by Megan Crane
Wulf didn’t wait for Ferranti to reply to that, possibly because the man was sputtering again. He shifted his gaze to Helena instead.
“Did you hear him?” he asked. “Your husband awaits.”
Helena’s gaze slid right over that first line of assholes, Ferranti and the narrow-shouldered twerp, straight to Tyr. And stayed there.
And Tyr didn’t care what might be perfectly visible on his face then. Not when she was looking at him like that. Like the whole world was right here, in between them, and nothing else mattered. No kings, no clans. Just the two of them. He straightened, done with this. It was time he handled it the way he should have back in Atlanta, so none of this would have happened in the first place. He should have killed that bastard Ferranti on sight. And he should have formally claimed his captive the moment he’d taken her.
It was past time to remedy that shit.
“I don’t mean my war chief,” Wulf said, mildly enough, but Tyr heard the warning in it. He gritted his teeth. Wulf waved his hand at the man beside Ferranti. “This one.”
It seemed to take Helena a long while to drag her gaze away from Tyr’s, and her brows pulled together as she stared at the man in question as if she hadn’t seen him standing there from the start.
“My husband?” she echoed. And Tyr smiled as she straightened her shoulders, then tipped up her chin. That was his girl. Stubborn and mouthy, the way he liked her. More raider than mainlander. “Hardly. It was a winter marriage, nothing more. And the last I checked, it was summer.”
Tyr liked the fact she’d echoed him, however unknowingly. He liked it far too much.
“That odd ritual you mainlanders participate in,” Wulf murmured as if he’d never heard someone confirm its existence before. As if here, it was nothing but a myth. “A strange little architecture built around sex, for no apparent reason.”
“It’s about sex, yes,” Helena said, her voice dry. “But not the kind of sex anyone here would recognize.” She shifted her gaze to Ferranti and his minion. “It’s much too boring.”
The brothers roared at that. The camp girls cheered. The little kinglet turned purple and his loyal follower looked ill.
Helena found Tyr’s gaze again, across the din. And he felt like her soft, unmarked hands were all over his body. Like her hot mouth closing in hard and tight on the head of his cock. It made it so tempting to ignore what had happened—and what was about to happen. What he’d shoved out of his mind while Krajic still lived, because as long as Krajic had been alive, none of the rest of this mattered.
Ferranti stepped to the side, and hauled the rest of his circus act forward, much too roughly to Tyr’s way of thinking. He gave the cloaked figure a little shove.
The woman staggered forward as he’d likely intended, her hood falling back and the cloak opening to show the tiny baby she cradled against her chest. She didn’t speak—she hadn’t spoken a word, as far as Tyr could tell, since Ferranti had demanded she be brought out of the ship’s hold back at the beach. She looked at Helena for a moment, then back down at her child as if she didn’t care what happened next.
But everything changed, as Tyr had known it would. For Helena, who looked as if she’d been the one hauled forward like that and then shoved a few extra feet for good measure—something that would never, ever happen to her as long as Tyr drew breath.
Helena stared, her face draining of color.
Her mouth moved, but for a moment there was no sound. When she forced it out, it hardly sounded like hers. She sounded young. Scared, even, and it ripped right through him, like she’d torn out his ribs and thrown them down at Wulf’s feet with everything else.
And she wasn’t even aware that he was there, as far as he could tell. She was staring at the woman and her baby.
“Melyssa?” she whispered. “What are you doing here?”
* * *
It was the camp girls who moved when Helena did. Joelle who murmured something about fluids and sent one of the other girls to fetch some. Rinni who clucked over Melyssa’s glassy stare and went to get food. Janhavi who led Melyssa and Helena to the nearest couch and made them both sit down.
They take care of everyone, she thought. Even complete strangers. Tyr had been right all along—she wasn’t a camp girl. She didn’t have it in her. They were far better people than she was.
Because the first emotion she’d had when she’d understood who she was looking at, who Ferranti had shoved at her, was anger. Pure and shameful and ugly. Not Melyssa, she’d thought, very distinctly. Not here. She ruins everything—
And then she’d taken a closer look at her sister’s condition and she’d hated herself.
“What happened?” she asked now as the camp girls buzzed around them, bringing drinks and foods and warm towels while Ferranti raged on about honor and duty behind them, right there in the circle where Krajic’s body still lay. “What did they do to you?”
Ranya eased the baby out of Melyssa’s grip, clucking at the little girl who arched her smooth back and curled her tiny red hands into fists, then murmured something about diapers to the women around her. Melyssa reached out as if she wanted to snatch the baby back, but she let her hand fall back to her lap, and Helena took an even closer look at her sister. She looked weathered. Ten years older in the weeks since Helena had seen her, and so obviously worn out it was almost as if she was see-through. Her dark hair was scraped back from her face and secured in a ratty little knot at her nape in marked contrast to the way she’d always worn it, swirling glossy and pretty around her shoulders, even in the final days of her pregnancy. She still had that ample, voluptuous figure of hers that had always attracted every man she’d ever made eyes at, but instead of the fitted clothes she usually wore to show off her charms, she was swamped in what looked like a man’s baggy castoffs.
