by Megan Crane
She would do what he told her to do, damn it. She didn’t have a choice. And besides, she’d already proved beyond any doubt that she liked taking orders from him. Which was good, because Gunnar liked giving them.
And simple fear didn’t make a girl wet like that. It didn’t make her come so hard.
He slowed as he eased along the treacherous roads leading in toward the capital building and the night market. Next to him, Maud buckled the heavy metal collar around her neck.
Obediently. His nun was good at obedience. And he was as hard as one of his own blades at the thought.
“I’m surprised it’s padded.” Again, she used that bright, unbothered tone of voice, as if she couldn’t see the outlaw assholes swarming out from their falling down houses and dank alleyways to watch Gunnar’s truck come through. As if the only thing on her mind at all was the fact the collar looked far more medieval than it was. “It’s actually almost comfortable when it looks like a torture device.”
“I can get you a shittier one.”
He felt her smile, though he still refused to turn and look at her directly. Or at that bright, happy smile of hers that had no place in this dark, crappy ruin of a city in their drowned world.
Or anywhere near a tattered, corroded ghost like him.
“That,” she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice, damn her, “is the nicest thing a man has ever said to me.”
Gunnar gritted his teeth, and felt not one single fucking thing at that. Not one.
He pulled to a stop outside the crowded capital complex, taking a grim survey of the usual street scene before him. Traders of goods and people and animals alike, hawking their wares around the lit torches. Bandits roaming in throngs, shouting into the night as they jostled for position in the horde, unwashed and ungoverned, the way these outlaws liked it. Two men slammed into the front of the truck and then rolled to the ground in a vicious grapple of fists and obscenities, while a woman slashed a different man across the throat in the truck’s headlights with knives she’d attached to her fingernails.
The crowd around them ignored both altercations equally. They were far more interested in Gunnar’s truck.
“This is a very different sort of town,” Maud whispered, as the dead bandit with the slashed throat toppled out of sight below the front hood of the truck. “I don’t see a single jellybean.”
He’d heard of jellybeans. He didn’t know why the fuck she was bringing them up now. If she was having a little breakdown, he didn’t have time to indulge it.
“The market only happens at night,” Gunnar told her, his voice short. “All night. You can buy or sell anything here.”
He cut the engine, but left the headlights on, in case he needed to find the truck again in a hurry later. And when he turned to her, she’d gone quiet again. Her face was a smooth, unreadable blank.
He hated it.
“Am I what you’re selling?” she asked. Serenely.
It was a mask, Gunnar understood then. That otherworldy nun bullshit. It was her armor.
He didn’t have the slightest idea why he didn’t rip it off her. Why he felt something like grudging admiration instead.
Or why he cared how she’d learned to hide herself. What did that have to do with anything? That was what weaker people did. That was their weapon.
“Obey,” he rumbled at her, not even trying to contain his fury. At her, yes, but mostly at himself. “And I might keep you.”
She didn’t say a word as he took her wrists and bound them before her with rope from his pack, not tight enough to hurt her, but enough to be more than simply decorative. Her response was to lace her fingers together, that was all. And she didn’t so much as blink when he pulled out a heavy length of chain and attached it to her collar, which sucked, because he could feel something dark and deliriously hungry begin gnaw at him in earnest.
Like it had been playing before.
He locked the steel box behind his seat with the rest of his shit. Then he kicked open his door and climbed out, hauling her behind him. He set her on the ground while he checked his blades, then reached in to yank the steering wheel from its shaft. No point giving the assholes any ideas. He hung the wheel from a loop on his weapon harness and tossed it around to hang against his back. Then he wrapped that heavy chain tighter around his arm, a little too into the way she lifted up her chin when the metal links pulled taut.
His cock actually throbbed at this point.
But there was no time for that. Gunnar started walking instead, clocking the crazy-eyed bandits as they mad-dogged him, then scattered before him. It pleased him on a level he didn’t really want to analyze when Maud kept pace with him easily, those long legs of hers almost a match for his.
It would take a stronger man than he’d ever been not to imagine those gorgeous legs wrapped around his waist or draped over his shoulders while he pounded deep and hard inside her. Maybe right here. No one would mind, not in the middle of the bandit city. Hell, they’d probably attract a crowd and make a little profit while they were at it …
That’s a great way to get you both killed, dick, he snarled at himself.
Navigating a bandit bazaar was tricky at the best of times. It was all about the way a man walked, the way he didn’t bother to pull his blade. The way he acted wholly unbothered by the things happening in the fetid stew of humanity all around him. It gave the impression he was deadlier than anything he encountered.
These were hard, desperate men and women. They couldn’t live in the kingdoms, the little villages, even out on the farms. They’d been thrown out, or they’d left at the end of a blade, or they’d been banned from entering in the first place. They couldn’t get along with all the bastards who called themselves kings and tried to impose a little order on the broken, battered world. These peopled didn’t believe in order. They believed in nothing except taking. They had no honor, no code. They were indistinguishable from cockroaches, to Gunnar’s way of thinking; as easily exterminated as they were oddly hardy when left to their own devices.
