Edge of Power

by Megan Crane

  Gunnar did something else on the panel in front of him, then nodded at Helena. Her fingers flew over the buttons on her tablet.

  “Okay,” she said in a strange voice. She shifted her weight, then glanced back over her shoulder—to make sure Tyr was right there with her, Wulf thought. The war chief gave her a nod and she turned around again. “It says we’re linked to the satellites.”

  If Wulf remembered Gunnar’s extremely detailed lecture about satellites correctly—which had involved a lengthy aside about the curvature of the earth and the fact that before the Storms they’d found ways to make satellites that could hold their positions for centuries on end without degrading—linking to them was a good thing.

  And then the screen on the wall changed. The map zoomed out, showing them a map of a world that didn’t exist any longer. Wulf had been staring at this same map for months now, trying to get his head around the enormity of what they’d lost. People. Cities. Languages. Memories and histories, wiped out. The seas were brooding and vengeful, but more than that, they were shifting, seething graveyards. Living monuments to lost worlds and happy enough to keep right on swallowing them alive.

  “I’m sending the signal. . . .” Helena muttered, her head down over her tablet.

  The screen shifted again, and eighteen raiders and one bandit collectively caught their breath.

  “Baby,” Tyr said in his carrying voice from the back of the room. “This is not the time to be an asshole. Look up.”

  Helena raised her head slowly, but Wulf didn’t stop to watch her reaction to achieving what her family had tried to do for generations, fighting and running and dying to keep that tablet out of the greedy claws of powerful douchebags just like Athenian.

  Because there were a lot of dots on that screen. Blue ones, sprinkled all over the old map, each one representing a power station with an attached server farm like the one here. If it was responding, that meant it was above sea level, out there in the unexplored parts of the earth everyone had always assumed had been lost to the seas hundreds of years ago.

  And there was a very good chance that where there was dry land, there were people.

  “Look at that,” Wulf said, because it was almost as if they’d all turned to stone.

  His eyes moved from one dot to the next, skimming over countries and landmasses he’d never heard of before Helena had appeared. Showing him nothing but possibilities instead of the same old ruined earth he’d thought he knew so well.

  Light, he thought, after all these years of darkness.

  Right there in front of them. Daring them to do something about it.

  And Wulf had always loved a challenge. “It’s a brand new world,” he said quietly. “And who knows? Maybe it’s ours.”

  This time when Kathlyn snapped awake at the sound of someone entering her rooms, there was no dagger beneath her pillow to reach for. It took her two swipes over the empty mattress to remember why.

  She sat up as the figure moved into her bedroom doorway and then stayed there, backlit by the firelight from her living room. And even though she couldn’t see his face, she thought she would know the outline of that tough, lean body anywhere.

  Wulf. Alive and in one piece after going up against her father. She still couldn’t believe it was real.

  “You killed him,” she said, her voice thick from restless sleep. But she already knew the answer. She’d still been out on the plaza when N’kosi had come out to make his announcement and claim his kingdom, moments after the lights had blazed on again.

  “I did.” Wulf moved further into the room and she saw the glint of metal in the hand he let hang by his side. The dagger. “I used the blade you gave me.”

  She watched, a great pressure seeming to weigh on her from all sides, as if she was caught in a terrible grip when she knew—she knew—she should feel free. Airy. Bubbling over with joy.

  But instead there was that pressure and, worse, a great rawness inside of her that had been gnawing at her all night. Since the lights went out and he’d left her. And even when N’kosi had stood there on the steps of the palace and announced that everything had changed, forever. For the better.

  Her father was dead. N’kosi was king.

  But Kathlyn had no idea where that left her.

  And nothing in the way Wulf was standing there, still in shadow and making no move toward her, made her feel any less adrift.

  “Kathlyn,” he said, as if her name was an apology in itself.

  And she knew then. It was like a shift inside of her. One minute raw, the next aware.

  “I love you,” she said.

  She hadn’t meant to say it. Not like that. She hadn’t even strung the sentence together like that inside her own head. But the moment the words were out, something in her eased.

  That was what it was, that ache that didn’t seem to go anywhere. That hunkered there between her ribs and made her breathe funny. It wasn’t surprising she hadn’t recognized it—but now that she had, she knew it couldn’t possibly be anything else.

  But the effect on Wulf was something like violent.

  He moved toward her, one stiff step, then another, and the firelight caught him. His eyes were on fire, blue and cold, and his mouth was a hard, forbidding line.

  “No,” he bit out. “You don’t. You don’t know what it is.”

  “You told me once that only cowards hide,” she whispered, and she thought his gaze looked as ravaged as she felt, all ripped up inside. “Wulf. You’ve never been a coward.”

  He seemed to take that like a hit, when Kathlyn had already heard the stories circling about what he was like when he was actually fighting. When blows glanced off of him and he moved like the wind, a terror with blue eyes and a hard grin, as if he’d been made purely for violence.

  He stood there at the side of her bed, and she watched him breathe in, then let it out, and change while he did it. The tension left his body. He widened his stance a little, that was all, looking perfectly relaxed.

