Page 42 of Her Viking Lord
The room he brought me to made my stomach clench. It was clearly purpose-built for interrogation, or worse. Chains hung from the ceiling, various implements lined the walls, and in the center stood a wooden frame that made my blood run cold—X-shaped, with manacles hanging from its extremities. A medieval device in a high-tech context that made it seem all the more frightening.
“Now, Fru Norquist,” Horakovsky said as he began to secure me to the frame, my front to the wood and my back to him, “let’s see how long it takes to make you tell me what I want to know. This will be even more fun than I’d imagined you’d provide.”
CHAPTER 22
Aksel
The alarm roused me from a fitful sleep at the controls in the safehouse’s surveillance center. The neural implant detector’s signature. Unmistakable. I pulled up the feed from the micro-drone network I’d seeded throughout a thousand square kilometers of the Arctic weeks ago. The timestamp showed 03:47 local time where the signal from the Freya’s Bridle located between Lorna’s vagina and anus had popped up, in a location that no state had laid any solid claim to.
Lorna’s biometrics had shown a spike of stress hormones and adrenaline, but she was alive. More important, she’d successfully triggered the security shutdown exactly as her visions had shown her, which had led to what amounted to a broadcast in the clear not just of the data from her implant but of a stunning amount of information about what lay under the permafrost at the site.
With three keystrokes, I activated the strike team. A squad of Pretorian Guard agents who had flown in from Rome, withHenrik, one of my brothers in the Sons of Odin, as a liaison, had been in position for the past eighteen hours, waiting in a reinforced shelter just beyond my best guess at Horakovsky’s sensor range.
With the data that the drones had captured and sent to me, I could provide the team’s operations officer with exactly what he needed to jam the station—Berkut Station, as it seemed to call itself. The strike force would need time, especially given what I could see about the depth of Horakovsky’s lair beneath the tundra, but they would be able to get in undetected.
“Operation Ymir initiated,” I said into the encrypted comm channel, my voice steady despite the rage burning in my chest at what the surveillance feed from the station was showing me from the past few hours.
I adjusted the video so that it unfolded at 3x speed, but, even so, watching myvolvaendure such degradation represented a severe trial of the evenness of my temper. Knowing I’d commanded her to submit to it made it worse despite my certainty that she could endure and triumph. The sight of her tied to the bed, violated again and again, simply tested my control in ways I hadn’t anticipated.
You love her, said the calm, simple voice in my head.You’ve never loved anyone this way.
“Primary breach in four minutes.” Henrik’s voice seemed so clear in my ears that I could scarcely believe he was hundreds of kilometers away, in the frozen wastes.
As I had programmed them to do, three micro-drones had traveled at supersonic speed the moment the signal had popped up, to penetrate the station’s ventilation system. Now theirfeed popped up on my screen: they had found Lorna, tied to a wooden punishment frame in what was all-too-obviously an interrogation chamber.
I watched Horakovsky take an implement from a cabinet and walk around the frame to show it to Lorna, who trembled at the sight. With fury rising in my chest, I recognized it instantly as a Russian knout, one of the cruelest instruments of punishment man had ever devised. But fury without precision was useless. I compartmentalized the emotion, filing it away for later.
In the feed from the drones still outside the facility, the strike team moved like ghosts across the frozen landscape, their thermal signatures masked by specialized suits developed in my own laboratory. Through their helmet cameras, I watched the facility’s exterior defenses fail to respond. Lorna had bought us our window.
I pulled up her vitals again. Heart rate 165. Blood pressure elevated but not critical. The neural discipline implant showed signs of activation—Horakovsky’s detector must have picked it up. I cursed myself for not anticipating that possibility, though the technology to detect Freya’s Bridle was supposedly limited to a handful of intelligence agencies.
“Breach team in position,” came Henrik’s report through my earpiece. “Awaiting final authorization.”
The drones had managed to hack the station’s own security now. I glanced at a secondary screen showing Takken passed out in what appeared to be guest quarters. The man’s blood alcohol content, extrapolated from his biometric readings, suggested he wouldn’t wake for hours. One less variable to manage.
“Execute,” I commanded.
Lorna
I heard Horakovsky’s footsteps circling behind me, the soft whisper of leather against his palm making my whole body tense against the wooden frame. The knout. I’d seen illustrations in history books during my university days—nine leather thongs braided together, each one capable of intense pain. The tsars had used them to break revolutionaries, to extract confessions, to destroy spirits.
“Such an elegant tool,” Horakovsky said conversationally, trailing the leather across my exposed backside. The touch was almost gentle, a lover’s caress that made the threat all the more terrifying. “The knout has a long history in my homeland. It teaches lessons that modern methods simply cannot match. This one is designed not to break the skin, in order not to damage a beautiful piece of ass like you, but I think you’ll find it painful enough.”
I tried to control my breathing, tried to find that place of calm myHerrahad shown me, but terror made my heart hammer against my ribs. The manacles bit into my wrists and ankles as I instinctively tried to pull away from the leather’s touch.
“Now then,” he continued, moving to stand where I could see him in my peripheral vision. “Let’s discuss what you’re carrying inside that pretty body of yours. My detector doesn’t lie, Lorna. There’s sophisticated electronics embedded in your pelvic region. Quantum-encrypted transmission capability. Military-grade bio-integration.”
He paused, letting the implications hang in the air. “So I’ll ask you one more time, and I suggest you answer truthfully. Who. Sent. You?”
“No one,” I gasped, my voice breaking. “I swear, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe it’s medical? Maybe my husband had something?—”
The first strike of the knout cut off my desperate lie. Fire exploded across my thighs, nine lines of agony that made me scream in terror. The sensation was unlike anything I’d experienced—not the focused burn of a strap or even the cruel sting of his flogger, but something that seemed to reach into my very bones.
“Wrong answer,” Horakovsky said calmly.
The second strike landed higher, right across my bottom. The third caught me diagonally, across my thighs again. I lost count after the seventh strike. Each one sent fresh agony cascading through my nervous system, the nine braided thongs leaving trails of fire that overlapped and merged until my entire backside felt like one enormous ball of fire. Tears streamed down my face, pooling against the wooden frame.
“Stop, please,” I sobbed between gasps. “I’ll tell you anything, just stop?—”
