by Megan Crane
“Here we go,” Eiryn said then, with a rich delight in her voice that promised nothing but blood, because the king’s guards were starting to move Athenian back toward the palace.
“It’s a target-rich environment,” Wulf said as they began to move, trailing after the guards. “But make sure to save room for dinner.”
The guards were hustling the king inside, and it had occurred to Wulf months ago, while running scenarios, that if the tunnels were highly protected, they probably also served as the king’s own little panic room. Athenian could retreat into his tunnels while the world burned and emerge from them just as powerful and unharmed as when he’d gone in.
All the raiders had to do was create reason enough for the guards to haul him off and hustle him away in that panicked state.
And what better way to do that than give the king something much more fun to concentrate on than possible tales of raiders on the move in the western highlands. They’d been afraid their presence on the mainland would trickle back to an asshole overlord like Athenian anyway, since he almost certainly had spies in the most unlikely of places, like the bandit-held port city on the Nebraska coast. Why not give him the raider king himself, a man Athenian had been messing with from afar for years, to toy with under his own roof?
Wulf had never been a distraction before. He had never been bait. And he had certainly never given himself over as a weaker man’s toy.
Still, he’d done it. He’d taken Athenian’s shit and he’d done it without killing too many wannabe assassins in the process.
And now it was time to play.
One man, even if that man was Wulf, didn’t stand too much of a chance against fifty trained guards outside a single doorway. But three raiders and a chaotic darkness? That was what raiders called a party.
They followed after the guards, picking them off one by one as they went. A slash of Wulf’s dagger here. Riordan’s hammer of a fist there. The faint, beautiful song of Eiryn’s blade through the thick night air.
By the time they made it inside the palace’s great hall, Wulf felt reborn.
It was darker inside, and he could hear nothing but commotion from the tiers above. A shadow detached itself from the wall and rushed at him, and Wulf pivoted into a combat stance with his dagger ready to strike—but it was Indy.
“Better not to roll up that hard on a man in the dark,” Riordan said dryly from Wulf’s left. “It’s a good way to end up with a gut full of raider steel.”
The bandit eyed the dagger that had come perilously close to his abdomen, but seemed wholly unperturbed. It was shit like that, Wulf thought, that made it impossible to look down on the guy the way he’d like to because of Indy’s unfortunate taste in body adornment.
Indy said nothing as he handed Wulf the harness with his blades that he’d gone to collect from Wulf’s rooms while Wulf was busy playing prisoner outside.
It took Wulf only a second to pull his harness on, secure the dagger, and then pull his favorite blade free. He tested his grip, liking the weight of the steel and the sense of his brothers at his back. Liking that, at last, he was free to be himself again. Not the chained animal he’d been pretending he was.
He finally felt like himself again. The only thing he was missing now was—
But he wasn’t going there. He wasn’t thinking about her, or the way she’d reached out her graceful little hand and tried to slide him a blade under her father’s nose. Not in the middle of a battle years in the making.
Not until he could figure out how he hadn’t felt like himself the entire time he’d been in this stronghold—except when he’d been with her.
“Let’s do this,” he bit out.
And it was on.
The scrum of guards around the king was taking him straight for the door to the king’s wing, just in case there was any remaining doubt. It took Wulf and the others only a few moments to catch up, and then they fanned out again. They had the advantage, because they’d been expecting the dark and had caused the chaos. The guards clearly had a plan for situations like this, but Wulf doubted they’d practiced it much—and certainly not with Athenian—because this palace was built on arrogance. He’d seen it the first day when they’d marched an enemy in their gate and through their villages, letting him see exactly what they had. And where.
But none of these people could imagine that anyone could dare to attack Athenian in his own stronghold. It gave the raiders the edge.
Servants came pouring out of the stairwells from the lower levels, running around with lanterns and terrified looks on their faces. Wulf swiped one, holding it high so his brothers and the bandit could get a good look at what they were up against as they assembled in the courtyard outside the king’s door.