  Only his eyes still stormed. But when he spoke, his voice was quiet.

  Worse than that, it was certain.

  “You have never had a choice in your life,” he told her matter-of-factly. As if he’d given the matter a great deal of thought. “Not even me. You would have given yourself to any man you found in that room.”

  “Funny,” Kathlyn said distantly, her stomach knotting. “I thought that with my father dead, there would be no one left to call me a whore.”

  “I am not calling you a whore,” he gritted out, as if he was offended by the word. Then he shifted slightly, and his voice cooled. “You were desperate. I get that. In the time I’ve been here you’ve suffered two beatings from your father. You’ve been shamed and ostracized from the only life you’ve ever known. You’ve been threatened. You lost your virginity and then had to pretend to lose it all over again in a ritual designed to fuck girls of your class into submission. Literally. You were walking around in a dress stained with your own blood and people complimented it. In case you don’t see the problem with that, baby, it’s fucking insane.”

  She felt herself begin to go numb to protect herself from wherever this was heading, but she fought it back. Letting herself actually live her life and feel the things that happened in it couldn’t only be for the pleasant sensations. It had to be everything, or it was nothing. It was sensation or numbness.

  Even if what she felt was this.

  “That wasn’t my blood,” she managed to say.

  “It might as well have been,” Wulf retorted, his voice a little tighter. “And that’s just what happened this month. How can you possibly know what you love? How can you know anything when you’ve been under your father’s control all these years?”

  “Because I’m not a child.” She frowned at him. “And you’re not my king. You don’t have the right to make decisions for me.”

  “The world is a different place than it was this morning,” Wulf continued as if she hadn’t spoken. He reached over and
placed the dagger on the table beside her bed with a little click she found far too decisive. “Especially here. And you deserve to enjoy it. Your brother won’t treat you the way your father did.”

  “How do you know?” she asked, not that she thought N’kosi was vicious. But because Wulf didn’t know, either, one way or another.

  “Because if he does, I will come back here and kill him, too,” Wulf bit out, that frozen rage in his voice. She recognized it from the last time he’d been here, standing over her bed and deciding things that weren’t his to decide.

  “This isn’t about me,” Kathlyn said then, in dawning understanding. “This is about you. You think you can’t protect me. You’re not concerned with my choices, you’re terrified that if I make them, you might actually be vulnerable for the first time in your life.”

  His eyes blazed. Blue and furious.

  “Princess, you don’t know a fucking thing about me,” he growled, but she thought the fact he didn’t try to pretend he was about to fall asleep where he stood proved otherwise. “I’ve been playing a role since the day I walked into this stronghold. The man you think you love doesn’t exist.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t believe you. I think you’re afraid.”

  And that was a mistake. She saw his eyes flare. His honed weapon of a body jolted as if she’d really hit him, and with something hard. She thought he meant to say something, but instead, he turned and started walking back out the way he came.

  Kathlyn didn’t think. She moved. She rolled out of the bed, hit the floor in her bare feet, and picked up the dagger as she went. When she caught up to him at the outer door, she didn’t consider how rash she was being. She just shoved him with all her might.

  Which did pretty much nothing but taunt her with the feel of his naked back, crossed with that harness he wore. He certainly didn’t move because she’d pushed him. It was so infuriating she did it again.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” It came out hard. Like a round of bullets from one of the guard’s guns.

  “The only thing you know how to do is fight,” she threw at him, hardly knowing what came out of her mouth. “So fight for me. Don’t run away. Fight.”

  “Keep poking at me, baby, and you’re going to get hurt,” Wulf said in that low, dangerous voice that made everything inside her shiver, then melt.

  “Are you sure?” she demanded, not sure where she was getting the strength to do this, but knowing she had to do it. She had to fight, too. She’d spent too long surviving in a half life, getting by like she was nothing more than a ghost herself. “Because that would involve interacting with me instead of running away like a—”

  He turned around, hot and furious and scowling at her, not a trace of the easy, lazy, perpetually amused Wulf he’d played for her father all this time.

  “You better not finish that sentence,” he warned her. “This is for your own good. You might not thank me now, but you will one day.”

  “Allow me to thank you right now,” she threw back at him.

  And then she wrapped her hand tight around the handle of her dagger, reached out, and cut him. A deliberate slash, straight across his taut abdomen.

  Wulf froze. Something like astonishment, only much, much darker, flooded across his face. He looked down, where drops of blood welled up in a thin, delicate line.

  “You only listen to people you think can hurt you,” Kathlyn said then, a little bit breathless with her own daring. “Will you listen to me now?”

  “Did you hit your head when you fell down out there?” he bit out, incredulous.

  “No.” She reached out and did it again, cutting another line beneath the first. “You’re so busy listing all the things I didn’t get to choose you seem to be missing the fact I’m choosing you.”

  “You can’t have me.” He shook his head. “And when the dust clears and you understand what it means that your father is no longer a factor, you won’t want me, anyway. Your father was a king. Why would you want another one?”

  “My father was a despicable tyrant,” she threw back at him.

