Page 78 of Her Viking Master

I let out a little cry of fear when I saw him also take out a whip of a kind I’d never seen before. It was unlike anything in Sven’s collection, or anything Beaumont had used on me. The handle was polished dark wood, perhaps eighteen inches long, wrapped in braided leather at the grip. From its end extended multiple thin leather tails, each about two feet in length, knotted at intervals. The implement looked both beautiful and terrifying.

“This,” Marmareus said, holding the whip in front of me so I could see it clearly, “is called amastix.” He ran his fingers through the leather tails, separating them, letting me see how they moved like living things. “It is the ancient implement of discipline that represents the civilization brought by my organization, the Pretorian Guard.”

The word ‘civilization’ again, linked to punishment and domination. I swallowed hard, my eyes fixed on themastixas Marmareus continued to stroke its tails almost lovingly.

“I am going to punish you, Mary,” he said, his voice soft yet implacable. “Not just for your disobedience, but for your lies. You’ve been less than forthcoming about many things, I think.”

CHAPTER40

Sven

“I think we’re almost there,” Erik told me, looking back over his shoulder at me, without ceasing to type. I looked at his monitor. “I spoofed an account at what they call theLeolevel.”

Central Mithraeum

Login Confirmed,LeoOrichalcus

System Routing?

“What is that?Leo, you said?” I asked, my heart pounding harder as I thought of the possibility of finally seeing Mary again, even if only through a surveillance feed. “Is that like a rank?”

Erik nodded, his fingers flying across the keyboard with practiced precision. “From what I’ve been able to gather, they use an ancient Roman hierarchy.Leo—lion—seems to be a mid-level operational commander.”

“Can you access the surveillance system?” I leaned closer, my breath catching in my throat. The strange mix of anxiety and arousal I’d been feeling ever since we had handed Mary and Camille over to Beaumont intensified with each passing moment.

“Working on it,” Erik muttered, his brow furrowed in concentration. “Their security protocols are impressive, but not impenetrable. Especially not with the backdoor access we got from that data packet Jean Gisard sent his masters before he went dark.”

I paced behind him, unable to keep still. The Situation Room felt both too small and too large at once—too confined for my restless energy, yet the distance between me and Mary seemed to stretch across an unbridgeable chasm.

“Got it!” Erik exclaimed suddenly. The main display flickered, then resolved into a grid of surveillance feeds. “Now to find her…”

My eyes scanned the multiple screens desperately, searching for any glimpse of Mary’s distinctive red hair. Most of the feeds showed empty corridors, laboratories, training rooms—the inner workings of what appeared to be a vast underground complex.

“There!” I pointed to a feed in the lower right corner. “That’s her cell.”

Erik immediately enlarged the feed, and my breath caught in my throat. There was Mary, my beautiful, fierce, red-hairedvölva, backed into a corner of a stone-walled cell. She stood completely naked, her pale skin luminous against the darker background, her green eyes wide with fear and—I knew that look too well—unwanted arousal. Before her stood a tall man with olive skin and dark, intense eyes, dressed in an impeccably tailored suit that did little to hide his powerful physique.

In his hand, he held what I immediately recognized as amastix—an ancient Roman whip used for both punishment and ritual. The multiple leather tails hung from the polished wooden handle, each one knotted at intervals to increase the sting without causing permanent damage. It was an instrument of discipline I had studied, but never used myself, preferring the cleaner lines of Norse implements.

“Who the fuck is that?” I growled, my fingers digging into the back of Erik’s chair as I leaned closer to the screen.

“According to the system, that’sLeoMarmareus,” Erik replied, his voice tight with tension. “He’s the agent who ran the extraction team, remotely from their HQ.”

I watched, my throat dry, as this Marmareus—this enemy—advanced on Mary. His movements seemed fluid, controlled, the stance of a man completely confident in his dominance. He clearly had extensive training, not just in combat, but in the darker arts of sexual mastery. The way he wielded themastix, with casual expertise, told me everything I needed to know about his skill level.

“Mary,” he said, his voice carrying clearly through the surveillance system’s audio, “you will now learn what it means to disobey aLeoof the Pretorian Guard.”

I saw Mary’s throat work as she swallowed hard, her chest rising and falling with rapid breaths. Her nipples had hardened to stiff peaks—not from cold, I knew, but from the complex alloy of fear and arousal that I had cultivated in her during our time together. To my dismay and yet also to my pride, I could see that her training was responding to this man’s dominance, her body betraying her even as her mind might resist.

“Please,” she whispered, her voice small, but still defiant. “I don’t understand what you want from me.”

Marmareus smiled, a predatory expression that sent a surge of jealous rage through me. “What I want is irrelevant at the moment,Columba. What matters is what you need—discipline, structure, submission.”

I felt my cock harden painfully beneath my loincloth as I watched him flick the mastix, causing the leather tails to dance in the air. The sound made Mary flinch, her eyes following the movement with a mix of terror and fascination. In the midst of my concern—no, my fear—for her safety and well-being, I couldn’t deny the primal response of my own body to the scene unfolding before me.

I turned to Erik.

“We’re going to start the extraction mission today,” I told him. “Get Aksel working on the airline tickets.”

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