and hands, narrowing slightly as she measured my obedience. And on the monitor—the large central screen that Giovanna’s repositioning of the bench had put in full view—Sven Hallstrom’s pale eyes regarded me from the stone chamber in Rouen with an expression that I couldn’t read, though I knew it must conceal deep consideration of my performance as a fuck toy.
Four of them. All clothed. All watching me rub a man’s seed into my belly with my own obedient hands.
I took my upper lip between my teeth and kept moving my palms. The tears had stopped, or nearly. Something drier and warmer replaced them—a heat that began at my sternum and radiated outward, taking in my throat, my cheeks, the backs of my hands. I understood that I should feel degraded, and I did feel degraded. But I also thought of my grandmother’s pendant, with its wunjo rune, and of the heritage it implied, realized here in the strangest, most thrilling, most shameful way.
The point, as my Herra had made clear, lay in the submission itself… a specific, mortifying act of obedience witnessed by people who would enter it in their own mental records, their own long institutional memory of girls bound to benches and made to demonstrate what they had become.
I smoothed my palms over the skin of my lower belly, and then further up toward my ribs where a few drops had reached, and I looked at the ceiling and breathed.
“Are you satisfied, Leo Aetnaeus,” Henrik said, “with what you’ve seen of her progress?”
He spoke with the collegial quality that brought the blood to my cheeks. I saw his gaze move to the monitor, too, where Sven’s expression hadn’t changed at all.