by Megan Crane
Tyr’s hand was too tight on Helena’s neck as they marched down the stairs. He was coming in too hot. He knew that. And Gunnar might be a crazy bastard, but he would sink a blade in Tyr’s side without blinking twice if Tyr tried to get in his face. He was unpredictable and unmanageable and—
This is not about Gunnar. You don’t give a shit about Gunnar. This is about Helena.
You want to keep her.
Tyr told that little voice inside of him to shut the fuck up.
Wulf shoved through the heavy door with the iron-barred opening in the middle that Gunnar usually peered out of, the better to slam it again in people’s faces. As they stepped into Gunnar’s domain Tyr wrestled with the unsavory truth that he’d rather fight a brother than lose a woman.
Not a woman. His woman.
But he couldn’t indulge that madness. Not right now.
Gunnar’s basement was a rambling, shadowy labyrinth of half-formed projects and fanciful inventions mixed with surprisingly well-furnished living areas, stretching out about half the length of the great hall above. The cleaners had kept up with it, obviously, because it smelled fresh, not closed-off and musty after the man’s year away. The whole sublevel was lit up with electric lanterns on all the pillars that cut up the space and winding strands of lights that flickered on and off as the mood struck them, illuminating the rich colors that Gunnar had always preferred—the red of blood, the black of earth.
The brother wants a crypt, Zyron had said once, rolling his eyes.
Tyr had been down here a thousand times, but he still couldn’t figure out the method to Gunnar’s seemingly chaotic explosion of things. Piles of waterlogged guns they’d liberated from fools on the mainland. Old structures piled here and there as if Gunnar planned to build a new lodge from the pieces. A long, corrugated metal boxcar that he used as his bedroom. A section devoted to screens and disc players, another to all the old computers and tablets and tech he’d collected over the years, spread out over a table long enough to seat the entire brotherhood he’d never allow in here all at once. Half an old ship that had been dashed against the rocks, with piles of furs and pillows inside the half-shattered hull as if it was a cozy lounge. Old wheels and gleaming engines for vehicles that would never run again on this torn-up planet, like metal phantoms of the rusted-out past.
Tyr couldn’t believe that he was going to have to hand his woman over to this freak. Who the hell knew what Gunnar might find on that tablet? And worse, who knew what Wulf would ask him to do to her when Gunnar found it?
He didn’t know if he could do it.
Tyr let go of Helena when they made it to the part of the basement kingdom Gunnar called his workshop, still reeling from that last crazy thought. He’d never shirked a single one of his duties in his life. He’d never disobeyed a single order Wulf had ever given him. He considered the king his friend.
His friend. His brother. His king.
How could he even consider standing up for this woman in the face of everything that mattered to him? The only things that had ever mattered to him? The very things that made him who he was?
You can’t, he snarled at himself, his hands in fists. You won’t.
Gunnar sat on that stool of his like he’d never left it, having maybe run a towel over his head since he’d stormed through the hall upstairs. Maybe. He was leaner than he had been, as if he’d been hunting for his food as he went out there, which meant going without a lot of the time, no doubt. He still looked deeply haunted. Those wolves’ teeth hung around his neck and Tyr couldn’t tell if they were meant to mark his triumph over the wild beasts or his failure to fall to them, that’s how screwed up Gunnar was these days.
The blond woman sat on a pillow in the corner of the workshop, her hands now bound before her with thick rope and the short, straight hair that framed her face already dry. Maud was still naked, yet she sat there wearing a serene expression that made Tyr’s eyes narrow. He didn’t trust obvious weaklings who didn’t look worried when surrounded by significantly more powerful people. Maybe because he’d grown up with Wulf, who used that exact kind of feigned physical understatement to sneak up on his enemies in plain sight.
