by Megan Crane
And still the summer storm howled on as if it would never end.
One night she snuck from the bed of furs and one sprawling giant of a man. She stood at his glass doors and stared out into the thick, threatening darkness, where lightning crackled over the water, ghostly and vicious. It made her feel raw inside. Small and vulnerable, and not in the way that soothed her.
She didn’t hear him come up behind her, but then he was there, a comforting wall against her back, hot and tough. Much better than the jagged light that split the clouds.
“It’s a lot scarier looking than it is,” he told her.
“Like you.” She laughed as she said it, and she felt his chest move as if he did, too, though he didn’t make a sound.
And neither one of them pointed out that Tyr was far scarier than he looked. Especially for her. And that even so, there were far scarier things out there. Like Krajic, who loomed as large in her head as the latest thunderheads on the horizon.
His hands came down to rest on her shoulders and she leaned into his touch, and Helena was glad it was so dark inside and out. She didn’t want to look at her own face or see the expression she could feel resting there, much too soft and wistful. She didn’t want to see what was stamped all over her, what she could feel bubbling up inside of her. What she refused to call by name.
She’d always been taught it couldn’t exist, that her parents had been the exception that proved the rule. What was the likelihood of it happening to her? In such extreme circumstances?
It was too easy to forget herself here, to forget reality. Tyr was too tempting. She’d accepted that this man fascinated her. She’d told him a hard truth, that she wanted only him. And she did. She thought she’d come to a kind of peace with that. But when had she started to like him?
More than like him. She felt safe with him.
Safe.
Helena couldn’t remember ever feeling safe before in her life. Not even when her parents had been alive. And certainly not since.
Not once since she’d seen Krajic standing over her parents’ bodies.
And it didn’t seem to matter that she knew it was temporary. That she was a captive, not this man’s mate, no matter how it felt when he tore her soul apart and sent her screaming into bliss, over and over again. No matter what seemed to swell between them sometimes, when she thought a single moment without touching his hand might make her heart burst open in her chest and drown her where she stood with all this jagged longing.
It was possible that she wasn’t going to survive Tyr intact, she thought as she stared at the flashes of light in the low clouds and reveled in the feel of those huge, hard hands on her skin. Whether she made it through this or not.
Tyr shifted around to look down at her, his dark gaze gleaming molten gold in the dark, brighter than the lightning in the distance. And this shouldn’t have happened, Helena knew. This wasn’t what she’d planned when she’d seen him out that window or crouched at his feet in that courtyard. She’d had the vague notion that she’d get away from him in the woods somehow—that he’d let her go, because what could he want with her? Tyr had only ever been her way out of Ferranti’s grip, so she could keep running from Krajic and make it to the Catskills before he caught her.
It hadn’t had a single thing to do with how looking at all his bold masculinity, so ruthless and unmistakable, made her feel. She kept telling herself that.
“Baby,” he said in a low voice now, “you’re going to have to tell me the truth sooner or later. All that shit you’re hiding is going to come out. You have to know there’s no avoiding it. Wulf doesn’t screw around.”
She didn’t lie to him, there in the dark with the storm right there against the glass, as if it lived inside her. She couldn’t. Tyr was the only warm, safe hiding place she’d ever known and she couldn’t make herself lie to him anymore. But she still didn’t know how to ask for help, even after his object lesson that night in the hall. And she didn’t have it in her to spill her family’s secrets, no matter how she longed to do it. She couldn’t. This was an impossible situation.
Particularly when she knew Tyr wasn’t kidding about Wulf. The king had watched her closely these past days, his blue eyes cool and calculating. He’d studied her in that same unnerving way every time he was near. Waiting, she understood. Biding his time.
“What’s going to happen when Riordan gets back?” she asked now, her voice soft in the night.
