by Megan Crane
9.
The walk up the hill was lit by the city spread out before them, beckoning to them as they made the climb. All the shops in the village were shut now, but the living quarters attached to them had lights gleaming in all the windows. About halfway up the mountainside sprawled the great Lodge, its great wings bright against the night and the glass that stretched up several stories at its entryway like a great lantern, showing the way.
Melyssa knew that she should turn around. Go back to her cottage and bar the door rather than face Jurin tonight.
To say nothing of the claim he planned to make.
Not, of course, that hiding from him would keep him out. Because what could? He was a man who took down castles. What was one small cottage?
Or her?
Melyssa felt herself getting more anxious with every step. She didn’t want his claim. She didn’t want him—because how could she want anyone?
The last time she’d wanted anybody, it had been for all the practical reasons that Helena had just mentioned. She might have survived her two winters with Ferranti, but Melyssa had the sinking feeling that it had poisoned all the rest of her, somehow. Making her as dark and tangled as her terrible years in that compound had been.
“How does a woman refuse a claim?” she asked when they made it to the practice green, empty at this time of night. Which only made her question seem to echo off the mountain.
Helena made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a real, honest laugh, but she was biting it back when Melyssa looked at her.
“Refuse it?” Helena asked, sounding . . . careful.
“A formal claim.” Melyssa waved a hand. “‘Let no one touch anything without my permission,’ or whatever it is.”
“I think you know as well as I do that’s not what they say or how they say it, but that’s okay.” Helena laughed again, and this time she didn’t bother to hide it. “I don’t think a claim is something you refuse.”
“What if you don’t want to be claimed?”
“These are raiders,” Helena said gently. “They can be very friendly, but don’t let that fool you. They take what they want. Especially if the raiders in question happen to be members of the brotherhood.”
But Melyssa was certain there had to be a way out. Because there was always a way out. It might not be a way anyone liked all that much, but it was always there.
Eventually.
“They take what they want,” Helena said again, even more firmly, when Melyssa didn’t respond. “But if it helps, in my experience, they also like what they take.”
Melyssa followed Helena into the Lodge, still trying to figure out a way to avoid the confrontation with Jurin she knew was coming. When Helena stopped to talk with some of the people standing near the entry—Riordan, the clan’s best tracker, Tait, the brother who’d come back from the sea this winter, and Elenthea, the woman Tait had claimed and brought with him from the floating city called the Raft, another thing Melyssa had thought was no more than a fairy tale—she ducked her head as if the baby were fussing and surreptitiously looked around.
Many of the camp girls were out in the lobby of the hall, mingling with the brothers who were just coming down from their upstairs rooms, laughing and doing their little dances in their little stretchy shorts and flowy tops the way they always did. Some of the shopkeepers and other city dwellers were here tonight too, and the camp girls always treated them the same as they did the king. Everyone knew the difference between a brother and a butcher, but the butcher was never made to scrape and bow and make himself small.
Neither were the camp girls.
Melyssa felt her heart thud hard at that, as if it was worried she wasn’t paying attention.
Why? Jurin had demanded when they were at the pool. What possible reason could you have for refusing my claim?
Because I don’t want to be claimed! Melyssa had thrown back at him.
Bullshit. Jurin’s voice had been like his axe, ruthless and unmistakable, and part of her had wanted to look down to see if it was lodged in her gut. She hadn’t.
He’d come out of the pool then, vaulting up the stairs while water cascaded off of him. He’d looked like something carved straight from marble, impossibly beautiful in the little remaining light from the last of the setting sun. Pale white skin, freckles here and there like bits of sun he carried with him, and all those bright, bold tattoos. His red beard and red braids, and that very nearly stern expression on his face.
He had made everything in her seize tight, then turn over.
Again.
She’d wanted to run, because that was what she knew how to do. Somehow, she’d stood still anyway.
You don’t want my claim? Fine. Who else do you think looks good? Who else do you want fucking you until you scream?
The very idea had made her stomach turn, and not the way Jurin did.
I don’t want any claims and I don’t want any fucking and I don’t have to explain myself to you.
Jurin had glared down at her, wet and furious and still, she wasn’t afraid of him. She hadn’t understood that. Why was he the only thing that didn’t terrify her when she knew—she knew—he was the one thing that could destroy her?
When he already had?
Baby, you’re so full of crap, he’d growled at her. You can’t possibly believe you’re going to sit out here in this cottage all by yourself for the rest of your life, afraid of everything and your own shadow. Like some ghost.
Maybe that’s what I want. Why doesn’t it ever matter what I want?
Jurin had shaken his head, and he’d almost looked sad. Almost. There are no free rides in the clan, Melyssa. You have to prove your value.
Then I guess you might as well throw me back in the sea, she’d snapped at him. Because I’m not valuable. I’m just me. And when he’d only shaken his head—looking more as if he was disappointed in her than actually sad, which had made her chest feel entirely too tight—she’d thrown out her arms. I shouldn’t have to do something I don’t want to do.
