Page 7 of Her Viking Lord
“Mila,” Horakovsky said, his voice deceptively soft. “Do you remember what I promised would happen to fuck toys who resist?”
The girl went completely still, as if his words had turned her to stone. A whimper escaped her throat, but she didn’t move again.
“Good girl.” Horakovsky positioned himself beside her, running the folded belt through his free hand. “You know, Prime Minister, I’ve had some trouble with this one recently. Just last week, I had to plug her tight little ass with a punishment dildo. Eight hours she wore it, learning what happens when a girl forgets her place.”
The casual cruelty of his words sent a wave of nausea through me, but worse—so much worse—was the pulse of heat that followed it. My thighs clenched involuntarily as my traitorous body responded to the image his words painted. The memory of my own finger circling that forbidden place last night burned through me, and I felt my face flush with shame.
“We’re leaving. Now.” Takken’s grip on my arm tightened painfully as he pulled me toward the door.
“Suit yourself,” Horakovsky said, not even looking at us. “Though I think your lovely wife might benefit from some old-fashioned discipline. These modern women, they forget theirnatural place without proper guidance. Isn’t that right, Fru Norquist?”
His eyes found mine over his shoulder, and I saw in them a terrible knowledge, as if he could see straight through to the shameful dampness gathering between my legs. Takken yanked me through the doorway just as Horakovsky raised the belt.
The sharp crack of leather on bare flesh echoed into the hallway, followed immediately by Mila’s scream—raw and desperate. The sound seemed to follow us as Takken dragged me away, my heels clicking frantically on the marble floor as I struggled to keep pace with his angry stride.
“Fucking Russian savage,” Takken muttered, though I noticed he kept his voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry back to the conference room. Even in his anger, he wouldn’t risk offending Horakovsky. Not with billions of kroner at stake.
My legs felt weak, trembling with a combination of fear and the helpless arousal that the silver raven had confronted me with last night. Behind us, I could hear another crack, another cry. Part of me—the part that had writhed on my bedroom floor last night—wanted desperately to look back, to see what was happening in that room.
CHAPTER 4
Aksel
I watched the feed from the Synergy Group reception with as much detachment as I could muster, my fingers steepled beneath my chin as I studied Lorna Norquist’s—my new bed thrall’s—reactions. The surveillance equipment we’d managed to install in the conference room provided crystal-clear imagery—and with the new biometric algorithms the Pretorian Guard had sent us, I could assess every micro-expression and every involuntary shudder on Lorna’s lovely face. The secrets beneath her carefully maintained facade lay revealed in the numbers aggregated in the chyron of my screen.
From my position in the Eye of Huginn, the Sons of Odin’s control room beneath Rouen, surrounded by banks of monitors and quantum-encrypted servers, I could observe everything while remaining entirely a mystery to Lorna, my most important project. The perfect vantage point for an engineer—and the Sons of Odin’s chief intelligence officer—who understood that the most elegant solutions often required distance and precision.
That would change very soon, of course. I could already feel my palms itching in anticipation of laying hands on the beautiful, criminally neglected young woman.
She’s responding perfectly.I felt my mouth curve into a smile as I noted, with the help of an extreme close-up, how her pupils dilated when Horakovsky mentioned the punishment dildo. The biometric sensor a nano-drone had installed between herfisseand herrøvhula few days ago provided real-time data—elevated heart rate, increased skin conductivity, above all the humidity in the vicinity of her understandably needy vagina. Lorna had no way of hiding the telltale signs of arousal from her newHerra, no matter how rigid she kept her posture.
The neural discipline implant installed alongside the perineal sensor was also performing flawlessly. I had designed the device myself, and refined it through years of careful iteration. I called it Freya’s Bridle, for its ability to rein in the waywardness of young women like Lorna. The ability to inflict discipline on a bed thrall in training at a practically limitless distance had already proven itself priceless.
Nothing could truly substitute for my firm, masculine hand, though—whether open to spank Lorna like a little girl or grasping a traditional Viking punishment strap to provide a more grownup sort of discipline. Lorna would feel that soon: she couldn’t feel it soon enough for my purposes, in fact. On the other hand the immediacy and intimacy of the discomfort, agony—or indeed the pleasure—I could bring to Lorna’s most private places with the Freya’s Bridle had its own exceptional value.
I pulled up her biometric history on a secondary screen, comparing last night’s readings to the current data stream. The correlation struck me as fascinating. Her response to authority, to commanded submission, showed the clear patterns we lookedfor—that much lay there on the surface of the numbers. But the comparison of her response last night to the facts I saw in real time said something more.
Lorna’s own first lesson in submission had progressed her training faster than all but the most promising bed thralls in our records. What I observed now—the strength of her arousal at seeing the mere beginning of another girl’s punishment session—made it clear that we had identified an extraordinary asset. The numbers demonstrated an important, valuable complexity to the deep-seated needs the poor girl had suppressed for years. The ancient knowledge ran strong in this one, even if she didn’t have access to it yet.
“Freya’s Bridle increases L’s emotional resonance,” I said quietly, making notes in Old Norse, the more scientific bits of it my own new coinages, via speech-to-text on my tablet—using the ancient language was a habit I’d cultivated from the Sons of Odin’s rituals that had also proven useful for maintaining operational security. “L shows heightened sensitivity to verbal dominance cues even when issued to other girls. Physical proximity to trained submissives triggers sympathetic arousal response.”
On the main screen, Takken dragged his wife from the conference room just as Horakovsky raised his belt. I switched to the hallway cameras, tracking their movement through the building. Lorna’s gait appeared unsteady, her body language broadcasting distress and arousal in equal measure. Her husband, that pompous fool, remained oblivious to the war raging inside his wife.
I put a time stamp on the data feed from her perineal sensor, making sure that I could find the moment again in the vast stream of data that was recording every sensation sheexperienced for later analysis. The graphs streamed across my screens in elegant patterns, each spike and valley telling the story of her internal struggle.
“Brother, she’s ready for the next phase,” I spoke into my encrypted comm unit, knowing that Henrik would be listening from his position in Oslo. “The conditioning from last night has started to take hold. She’s primed for training. Get the Jagburg facility ready.”
Lorna
Two days went by.
Two days of pretending everything was normal. Two days of smiling at Takken’s breakfast table, attending committee meetings about cultural preservation while knowing I’d already betrayed everything, two days of checking the burner phone obsessively only to find nothing. No silver raven icon. No messages from ‘my’ mysteriousHerra. Just silence that felt heavier with each passing hour.
I’d started to wonder if I’d imagined it all. The pain, the pleasure, the complete loss of control. Perhaps I’d suffered some kind of breakdown. The alternative—that someone really had installed something inside me that could control my most intimate responses—seemed too impossible to accept in the clear light of day.
Then, on the evening of the second day, as I sat in my study pretending to read a biography of Queen Margrethe while actually staring at nothing, the phone buzzed.
The silver raven had returned.