Not much. Half the guard had stayed outside the palace, as if they expected an attack out in the gorge. Possibly from their own people. And the better-trained squadron who’d hustled the king to safety had already gone through that damned door that Wulf had stared at every night until he saw the fucking thing in his dreams.
“There are only four of you assholes,” one of the guards belted out. Like his ability to count was a deterrent.
“Remember you said that,” Eiryn invited him, and then they showed the overconfident knot of twelve men exactly how lethal a handful of raiders and a motivated bandit could be.
And then finally, they were shoving through that door and leaving it not just open, but torn off its hinges behind them.
“Why the fuck is everything six kinds of shit wherever I look?” Riordan asked, scowling around in the light from the lantern Wulf hadn’t put down while he’d kicked three asses one-handed. It was good to be back. “Gold, silver, whatever the hell that is . . .”
“You should see the throne room,” Wulf replied, ducking around a blind corner and going low to kick the waiting guard in the kneecap while Eiryn went high and kicked the gun straight out of his hands. Riordan followed after them and knocked him out with an elbow strike to the temples. “Fucking blinding.”
“Men don’t get this powerful unless they’re creepy as fuck,” Eiryn said with a shrug as she moved in that deliberate way of hers, smooth and lethal, that made her look like she glided an inch above the ground. She slid a dark look at Wulf. “Except you, of course. Not creepy at all.”
“I earned my throne the non-creepy way,” Wulf retorted, more amused than offended. Especially because there was a time his prickly sister couldn’t look at him without hate in her eyes. He liked this Eiryn better. Still lethal. Still the fastest blade in the clan. Always a little angry about something, because that was her way. But no longer boiling over with all that hate.
It certainly made raids and missions like this one a hell of a lot more entertaining.
“Blood is always better than gold-plated lies,” the bandit said then, trailing behind them with both his blades ready to take out any odd stragglers who tried to come at them in their blind spot.
“It’s honest, anyway,” Riordan muttered.
Instead of leading them straight on toward the king’s private quarters, Wulf turned left at the first opportunity, and followed the sounds of guards barking out orders to each other down a hallway he’d never seen before. The palace walls, all that gold and dazzle, faded away as the hallway went down a dimly lit set of stairs, and led straight into the side of the mountain.
The tunnels. At fucking last.
And they’d all memorized Helena’s maps, but Wulf waved Riordan ahead of him. Because the brother was the best tracker in the clan for a reason, and unlike douchebags like Athenian, Wulf didn’t have to measure his dick every five seconds. He knew exactly how big it was. And he knew that delegating to his talented brothers only made him stronger.
He could feel the itch in his hands, like even his fingers were on fire with the bloodlust. Specifically, King Athenian’s blood.
Riordan picked a tunnel with no hesitation whatsoever, and it was a mark of how much the rest of the brothers trusted his instincts
that they ran right after him, no discussion or commentary. They ran low to the ground and quiet, following the rambling lights of lanterns hung here and there as the tunnel meandered this way and that, hacked into rock and stone. Wulf stashed his lantern by the side of the path and let the existing light the guards had been so good as to provide them lead the way.
“The little hall with the control room should be in two turns,” Riordan said after what Wulf estimated was a good half-mile dead north.
Which put them directly under the dam. So far, everything Helena had told them, based on the information her family had hoarded and tried to protect since the Storms, had been right on. Wulf was glad—not for the first time—that he hadn’t ordered her execution back when they’d had reason to believe she might have been working with that mercenary scumbag, Krajic. Who, it turned out, had been working for Athenian’s pet bishop the whole time.
He was especially glad because he would have made his war chief carry out that order, and given that Tyr had claimed Helena as his mate, Wulf imagined that would not have gone well.