But Gunnar’s latest toy—so what if he’d named her his mate before the brotherhood, it was clear what she was—was one mystery Tyr couldn’t let himself get dragged into. Not when there was still Helena’s future to sort out. Next to him, she stiffened suddenly, and he turned his attention back to her. He saw what she was staring at instantly. That damned tablet of hers that Wulf pulled out of his pocket and placed in front of Gunnar.
Who, of course, had continued to sit on his stool as they all walked in, showing his king his back in an act of disrespect that would get any other member of the clan a quick trip to the hard floor and a swift introduction to Wulf’s boot on his neck. It was obvious from the murderous glint in her dark blue eyes that Eiryn was considering doing it herself.
This was why Tyr was glad he didn’t have any family left. He’d loved his blood brother but the truth was, Zyron had been an endless agitation in his own way, as all siblings were. Why did Tyr think he wanted a woman? It was signing up for a lifetime of this kind of crap. It was sheer stupidity.
“I want to know if the Internet is a myth, brother,” Wulf said in a friendly tone no one in the room was likely to believe for a second. Tyr didn’t know why he bothered. “Then we can talk about where the hell you’ve been. Brother to brother.”
“As far as I’m concerned I have no brother. Not one of my blood.” Gunnar gritted the words out, picking up the tablet in its watertight plastic case and studying it, so intensely Tyr thought Helena would come out of her skin beside him as she watched. “I will, of course, obey the orders of my king.” He snorted. “If not the obedient little lapdog I refuse to call my sister.”
“Then you can explain yourself to your king,” Wulf replied, the friendliness absent this time. “But you should be careful, Gunnar. Your blood brother might give a shit that you went rogue for a year and turned your back on the whole of the clan. Your king does not.”
“Believe me,” Gunnar growled, “I know he doesn’t.”
The tension in the room spiked. Gunnar still sat there with his back to Wulf, as if he didn’t know that his king was glaring daggers at his back or that Eiryn had her favorite blade in her hand, ready to gut him as if he wasn’t her own blood. More likely, he didn’t care either way.
The chained woman looked alarmed and Helena inched closer to his side in that way she did that Tyr liked too much. He didn’t think she even knew she did it.
He was so thoroughly screwed when it came to this woman. Thoroughly, utterly screwed.
“Find out what’s on that tablet,” Wulf ordered Gunnar, in a calm voice that was completely at odds with the fury Tyr could see written all over him. The king forced it back, an obvious struggle, and then he blinked and like that he was cool and easy again. The unruffled, unbothered king he liked to play in public. “Tell me how to use what’s on it to reaccess the Internet. More importantly, tell me what else is on it that she doesn’t want us to know.”
Wulf turned away from Gunnar and eyed Helena, and it was Tyr’s turn to fake some cool instead of leaping to protect her. He didn’t like the sensation.
“Are you going to be a help or a hurdle?” Wulf asked her softly.
“I don’t need help,” Gunnar snapped. “I don’t want it.”
“Something I might care about if you were a brother of my blood, but you renounced that connection, did you not?” Wulf retorted. Then he shifted his frigid gaze back to Helena. “Decide now and this might not go badly for you.”
Helena shook, but Tyr was proud of the way she straightened her shoulders and didn’t cringe away from Wulf’s harsh, cold attention. As if she was as much a raider woman as she looked.
“It’s not my decision to make.”
Wulf’s cool expression barely changed as his eyebrows rose. “If it’s not your decision, why are you alive and
under my roof? My war chief can get compliant pussy anywhere.”
Tyr entertained several comforting if traitorous fantasies of tearing his king limb from limb with his own bare hands, but he didn’t say a word. Not even when Helena pulled in a deep, shuddery breath and then let it out again. And he thought not touching her, not soothing her, was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do.
So. Completely. Screwed.
“You’re not the only people in the world who make vows,” Helena said, sounding as scared as she did carefully respectful, and Tyr couldn’t help her. He couldn’t touch her. He couldn’t tell his king to back the hell off. His job here was to push her, not protect her. “And you’re not the only ones who keep them.”
