by Megan Crane
He’d known that going in.
And he’d gone in anyway. Repeatedly.
The second time was a little less the scratching of an itch and little more emotional, she’d accused him, and she was right, damn her. There was no excuse for it. For him.
And none of it mattered. Not what had happened between them, what he’d done and what he hadn’t. Not what he’d understood, too late, about the both of them and how they fit together, a single crooked whole. He’d been unable to keep himself from tasting it, drowning in it, losing himself.
Just once. Just for one night. No matter how stupid it was.
It didn’t matter that nothing was going to change because he knew, now, what it was like to taste that kind of total surrender. What it called up in him, what it made him feel. It didn’t change a single goddamned thing.
“You could always mutter a few black magic spells and toss me over the side of this cliff,” Maud said into the heavy, seething silence of the truck. The drumming rain did nothing to melt the cold, aloof tone she used, and Gunnar knew somehow that if he looked at her she’d still be glaring at him with icy murder in her eyes the way she had been back at the cabin. Beside her, Riordan let out a snort of laughter. “That would make this all so much more convenient, wouldn’t it? No need for all these theatrics.”
If he’d been one of his own pit wolves, currently unhappily crouched in the cargo area of the truck, his hackles would have risen. Gunnar shifted in his seat and took her chin in his hand, swinging her face to his and oh yeah: She was still pissed. That cold fury in her blue gaze and her wide mouth surly instead of sweet.
He still wanted to get inside her again. He didn’t see that going away. Ever. But he also wanted to tie her up and paddle her ass for talking to him so disrespectfully. Especially in front of Riordan.
“I need your body, little nun,” he told her, low and harsh, because he didn’t have a paddle and he didn’t want Riordan there when he dealt with her the way he wanted to. The way she needed him to. The way he knew he shouldn’t, but what did it matter anymore? They were both completely and utterly screwed. Why not enjoy the downward spiral? “Throwing it over a cliff puts me back to square one.”
“And we certainly can’t have that.”
“No.” He held her chin firmly enough that she couldn’t jerk away, but not hard enough to hurt. Just enough to really piss her off. “I didn’t take you captive to save you, Maud. I was never going to save you. You walked off into that desert to die and running into me didn’t change that. It only delayed the inevitable.”
“There’s no reason—” Riordan began, ever the peacemaker.
Gunnar let Maud go. She rocked back against the seat, and though she didn’t make a sound, he could see her chest heave as if she was breathing hard. As if he’d smacked her, hard. He had. He cut his gaze to Riordan.
“You can shut the fuck up or you can walk,” he growled. “Your choice.”
There was nothing, then, but the rain. Always the rain. The earth had already drowned and yet still came the rain, on and on, as if it were a living, breathing entity that wouldn’t rest until it had washed them all away. Sometimes Gunnar wished it would. It would make it all that much easier, surely. It would save him from having to try and fail to save himself or anyone who mattered to him, over and over again.
No one spoke. Riordan thrust his legs out in front of him, crossed his huge arms over his ripped chest, and dropped his head back as if he’d fallen asleep in an instant, and he might have. Between them, Maud vibrated with a silent fury but made no attempt to speak another word.
“Good choice,” Gunnar grunted at her. Then he shifted the truck into gear and kept going up the side of the mountain.
Slightly more slowly, so he could keep her alive long enough to kill her properly.
* * *
They made it to the raider city after night had fallen, and miraculously enough, in one piece.
The lights from Lodge blazed from halfway up the mountainside, set apart from the wood and stone buildings that were clustered together down closer near the water of the busy, island-choked harbor. The village was built in a haphazard jumble of narrow streets that wound this way and that, rambling from the docks to the trees and all around the base of the mountain. The Lodge’s great hall was the highest building in the city, rising several stories above the wings that buffeted it on each side and set with high, arrogant windows that proclaimed the raiders’ defiance of the cold, dark winters to any who gazed upon it. Even now, in the midst of a little summer squall, it shone gold and warm, a beacon against the rain and the cold.
Gunnar had personally installed those lights, made them all electric, doing away with the candles and lanterns and signal fires that the rest of the world accepted as the best they could do. He’d never resigned himself to the darkness, no matter how many adults had told him as a child that dark was how the world was and there was no changing it. Gunnar had never much liked being told what he could or couldn’t do. And the Lodge his blood brother now ruled had been his personal fuck you to all the people who told him to accept what he couldn’t change and mind his place in the ruined world.
He’d changed everything.
He’d installed the lights. He’d moved the powerful, roaring generators to the caves so the noise no longer tore down the night. Whole armies could have sauntered up from the beach under the cover of the generators’ roar, but no longer. He’d hated the inefficiency of having to walk halfway across the great big building to ask another brother a simple question, so he’d figured out how to make telephones work again, at least within the building, and he’d wired them into the walls. The Lodge was where the clan gathered in good times and bad. It housed the throne. The king lived there and so did the brotherhood, the two major governing forces of life on the island. Any clan member could speak his or her piece, but the brothers voted and the king ruled, and they did it here. The Lodge was where captives were taken and enemies either died or were imprisoned. It was where festivals were held all year round, and where clan members stuffed themselves full of the bounty from the summer raids. The clan fought here, feasted here, fucked here. It was the beating heart of the raider world.