But he stopped thinking about Helena and her tablet that kings and bishops and mercenaries had chased her all over the mainland to get their hands on—to prevent exactly this from happening—when they came around the first turn and found N’kosi waiting there, a burning torch attached to a long stick in one hand.
Riordan dropped into his fighting crouch, but Wulf studied the head of the guard’s face. His set expression.
“Wait,” he murmured, keeping Riordan from striking.
Eiryn moved around him, too, staying where she could see behind him as well as in front of him, and Wulf liked that. It felt like a lock in a key. It reminded him—in case he was tempted to forget—that any weakness he’d displayed in this place had been for show.
Except with her.
He shoved that away, again, because this was no time for stray thoughts, much less ones that could only serve to distract him from his purpose. And maybe later there would be time to question how, in all his years of battle and focus and victory, nothing had ever distracted him from his goals. Ever.
Until Kathlyn. He’d gone to her rooms that last time to find out what she knew about these tunnels, had found her hurt, and he’d never even asked. He’d forgotten about it, in fact, until right now. Something that should have been impossible.
His skin felt a little too tight for his body—and this was not the fucking time.
“If you are heading to do what I think you are,” N’kosi said stiffly, as if the words cost him, “I want to join you.”
“What do you think I’m going to do?” Wulf asked mildly. “I’m out for a walk to clear my head. Maybe you heard. My wedding was a bit of a disaster.”
But N’kosi, as he recalled, had never been particularly taken in by Wulf’s offhanded, lazy act. Not from their very first meeting in the great hall. And clearly not now, either. The other man’s hand gripped the burning staff he held that much harder.
“He doesn’t beat me,” N’kosi said in a deadly voice, his dark eyes gleaming with a very particular fire that Wulf knew very well. Pure hatred. “He wouldn’t dare. I was taller than him when I was twelve. I outweighed him easily within a year. And now? I could crush him. But I didn’t. I thought I was protecting her.”
Kathlyn. All roads led back to Kathlyn. Her father. Her brother.
Wulf himself.
“Surely you know he’s beaten her before,” Wulf said quietly, and he chose to ignore the shift he could feel in both Riordan and Eiryn, as if they were reading shit in him he refused to admit was possible. “She’s remarkably nonchalant about the whole thing. He left welts all over her body with a strap because she dared to obey him at that stupid-ass ceremony, and she didn’t bother to summon help. Not a healer. Not her brother, the captain of the king’s guard who might have had some influence. No one.”
He’d almost said, not even me. But something had stopped him. Maybe it was that Eiryn and Riordan were here now and paying much too close attention. Maybe it was because N’kosi was staring him down, reminding him that the man was her brother and he, too, had witnessed that mounting ceremony.
Or more likely, because he was still trying to deny it to himself. Like the little bitch he’d never been about anything.
“I saw her,” N’kosi gritted out, and his dark eyes flared with something that might have been dislike—but whether of the situation or Wulf himself, Wulf couldn’t tell. Not that it mattered. “And I’ll say it again. If you’re in these tunnels for an evening walk, I’ll have to take you back to your cell.”
“That would be quite a trick,” Eiryn murmured, N’kosi’s bloody death in her voice.
N’kosi shot her a look, blinked at the sight of a woman dressed like a complaint yet wielding that blade with such obvious skill, then returned his attention to Wulf.
“But if you’re here to take him down, I’m in. I’ve been waiting for this day since I was twenty. And it’s not just me. There’s a core of men in the guard who are loyal to me, not him.”
It could be a trap, of course. A little game set up by Athenian, who certainly liked his games. But Wulf didn’t think so, somehow. It was something about the way the man had mentioned his sister. It was the stiff, uncomfortable way he was standing, as if sedition didn’t sit well with him no matter how much he disliked his father. And to Wulf’s memory, it was markedly different from the way he’d behaved when Wulf had first arrived.