And he thought he’d rather look down to find six blades shoved deep in his gut than feel this searing agony again. He scowled at her because she’d done this to him. She’d done it and now he was as screwed as she was.
“What the fuck is on that goddamned tablet?” he roared at her.
She jerked beside him and Tyr forgot they had an audience. That they were standing in Gunnar’s basement of pain. That Wulf was right there watching him unravel like this. That Eiryn was probably sharpening a new blade with his name all over it.
He didn’t care about any of that. It was as if they weren’t there.
Helena was so beautiful it made him ache and he wasn’t the kind of brother who got worked up about that sort of thing. But there it was. Her hair was in a braid again, that gleaming dark silk that hung over one shoulder and left her nape free the way he liked it. She was dressed like a raider, like his mate, and he could hardly remember a time he hadn’t thought her cute little tits were so damned perfect they made his mouth water. He knew her smell, her taste. He knew almost every inch of that lush body of hers, every fold of her cunt and contour of that smart mouth. He’d had a finger or two in that ass. He’d had her more than he’d ever had any other woman, consecutively, and he still wasn’t bored.
Hell, he was hard right now.
And she was looking at him with those stormy gray eyes of hers slicked dark with emotion and a stubborn set to her mouth and he didn’t care who was watching. He didn’t care what they thought.
He felt like this—whatever this terrible thing was that was twisting him up and making him as much of a lunatic as Gunnar—and she didn’t trust him at all. To make her come, sure, again and again. But that was it.
It made him want to howl at the sky. He wasn’t sure he didn’t, down here below the earth in this red and black dungeon. Gunnar’s own, personal hell. And now his.
“Tell me,” he grated at her.
Her eyes were so dark. “I can’t.”
He wanted to wring her neck. But he knew that if he touched her, that would lead to other things he didn’t need to do right here, where this thing in him would be visible to everyone watching. He couldn’t have that. He couldn’t expose this kind of weakness he’d never had before.
“You don’t have to trust him,” he told her, his voice low and his gaze locked on hers, though he nodded toward Gunnar. “No one trusts him. He’s a crazy lunatic. And you don’t have to trust Wulf. He’s not your king.” He tried to push her with his gaze alone, the way he would have with his hands if he could trust himself not to either hurt her or haul her up against him for a different reason entirely. “But you can trust me, Helena. I’ve kept every promise I ever made you.”
The first one hung there between them. I don’t do cold pussy. Tyr wasn’t an idiot. He might not have known why she’d provoked him at the time, but there was no way she’d have escalated her behavior if he hadn’t said that.
More to the point: if she hadn’t believed him.
Then he’d proved it.
And that had only been the first night.
He was only dimly aware of all the other people in this red and black cave. What mattered was the way her gray eyes held his, the things he saw scroll over her pretty face. The way she looked as lost as he was, as twisted up and destroyed, and the way her lips parted a little bit as if she couldn’t breathe through it.
It could have been a thousand years. It might have been a second. Tyr would never know.
And she would never ask for help without a push. Never. Not even when he would give her anything she asked, without thinking twice about it, and he was amazed at how hollow that made him feel.
But none of that mattered. Because if Tyr didn’t push her, Wulf would, and then there’d be a real situation if it turned out Tyr couldn’t handle it.
He already knew he couldn’t handle it.
“Krajic killed my blood brother,” he told her, pissed about the fact he was even saying it out loud. It felt as if he was acknowledging a critical weakness, and he added that to his list of grievances with this woman who was driving him crazy. “He took Zyron down from behind and then he toyed with him for three days, because he could. He dragged him from the battleground and cut him apart. We found nothing but pieces.” He didn’t look away from her as he spat that out. “Trust that there is no one on this earth who wants Krajic dead more than me, and no one better equipped to make certain that death is merciless. Trust me, Helena.”
