by Megan Crane
Good people work together to make more people, the priests intoned whenever and wherever they could. To take back what we’ve lost to the rain and the seas.
Blah blah blah. Mostly what they wanted was a world under their command, not anyone else’s. Mostly, Gunnar thought, that was what everybody wanted whether they admitted it or not. Including his blood brother.
But raiders had never been about rules. Certainly not rules about where and when and how a man could indulge himself in pussy, much less go about making himself some babies if that was what he wanted. Please. Raiders had turned their backs on civilization when it fell, and they didn’t think much of what had been raised up afterward. The selfish prick priests who hoarded pretty girls and land and called for more darkness, less tech, to stave off a repeat of the Storms. The bastard kings who held the protected western highlands in the Rocky Mountains and swanned around like they’d been placed there by divine right rather than their own ruthlessness. The sheeplike people who believed anything they were told as long as they didn’t have to think for themselves.
The only good things in this ruined world had been the magic Gunnar could work with scrap metal and ancient tech, and the one woman who’d pursued him above all others.
“Whether compliance is bullshit or not, I don’t want to be a virgin,” his nun told him now. Her voice was quiet, so there was no reason it should pound in him like that. Gunnar told himself it couldn’t be temptation. Because he wouldn’t allow it. No matter how blue her eyes were or how talented she was with that damned mouth. “Can you help me with that?”
Something hard and dark roared in him then. Gunnar told himself it was triumph, nothing more, that he’d found himself the necessary virgin so easily.
He hadn’t expected that the virgin he’d pick for the job would be any kind of temptation to him—it was his father who had been into captive pussy. Gunnar had always preferred his women free and fierce, the better to enjoy their inevitable surrender. He certainly hadn’t imagined the virgin in question would suck his dick by way of an introduction. When he’d told her to prove herself, he’d thought maybe she’d cry a little. Beg prettily. He hadn’t thought very much about the virgin in question at all, in truth. He’d thought only about acquiring her, like the herbs and the old books and all the other items he’d been collecting this year to make the necessary altar and perform the blood ritual in the Kentucky mud where Audra had died.
He didn’t want to think about anything else.
He was not going to take this little nun’s virginity. He was going to use it to resurrect his mate and clear her name once and for all.
“Let’s go,” he said, and even he could hear the wild thing in his voice, intense and animal. To her credit, she didn’t flinch—as if she was tough, somehow. This soft, weak creature all cream and summer and sweetness begging to be soiled. “We’re not camping here. I have too much shit to do.”
“Where are we going?”
He slanted a dark look at her. “You’d rather stay here? The coyotes would enjoy that. They like fresh meat.”
Was it his imagination that she looked less calm? “You misunderstand me. I don’t care where we go, as long as it’s not back to the church.”
She looked away as she said it. Gunnar didn’t know if she was glancing back to see if there was a priest bearing down on her or if she was hiding her expression from him, and he let her do it because he knew that if he didn’t, they really would stay here. He would throw her down on the ground and lose himself between the thighs he imagined were twice as silky as her arms and her face and then he would have to find his way to the temple she’d come from, scale the walls, and start this whole process over again.
Besides, he’d had enough of this dry-ass place to last him a lifetime.
“Follow me,” he told her shortly. “Or stay here and become coyote dinner. I don’t give a shit.”
Which wasn’t true. He did give a shit. He needed her. But Gunnar hadn’t grown up in the raider brotherhood, blood relative to two different men forever neck deep in clan politics, without learning that showing need meant losing power. Every time. So he started walking as if he didn’t care what she did.
He didn’t look back to check whether or not she was following him because he didn’t have to look. He could hear her, sliding and scrabbling in those dumb shoes over the desert floor, but he made no move to help her. This wasn’t a charity. The things he intended to do to her weren’t exactly kind. And the more she wanted to follow him, the better it would go.
Gunnar didn’t want to think about his nun. He concentrated on how much he hated this desolate place instead. This desert prison so unlike the cool mists, cold summer winds, and plentiful evergreens back home in the eastern islands. The heavy red heat was everywhere, frying his bones and drying his throat. The whining idiot who’d provided him with a very broad map to his destination two days back had assured him that if the heat didn’t get him, the freezing cold nights would, and long before he found the church’s hidden temples—but he expected that kind of negativity from the pathetic little shit who’d made no attempt to defend himself, and who Gunnar had barely had to threaten for such basic information in the first place.
It had been hot as balls all day. It had been cold as hell all night. The weather had only pissed Gunnar off.