He had to figure that if this was a trap, N’kosi would resemble the man Wulf had met in the great hall that first afternoon. Broader of gesture, bolder of voice. Clearly acting instead of simply talking—about something that could get him executed as a traitor if the wrong person overheard.
“Do your men fight like the dumbasses down at the gate?” Wulf asked mildly. “Or do they fight like you?”
N’kosi didn’t answer that. His affronted glare did it for him.
And when Wulf nodded, N’kosi let out his own low whistle, and ten men appeared behind him from further back in the tunnels.
“Look at that,” Riordan murmured. “It’s a party after all.”
But the men were solid fighters. Wulf could see it at a glance, in the way they stood and handled their weapons, and fell easily into formation at N’kosi’s signal. They’d do.
And they headed further into the mountain, now a much larger force than when they’d started.
When they reached the final turn that should lead them to the control room at last, Wulf motioned for N’kosi to stay behind.
“He can’t see you yet,” he said, and the other man nodded his understanding. “Wait for our signal before you come in.”
“What’s your signal?”
“Don’t worry,” Eiryn murmured, her voice ripe with anticipation. “You’ll know.”
Wulf looked over his shoulder at Indy then. “Ready?”
The bandit looked scornful. His two short blades were in his hands, and if the dirty looks he was exchanging with the guards were any indication, he wasn’t a fan of the addition to their team. “Of course.”
“Then let’s get this done,” Wulf said. “I’m tired of this place.”
And he stood up, shaking off the fighting stance he adopted without thought when his blade was in his hand. He held his blade at a careless angle, let his lips curl in a lazy little smile, and strolled around the final curve.
The tunnel dumped them out into a little hall of sorts, obviously built by ancient machines instead of human hands wielding picks and shovels against the mountain. Smooth concrete everywhere. An industrial ladder was attached to the far wall, leading up toward what looked like a hatch, and there was one single, reinforced blue door in the corner.
The control room. It had to be. Wulf felt Eiryn and Riordan bristle into awareness behind him, clearly reaching the same conclusion the moment he did. They were in the right place.
Too bad there was a lunatic king and about twenty guards between them and that door.
“I knew it was you!” Athenian howled, his dark eyes narrow with rage. “I knew you did this!”
“And here I thought you were the king of light,” Wulf said mockingly, still holding his blade as if he hadn’t noticed there were all those guards, many of them toting guns and pointing them straight at him like the fucking morons they were. “I thought electric light was yours by the will of god. What could a scavenger like me possibly do to something you own so completely?”
Athenian had clearly left his creepy-ass smiles somewhere back in the tunnels. He growled at Wulf instead, his brocaded jacket askew and the hint of spittle on his curled lips.
“You are nothing but vermin,” he spat. “There are twenty of my men and three of you, plus that metal-faced freak.”
“Watch yourself,” Riordan said chidingly, as if Indy had never stood on a cold beach in the eastern islands and waited for Riordan’s death. “He’s our metal-faced freak.”
“Don’t you remember me, Your Majesty?” Indy asked softly.
He moved away from Wulf as he spoke, heading clockwise along the perimeter of the room while Wulf started to move in the opposite direction. The guards didn’t like it. They swung their heads—and their big guns—back and forth between them with increasing agitation.
“I’m crushed,” Indy said. “I remember you. It’s not every day that a king orders an entire family executed for the grave sin of kicking up dust in the middle of a road. It touched you, apparently, as you rode in your fancy carriage outside of a walled city on the Arizona coast.” He shook his head, the faint smile on his mouth doing nothing to conceal the black fury in his dark green eyes. “One of your guards betrayed you and took pity on me. I was only five. He spared my life, then handed me off to the first bandit he saw on the road back. Who liked boys, the younger the better. Guess why.”
“If I knew what guard that was,” Athenian snarled, “I’d take his head and bury it with yours, right after I let every pervert in this palace fuck the both of you in the ass until you bleed.”
“That’s pretty much what I thought you’d say,” Indy said through his teeth.