Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 125077 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 625(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125077 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 625(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
“Please,” I whispered, my voice barely audible even to my own ears. “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to—”
“Silence,” Marmareus snapped, cutting off my pathetic attempt at apology. “You deliberately defied me. You touched yourself when I expressly forbade it. You brought yourself to orgasm while watching me use your friend.”
He advanced into the cell with the measured tread of a predator, each step deliberate, unhurried. He knew I had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The cell suddenly seemed much smaller, the air thicker, harder to breathe.
“I… I couldn’t help it,” I stammered, pressing myself harder against the wall. “It just… happened.”
Marmareus’ laugh was cold, humorless. “Nothing ‘just happens’ in the Mithraeum, Mary. Every action has purpose. Every disobedience has consequences.”
He moved to the section of wall that I knew now must conceal a cabinet similar to the one in Camille’s cell. With a press of his palm against the seemingly solid stone, the panel slid open, revealing the compartment within. My breath caught in my throat as he withdrew the familiar leather items—a collar, a belt, wrist cuffs, ankle cuffs, and thigh cuffs. The same restraints I had watched him place on Camille.
The leather gleamed in the cell’s soft lighting, the metal fittings catching the light and throwing it back in glittering pinpoints. Despite my fear—or rather, to my horror, because of it—I felt my body responding to the sight, the unwelcome warmth building between my thighs.
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 a mastix.” 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 the mastix as 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.”
CHAPTER 40
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 the Leo level.”
Central Mithraeum
Login Confirmed, Leo Orichalcus
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-haired völva, 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 a mastix—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.