by Megan Crane
This wasn’t a raider village. This was a city.
Helena had been taught her whole life that the only cities left were in the western highlands, under the rule of the rich western kings with their hoarded light and heat and lavish stores aplenty. She’d had no idea anything like this had survived the Storms, much less was inhabited—and clearly had been for a long time, maybe even since the Storms. She didn’t know how to process that, or all its implications. She didn’t know why there was that insistent little kicking thing inside of her that swore it was important that these raiders were so well off so far from the reach of the west, that demanded she pay attention to that fact.
But there was no time for that. There were drums and horns in the air, and people were singing. The ships came into smooth landings at the long wooden docks, and suddenly there was yelling and commotion and they were all being herded off the deck that had been their home for days on end. And Helena found she was far more terrified of this crowd and the rush of it all than she had been when it was only her and Tyr in the woods.
She gulped back a sob of sheer terror as she was carried along in the tide of people, the camp girls dancing and calling out ribald suggestions to their friends on shore, the brothers shouting out their own version of battle cries to the adoring crowds, a few of the captive women weeping out their second thoughts while the brawny male captives marched quietly with wary looks in their eyes.
It wasn’t until she was up on the dock and staggering down it with legs that felt like jelly that she realized there was a method to the seeming chaos of this landing. Wulf and his scary bodyguard stood at the end of the long stretch of wooden docks, on the rocky beach with the returning raider brothers assembled around him. The camp girls danced on by and the captives were sorted as they filed past. Captives for hard labor to the right, where more terrifying men waited, only these wore shirts instead of weapons hung in leather straps. The raider farmers, if Helena had to guess. She saw all sorts of people lining the shore and more pouring down from the side of the mountain. Tons of women, dressed with enough variety to suggest a selection of occupations—and to prove that Joelle and Ranya hadn’t lied to her on the boat, she supposed. Many men who looked tough and strong, but not battered into being from the hard rock walls that surrounded this place, like Tyr and his brothers, which suggested there really were raiders who did other things.
And children.
Helena felt herself finally pull in a deep breath, and realized she’d been holding it all this time. Maybe she was more compliant than she’d ever imagined, down deep, because she hadn’t understood until she saw them in front of her how worried she’d been that the raiders were so outside the bonds of the rest of the world that they didn’t even bother with children. And maybe Helena didn’t exactly want to be a baby factory. Maybe she had things she wanted to do before she got into all that and tried to be the kind of mother her own had been, but no matter how terrible men like Ferranti went about it, this was still what was left of the world after the Storms. There weren’t that many people remaining. Children were precious and more than that, they were the health and future of any settlement. Optimism with sticky hands. Any one of those rich men in the western highlands with multiple wives could call himself a king, but until he had children, that was nothing but a lot of posturing.
It amazed her how much it affected her to see that despite all the stories she’d heard her whole life—despite that bonfire and all that crazy sex she still couldn’t get her head around, despite the fact of Tyr and the things she needed to keep hidden from him and all the rest of them—raiders, it seemed, were people like anyone else.
Until now, she hadn’t entirely believed it.
“Stop.”
She knew Tyr’s voice now. She’d know it anywhere. That ruthless belt of power that could, when he wished it, travel across the open sea. She’d watched him do it. The line of captives in front of her, feeding in from all three ships, slowed to a standstill. Helena couldn’t see a thing over the broad shoulders of the two men standing in front of her. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see.
“That one is mine,” Tyr said in the same voice that seemed to echo off the green and gleaming hills and bounce back against the sandy beach.
And then the line in front of her was moving, stepping aside and widening a path—straight to her.
Helena felt a bolt of something liquid and hot slam through her. And then another one, even harder, when she looked down the cleared space to see Tyr staring right at her, his fierce face stern and uncompromising.
And dangerous, something inside her whispered, as if she might have missed that. So very dangerous.
“You,” Tyr said, as if he didn’t know her name. As if she wasn’t wearing his wool. As if he hadn’t—but she couldn’t think about that here. Now. With so many people craning their heads around to look at her. “Come here.”
The king was behind him, on a rock higher than Tyr’s though he’d crouched down to watch the spoils of the raid walk by, and his cool blue gaze was worse. Well, maybe not worse, Helena amended when she looked back to Tyr, at all that dark gold fury in his gaze and the mayhem it promised. Maybe there was no worse when it was nothing but raiders in all directions.
“Now,” Tyr ordered her.
He didn’t wave her tablet at her. He didn’t know to do that, or maybe he simply didn’t have to do it. Helena knew he had it—and if he had it, he had her.
And we can just pretend that if he didn’t have it, you’d defy him and throw yourself on the mercy of … who? That scary-ass king? Sure you would.
She wanted to fight. She wanted to flee.
Instead, in the latest in a series of decisions Helena regretted even as she made them, she ignored the turmoil inside of her and obeyed.
And walked right to him through the crowd, like the pet on a leash she had no choice but to pretend she was.
7
Tyr was long past ready to get his little liar alone at last, and find out exactly what she was hiding and what the hell it had to do with that sadistic asshole Krajic.