But she was silent, or maybe that roaring in his head had taken over, and that hollow thing inside him doubled. Tripled. And she only looked back at him with her eyes too gray and tormented.
“You’re such a little shit,” he growled at her. “You know damn well you already do.”
She swayed slightly on her feet and then she pressed her lips together. Her eyes looked wet and miserable and he thought she’d say something stupid again, but instead, she nodded. A jerky tilt of her head as if she thought she might sob if she moved too much. As if it was that precarious.
“I do,” she agreed, her voice very low, very short. “I do trust you.”
It was like a bright summer day after another bleak and frigid winter. Tyr was surprised he was still standing. He wasn’t sure he’d ever stand the same way again.
He wasn’t sure he cared.
Helena turned back to Wulf, and she looked uncertain and more fragile than Tyr would have liked, but she tilted that chin up once again and she met the king’s gaze. Because that was his girl. Stubborn to the end.
He was going to have to deal with that, with her, as soon as this was done. He was going to devote himself to dealing with her, in fact, until she understood what was happening here.
“It’s not about the Internet,” she said, her voice crisp despite all that emotion on her face, slicing through the dark red crypt they all stood in. “Or not really. It’s about power.”
Wulf’s cool eyes gleamed. “In the end, it always is.”
14
Helena started with the maps, the way her family always had, passing them down through the generations and telling the same stories again and again until they could recite all the necessary information by heart. She tried to pretend she wasn’t at all shaken by what had happened.
What Tyr had said. What she’d agreed to do. What trusting him meant.
Wulf had called down a handful of other raiders the moment he’d seen the first map and they all stood there now, arrayed around him, watching Helena with an intent focus that made her stomach twist. But she couldn’t concentrate on that, or she was very much afraid she’d collapse to the floor where she stood, so she kept her attention on the maps instead.
The maps that had always been her calling, her destiny. Her promise and her doom.
Gunnar had hooked up her tablet to one of the huge screens he had on the wall of his workshop, and she stared at the map that popped up on it until she felt, if not exactly calm, as close as she was likely to get to it. Now that she’d decided she really was doing this. After all this time, after everything she’d lost and everything her relatives had suffered across the years, she really was going to be the one to take the family secrets outside the family.
“This is what the world looked like before the Storms,” she said, be
fore she panicked too much to speak. She sounded stiff to her own ears. Strange, a bit too high-pitched—but that was better than shaken. She moved her fingers on the tablet and the image zoomed in, focusing on one of the big landmasses. Old words were scrolled across it; the names of forgotten nations and lost cities arched over long-sunken topography. She nodded toward the eastern stretch of the map and zoomed in a little more. “And this is where we are now, more or less.”
Helena had studied these maps her whole life. She knew the shapes of all the continents of the drowned world by heart. The maps weren’t only markers of long-ago history, civilizations and societies lost in time. They were memorials for the dead, memories pressed to the screen like eulogies for all they represented, all they’d lost. All that land and all the people who had lived there, before the water had risen. Cities and countries she’d never heard mentioned outside her family in her lifetime; names nobody knew any longer. And most of what they’d seen on the screen was likely gone, lost beneath the water, just as it was here.
“It’s hard to remember it was a proper world once,” one of the raiders Helena didn’t know said in a low voice. “Just look at it.”
Helena glanced over at the intimidating pack of them, swallowing hard, a lifetime of hiding and running constricting her throat, making her tongue feel thick and wrong in her mouth. Maybe it was better to keep her mouth shut and let—
But no. She knew better. Whatever else happened, whatever happened to her personally as a result of what she said here today, and even if her trust in these hard men was horribly misplaced, Helena couldn’t do this on her own any longer. She’d tried for two years and failed. Miserably. Every season that passed without her sharing what she knew with someone else was a season closer to the inevitable day when Krajic caught up to her. He would kill her, she had no doubt, and that would be that. All this knowledge, gone forever, or simply put back in the hands of men who already abused it and left in their exclusive control forever.