by Megan Crane
She didn’t mean to laugh at that, though it was an empty sound, and made his dark gold eyes narrow. “Is happy something you do?”
“You better hope so, sweetheart,” he growled at her, though there was a gleam in his dark gold eyes. She was sure of it. “You better pick a god and pray. Now walk.”
He pushed her ahead of him again and Helena was grateful, suddenly, for the dark all around them and the fact he was behind her once again. When her face crumpled, he couldn’t see it. When she fought it off, he was no wiser.
And that pressure inside of her didn’t subside. It got worse.
It was like Tyr was a storm, one of those long ago great ones that had wrecked the whole world, and he’d leveled her. She felt ruined all the way through, razed and toppled and used and broken by her body’s enthusiastic response to him, and she didn’t understand why a big, dumb, impossibly violent animal like this one had managed that when no one else ever had. Not even Krajic.
She knew Krajic wanted to kill her. She didn’t know what Tyr wanted from her.
Tyr isn’t like any man you’ve ever met, that voice in her snapped. Nor did she think he was all that dumb.
The truth of that buzzed through her as she stumbled farther into the woods, following what was barely even a path this far away from Ferranti’s so-called stronghold. Her mouth didn’t feel like it belonged to her anymore, after the way Tyr had simply … taken it. Her entire body ached, and not because she was in any kind of pain. And that was nothing next to the riot happening between her legs, where she felt soft and destroyed and hungry for something else. Something more.
Helena wasn’t like a lot of the women she knew, like her own sister, in fact, who viewed their compliant sex acts during their winter marriages like separate, individual opportunities for dramatic martyrdom. Helena had never viewed it as any particularly great sacrifice. Her mother had told her that it was all about a greater good, but that there was no shame in having a hand in the timing of that good, and Helena had always taken that as fact. She thought the reality of the whole thing was fine, more or less. And some winters were more fine than others. Sometimes it was a little gross and embarrassing. Sometimes it was kind of nice. Though she’d certainly never thought any man was worth giving up the herbs she drank once a month to prevent pregnancy, because she’d never thought the time was right. Especially not now that carrying out the family legacy fell to her.
But what she felt tonight—what she still felt, rampaging through her body the way Tyr had ransacked Ferranti’s courtyard—had absolutely nothing in common with any of the winter marriages she’d had in the years since her first blood had announced her fertility.
It was something brand new and almost as terrifying as the man who moved with surprising speed and ominous quiet behind her in these never-ending woods. Helena ached. She almost thought she was coming down with something, one of those plagues the old people muttered about so darkly, but this wasn’t a fever. It only felt like one. Her breasts felt too heavy against her muddy shirt. She was aware of every step she took, the way the hard, stiff material of her jeans dragged against her swollen pussy, and her skin seemed much too tight and flushed.
Compliance was mechanical. Quick and often boring and sometimes, as with Rolland this past winter, even apologetic. It was duty and obligation. A daily chore like all the rest.
Tyr was none of those things.
It was almost a relief when they finally cleared the woods. Almost. The wind was higher and more insistent when they came out of the trees and onto the beach tucked in between high rocks on each side, buffeting her and reminding her how wet and chilly she already was, no matter how warm the midsummer night. Helena could breathe again, suddenly, as if the woods had been the thing pressing down hard against her chest, edging her that much closer to the tears she didn’t want to cry. Filling her lungs felt like a victory in a night made of very few of those.
But there was also … everything else.
Three raider ships were moored out in the small, wind-battered cove like something out of a child’s bad dream. Looming, indistinct shadows out on the waves with lanterns hanging from their masts like flickering phantoms against the rainy dark. And closer in, above the high-tide mark, a cluster of equally dark and yet far rougher shapes were arrayed around a big bonfire. The raiders themselves. Far more than had swarmed Ferranti’s courtyard.
Mistake number 970 tonight, Helena thought, was that she’d had some indistinct notion that she’d slip away from this man once he spirited her away from Ferranti and the threat of Krajic. That was laughable enough. But who knew? Even wolves had to sleep. Still, she hadn’t really thought beyond the one man. The one wolf. The one obstacle.
She certainly hadn’t thought about a whole pack.
Helena was entirely too aware of Tyr at her back, that same lethal wall of intensity that she could feel now in a different, disturbing way, like some part of him was still lodged deep inside of her.
“Problem?”
His voice was a taunt, for all it rolled over her like a rough caress. As if he knew what she’d thought, what she was thinking. What she’d imagined she could do.
She had the terrible notion that somehow, he really did.
“Not at all,” she threw back at him, and she thought she heard that laugh of his again, a low rumble in the dark.
And she had no choice here, did she? She couldn’t fight this man. She certainly couldn’t fight all the rest of the savages he called his brothers.
She’d acted rashly, just as her mother had warned against years ago. She’d done this to herself, stupid choice by even stupider choice, going back to that time she’d let Melyssa ruin their lives because her sister had wanted to feel special and had thought a man like Ferranti could do that for her. Helena had known better then and she’d gone along with it anyway, because maybe she’d been tired of running too. This was nothing more than reaping what she’d sowed.