Gunnar had made it his masterpiece.
You made the king’s house a castle and what are his thanks for that? Audra had whispered in his ear, her clever tongue toying with the sensitive spot behind it. He casts you into his basement, though you are his blood, and makes you fight for his favor with the rest.
He’d grown to hate this place and everything it stood for. The politics. The endless jockeying for position. Cruelty dressed as charity. It didn’t matter what Gunnar wanted or what he chose to do with his life. It didn’t matter how many innovations he tried out here, how he made lives easier or better or simply made sure there was hot water for all. He was the clan’s favorite tech head, he had his responsibilities to the brotherhood, but beyond that he was seen as an extension of Wulf and nothing more. The moment some ambitious upstart decided to pull a coup—the way Wulf himself had done when he’d taken down Donovan, his predecessor—they’d come for Gunnar, too. His blood marked him. He’d hated that most of all.
Why should you pay for his ambition? Audra had hissed as she’d danced for him in one of her dark moods, wearing a reindeer’s skin and head and nothing else. Why should I? Why should his enemies vent their spleens on our backs?
Gunnar blinked away the ghosts as he pulled the truck to a stop on the green. He wasn’t surprised when Riordan slammed his way out of the passenger door and set off for the Lodge’s great doors and the sentries who waited there with their blades at the ready, barking out orders as he moved across the wet ground. When Maud made as if to follow him out of the truck, Gunnar laughed—not nicely—and hauled her back to him with a fistful of her shirt.
“He’s not your ally, little nun,” he said, his mouth on her ear. He indulged the need he’d been fighting for hours and got a taste of her skin, salt and sweet Maud. It
didn’t help. “And the people on the other side of that door are even less on your side than he is. You’re a piece of ass here, that’s all. Believe me.”
“I don’t need an ally,” she threw at him, and he didn’t think that fine tremor that he could feel go through her was because of the blast of cold, wet air Riordan had let into the truck. Need was need. It didn’t give a shit who she was mad at. “I’m nothing but a ghost walking around, waiting for her death ritual. Who cares what I do?”
Gunnar waited until the sentries sheathed their weapons and Riordan stalked inside the great doors. Then he shut down the truck, switched off the headlights, and pulled Maud out of the cab with him.
The rain beat down on them, but she didn’t seem to care. Gunnar certainly didn’t. He wore his blades in their harness because he wasn’t fool enough to drive anywhere unarmed, no matter whose territory he was in, and the heavy, hooded cloak he wore to keep the weather off his face. He could have stood around in a little bit of summer spitting all night. He had before.
Maud was drenched in an instant. The thin material of her shirt slicked against her skin, reminding him that she didn’t like to wrap her tits. He hadn’t needed that reminder, just like he didn’t need another glimpse at her hard nipples now that he knew exactly how they fit in his palms, velvet and ridged. He thought they were burned into him, like everything else about this woman he’d never had the slightest intention of regarding as a person. She was a virgin, that was all. Technically she still was, despite how long and hard and well he’d fucked her last night.
“You’re still a virgin.” As if that needed to be stated. Maybe it did.
“You must be kidding.” She shook her head, her eyes flashing. “Barely.”
“You’re technically still a virgin,” he told her harshly. “That means you’re still a necessary ingredient. I’m a man who keeps my vows, Maud, no matter how much you try to glare at me like you hate me.”
“I do hate you.”
He didn’t think anyone would call the way his mouth curved then a smile.
“You only wish you did, little nun.”
The rain poured over her the way he wished he could, and was that how far he’d fallen? He was jealous of his brother and now of the goddamned rain? She swallowed hard, and he watched the water course down the elegant line of her throat. He stood there with regret in his gut, her taste in his mouth, and a hard cock that didn’t care what the problem was, the simplistic asshole. It just wanted in.
“What’s going to happen in there?” Her voice held the anxiety she was trying to hide. She was scared. She should have been. She never should have gotten in his face. She never should have shot her mouth off. She never should have imagined that a little sex made her matter to him.
Because it couldn’t. He wouldn’t let it.
“Do you want me to show you that I’m not really the monster who fucked you in the ass and still has every intention of sacrificing you?” His voice was gruff. Harsh. “Because I can’t do that. I am that monster. Nothing’s going to change it. Not that tight little ass of yours. Not anything you do. Not your little show of temper or how you look at me in the goddamned rain.”
Her eyes searched his. “Is this where you’re going to do it?”
“No.”
He shouldn’t have told her. He should have kept her scared and worried about where and when and how. He should have done anything to keep her off balance and away from him. Instead, he reached over and traced a finger over the marks he’d left in the crook of her neck. His teeth against her flesh, making her scream when she came, when he did—but there was no use thinking about that now. It only made everything worse.
She made an abrupt, jerking sort of motion, and Gunnar thought that if she was a raider woman she would have slapped his hand away. Audra would have hauled off and punched him, then blamed him when she hurt herself doing it. But Maud was too well trained for that.