Tyr turned her to face him, his hands heavy weights on her shoulders and his thumbs at the base of her neck, and Helena didn’t understand how it was possible to feel so safe and so scared at once, so lost and so found, and all of it pointless anyway. Because Riordan was coming back. There was no escaping it.
And if she still entertained the treacherous thought that sharing all her family’s deepest secrets with the raiders would be a good thing, if she still wondered whether these powerful men might be much more likely to find a way to carry out the plans her family had made but never managed to complete—well, there was no point to that either. She was terribly afraid that was her own weakness talking. Her own cowardice.
“There’s no avoiding this,” Tyr said again, and she knew him now. She knew that scrape in his voice. She thought it was concern. She hoped it was.
Because she couldn’t really have him, she knew that. Not in any meaningful way. Whatever the hell meaningful was for a man who expected comfort pussy as his due. This was nothing more than a few days in the rain. It was only sex.
But she still thought his pity might be the death of her.
Helena tilted her head back and shifted position to melt against him, rubbing her breasts against the expanse of his chest and letting the fire that raged between them do her talking for her. He made a rumbling sound of displeasure but she felt the truth in the way his cock stirred against her, and she reached down and wrapped her hand around it.
She knew him now, and still, the way he kissed her thrilled her, that tangle of mouths and the dark need that beat through her at his taste.
He sank his hands in her hair and he picked her up. Then he tossed her back on to the bed and followed her down. Helena rolled and tried to scramble up again to meet him, but Tyr was there behind her as she made it to her hands and knees, and that filthy, glorious laugh of his made her freeze right where she was.
“Perfect,” he said, or maybe it was more of a groan. “Always so perfect.”
Tyr wrapped one hand around her hip and used his other to guide his cock to her pussy from behind. She already wept for him, her need a rich scent between them, and he didn’t waste any time. He slammed himself home.
And he took her as if he felt it, too, the desperation. The coming loss. The end of this, whatever it was. He took her so well and so completely she started to wish that maybe this time the rains really would last forever. He took her hard and wild until she bucked against him, dropping her head down so she could scream it out into his furs. And he didn’t stop. He only bent over her, covering her with his wide chest as he took her harder, deeper, until every breath was his name and it ended on a moan.
He flipped her over then, kneeling up above her as he thrust back into her. He pulled her legs high and hooked her ankles around his neck, so she was suspended in the air between the fur-piled bed and his perfectly sculpted body, nothing anchoring her but the slick, delicious fullness of his cock deep inside of her.
For a moment he held her there, his face harsh, his braids falling down around it, making him every inch the barbarian. There was a flash of something—a gleam, perhaps, nothing more—that she couldn’t quite read in his dark gaze. His breath as harsh as hers. The two of them poised there, together, as if on the edge of a perilous cliff with nothing below them but the cold, gray sea.
He was the whole of the world to her then. Always, something whispered, more in her heart than in her head.
He was the only world Helena wanted, but not the one she’d vowed to save.
Tyr started to move
again, slowly. Almost reverently.
As if he felt it, too, here in the dark, these things she dared not say.
And when Helena finally came again, tears streaming down her face and her voice half gone, he shouted out her name and followed her.
* * *
The brotherhood had lazily gotten around to sitting down to their usual nightly meal one evening when a commotion near the doors made everyone at the long tables in the great hall stop. And then turn to stare at the grand entrance. Raider warriors and camp girls, the brooding king and his lithe, deadly shadow alike.
Helena felt Tyr go taut and hard all around her in the same instant, one of his heavy arms clamping over her middle as if he thought someone might try to take her away from him. Her breath went out of her in a rush, and she frowned as she looked to see what had all the raiders muttering to each other.
Riordan was there, looking wet and furious as he marched down the length of the great room. But even though Helena’s stomach dropped at the sight of him, that wasn’t what had captured everyone’s interest.
It was the man behind him.
