by Megan Crane
“You okay?” he asked, a dark growl near her ear.
“I’m fine,” she whispered. “I’m more than fine. I don’t regret a thing.”
“I regret it took me five years to deal with Krajic. And I regret I didn’t kill that jackass kinglet on the mainland when I had the chance.”
“Except maybe that,” she agreed. She frowned. “I should have made sure my sister—”
“She’s fine.”
“You don’t know she’s fine.”
Tyr sighed and rolled over on his back, though he tugged her along with him.
“I don’t know her emotional state and I don’t care. She’s fine. We take care of people here, Helena. I’ll give you about five more minutes to get that in your head, and then I’m going to get pissed off.”
But he smoothed his hand over her hair when he said that, and she smiled against his shoulder.
“I love you,” she said. She didn’t plan it. It was simply, suddenly, the only thing to say. “I didn’t say it then because I thought I was never going to see you again.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“I didn’t say it only because I thought I was never going to see you again.”
“Listen up, you little shit,” Tyr said into the dark. “You were never getting on that boat. That was never happening. What kind of man do you think I am?” He tugged on the sheaf of her hair he’d wrapped around his hand. “Don’t answer that. I couldn’t believe you were letting that little dick treat you like that, or that you didn’t already know that of course I was going to protect you. You’re lucky you stepped up when you did, Helena. You’re already in enough trouble.”
And she had never felt more safe or more protected in all her life. Or happier. It danced inside of her. It filled her up.
She smiled again. “I like being in trouble.”
“Good, because I plan to be pissed off about this for the rest of my life.”
She snuggled against him. “If you insist.”
He shifted again, rolling her onto her back and coming over her in the dark, so she could see the gleam in his dark eyes, the serious set to his perfect mouth. And she could feel the rightness of this, of him, shake through her. Letting her know this was where she belonged, at last. This was home.
Right here in her raider’s arms. Forever.
“I’ve always had the clan,” Tyr told her, his voice hoarse and his dark gaze serious. “The clan takes care of its own. I was a nursery kid, raised by everyone and no one. I never doubted my place in the world for a second. Then I became a brother, like my father before me and my blood brother behind me, and that was even better.”
He took a breath, as if this was hard for him. Helena reached up and smoothed her hand over his hard, hard face, reveling in his beard beneath her hand and the feel of him, granite and man. Hers.
“I love each and every one of those twisted bastards,” he said, as if it was some kind of vow. “They love me right back. I’d die for any one of them, and they know it. They have my back in any battle and I have theirs, and that’s the kind of love I know. Blades and blood. That’s who I am.”
“Tyr,” she said, soft into the night. “I know who you are. I think I knew from the very first second I saw you.”
“I have a tiny island in the north,” he told her, his voice a whisper then. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever had that was only mine.” His dark gaze swept over face, making her tremble. “I’ve never had a person who was mine alone. I never thought I would.”
“Now you do,” she promised him. “And you always will.”
He was on his elbows above her, cradling her face between his huge hands. And he was perfect. This was perfect.
The world might be ruined but this, here, was perfect.
“I love you, Helena,” he told her, very carefully and deliberately, as if he was testing it out and wasn’t quite sure how it would fit in his mouth. Then his mouth curved. “That has to be what this is. It’s messing me up.”
And she smiled at him with tears in her eyes, her beautiful barbarian, who she thought she might have loved even before she’d met him. If such fairy tales could come true in this drowned old world.
Here, now, with Tyr, it felt shiny and new.
As if they’d made it all up from scratch.
Together, she thought, as he took her mouth like the raider he was, they always would.
Again and again and again.
18
A week after that bloody day in the Lodge, Helena waited for the rest of the king’s council down in Gunnar’s workshop for another meeting about how best to access that power plant in the Catskills.
I still have a mission, she’d told Tyr crossly a few nights after he’d formally claimed her. He’d been cleaning his blades at that stone table and she’d felt … useless, suddenly. Too many changes too fast, maybe, but one thing would always stay the same, and that was her purpose in life. I shared it with a raider clan but I didn’t abandon it.
Tyr had eyed her over the gleaming steel in his hands, and she hadn’t known which was more dangerous—the man or the blade.
You have a mate, he’d growled. That means we have a mission, asshole. Try getting that through your head. We.
It was a novel concept. But Helena was trying.
Today she was early. Her reward for that was that Gunnar had scowled at her when she’d arrived, muttered something incomprehensible as he liked to do, and then melted off into the shadows.
Leaving Helena with Maud, who was still chained up in the corner. Though at least Gunnar had bowed to Wulf’s wishes and put some clothes on her. The bare minimum, Helena saw. A stretchy shirt that almost lovingly outlined her breasts and a tiny pair of shorts like the clingy ones the camp girls wore.
Their eyes met. Once, then again. Other woman smiled as if she was perfectly content. She always did.
With that iron collar wrapped around her neck.
It occurred to Helena that this was the first time she’d ever been left unsupervised with Gunnar’s supposed mate. Tyr had told her to leave this alone. But what kind of person would that make her?