“Don’t.” Her voice sounded strangled. Harsh. So unlike her it was worse than any slap she might have delivered. It actually stung. “Don’t pretend…” She shook her head, something in her gaze so fierce it shamed him. “If I’m your captive, who you plan to gut while you chant out gibberish to a blue moon—”
“You are.” He didn’t quite growl that out. “And it will be a full moon, not a blue moon. No need to get melodramatic.”
“Wonderful.” But there was a catch in her voice. He would have preferred a blade to his throat. “I can’t wait.”
She stepped back from him, but since that only trapped her even more securely with the truck at her back, he didn’t stop her. Then watched in astonishment as she stripped her wet shirt off. She didn’t stop there. She kicked off her boots and wiggled out of her trousers, and only then did she face him again, letting her hands drop down to her sides.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Gunnar made himself sound bored, or at least not interested, and it was harder than it should have been.
“I spent the last ten years of my life in a convent.”
“Thanks for that update. This whole time, I thought you were the only virgin camp girl in the history of the clan.”
If her eyes were even half as sharp as they looked, he’d have been the one gutted then. He was used to a murderous glare from others, but not from Maud. Not his remarkably cheerful little sacrifice. He found he didn’t like it.
“Life is very simple there. Regimented. Everything, every day, at exactly the same time and in exactly the same way. We pray. We eat. We take our classes and listen to sermons in church. We exercise, we bathe, we eat again. We go to evening mass and we attend our confessionals. We chant and we sleep. It’s always the same. We all know exactly who we are every moment of every day.”
“It sounds like hell.”
She shook her head. “I don’t like confusion. I don’t like blurry lines and mistakes. If I’m your captive, treat me like a captive.”
“I don’t know what you think that looks like. What do you want? Water rations and a cell?”
“Is that how they treat captives here?” Her eyes narrowed, and he should have realized she had this in her, this streak of steel. After all, she was the nun who’d left the church. He’d never heard of any other nun doing the same. Ever. “Because I’m betting most raiders don’t line up the prisoners of war and fuck them in the ass.”
“Only the ones that get off on a spanking first,” he growled at her. “We have special rules for them.”
“Put me in a collar and keep me chained,” she told him, her voice even and her head high. And again, that easily, she shamed him. “Maybe I’m not confused at all, Gunnar. Maybe you are. Maybe you’re the one who needs to remember who I am.”
* * *
It felt good to walk after such a long, perilous drive, trapped between two giant, pissed-off raiders in the much-smaller-than-she-remembered-it cab of the truck.
Maud had forced herself to sit as stiffly as possible, anything to keep from touching Gunnar and betraying herself all over again—and she was more than a little convinced that his crazy driving had been a direct attempt to make her keep falling against him again and again. She’d been proud of herself for managing it across so many long hours, but now she was paying the price. Her poor body had protested all the way out of the truck—but maybe it was just smarter than her. Maybe it knew better than to let Gunnar touch her.
Especially because, even now, it was the only thing she wanted.
But it felt good to walk through the rain and over the soaking wet grass toward the bright, inviting building made in the ancient style. Bricks and glass and paint that marked it as something that had been built before the Storms, with the machines no one had been able to operate in hundreds of years. Her bare feet went cold quickly, nice and numb so she couldn’t feel them, and that was good, too. She wished she could as easily go numb everywhere else. Because she was very much afraid that on the other side of the cold fury she’d been nursing since this morning was nothing but a deep
well of hurt.
And Gunnar was absolutely right. Hurt feelings made her an idiot. He’d never pretended to be anything but what he’d said he was. He’d never claimed that things had changed because he’d finally touched her that way.
Maud was the one who’d woken up without her protective shell this morning. She was the one who should have known better and she hadn’t. Still, knowing she had no one to blame but herself didn’t exactly help. She had to blame him. She had to—because the moment she stopped, she was afraid of what she’d do instead.
Was that the dark side of surrender? That once it started, it never, ever stopped?
She was terrified she already knew the answer to that question, at least when it came to the dark, ruthless raider at her side.
Gunnar had snapped on that collar again. His fingers had brushed against her chin, her neck, and she hadn’t been numb then. That simple little offhand touch had seared through her, making her attempts at keeping herself aloof laughable.
He’d clipped the chain to her collar and then he’d bound her hands in front of her again, and he’d taken his time with the rope.
Very much as if he knew that his hands on her and the rope digging into her skin had only fanned that same fire deep inside of her, making her feel singed anew. She’d told himself he had no idea, but then he’d finished and he’d tipped her chin up again, forcing her to look him in the eye.
“My mother was a captive,” he’d told her, his voice as calm and even as when he’d ordered her to take his cock and work it inside of her. It had a similar effect on her then. “My father was a warrior of the brotherhood, bold and fearless as he’d be the first to tell you, and he picked her up on a raid of a rich little mining compound in West Virginia. He tied her up and he had his way with her and he liked it enough that he took her back with him when they sailed. She was a good, compliant girl, raised on winter marriages. She could have made her peace with her situation. They say she did at first. But he didn’t let her. He didn’t want her to be at peace. He didn’t want a mate. He wanted captive pussy.”