And she refused to cry about it. She refused. Tears wouldn’t help. As ever, Helena needed to help herself because there was no one else who could.
Her parents hadn’t died only to save their daughters, and Krajic wasn’t chasing her across what was left of the world for kicks. Helena had a duty to all of those who had fought and died before her to make certain the greedy western kings in their dry and warm and fancy Rocky Mountain compounds couldn’t hoard all the light in the world for themselves the way they had since the Storms.
Melyssa had never been much help with any of this. That meant it was down to Helena and that tablet computer Tyr had taken from her to get the power back on in all these far-off places, where there had been nothing but darkness and the occasional generator for more than a hundred years. The priests liked to build their temples in the places the old world had used for their various technologies—power plants, server farms, industrial complexes of all kinds. They claimed all that blasphemous human technology had made the seas rise in the first place. Meanwhile, the western kings had been proclaiming they’d wrested the localized light in their territories from the darkness thanks to their might and influence since the last of the great Storms eased. Helena’s family had known better. It was about controlling power. It was about feeding off fear. It was about the things it was always about for great men with grand ambitions.
Helena’s mission was simple, if enormously complicated by things like Krajic on her ass and six months of lockdown every year when the winter rains came. There were two mainland power plants she knew of that were also server farms with direct links to the satellites that were still in the sky, presumably unaffected by the weather below. One was so far in the western highlands it had always been too risky to attempt to reach it, but Helena knew where the other one was, buried in the Catskills in the east. She needed to get to it and once there, she needed to turn on the goddamned lights. Then she’d access the long-lost Internet to find out how many other power plants remained on the planet— thanks to the technology people had installed in them
when they’d moved away from archaic power lines in the early days of the bad weather that became the Storms—and discover what, if anything, was left of the rest of the world.
That meant she had no choice, the way she’d always had no choice. The way no one in her family had ever had any choice, going back generations. There was what had to be done and the doing of it, and trying not to die along the way. There could be no tears in that. There could be no tears, period.
So Helena picked up the pace as if she were wearing her own pair of steel-toed boots, ignored the dangerous wolf at her back, and marched herself straight into hell.
3
Helena kept moving as best she could over the sliding, cold sand that scraped at the bottoms of her poor, abused feet and attached itself in heavy clumps to the dragging cuffs of her muddy, soaked-through jeans. She kept moving so she wouldn’t have to find out what Tyr might do if she didn’t.
She kept moving until the rough shapes around the leaping, spitting fire separated and became at least fifty big-ass, terrifying men.
Much like the one who settled his heavy hand on the nape of her neck when she slowed at the edge of the great mess of them and propelled her forward, straight into the center of all that astonishing brute force masquerading as epic, astonishing male bodies. Every single one of the raiders was big and brawny, made of scars and huge muscles, with powerful legs like tree trunks. They stood with their feet planted in the ground as if the sodden earth itself obeyed their commands because it, too, dared not defy them.
They were loud, brash, and seemingly unconcerned how their voices carried across the night. Helena got the distinct impression that they were not hiding here, in this rocky cove, so much as passing the time. They pounded each other on the back, drank deep of the carved mugs they carried, and roared with raucous laughter as if they had no fear of attack. They seemed to be utterly at their ease and involved in their own conversations and amusements, yet Helena could tell that every last one of them knew the moment Tyr had stepped out of the trees.
He steered her—pushed her, really—right into the thick of them, where no sane person would ever willingly go. It was like being back in the forest again, except far more claustrophobic this time. Because the trees had been close, but they hadn’t watched her with those calculating eyes, sizing up her weaknesses and her body and her at once. The trees hadn’t studied her, making her hyperaware of the fact she must look as if she’d rolled here, she was so covered in mud.
Maybe that’s a good thing, she thought with her heart thumping in her throat, and she found she was averting her eyes the way a smart woman would have done back in the compound, thinking of the kind of rough, dirty sex these men were known for despite her efforts to do anything but that. Maybe that means they won’t touch you.
But of course, Tyr already had. He still was, in fact, and it didn’t matter that only the two of them could possibly know what he’d done with that hand. Where it had been. How it had felt.
Helena knew. And she didn’t think it was a coincidence that he was using that particular hand with those specific fingers to lead her straight on into her doom. Raiders were many things—scary, big, and untethered from the world she knew in a way she recognized but didn’t entirely understand after such a brief exposure to them—but they weren’t exactly subtle.
“The storm is being a cunt, brother,” the giant redheaded—one with all those freckles against his tanned white skin she remembered from back at Ferranti’s—boomed at Tyr as he shouldered his way through the pack, propelling Helena ahead of him with that implacable hand at her neck. “I’m hoping those pansy little bitches lose their minds and come after us. If I have to sleep with the rain in my face on this stinking anus of a useless beach, there better be asses to kick.”