“Are you okay?” she asked, her voice uncertain in the quiet of the dark basement. “Tyr tells me it’s not my business to ask. That it’s prying and an insult. But … did Gunnar abduct you from somewhere? Is your family frantic, looking for you? Do you need help?”
Maud moved her wrists in the ropes that bound them, shifting them in her lap.
“I am Maud of the Great Lake Convent,” she said, her gaze steady on Helena’s, and totally unreadable at the same time. “My family is the church. My blood relatives were paid in many furs and a full winter’s stores to hand me over to the priests when I was eleven. I don’t think they’ve thought about me in years.” She shrugged, and it made that heavy chain clank against the wall, like a bleak little bell. “I don’t know if I need help. Do you need help?”
Helena blinked at her. There was something about Maud that got to her. She was a little too mesmerizing, with that remarkably symmetrical face and those wide, gorgeous eyes. It was that Maud was so obviously a nun, she told herself, and no matter that she was chained to a wall here. The priests picked the prettiest, most stunning girls they could find; everybody knew that, no matter how many times the priests claimed they were called by something within each girl.
You’ll notice nothing within a plain or ugly girl ever seems to call out to a priest, Helena’s mother had always said in her dry way.
Helena had seen a row of nuns once in one of the western kingdoms, marching toward services on a cold April day with the wind kicking up the smooth white cloaks they all wore so the gold fringed edges danced, and the intricate metal pieces they wore fitted close to their heads gleamed in the afternoon light.
They look like swans, Helena had whispered, awed. She’d been ten.
They look like what they are, her mother had replied, and not in her playful voice. Helena remembered it perfectly. Ghosts.
And
then she’d hurried Helena away before anyone paid any attention to them.
Here in Gunnar’s dark basement, Helena slid off her stool and looked around, but there were no raiders anywhere in sight.
“Why don’t we try to get you out of that chain?”
But Maud shook her head. “Gunnar only seems absentminded, but he’s not. It’s a mask he wears.”
“He’s not here.”
Maud shifted again, tucking her long legs up so she could prop her bound hands on her knees. “But he would catch me. It’s not worth it.”
Helena found she was chewing worriedly on her bottom lip.
“Are you all right, Maud?”
As if, should Maud say she wasn’t, Helena could do anything to change that. She’d made the same calculation about escape attempts herself, hadn’t she? She’d come to the same conclusion and here she was in the same basement. She just happened to be okay with it.
Maud smiled faintly, then tested the rope on her wrists. “This is really all for show. He threw this pillow down next to a heating vent, so I’m not cold. And the collar looks alarming, I know, but it’s padded. Oddly comfortable.” She laughed then, and it was a blinding thing, all light and a kind of joy. “He doesn’t want to hurt me.”
What was there to say to that? Here in a dark, mysterious basement filled with as many nightmares as inventions? And the crazy man who lived here that even the other raiders didn’t entirely trust?
Helena’s throat felt tight. “I … Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” Maud met her gaze. Held it with those dreamy blue eyes of hers that made Helena wonder what she saw. Then smiled again, as serenely as ever. “Gunnar wants to kill me, Helena. Not hurt me. They’re not the same thing.”
* * *
It was a bright, sunny summer day, the kind that anyone with any sense spent outside. Winter came fast and lasted too long, and days like this were what got people through the darkness.
Which was why, Tyr thought grumpily, he wanted to light Gunnar’s basement from hell on fire.
But he didn’t like leaving Helena alone very often and certainly not with Gunnar, no matter that he thought he understood the brother a little more these days than was strictly comfortable. It was a distinct kind of hell, having something—someone—he didn’t think he’d survive losing. Not intact, anyway. So here he was, stuck underground while what little sun they ever saw was shining on everyone else.
He didn’t join in the heated discussion that was happening between Helena and her sister on one side and Gunnar and his unlikely ally, Riordan, on the other as they debated locations and temples and whatever the hell else was involved in getting a decent force to that power plant. He was watching the bright-eyed problem of a nun that the clan’s resident lunatic still had chained to his wall. With clothes on, these days, but he wasn’t sure that really made as much of a difference as Wulf might have imagined it would. Crazy was crazy.
He felt the air change at his neck in the instant before Wulf appeared, and he gritted his teeth.
“You’re even spookier down here,” he gritted out at his king. “Where I can see it’s a genetic mutation you share with that fool.”
Eiryn stalked past them, into the pool of light surrounding Gunnar’s workshop space and then out of it again—maybe only to freak everybody out, because she kept on moving, melting back into the shadows.
Spookiness was clearly a family trait.
Wulf didn’t speak for a long time. Tyr didn’t push him. He thought about the three mainlanders he’d sent into the interior yesterday to help with the summer farming while Wulf decided what he was going to do.
What happened to safe passage? one of the mercenaries had demanded.
Are you dead? Tyr had retorted. No? Then shut up. You’re as safe as you’re going to get.
After all, no one had ever indicated how long the safe passage in question might be. Maybe a couple of years. Maybe a decade. Who knew? None of the three of them seemed to have any useful information, but a little hard labor might jog their memories. And if not, well. At least they’d earn their keep.