But even cockroaches could swarm, and every one of these dirtbags had blades of their own. And worse, ancient guns strapped to them, because bandits didn’t give a shit if waterlogged ammo made shooting a weapon a crapshoot. They liked the mess, the blood, the grisly accident of what happened after a misfire. Maybe even more than they liked hitting their target.
“Will they attack?” Maud asked, in that same serene tone, hardly seeming to move her mouth to speak.
Gunnar glanced at her, somehow unsurprised to see she looked as dreamy and calm as if she were off sunbathing somewhere on a hot summer’s day, her face tipped into the sun. How she managed that level of serenity this far after midnight in a bandit market town, he didn’t know.
She was talented, his little nun. Much too talented for his peace of mind.
“Just don’t flinch when they come at us,” he told her.
Because of course they did. They were mindless cockroaches and they couldn’t help themselves.
Gunnar took out some toothless fool with jittery hands when the bastard lunged at Maud, those hands like claws and aimed at her tits. One well-placed punch to the jugular and the idiot was on the ground.
Another comer got a vicious knee in the balls.
And Gunnar broke one fucker’s neck with Maud’s chain when the drooling bastard hurled himself at her, then elbowed the guy coming up behind him in the face for good measure and a satisfying crunch.
Maud obeyed beautifully. She didn’t react. She didn’t flinch or scream or even breathe heavily. She looked as if she were out for an evening stroll in some safe, protected place, with guards on thick walls keeping close watch over her from above, like the coveted princesses in the western kingdoms. As if none of these things were happening, and the fact she had to step over the bodies Gunnar dropped at her feet hardly registered.
He had to stop finding reasons to admire her. He was only making this whole thing worse.
There is
no worse, he snapped at himself. There’s getting Audra back, that’s all. This nun is nothing but a tool, a means to an end, no matter how she handles herself.
The trouble was, he was the one who wanted to handle her.
Gunnar reached the trader’s stall he wanted with no further problem from the scumbags all around them. Drugged out and desperate, or drunk and too full of themselves. Puffed-out chests and glazed eyes wherever he looked. He could smell that sweet, metallic smoke in the air that meant the insects were high and likely to turn murderous even more quickly than usual. He could see the stalls hawking the moonshine that some preferred, with its guaranteed slam dunk into intoxication, the likelihood of total memory loss, and a killer morning after. He stood Maud between him and the stall in front of him, then pivoted to glare at the assholes still muttering crazy and pacing around behind him.
“Can I get my shit now?” he growled, pitching his voice loud enough to be heard over the cackles from the drunk-ass women, the sound of a pit wolf fight farther off in the darkness, and the shouts of the bastards betting on both. “Or do the rest of you fuckers really want to see how much smaller your dicks are than mine?”
Gunnar reached down with his free hand and adjusted himself, just in case there was any confusion.
They left him alone after that—not that they stopped watching, always looking for a weakness or a way in. He and Maud moved from one stall to the next, and she stood beside him in her same graceful silence as he gathered what they’d need for the two weeks at sea, trading with the hard-eyed men who ran their stalls in this shithole the way raiders ran drills on their ships.
They always wanted his blades, all of them clearly raider-made to anyone who knew what to look for, not that anyone dared say so out loud. Even bandits preferred not to call down the rage of a raider clan if they could avoid it. Tonight they also wanted Maud, with her huge blue eyes and that astonishingly angelic face on such a sleek, hot body. But they ended up with the lesser goods from the raider settlements on the east mainland, because that was what Gunnar had on hand to trade. Grain and spices. Salt. Leatherwork. All the shit from the eastern islands he carried with him because he knew they couldn’t get it easily here.
He gathered the last of what he needed—three hefty skins of water—and hung them from his shoulders with the rest, then decided it was time to get out of here before the night wore on and what little sense these bandits had lost out to drugs and opportunity. He led Maud back toward the truck, skirting an auction going on in the center of a hastily made circle. Gunnar saw a bastard with a skinny-ass cow. Two women who clung to each other, naked and lush in the torchlight, one soft brown and one pale gold. A very pretty young man, with the kind of tight, rounded, olive-hued ass that would cost the greedy-eyed fuckers salivating over him and arm and a leg. Possibly literally.
He ducked between two stalls and then stopped, contemplating the best route back to the truck. Something had shifted in the time they’d been here. There was that tense, too drunk feel to the crowd that could explode as easily as it could ease, and he was laden down with a lot more shit now. It might encourage one of the losers, hopped up on sweet smoke and a bandit’s usual disregard for reality, to try his luck again.
“Oh, that’s weird,” Maud said.
Gunnar slanted a look at her, surprised. She hadn’t said a word in half an hour, too busy practicing her armored serenity as they’d moved from stall to stall, unnerving the bandit merchants almost as much as Gunnar did. But she wasn’t smiling now. She was frowning into the crowd and he followed her gaze to a clump of ferocious-looking men with shorn heads and guns strapped all over their ripped chests, making a scene near the steps of the capitol building.
Mercenaries.