  But all he did was shake his head again, as if she was being ridiculous. As if he felt nothing while what she felt was jagged and wretched and raw and too big to fit inside her.

  Even if what it really was, Kathlyn thought, was grief. Love turned inside out.

  And she didn’t see why, if she had to feel these things, he shouldn’t feel them, too.

  So she cut him a third time, and he exploded.

  He took the dagger from her with a move so liquid and impossible that she understood, with a suddenness that made her stomach drop, how tolerant he’d been until now. Wulf didn’t shift his blistering blue gaze from hers, he just held the dagger by its tip and threw it across the room, sending it spinning end over end until it embedded itself in the far wall.

  “Wulf—” she started.

  “Shut up,” he growled, and he bent a little and picked her up. And she could have struggled. She could have fought. But she didn’t want to fight him. This stupidity of his, masquerading as some kind of misplaced nobility? Yes. But not him.

  Instead, she melted against him, and he swore.

  The room spun all around and then she was on her back on her bed, a furious Wulf propped up over her on his fists with his feet on the floor.

  “Don’t,” he said, his voice a rough scrape of a command. “Don’t do that. Don’t surrender to anyone, especially not me.”

  “I love you,” she whispered.

  “Don’t do that, either.”

  She reached out and touched him, tracing the three lines she’d put on him, smearing the beads of blood into his skin. He didn’t flinch. He only stared down at her as if he was trying to force himself to leave. It was like she could see the struggle on his skin.

  “I love you,” she said yet again. And when his mouth tightened and went flat, she focused on his abdomen and those three red lines again. “Why did you come find me tonight? What’s the purpose of this if not to torture me more?”

  “This isn’t torture,” he gritted out. “This is goodbye.”

  So she angled herself up and took his beautiful face between her hands. She let her palms rest against his beard, and she kissed him.

  And it was like lighting a match and throwing it into a pool of fuel.

  Wulf exploded, or maybe she did. His hands were on her, lifting her up and tossing her backward, and then they were rolling. He tugged on the nightgown she wore, pulling it up and over her head. He threw it to the side and then she was naked for him at last, truly naked and straddling his body.

  And she didn’t know which one of those things was making her so dizzy. She only knew she didn’t care.

  “Finally,” he muttered, and then he tipped her toward him and took her nipple in his mouth.

  And this time, Kathlyn didn’t have to moderate her responses. This time she could pant and moan and rock herself against that hard ridge in his trousers while he did dirty, beautiful things to her. She could feed her breasts into his wicked mouth and ride his clever fingers when they moved between her legs, sensation crashing over like waves and wracking her with shivers so intense they should have knocked her sideways.

  Maybe they would have if he hadn’t been holding her upright.

  He played with her bare folds until she was incoherent, and then he reached down between them and freed himself from his trousers.

  Kathlyn was breathing so hard she could hear the wheeze of it, her heart was slamming against her chest like a hand against a wall, and Wulf simply wrapped his hands around her hips and lifted her up, then set her down again, this time as the plump head of him slid through her folds and sank inside her.

  She tried to hurry it up, to hurry that slick, deep slide and the wonder of all of him lodged deep inside of her, but he wouldn’t let her. He controlled the depth, and he took his sweet time lowering her onto him. One inch. Then the next, slower.

  By the time he’d impaled himself all the way
, Kathlyn was trembling wildly and she’d broken out in a kind of wet heat, everywhere.

  Wulf watched her from where he lay on his back, splayed out beneath her, and he slowly moved his hands from her waist to grip her bottom.

  “Go on,” he told her in a guttural voice that sent a thrill spinning through her. “Ride me. And I know you don’t know how,” he said when she started to speak. “Figure it out, princess.”

  And she did. She thought of that carousel long ago in Montana, and thought he was much better than an ancient, painted pony. Kathlyn propped herself up with one hand on the cuts she’d made, and another a little bit higher, and she experimented. She lifted herself up, then sank down again. She went up on her knees. She bent forward over him and he took her mouth with his, greedy and hot, and that was when she found it. A roll of her hips. A rhythm.

  “There you go, baby,” he said against her mouth, and his growled approval was like a lick of fire, searing through her.

  And she was the one who moved, rocking herself delirious against that implacable iron rod so deep inside her. Wulf lay back and let her work herself against him. He explored her breasts with his rough, battered hands, the friction making her shudder. He held her bottom in his fists and kneaded her a little as she rode him. And he moved those wicked fingers to the part of her she’d never known she had before him, holding that sensitive bit of flesh between two fingers.

  And then tugging on it until she blew apart, this time without having to keep it all inside, and it still went on forever.

  But he wasn’t done. He flipped her over and followed her down, pulling her knees up high on either side of him as he sank into her, deeper and more intense than before. And she just kept shaking as he hammered himself into her, rolling from one peak to the next until she couldn’t tell if she’d ever come down.

  And she didn’t until he found that same great shaking explosion, his mouth against her neck and her name on his lips.

  She braced herself to fight him some more when he pulled away, but all he did was strip off his clothes.

  And then they lay there together on her bed, both of them wholly naked together at last.