In most women, Helena would think this was simply the realities of motherhood, taking perhaps a harder toll than most. It happened that way sometimes. But in her happily vain, remarkably focused sister, this was nothing short of terrifying.
One of the camp girls pressed a carved mug into Melyssa’s hand and she drank from it, grimacing slightly.
“It’s a good tea,” the older woman said quietly. “It will help.”
Melyssa didn’t argue, and that was even more alarming than her appearance.
Helena shot a look over to the huge group of raiders. Ferranti didn’t seem to realize they’d formed a wall between him and Melyssa, her baby, and Helena. Or that Jurin had taken up a guard position at the end of the sofa. She could hear Ferranti’s voice rise and fall as if he was telling a story—or spinning out some new line of crap. She felt jittery and … ruined, somehow. Even if Krajic really was dead. As if this had all been some fantasy, like those dreams she’d had since she was a girl, and now Melyssa had come and woken her up again.
And no good could come of waking up like this, so harshly and so fast. Helena was sure of that.
“Melyssa,” she said, pulling her knees up beneath her on the cushion next to her sister and hugging them to her chest, “please. Tell me what happened.”
Melyssa held the mug between her palms and scowled at it.
“It was bad after the raid. After you left.” She pressed her lips together. I had the baby out there on the stones. More blood to wash away. It took a long time.” Her voice cracked on that. “And no one cared. They were worried about the dead. They were worried about you.”
“Melyssa.”
Her sister shook her head once. Hard. “And I’ve been so mad at you for so long now, Helena. My whole life, maybe.”
That took all the air from Helena’s chest.
“I thought, maybe if you’d taken my side even once, things would be different. We wouldn’t have had to run around like that. We could have pretended to be normal for a while. Just a while, someplace nice and warm.” She sucked in a breath, and glanced over her shoulder, toward that same still body of the most evil creature they’d ever encountered. “Maybe if you’
d backed me up, they wouldn’t have died like that.”
Once, when Helena had been small, she’d ignored her father and run too fast through a dangerous old ruin in the high desert. She’d fallen through the roof of a half-buried old house and landed with a sickening crunch on the floor below it, in a shower of rocks and dirt. She’d come out of it with scrapes and bruises and a broken leg, and she’d never imagined anything could hurt worse than that. The terror of the fall, the horror of the landing.
This was much worse.
She couldn’t speak. She didn’t think she could breathe. She felt frozen solid, aware only of the tears streaking down her cheeks when they made her chin itch. But she let them fall.
“All I wanted was a real family,” Melyssa whispered. She looked at Helena then, with the same gray eyes they’d inherited from their grandmother, or so their mother had always told them. Melyssa’s were paler, and far more tormented. “And maybe I wanted a little attention, too. I was never the smart one. I was never going to be the savior who changed the world. I was never going to be you. So when we met Ferranti I thought, well, the compound might be a shithole. He might be a jerk. But it could be my shithole and he could be my jerk and I could finally have what I wanted. A family. My family.” She shook her head. “Then I had the baby and the raiders took you and still, all he wanted to talk about was you. Krajic showed up at dawn the next morning, and that was worse.”
“Melyssa.” Helena’s voice was thick. Distorted. “You have to know—”
Her sister held up her hand. “I was so mad at you I thought it would kill me, Helena.” She dropped her hand, but she didn’t drop her gaze. “They told me I was the insurance policy. They put me in the hold of that ship with a day-old baby and they left me there, and I was fine. I just hated you the way I always did.” She swallowed. “But then the storm came.”
Helena didn’t know when she’d moved her hands to cover her mouth again, as if that was the only thing holding back a scream. Or a sob. Or both.
“And I thought I was going to die,” Melyssa told her, her voice hardly a scratch against the much louder voices of Ferranti and the raiders behind them, but Helena heard her perfectly. As if her every word was etched into stone. Cut deeply and indelibly into her own bones. “I wanted to die. And the only thing I regretted was you. That I was such a bitch to you for all these years when you’ve been my family all along. That I’d lost you as surely as we lost Mom and Dad, as if I’d sold you out to Krajic myself.” Her voice broke then, and tears tracked down her face, but she shook her head when Helena tried to reach out to her. “Listen to me, please. I know I’m a bad sister. I’m a terrible person. I told Ferranti everything I know, all our secrets—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Helena said fiercely. “I know you did, and Melyssa, it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It matters a lot,” Melyssa whispered. “He sold them. Why do you think Krajic let him live? Let any of us live?”
Helena’s mind whirled. “Krajic is dead. Who cares?”
“Krajic was for sale like anyone else,” Melyssa said, and she wiped at her face with her free hand, her voice losing its brokenness and moving to panic. “It isn’t Krajic who matters; it’s the rich bishop who owns him. And with gold and furs and barrels of fuel, Ferranti gets to make himself the grand overlord of the Atlanta coast.” Her lips thinned. “But they knew what I told them isn’t enough. It won’t help anyone find anything. I was terrible at all that stuff. They know they need you.”
