Page 8 of Her Viking Lord
My hands trembled as I opened the app. A single line of text appeared:
Tomorrow. 0800. Kornveien 47. Say you’re going to the gynecologist. Come alone. Bring nothing.
The address meant nothing to me—somewhere in the industrial district, I thought. My finger hovered over the screen, wanting to type questions, demands, anything. But I remembered what had happened the last time I’d hesitated to obey.
The message vanished, replaced by another:
Wear something that’s easy to remove.
My stomach clenched at the implications. I should have been terrified. I should have gone straight to the police, or at least to someone who could help me. Instead, I found myself thinking about what I could wear that wouldn’t look out of place. An old sundress from before my marriage, perhaps. Something from when I was still Lorna Anderssen, before I became Fru Norquist, the perfect political ornament.
That night, I barely slept. Every time I closed my eyes, I remembered the feeling of those commanded orgasms, the complete surrender of control. My body ached with a need I couldn’t name, a hunger that had nothing to do with food or rest.
When Takken came home late, reeking of expensive whiskey and cheap perfume, I pretended to be asleep. He didn’t even check on me, just went straight to his own bedroom. We’d keptseparate rooms for over a year now. Another political marriage convenience that had become a mercy.
At seven, I left a note saying I had an early appointment with my gynecologist—believable enough, and something Takken would never question further. I worried about my security detail, but I felt certain that whoever had managed to accomplish what this man had done so far must have some way of dealing with them.
I wore the sundress I’d found in the back of my closet, pale yellow cotton that felt strange against my skin after years of designer fabrics.
Kornveien 47 turned out to be a nondescript warehouse, its corrugated metal siding rusted at the edges. No signs, no indication of what might be inside. I parked my car—the modest sedan I used for errands the security team considered beneath their notice—and stood before the building’s single entrance. The door was steel, unmarked, with a keypad lock that shouldn’t have responded to my touch. But the moment my finger approached it, the lock clicked open.
Inside, fluorescent lights hummed over a narrow hallway that smelled of industrial cleaner and other things, masculine scents that to my dismay made my pulse quicken. Machine oil, perhaps, mixed with leather and wood smoke. My footsteps echoed as I walked, following the only path available, deeper into the building.
The hallway ended at another steel door, this one already open. Beyond it lay a space that made my breath catch in my throat.
It wasn’t the workshop I’d expected from the warehouse exterior. The room stretched high, at least two stories, with exposed beams that looked ancient despite the modern lighting.Traditional Nordic carvings covered the wooden pillars—ravens and wolves, hammers and trees, symbols that stirred something deep in my blood. But interspersed with the ancient imagery were pieces of technology so advanced I couldn’t identify their purpose. Screens displaying data streams in languages I didn’t recognize. Machines that hummed with barely contained energy.
And in the center of it all stood a man.
He was tall and lean, with the kind of precise stillness that made me think of expensive machinery at rest. His white-blond hair was cut military-short, and when he turned to face me, his steel-gray eyes seemed to catalog every detail of my appearance in a single sweep. His hands—strong, scarred hands that spoke of real work—held what looked like an ancient manuscript bound in leather.
“Lorna,” he said, and his voice carried the same quiet authority I’d read in those messages. The word wasn’t a greeting. It was a confirmation, as if he’d been expecting me for much longer than two days. “You’re precisely on time. Good.”
I wanted to demand answers, to ask who he was, how he’d done what he’d done to me. Instead, I found myself standing straighter, my body responding to his presence in ways that both thrilled and terrified me.
“Take off your dress,” he said, setting the manuscript aside with careful precision. “Fold it and place it on the bench to your left.”
The casual command sent heat flooding through me, along with a spike of indignation. “I don’t even know your name.”
The pain hit instantly—not as severe as before, but sharp enough to make me gasp and press my thighs together. A warning.
“You know what to call me,” he said, his tone unchanged. “And you know what happens when you hesitate. The dress, Lorna.”
My fingers moved to the sundress’s buttons before I could stop them. I seemed to see myself from a vast distance, suddenly, and I understood that my mind had taken that perspective so that the rational part of me could disown what my body had decided to do. A voice whispered inside my head,Let it happen.
I fought, though. I felt as if I didn’t have any choice but to fight—at least until I didn’t have any choice but to obey. I stilled my fingers on the buttons.
“No,” I said, cringing even as I said it. “I… I can’t. I’m… I’m the wife of the prime minister… I mean, that doesn’t really matter, I guess… but I…”
The pain that lanced through me this time made the earlier warnings seem gentle. It felt as if someone had inserted a burning coal between my legs, the agony radiating outward until my knees buckled. I cried out, my hands flying to clutch at myself through the thin cotton of the sundress.
Then I noticed to my horror that myHerrahad moved—faster than I’d have thought possible for someone so controlled. One moment he stood by his workbench; the next, his hand wrapped around my upper arm in an iron grip. I barely had time to register the warmth of his skin, the calluses on his palm, before he dragged me across the room.
“No, please—” The words tore from my throat as he drew me to a low wooden stool, positioning his left foot on it and yanking me forward. The world tilted as he bent me over his raised knee, my hands scrabbling for purchase on his thigh, on the floor, on anything.
“Still,” he commanded, and something in his voice made my body obey even as my mind screamed in protest. His hand flipped my sundress up over my back in an instant, the cool air of the workshop hitting my exposed skin. Then his fingers hooked into the waistband of my plain cotton panties and pulled them down to my knees in one smooth motion.
“The device we’ve installed between your legs,” he said conversationally, as if I weren’t bent bare-bottomed over his knee like a naughty child, “is remarkably useful for certain aspects of your training. The neural discipline implant—Freya’s Bridle, I call it—can deliver precise stimulation or punishment from any distance.”