He propelled her down the long hallway that led to the quarters he used when he was here at the Lodge. He might have tried to front like he had this under control while they were down at the docks, pulling her out from the line of captives and making a very public claim on her in front of the entire clan as much to put the fear of god into her as to make a statement, but the truth was in his hard cock despite his frayed temper. He wasn’t making her walk the hall in front of him because it let him look at the way her ass swayed and amplified her obvious anxiety, though both were pluses.
He was trying to get his shit together before he lost it completely, all over her, which he was all too aware was no way to get what he wanted. Well. Not everything he wanted, anyway.
And Tyr had no doubt that he would get every last thing he wanted from this mysterious mainlander. One way or another. It was just a question of which raw nerve to push first.
Tyr loved only a handful of things in this life. His clan. His brothers. His king. The inhospitable little island to the north—barely big enough for a house and a field and some trees—that he’d claimed and settled on his own damned time, far away from all the politics and bullshit that went on in the city, where he imagined he’d go one day if he lived past his usefulness as a warrior for the clan.
And the sea.
The glorious, treacherous bitch of a sea. Sullen and seductive, harsh mistress and sweet lover in turn. He’d learned how to sail before he could speak in full sentences. His mother had been a camp girl and his father had died in battle before Zyron was born, so the two of them had been raised up in the clan’s nursery system with all the rest of the raider kids without parents who could take care of them, whether because those parents were dead or because they had other responsibilities to the clan. They’d been taught how to swim before they’d done a whole lot of walking and had been thrown into boats in the harbor not long after.
Ty
r had spent his entire life on that sea, making the smaller crossings between the many eastern islands, then the longer journeys to the mainland and back. He’d scrubbed the slimy bottoms of the boats with handfuls of sand when his teachers or the brothers had thought he’d needed lessons in humility, he’d done the scut work necessary to prove himself a full member of the clan on every ship in the raider fleet, and he’d taken his place at the oars of the raiding ships when he’d finally earned his place as a brother. He’d repaired the engines on all the old-ass boats the way they all learned how to do, standing around in the freezing water or diving to deal with it out at sea while the bastard currents raged all around. He’d had a lot of sex in the sea, bathed in the sea, even floated for days on his own goddamned back in the sea when an asshole of a would-be king got lucky with an ancient rocket launcher off the coast of Pennsylvania.
One thing was always true. Always. When Tyr was sailing—when his feet were on the deck of a boat and the wind was in his face—everything else stilled. Disappeared. There was only that beautiful magic of sails fat with wind and the slice of a perfectly crafted prow through the waves. If there was a meaning to this life, Tyr knew without a doubt that was it—a raider, a ship, and a sail filled with wind.
Except this time, the only thing he’d been able to think about after they left the lower Appalachian highlands behind and headed out into the open sea crossing to the eastern islands was Helena.
It was a fire in him, this burning rage, and it had done nothing but bite at him throughout the long ocean crossing. He could still taste her in his mouth and yet all he could see when he looked at her was Krajic’s brutal face. He’d wanted to get his hands on her right there on deck, make her beg and then break and then tell him everything he wanted to know. He’d wanted it so badly he’d almost overlooked one of his own cardinal rules. Tyr didn’t mix pussy with the sea. Ever. No matter if the pussy in question might very well be in league with his enemy, and getting a piece of it was becoming an obsession.
One bitch at a time, his favorite teacher in his nursery days had always said.
Tyr had never been tempted before. Not in the slightest.
“The door at the end,” he told her as she slowed near the far end of the hall, and it was a measure of how black his temper had grown that he took a certain pleasure in her hesitation.
He was the war chief. He knew that victory came as much from good strategy as from excellent blade craft. And still he wanted to throw her up against the nearest wall, make her writhe beneath him all over again, and use that against her.
You need to get a grip, he snarled at himself.
Tyr could hear the horns still blowing outside, an invitation to any clan members in hearing distance to come join the revelry. He heard the thump of drums and the laughter of his brothers from the Lodge’s main hall. And along the hallway, the creaks and groans of the old place as it welcomed the reappearance of so many large, loud men at once. Any return from the sea’s vicious grip was cause for celebration, but the safe return of an entire raiding party—and the king—with cargo holds filled with game and various other spoils they’d picked up along the way, human and otherwise, called for nothing short of a clan-wide holiday. Tyr would normally be right in the thick of it.
But first, there was business to tend to, in the form of one gray-eyed woman who was already stuck much too deep beneath his skin.
Helena stopped in front of his door and Tyr was right behind her. He reached over her and opened it, then guided her inside with an impatient hand between her shoulder blades. He slammed the door behind them and flicked on the lights, watching her with grim interest when she let out a gasp.
“You turn on your lights during the day? How much power do you have? And how?”
Her voice was too quick, he thought. Almost panicked. He filed that away.
“Generators, the same as anyone else,” Tyr said as he moved farther inside the living room.
