She put cuffs on my wrists and ankles, then around my thighs just above my knees. Then a belt with D rings at either side went around my waist. Despite my attempts to think of Latin quotations I had learned in college that featured the word columba, my mind instead wanted to imagine how the rings on the cuffs and the belt could be used to keep me positioned in various absolutely humiliating postures—positions in which I could be…

None of the verbs that came to mind reassured me. Worse, each of them brought a fresh wave of heat both to my cheeks and down there, between my legs, where Giovanna had already promised, in her matter-of-fact way, to bare me.

Positions in which I could be used… enjoyed… punished…

Fucked.

At last she stood before me, holding what I knew must be my collar.

“This is a special moment for you, columba,” she said, “though you still understand so little. Remember the feeling, and cherish it as you learn about your new life and your new duties.”

I couldn’t keep back the sob that rose in my chest as she reached the black leather collar, so much less elegant than her own, but functionally the same symbol of submission, toward me. I smelled the spice of her perfume, and to my distress I smelled my own mineral scent, too—the same shameful fragrance I knew I had left in the Viking bride chamber.

Giovanna buckled the collar at the back of my neck, and then she stepped back.

“Nymphobus,” she said quietly.

The man she had called Oceanus moved to the coffee table. With a swallow I noticed something about the table I hadn’t seen before: it had fittings, clips attached to retractable straps that the huge man drew out a little way and then clamped in place.

He turned to me and rose. His hands were on me an instant later, not unkindly but with the same expertise with which he had positioned my elbows on the chair seat. I cried out as he hoisted me into the air with no apparent effort, and then I found myself on my back on the low leather-covered table with my legs raised and held apart by the cuffs at my ankles and thighs that the nymphobus had quickly connected to the table’s straps and clips.

He secured my waist to the table with more straps, clipped to my belt, and then my wrists to the belt.

I stared at the ceiling. My legs were spread and raised and I could feel the air everywhere that air had never been, in any context involving another person’s presence, in the entire twenty-four years of my life. The welts on my bottom, my virgin pussy, even my cringing anus, all so visible that hot waves of mortification seemed to travel from my toes to my scalp.

I blinked, and my lips parted without a sound as above me, upside down in my vision, Giovanna hiked up the narrow skirt of her linen suit and reached below the hem. Her movements were calm and unhurried. I heard myself let out a tiny, whining noise from the back of my throat as she drew her lacy black panties down. She stepped out of them and set them aside, and I had one moment of absolute incomprehension before she moved over the table and lowered herself onto my face.