He hated those assholes with every last, blackened scrap of his raider soul. They rented themselves out for profit to whatever asshole could afford them. They marauded all over the place, leaving swathes of destruction in their wake and for no particular purpose except the orders they’d received from whoever was paying them. Raiders raided, sure. But they didn’t do it to make themselves feel like bigger men, or because some pissant king paid them to do it. Raiders took what they needed, nothing more. They settled lands and allowed most of their captives to transition into clan members in time, Gunnar’s own douche of a father excluded. Raiders had honor. All the raider clans Gunnar had ever heard of lived and died by their honor, which was why it was so important Audra’s name was cleared.
Being a raider meant something. It always had. The men who had broken away after the Storms and set up their own society because the leftover governments and crumbling institutions hadn’t had anything that appealed to them. They’d done it because they believed in something more than simply banding together and waiting out the next rainstorm.
Raiders cared about freedom and honor and the clan. They weren’t mercenary assholes who cared about nothing but their own personal gain.
“They’re not weird,” he said in a low voice, unable to keep himself from snarling in the direction of the shitheads Maud had pointed out. “They’re just a pack of whores.”
There was a group of them. Three were standing over a pair of bandit women, heavily pierced from their faces to their tits like all the rest, going at each other’s cunts like they were getting paid to eat pussy right there on the street. They probably were. The three standing with them had their dicks in their hands, pumping one out while they watched the show. The other two were conferring with each other over a smoke they passed back and forth.
They were worse than cockroaches. Worse than scum.
“No. I mean, I’m sure they are.” She let out a soft little laugh that Gunnar could feel like her hot mouth sucking him in again. “I meant that I know them.”
That went through him like an electrical shock. A deep, terrible burn.
He felt himself go hard and taut, and not in his cock, for once. Protective and furious. Ready for battle in an instant.
“What do you mean you know them?”
Maud nodded toward the mercenaries as the men roared into the night. One shot out his load on the women writhing before them. The other two pumped their dicks harder, as though it were a race. Gunnar wanted to start detaching limbs from the bodies of those fools, then pivot back around to the two sitting out the mercenary circle jerk.
“They came to the convent a few months ago,” Maud said conversationally, as if what she was saying was so minor she almost couldn’t be bothered to complete her thought. “They know the bishop.”
The biggest one turned then, that rolled-up smoke in his hand, so Gunnar could see more than his shorn head and all the stupid-ass guns strapped to his back. He had black eyes like a fucking ghoul. A wicked, curved blade that hung at his side. And a grotesque, diagonal scar across his whole face, giving him a permanent sneer.
And Gunnar knew exactly how he’d come by it. He knew him.
He’d been on the same battlefield where the war chief’s blood brother, Zyron, had delivered that disfiguring blow across this douchebag’s face. Zyron, who’d run around the clan nursery with the rest of them—the kids with parents whose duties to the clan meant they couldn’t take on the raising of their children themselves. Zyron, who’d earned his way into the brotherhood and had stood proud when his blood brother Tyr had taken his place at Wulf’s side as war chief.
Zyron, who this piece of shit mercenary had brutally killed shortly after he’d left that mark, then dragged off to cut up like a fucking psycho, leaving only pieces for Tyr to take to his blood brother’s funeral pyre.
The asshole’s name was Krajic. The brotherhood had been looking for him for years, the war chief particularly.
Something in Gunnar roared for the vengeance owed his warrior brother, when he’d thought that part of him long dead, as lost to him as Audra. But he’d earned his place in the brotherhood, fight by fight. He’d battled his way up like everyone else who became one of the clan’s elite warriors, and he’d meant the vows he’d
made to the clan and his brothers. He had the brotherhood’s sigil tattooed on his chest. He’d once believed in the runes that marked him more than anything else in the world.
It turned out not all of him had died with Audra.
He itched to pull his blade and avenge his lost brother, even though the dark thing inside him whispered that it was a betrayal of Audra too, given what the rest of his brothers had said about her after her death. And more, that all the vengeance in his shriveled, burned-out soul belonged to her by right and should be used to prove her innocence once he restored her to life.
And Gunnar knew three things in the split second before Krajic turned further and saw him standing there with Maud.
First, that Krajic would recognize him. If not Gunnar personally, than the fact he was a very clearly a raider trying to blend into a bandit’s night market. One warrior knew another on sight, and no matter if only one of them deserved that title while the other was a soulless husk of a blade-for-hire.
Second, that any man who’d met Maud would know her again in an instant. Especially if that man was a douchebag mercenary trained to hunt people down across the whole of the known earth, which suggested a certain facility with recognizing faces.
And third, that while Gunnar could handle a few uppity bandits on happy juice and too much smoke, he couldn’t hold off a pack of mercenary scum.
Not with his hands full and a virgin nun to keep hale and hearty until it was time to kill her his own damned self. So he did the only thing he could think to do with nothing but the deep shadows between the market stalls and the dark night working for him. He pulled on Maud’s chain, hauling her in close. Too damned close. She looked startled, and he shouldn’t have liked that so much. He shouldn’t have cared what mask she wore in the first place.
Or that she’d dropped hers then, when they were closer than he’d ever planned to be to her.
“What are you…?” she began, a hitch in her voice that his cock adored.
So did the rest of him. That was the problem.