He could have told her that it was mad Gunnar who’d moved the noisy things into the caverns behind the Lodge, so the brotherhood would never have to worry about the roar of the machines masking the sound of an approaching enemy. He didn’t. Just like he could have told her about the ways Gunnar had figured out how to harness the geothermal energy all over the islands that warmed their many pools and baths. He didn’t mention that either. Mainlanders, in his experience, saw savages where they expected to find them, no matter any evidence to the contrary. And if this woman was in league with the devil, she didn’t need to know any raider secrets. It was bad enough they’d taken her back to the Lodge when she was likely tainted. She might as well have security risk tattooed on her forehead—and Tyr knew it would be on him if she turned out to be a pawn of that mercenary bastard. If he’d somehow sent her here.
Talk about appearing weak in front of his clan. It didn’t bear thinking about.
“Then again,” he said, not exactly hiding the turmoil inside of him, that raging flame of something that still felt a little too much like betrayal for his liking, “if it was by the favor of the raider gods like all those stories you mainlanders tell, do you really think I’d tell you?”
He considered doing something about the way she scowled then, so unwise and inflammatory for a captive of the raider war chief this far from the mainland and any hope of rescue, but she was smart enough to aim it at the nearest light fixture rather than at him. And so he let her continue to glare at his lights as if she was personally offended by electricity when he hadn’t exactly taken her for one of those religious sorts, so convinced that technology was the root of all the evil that had beset the world and drowned it once already. He told himself that if she hadn’t been connected both to that odd little compound and Krajic, he wouldn’t have cared one way or the other what was going on in her head. That the only reason he was interested in her at all was because she was a means to an end, and so what if he’d come so hard at that bonfire he could still feel the rush of it inside him.
Tyr was getting as furious with himself as he was with her. He walked farther into the big room and started stripping right there, slinging his weapons harness across the big stone table near his private kitchen, throwing his pack next to it, and then starting on his boots. All without another word to the woman he needed to take apart like a puzzle and leave that way, the pieces scattered all over the Lodge like sand for all the brothers to sift through at their leisure.
Helena hugged that wool shroud around her like it was a security blanket and suit of armor in one, not that it would help her any. He eyed her while she took in his place as if she couldn’t believe it was real. Or that it wasn’t a hovel, more likely.
“Were you expecting a cave and few rocks?” he growled at her.
She swallowed. Hard. “Dirt and rags,” she replied, in a voice that wasn’t nearly as solid as the way she stood there. Good. “Or maybe a swamp.”
“I know the stories.” He kicked one boot off, then the next. “Sorry to disappoint you.”
There were the old rugs he’d found in various abandoned—or sometimes not so abandoned—mainland buildings and had hung on his walls. Weapons in cases and hung everywhere there was any wall space, as if he’d decided to decorate with death. Why not? It was a major fact of his life. Across from the screen he’d rigged up on one wall was a big, wide pile of furs and pillows that took the place of a couch. And on the far side of all that was the wall of windows facing the harbor and the sea beyond it and the doors that opened up to his long, wide balcony. It wrapped all the way around the end of this wing, and all of it was his. Tyr hated feeling trapped inside, too far from the elements. Being the war chief of the brotherhood had its privileges.
“Not exactly a crap hole of a concrete bunker, buried in kudzu and bullshit, I know,” he said, feeling his familiar rough-hewn wooden floor beneath his feet again and using it to center himself and ratchet back that pounding fury a little bit. He tried to look nonthreatening, the kind of man a compliant woman might tell all her s
ecrets. Whatever the hell that looked like, because he didn’t have it in him to play a punk-ass bitch. “You might not be able to handle the adjustment.”
She looked wary, and she should. He couldn’t fault her instincts, however little they were going to help her here.
“I’ll be honest, I expected the heads of your enemies and some trophy kills.” Helena cleared her throat as if she was as thrown by that soft note in her voice as he was. When she went on, she sounded cool. Unbothered. It was a good reminder that she did nothing but lie. “Maybe a pile of treasure in the corner, mixed in with the gristle and bones.”
“That’s in the bedroom.” He allowed himself a grim smile when her head snapped back around to him a little too fast for that unbothered thing to look convincing any longer. “Strip, girl.”
The air in the room changed, then. It went flat, then thick.
Tyr didn’t look at her. He didn’t need to look her. He could feel her tension skyrocket and he liked it that way. He peeled his trousers off and threw them in a pile with the boots. He could feel the salt all over his skin from the sea and the air alike, making him feel tight and gritty. He had more than a mere passing urge to lick some of that same saltiness from her. Or all of it.
He told himself that was part of the revenge he planned to take, nothing more.
Tyr took his time turning to face her. She was still wrapped up tight like that might save her, her gray eyes much too wide and that hair of hers a mess, and the fury in him seemed indistinguishable from hunger, suddenly. The same crazy need he’d felt on that beach pounded through him like she was doing a goddamned belly dance instead of just standing there. He should hate himself for that. He told himself he did—but his cock couldn’t tell the difference between revenge and lust. It was all the same to that fucker.