He strode into the hall, stopping so he was framed by the great high ceilings and backed by the huge stone fireplace and the chimney that soared to the roof far above, the great raider shield they all wore stamped over their hearts above him. He wore some kind of flowing thing like a cloak and it swirled around him, wet and dark and imposing. He let his hood fall back as he stood there and a gasp rolled through the hall. This man looked fierce and entirely feral, as if he were not wholly a man. He looked like a wolf, his face drawn and gaunt, so there was nothing but stark fury and the glitter of cool blue eyes. His dark hair fell around him, damp braids to match his damp beard, and when he moved Helena saw a set of wolves’ teeth on leather cords hanging around his neck. At least ten, she guessed.
And this man, she knew without having to be told, was Gunnar. The king’s full blood brother. And her doom.
But Gunnar was only part of what made every last person in that hall stare.
The rest was reserved for the naked woman beside him, lean and long limbed and peach skinned, with wet blond hair cut short around her ears in the way Helena had only ever seen the priests do to mark their collections of virgin nuns. The woman had huge, dreamy blue eyes, a wistful sort of expression to match, and a wide, generous mouth that looked as if she was on the verge of smiling. Even now.
She also had a thick iron collar around her neck, connected to the heavy chain Gunnar held in one hand.
“Welcome home, brother,” Wulf said, in a voice that sounded casual and yet managed to fill the entire hall just the same. Helena felt a chill creep down her spine, and sat a little bit straighter in Tyr’s hard lap. “Did you bring the clan a gift after such a long absence from your duties? Wrapped in iron chains, no less?”
Gunnar’s gaze seemed as cold as the king’s, yet far darker, when Helena could see his eyes were precisely the same shade of blue. He glared and the hand at his side moved, making the heavy chain clank. The woman next to him didn’t react at all. Only the faint movement of her bare chest indicated she wasn’t carved entirely from stone.
“This woman is Maud. I claim her as mine,” Gunnar rasped out, in a voice that sounded as if he hadn’t used it in a long time, and every raider in the hall seemed to sit straighter at the sound. “Let no hand touch her without my blessing. I’ll cut it the fuck off.”
There was a low murmur at that, snaking darkly from table to table, but Helena didn’t understand it.
“If you don’t want people coveting your woman, you shouldn’t parade her around naked.” That was Riordan. He’d moved to stand before the king’s table and he still looked furious. Even more furious as he scowled back at Gunnar and his woman. “Take some responsibility for your own crap.”
Gunnar’s lip curled, but he kept his furious gaze on Wulf, who hadn’t seemed to move at all since his brother’s arrival—and yet, Helena had no doubt whatsoever that the king was not amused.
At all.
“I’ll be below,” Gunnar growled.
Tyr vibrated with tension beneath her, or maybe he’d growled. She couldn’t tell the difference—she only knew that his hard grip on her tightened and that the blast of his temper nearly took the top of her head off.
“Am I to wait on you at your convenience, then?” Wulf asked his brother idly. Almost softly. He unsheathed one of his blades and began to toy with it, testing its edge against his thumb. And Helena found she was holding her breath. “Is that how this works? I was under the impression I was your king.”
Gunnar looked murderous. His huge arms tensed as if he was ready to fling himself down the long stretch of hall toward the king’s high table and go for Wulf’s throat. The expression of every raider brother Helena could see told her they thought he might do it. Behind her and beneath her, she felt Tyr tense in a way she realized, belatedly, meant he was ready to hurl himself into the battle if Gunnar tried.
Wulf continued to toy with that wicked blade as if nothing of any note was happening. Somehow, that made the tension much worse.
There wasn’t a single sound in the hall.
Until the woman beside Gunnar … did something. She moved, maybe. She must have. It could only have been the tiniest little shift—as if her feet were cold against the great hall’s floor and she lifted one or the other, perhaps—but whatever she did, it made that heavy chain clank again. The sound was like a gong in the tense, silent hall. Gunnar scowled at her and she only gazed back at him, her blue eyes as dreamy as before and her expression impassive. Almost enigmatic. Gunnar wrapped the heavy chain tighter around his hand and slowly shifted that glare to the king.