That sounds great. He’d sounded almost tired, for the first time in as long as she’d known him. I don’t particularly like half the shit I have to do, like standing guard for a thousand hours in the coldest part of winter, but I do it anyway. Because it’s what I do. That’s part of being a grown-ass human. I get the rewards from doing my job, but I also have to accept the consequences.
I’m not a warrior, she’d retorted, but his gaze had been so stern that she’d sounded a good deal more plaintive than she’d planned.
Your other choice is to go back to the mainland, but I think you already know what’s waiting for you there. Jurin had shrugged, something darker in his eyes then. It had made her shudder. You’re a fertile woman. I’m sure they’d make great use of you.
Threats, she’d thrown at him, something like desperate. Always with the threats.
That’s not a threat, baby. That’s life, Jurin had said tightly. If you’re not mine, you’re fair game. You need to ask yourself if you’re prepared for that.
She was asking herself that right now, in fact.
Melyssa trailed after Helena as her sister led the way in from the lobby to the vast hall itself. The long tables were set, stretching back from the grand stone fireplace that took over the whole of one wall. Up above the fire, crackling and dancing at this time of night, the clan sigil hung. It was the same mark that all the brothers wore over their hearts to symbolize the vows they’d made to protect the clan above all things and defend it with their very lives. She’d traced the one on Jurin’s skin with their fingers today. She’d fantasized about doing it with her mouth.
She shook herself at that. She’d had no idea that sex could be so . . . Addicting. So powerful that it was all she could think about even when she wasn’t having it.
She followed Helena to the table where Tyr already sat waiting, kicked back in his chair like the right hand of the king that he was. She watched the way his hard mouth crept up in one corner as his
woman approached, and something in her fluttered a bit when he pulled Helena into his lap. And still more when her sister melted into him.
Something in her melted too. Because she saw all of these things differently now.
If Helena wasn’t pretending—if no one had been pretending, all this time—
But her throat felt too dry. Her heart was pounding too fast. She didn’t dare finish that thought.
Her gaze was caught by the two women talking at the foot of the table. Tall, strong, red-braided Hedy stood with lithe, deceptively little Emmalyn, whose jet black braids reached her knees. Like the king’s sister and bodyguard Eiryn, Hedy and Emmalyn were full brothers, equal to any of the other male brothers arranged around the table. They were warriors. The only three women in the clan who’d made it through the trials all the prospective brothers went through. They bowed their heads to Wulf and Wulf alone.
There was no one like these female brothers on the mainland. Not in any of the compounds where Melyssa had lived over the years. Mainland women didn’t fight. Mainland women hid.
After Jurin had left, she’d stood in her shower and told herself that maybe she should go back to the mainland. She knew her place there. She knew who she was. She knew exactly how to survive, just as Helena had said. There was no mystery and no worry, because she knew exactly what to do—and Jurin was right. As a fertile woman with a living baby to prove it, she’d have no trouble finding winter husbands, if not a more permanent mate, wherever she went.
And now, she’d reminded herself when she’d climbed out of the shower and stood in the cottage’s main room with that bed whispering to her of all the things she’d done on it, she wouldn’t even have to run from anyone. The mercenaries who’d hunted her family were dead, Even if they hadn’t been, Wulf had killed the king who was their master only last month.
If she went back, she’d be free.
Except as she looked around tonight, she knew exactly how stupid that was. There was no free on the mainland. Compliant women were nothing like free. There were no Hedys and Emmalyns and Eiryns on the mainland. There weren’t even any women like her sister, permitted to share her knowledge with the king and his highest ranked brothers here and in the end, honor their family’s legacy. No one had cared about their family’s legacy on the compliant side of the Atlantic.
There weren’t even women like darkly frightening Gunnar’s mate Maud, the former nun, because nuns on the mainland were nuns. They didn’t smile the way Maud did, bright and dizzy, and treat their pregnant bellies as if they were more precious than all the raiders’ plunder and stores. Nuns on the mainland served the needs of the priests and they didn’t smile much. If at all.
Compliance was cold and matter-of-fact, but even if she’d preferred the idea of it—even if she’d been as pious as she’d sometimes she wished she was, because she imagined it made life easier—the fact was that Melyssa couldn’t imagine subjecting herself to another winter marriage. Not now.
Not now she knew the difference. Oh, the glorious difference.
The very idea made her feel sick to her stomach.
But it wasn’t just about sex, she realized that she stood there, watching the two female brothers laugh with each other. She felt Rhiannon snuggle deeper against her chest, breathing with her whole body, because she was so young she hadn’t yet learned how to hold her breath.
How to make herself small. How to hide.
No matter what Melyssa could or couldn’t survive on her own, she understood then that she would never allow Rhiannon to suffer compliance. No winter marriages for her beautiful daughter. No talk of duty and responsibility and what Rhiannon owed humanity on her back every winter.
She felt that ferocious, spiked love that had burst through her the moment she’d first seen her daughter seize hold of her again. It was the closest thing to violence she knew, and it rolled through her like a kind of temper.