Next to him, Wulf finally inclined his head in the direction of his blood brother.
“He’s a wild card.”
“He always has been.” Tyr moved things around in his head, his gaze on the big map. He tried to look at it from every angle. “You can’t send a major force over to the mainland without calling down some ten armies on the clan.”
“No,” Wulf agreed, as if he’d considered doing it anyway. “But I don’t like that some unnamed bishop thought he was getting his hands on all this information. Or on the clan. I don’t like where that goes, logically.”
“I want to know which bishop. There are at least five.”
“I want to know everything.” Wulf eyed his blood brother again. “And I need Gunnar whole enough to stay on his game. I need a better map before I send my people wandering to their deaths to service what could be no more than a myth.”
“He’s never been anything close to whole,” Tyr muttered. “Not even when Audra was around. Especially not when Audra was around.”
Wulf’s clever gaze moved from his blood brother to the blonde woman sitting against the wall with that chain around her neck. Tyr looked at her too. She wasn’t paying attention to the people arguing at the table over the boundaries of the new map they were trying to build out from the originals on Helena’s tablet.
But Maud was looking straight at them instead. Tyr wanted to know why. He wanted to know what a church nun knew about bishops and mercenaries and all the rest of it. He still wasn’t a big fan of any mysteries.
“I said whole enough,” Wulf amended after a moment. “Not whole.”
Tyr let that sink in. Helena was arguing now, raising her voice and using her hands as emphasis, and he wanted his woman spread out somewhere, the sun all over her tits and his face between her legs. Or up on top of Wulf’s tower again, holding her against him while she looked through that telescope and told him her favorite stories about all those far-off stars.
He was about out of patience with this meeting.
But he slid a look at his king.
“So we’re doing this?”
Wulf’s smile took a long time, but when it came, it lit him up. His blue eyes gleamed with dark laughter and the kind of mayhem that meant whole wars or deposed kings, the way he got when he got going.
Tyr was all in. Him and his woman, completely on board with his clan, his king. His blood brother avenged at last. It was the only life he’d ever wanted, and better than he’d dreamed. It was the best life he could imagine.
He’d always known he was a strong man, a powerful one.
But these days, Tyr knew that really, he was lucky.
“Yeah we are,” Wulf said, and the mayhem was already there, already all over his hard face. Tyr’s favorite. “It’s going to be fun.”
* * *
One afternoon Helena found herself left to her own devices outside the great raider hall.
For the first time in as long as she could remember, Helena had absolutely nothing to do. Not right that minute. There were the lights to turn on and a world to save—or at least illuminate a little—but the raiders, she’d found, liked strategy and planning. They didn’t simply wander around the mainland and hope for the best.
That meant that right here, right now, there was nothing that required Helena’s attention. No one who waited for her. Nothing she needed to accomplish. No tasks she needed to complete.
Melyssa was off administering the baby’s bath. The camp girls Helena counted as friends were taking their much-earned downtime before the evening’s usual debaucheries. Tyr was off training in the far corner of the green, where he could yell at the prospective brothers and keep an eye on her at the same time. The way he liked to do. It made them both feel safe, Helena thought.
Safe and secure and totally, irrevocably claimed.
If she wanted, she could simply take a walk. She could s
tand in the sun out on the bluff and let the summer sea soothe her. She could run up that mountain the way Tyr did every morning or hike down to the docks to put her feet in the cool water of the bay. She could wander the shops and barter for goods and trinkets.
Or she could stand all by herself on the Lodge’s green, awash in a thousand options, and do nothing at all.
The raider city looked different in the golden summer light, the roofs of the houses painted bright colors that seemed to dance beneath such a blue sky. They seemed etched into being, not built by raider hands, and behind them, the stretch of the harbor and the far-off gleam of the sea seemed like a blessing.
The faint breeze was scented with flowers and the suggestion of honey, cut grass and salt. Helena wandered out to the edge of the green, where the flat part toppled off and started that steep slope toward the harbor. It was beautiful here. Completely unlike any of the stories she’d heard her whole life about the savage raiders and the hells they called home. It was the kind of beautiful that made every breath she took feel like an ache, like she might simply take flight on the back of it. It soared within her, as dizzy and perfect as all that pristine blue.
It felt like Tyr. She couldn’t wait to tell him. The group of young brothers Tyr was training clashed iron in the distance, a kind of raider music on the breeze, and she could feel him glance over at her now and again. She knew if she needed him, he’d be at her side in an instant.
He always would be. Her man. Her mate.
And it took her a long moment to realize what it was, that thing that grew bigger inside of her every day she stayed here, with him.
That she wasn’t simply in love. She wasn’t merely claimed by the best man she knew. She was happy. She was at peace, despite the family mission that she had yet to complete. There was no doubt left in her that she would, that coming here had ensured her success in a way her previous two years on the run had not. The raiders would see to that. She hadn’t betrayed her family, she’d expanded it.
Try getting we through your head, Tyr had told her.