But that awful, murderous tension was gone.
Slowly, perhaps painfully, Gunnar inclined his head.
And the whole hall seemed to exhale.
“What just happened?” Helena whispered to Tyr as Gunnar led his naked woman away, along the edge of the hall toward the back where she’d thought there was nothing but kitchens and the mountain beyond. “Why was that so tense? Aren’t they full blood brothers?”
“Gunnar’s wife died in a raid a year ago,” Tyr said shortly. His gaze was fixed on Wulf, who had leaned over the table to confer with Riordan, and his grip on her hadn’t eased at all. “He blames Wulf.”
“Why?”
Tyr shrugged. “Wulf ordered the raid.”
“That doesn’t—”
Tyr slanted a hard look at her then, and she jolted a little bit against him.
“People always want someone to blame, Helena. Always. It’s a lot easier than accepting that bad shit just happens in a jacked-up, leftover world like this one. Gunnar’s just one more fool who would rather be delusional than deal with reality.”
She didn’t know why she was trembling, deep inside. “He looked a little more angry than delusional. He looked like he spent the last year with ghosts and they taught him how to kill things. For fun.”
But Tyr didn’t respond. Helena followed his gaze and saw the hard look Wulf threw at him. Unreadable to her, but Tyr nodded. Decisively.
When he looked down at her again, he wasn’t the man she’d come to know at all.
He was the war chief through and through, and it chilled her. More than that, it made her chest ache. His grip on her tightened once more, almost too hard, and then he let her go.
“Time’s up, Helena,” he said softly.
* * *
It was the drama that Tyr couldn’t stomach.
Or so he told himself as he stalked from the hall a decent, respectful distance behind Wulf. He knew the king would not be interested in anyone seeing how furious he really was at this latest stunt.
Gunnar had always been a pain in the ass. Older than Wulf by a handful of years and as weird as his younger brother was effortlessly magnetic. In that particular way of his that had led him to do annoying shit like replace all the blades in the nursery with his version of “better” steel that fell apart a
t the first touch of water and then follow that up with figuring out how to make the motors on the raider ships run silently, thereby revolutionizing the entire fleet. Punish him or praise him? No one had ever known.
You’re the most irritating genius I’ve ever met, you little shit, the old king had roared at him then, in front of the entire clan.
Gunnar had been about twelve.
Age hadn’t made Gunnar any less irritating. He likes to try patience, Zyron had said once. It’s his art. His woman had been as nutty as he was, always rubbing her face with the juice of different berries so she’d look painted and wafting around the hall cackling about witchcraft and ancient gods and a whole crap load of bullshit. But live and let live, as long as a man did his duty to his clan, Tyr had always thought. Whatever got the two of them off was their business.
It was the theatrics that Tyr objected to, he thought now. Audra had been about as far from a camp girl as it was possible for a woman on the eastern islands to get without being drowned for her bullshit as a snotty teenager. Gunnar had always called her his most finicky machine, information Tyr knew because they’d always conducted every second of their over-the-top relationship like they were performing it on a stage and the entire population of the eastern islands was their captive goddamned audience.
Apparently nothing had changed without Audra around, he thought darkly as he led Helena back through the kitchens and then down the dim stairs that led to Gunnar’s basement lair. Wulf led the way and Eiryn took the rear. It was one more parade Tyr didn’t like at all. He put that at Gunnar’s door, too.
That naked woman. Maud. What the hell was that? She hadn’t looked cold or muddy, so that meant Gunnar hadn’t kept her naked on his long trek back in from wherever he’d been all this time or she’d have frozen solid. As usual, he’d wanted to make a dramatic entrance. The last time the brothers had seen him he’d been drenched in blood and howling about slaughtering wolf packs in his beloved’s name, and now he was claiming a new mate?