“They can’t have either one of us.” Helena wiped at her face. “And Krajic is dead, Melyssa. Ferranti is nothing—”
“Listen to me,” Melyssa said urgently. “He doesn’t look like much, I know, but he’s devious. And vicious. I know how his brain works. Krajic’s death just means there’s no middle man for him to deal with, not that he’ll give up on the prize. And if he can’t give his bishop you, he’ll give him me and pretend I’m you.”
“And here I thought he wanted to kill us.”
“Eventually, Helena.” Melyssa’s voice was stark and low. “Eventually.”
Helena found she was clenching her hands into fists. “How would this plan of his work if you don’t know anything?”
“I’m sure he’ll tell the bishop I’m just being stubborn,” Melyssa said, and she looked at her mug, her lips trembling. “I don’t really want to think about it. But I can handle it. It’s my baby having no one in the world that I can’t—” She shook her head, and her voice thickened again. “Please. Know I’m a terrible sister. But if he takes me away, I need you … I’m begging you; please take care of my baby. Please.”
Helena didn’t think. She shot to her feet, something sharper and harder than mere temper flooding her.
“No,” she bit out. “Absolutely not. You will take care of your baby. He’s not taking you anywhere. I’ll go. I handled an island full of raiders, I can handle one petty little bishop.”
It took her a moment to realize that the ringing silence wasn’t only in her head. It was in the great hall itself. The raiders had gone quiet and, worse, they’d all turned toward the couch where she and Melyssa were sitting. She didn’t know how long they’d been listening. She didn’t know what they’d heard. And she certainly didn’t know when Tyr had moved to stand with Jurin as some kind of guard.
But she didn’t back down. She couldn’t.
She felt the same way as she had back in that courtyard. That what happened in this moment would change everything, forever, and she had to do it anyway. She had to hope that whatever was in front of her was better than what was behind. She had to believe she could save, if not this ruined world or even herself, then at least her family. Her family.
She hadn’t lost them, not all of them, after all. They were right here in front of her. Melyssa and the baby. All these scowling, ferocious raiders. The women who loved them. And what was the point of saving anything if she couldn’t save those she loved? This was what she’d been preparing for all her life, one way or another.
Tyr stood there before her, still bleeding from Krajic’s blade, not that he appeared to notice. And she loved him so much it ached in her, like a bruise. Like a matching stripe of red, slashed deep across her own chest. Tyr, without a doubt, could save himself. He’d killed her worst nightmare. He’d already saved her, more than once.
How could she live with herself if she did anything less?
“Right then,” Ferranti said in his horrible little voice from somewhere behind Tyr’s beautifully massive body, like a poisonous fog. “Then let’s get the hell out of here.”
17
Helena thought maybe there was noise. Shouting? Fighting? She couldn’t tell. She knew her sister was beside her, that Melyssa threw her arms around her, and that they still fit together the way they always had as girls, when their father had called them my bickering puzzle pieces. And that Melyssa smelled of honeysuckle, the way their mother always had.
But the only thing she was really, truly aware of was Tyr.
He was in his full battle gear, bearing the marks of his battle with Krajic. His dark gold eyes were bright and hard, and he was looking straight through her as if she were already a memory.
Already a ghost.
Helena wanted to sob. She wanted to throw herself into his arms and wrap herself around him and tell him every last thing she’d been too afraid to tell him before. She wanted to ask him how he would solve this problem, beg him to help this sister who she’d had such a complicated relationship with all her life. She wanted the words he hadn’t said to her before that alarm had been raised, even if they were harsh. She wanted to go back to the last time he’d taken her, bent over the stone table in his living room before they’d gone down to dinner last night, his hard cock splitting her open and changing her whole life and making her brand new. The way it did every time. The way he did when he looked at her, even now.
She wasn’t nearly ready to say goodbye. She wasn’t ever going to be ready.
�
��I have to go,” she told him.
And she thought he heard the question in that. She certainly did. She saw a flicker in his dark eyes, though his mouth remained stern and granite and forbidding.
He said nothing.
Helena didn’t think she could do this. She looked past Tyr to where Ferranti waited, his whole, small body vibrating with tension and with the force of the dislike she could see burning in his gaze. She’d pay for this, she knew. All of this. He would make her pay. And there were so many ways to hurt someone without killing them out there on a long sail over the sea. So many soul-destroying ways.
I’m sorry Mom and Dad, she thought in a rising panic. I can’t. I can’t do this—
But behind her, she heard the wail of her sister’s baby—the niece whose name she didn’t yet know—and she knew she didn’t have a choice. She thought of the women here who trained so hard and fought so well they became warriors. Brothers. She thought of all the camp girls who put all these hard, complicated men before themselves, and everyone else they came into contact with.
Sometimes strength was a blade, a fight. Sometimes it was the ability to bend.
And sometimes it was as simple as surviving.
Helena knew she could do that. She already had. She would again.
She swiped at the wet places on her face and she hugged her sister, hard.
“Tell me her name,” she said fiercely.
“Rhiannon,” Melyssa whispered back, and the sisters’ eyes met for an electric moment of communion, gray to gray, as old and as wise as the blood in their bodies and the people who’d made them.
Helena felt her lips curve a little at that. “You put their names together.”