Her daughter would not bend, just because it was what decent people did. Her daughter would not lie there in the dark, praying for it to be over fast. Her daughter would not line up a set of bad options and pick the one that seemed the least offensive—or if that wasn’t available, the one that would garner her the most in return.
Rhiannon would not be forced to use her body as barter.
Melyssa would die first.
Something broke free in her then, something hard and sharp that she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding within her all this time. As if it was a splinter she’d worked deep into her own flesh.
It was time to let it go.
She wanted to be here. She wanted to raise her daughter here, not anywhere else. She might not be a part of the clan, but she’d spent enough time here to know that the way the clan approached this brutal world was far superior to life in any of the compounds she’d grown up in.
None of them had ever felt like home. But this place did.
And more than that, she thought as she saw a familiar figure stride into the hall, one of the biggest men in a room packed solid with huge, terrifying males with weapons she knew full well they knew how to use, she wanted Jurin.
Because he is home, something wiser than her whispered.
Had her body known the truth all this time? How had she missed it?
Jurin had claimed her baby was his during that tense, awful scene with Ferranti last summer. He’d saved both Rhiannon’s life and Melyssa’s, because if Ferranti had left this island with her child, Melyssa knew she would have been damaged beyond repair.
And Jurin had never let her go.
All this time, no matter what Melyssa threw at him, he kept coming back for more. It was as if he knew how fragile she’d been all this time, how asleep in her own skin, and had waited until she was strong enough—awake enough—to take him.
And then he’d showed her every single thing she’d been missing in this world.
All that sparkle. All that joy. All that wild, mad sensation.
Jurin met her gaze from across the hall, that searing shot of clear amber. And he looked the way he always did. Steady. Certain.
Hers.
And Melyssa realized that all this time, the decision had already been made. She had never been fighting against him, she’d been fighting against herself. Because it was only her own fears that had held her back. She’d been afraid to see what was all around her all this time. She’d been afraid to let herself see the truth.
Jurin was absolutely nothing like any of the men she’d ever known. He never would be.
His claim didn’t come with a life sentence of hard labor beneath him on a sad, angry bed, night after grinding night.
His claim was the opposite of a chain. His claim really would set her free.
To be whoever she wanted to be, because he was man enough to handle it. Whatever she threw at him, whatever became of them, it would all sit easily on his big, wide shoulders.
He could hold up the world. What was one formerly compliant woman and a baby girl who already adored him next to that?
She felt that hollow thing inside of her shift, somehow. Shimmer, maybe.
As if her body already knew how this would end.
As if it had never suffered any doubt.
Melyssa slipped off the wool she’d wrapped around her like a cape and slipped it over the back of the nearest chair. She took a deep breath, then let it go.
And she resolved, then and there, to stop being scared. Especially of the things she wanted.
Then she turned, her daughter strapped to her chest like the raider woman Melyssa was determined she’d become one day herself—and if not, well, Melyssa intended to watch her daughter grow up to throw axes like the only man she’d ever know as her father instead—and crossed the floor to her man.
10.
Jurin watched her come to him.
The hall was filled camp girls, the most beautiful women in the whole of the waterlogged world by any definition, and yet they all seemed like shadows to him. All he saw, all he’d se
en for nine months now, was Melyssa.
She walked toward him, her gaze locked to his, and he assumed she was coming to pick up the fight where it had left off in her cottage. And he felt sorry for her, he really did.
Because none of this was going to go the way she thought it would.
Not that he gave a fuck. Because he’d tasted her now, and he wasn’t holding back any longer. He was done waiting for her to see what was right in front of her face.
He’d told her so.
Jurin stood where he was, next to Eiryn and his king as they told the story of Wulf’s stint undercover as a weakling prisoner in evil King Athenian’s winter palace in the western highlands to a throng of awed clan members. But he wasn’t listening to the story, which was already one of his favorites and would go down as part of Wulf’s legend. He watched Melyssa approach instead.
Because he thought it was a sight he would never tire of, no matter how many years he had left on this cursed, ruined earth. His woman, soft and sweet, looking as if she’d been fucked hard and well for hours. His cock twitched at the memories, because one afternoon with Melyssa barely scratched the surface of the powerful need he had for her.
He let his gaze fall to that baby on her chest, cuddled up tight, eyes closed and mouth open, as if Rhiannon was trying to fight her mama for space in Jurin’s heart.
His, he thought. Both of them.
End of discussion.
When she drew close to him, he saw that there was expression in her eyes that he’d never seen before. Part of him instantly went into battle mode. Tactics and strategies to make her stop fighting this. Him.
Because he didn’t think she wanted to fight him. He thought she didn’t know how not to fight. It wasn’t the same thing.
“I’m not fighting about this anymore,” he told her, his voice rougher than he would have liked. Especially in public.
“Did you ever fight about it?” she asked mildly. “I thought you just made pronouncements.”
And Jurin was a man who’d been born to swing a blade. He was big and he was tough, built to brawl. He knew how to take a hit and he knew how to storm a castle wall. He laughed in the face of his enemies and he feared no man.