“Who do you think will come after you, dirtbag?” another one of the raiders demanded from beside him, this one with what looked like bones braided into his long black beard, shining white against his copper colored skin. “That bitch who pissed himself? Why am I not surprised you like golden showers?”
Then both men roared with laughter and slammed their carved mugs together, so hard Helena thought it sounded like a thunderclap and whatever they were drinking sloshed over the sides. No wonder the raiders starred as monsters in everyone’s favorite fairy tales, she thought then, trying not to stare. They were like nightmares brought to life in searing, overwhelming color on this dark, wet beach. She felt washed out and tiny in comparison, as though she’d be swallowed up without a trace if Tyr was not gripping her the way he was.
She felt Tyr’s laughter in his chest behind her, then felt it travel down his arm and into the fingers that collared her and steered her so easily, like he had her on a leash. The rumble of it shot through her, more of that wild heat she didn’t understand, and made her nipples hard and painful again beneath her shirt. And worse than that, the sound and the sensation pooled in her belly and dripped that restless heat straight into her pussy. Again.
Not again. Still.
And it felt that much more horrifying to her here, surrounded by all these men who, if the stories were true, had sex with anything that moved in a variety of creative and filthily noncompliant ways. Helena’s cheeks felt scalded bright red and she was sure that every last one of them could tell why. That they could see that terrible hunger in her that she’d never known was there. That she’d never felt in all her life before tonight.
Three men to her left let out a wild, earsplitting howl—then pounded each other on the backs and shoulders as if that noise had been a little song they’d shared. Not unlike the packs of wolves that prowled through the long winter nights, singing their songs of the hunt into the grim dark. Helena swallowed hard.
And it didn’t matter how many times she reminded herself of all the many myths she’d heard all her life about these men. That they were violent, yes, and wildly sexual in all the ways the priests preached against—but nonetheless lived according to strict codes. That unlike men like Krajic, they rarely attacked without provocation. That they were barbarians, true, and proudly refused to comply with any rules but their own. And yet all the same, there were women from across the mainland who went to them willingly—which, Helena assured herself, aware that a bubble of something a whole lot like hysteria was threatening to burst wide open in her chest, meant they couldn’t be all bad, surely …
Tyr pushed her to the center of the crowd, up close to the big fire. Helena looked around anxiously, not really sure what she was seeing. The bright fire and the pack of loud men were almost too much to take in. The rain had let up at some point, and that meant sound wasn’t muted any longer. There were all these big, loud, terrifying men and so much noise after the close, dark quiet of the woods. There was the rumble of male laughter, low, rhythmic sounds she couldn’t quite work out, and what sounded like women crying out into the smoke from the bonfire. The flames leapt and slapped at the night, and the wood popped and cracked in the pit they’d dug into the sand. The smoke danced this way and that with the indecisive tug of the wind, making it impossible to see more than intermittent flashes of things.
None of which made particular sense to her. Big bodies, greedy eyes. Strange positions, almost as if—
But then in the center of all the commotion, there was a small cone of quiet that shouldn’t have existed. It made even less sense than the rest. A small bit of space none of the men looming around her appeared to notice, but yet none breached, as if there was a high, impenetrable wall around that particular fallen log in the middle of all the noise and clamor.
A dark blond–haired man, wearing an intricate and single thick braid that made his pale gold cheekbones look like reverence against the night, lounged there in the sand with his back against the sodden log as if he were entirely alone on this crowded beach. As if all the raiders arranged around him, yet outside that invisible boundary, really were figments of her imagination.
Helena had no idea why he caught her attention. Or why, once he
had, he held it. Like a vise grip around her throat, choking the air from her lungs, and he wasn’t even looking at her.
He was like a random branch in the middle of a sun-drenched path on a peaceful afternoon’s walk that suddenly slithered into a venomous snake.
This man exuded power in an entirely different way than all the other men here; all of them obviously hardened warriors, from the weapons strapped to their bare chests to their mighty arms and wide shoulders. It hummed around him, making the night seem to shimmer where it touched him and making the indolent way he sat there, one elbow propped up on the log behind him and his long legs stretched out in front of him, a trap.
That was exactly what he was, Helena thought in a kind of panic, her blood turning to sheer ice in her veins. A trap.
He was cut sleeker than the other raiders, leaner—if not any smaller. He was a long, finely honed blade of a man no matter how at his ease he looked there. He was something more than the blunt-edged sort of weapon the rest of them were to varying degrees, all heft and bludgeon. This man was an assassin’s razor-edged, elegant steel. So sharp and deadly he could cut the unwary in half without seeming to move. It was written in every lean and sculpted inch of his hard, smooth, deceptively rangy form, all of it on display there before the fire. He wore what looked like a set of finely made casual clothes while everyone else was dressed for war.
This was no cunning animal, no run-of-the mill raider more wolf than man. Helena knew—she just knew—that underestimating this stunningly lethal man before her was the very last thing far too many fools ever did.
She couldn’t let herself become one of them.