Because it would take a lot more than that to slow him down. He’d rigged up a solo boat that should have killed him in the spring squalls that had cropped up while he’d crossed the Atlantic to the mainland from the raider stronghold in the remote eastern islands. He’d made it around the bottom of the Atlanta coast without incident, across the Mississippi Sea without attracting any notice, then up the eastern coast of the western mainland. Past the bustling port of Kansas City that was still held by the western kings and their well-trained militias, and on until he made it to the much wilder coast of Nebraska and the outlaw port of Lincoln, where king-for-a-day bandits ruled the eastern terminus of the only remaining decent road on the west mainland. Rumor was the fabled Eighty stretched all the way west from Lincoln to the Pacific Ocean itself, lapping at the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas outside of Reno, and the bandits preyed on that—demanding tolls from anyone who wanted to travel on all that smooth, paved goodness. Gunnar didn’t give a shit if the ancient highway circled back around and tied itself in a bow, or how many tolls the bastards tried to make him pay along its length, so long as it led him to the valley the priests had claimed after the Storms.
He’d needed a virgin and he knew the priests kept them in the prisons they called convents, training them up to be perfect little servants for all the twisted shit they could come up with. Raiders didn’t play those games. Their camp girls served the raider brotherhood because they liked having a lot of sex, not because the raiders claimed some god had happened along and told them the camp girls needed to serve. That it was their calling.
It bugged Gunnar that despite how much he personally hated the priests and all their bullshit—he always had, on principle alone, because he liked tech and he didn’t like people telling him the shit he liked was bad, thank you—he was still hard as hell after experiencing the way one of the church’s faithful had used her mouth. It was enough to make a man consider taking up prayer.
And that was the first time in this long, terrible year that Gunnar remembered that whatever else he was—mate to Audra despite the fact she’d been killed, blood brother to that ambitious fuck of a raider king who had ordered the raid that had killed her and had then claimed that if it hadn’t he would have done the job himself, and one of the elite raider warrior brotherhood who’d all turned against him in this last, long year—he was also a man.
A perfectly healthy man who’d been denying himself sexual release for a long, long time.
It annoyed the shit out of him.
Gunnar stalked all the way back to the place where he’d ditched his vehicle and then stopped, and he shouldn’t have been surprised that the little nun walked righ
t into him, slamming into his back with a soft little sound. That meant he could feel her. That deliriously long body of hers and those sweet, soft tits in that airy tunic she wore, pressed against his bare skin.
He wanted nothing more than to turn around and lift her up where they stood, wrap her long legs around his hips, and work his way into her. He could hold her splayed open and take it easy, letting gravity do half the job. His cock twitched as if he was already doing it, the greedy fucker.
But that wasn’t why he’d come all this way.
He didn’t reach around and pull her off him, and she didn’t seem too bothered by her proximity—another thing he didn’t get. Raider women were one thing, bred tough and unflappable or they wouldn’t make it through a single winter on the eastern islands. But there were two types of mainland women. The ones who tended to take one look at a raider brother and run the other way or simply faint dead where they stood. And the ones who came toward the raider in question with her tits out and her whole body on offer, because she wanted a little bit of the noncompliant sex the raiders were known to enjoy. And even though his nun had been on her knees already and hell, had his dick down her throat, she wasn’t quite a camp girl. She wouldn’t have been just as happy to treat any of his brothers to the same greeting. He didn’t know how he knew that, or why, only that something in him was certain.
She stood there behind him, pressed up against him like this was some kind of opportunity to get close to him. Or as if she’d gotten cold walking around the still warm desert in the dark. He could feel her lips against his shoulder blade. He could feel that damned smile of hers that did things to him he didn’t like at all. Against the skin of his back and then worse, the spike of it in his cock.
Gunnar turned then. He expected her to leap away from him when she saw the look on his face, like any smart person would, but she didn’t. Her eyes seemed big in the dark, that was all. She didn’t move. She didn’t cringe. She didn’t do a single goddamn thing a normal person would have done upon finding themselves face-to-face with a raider in the middle of the night.
Maybe the thing he should have been paying attention to with this woman was the fact she wasn’t normal. At all.
“What’s the matter with you?” he demanded. “Did you run away from that church or did they throw you out?”
“Somehow I don’t think you’re asking me that out of polite curiosity or the urge to get to know me better.”
“You’re not afraid.” He scowled at her. “You walked right up to a raider like I was about as dangerous as a flower petal and then you knelt right down and took my dick in your mouth. Most people would trip themselves rather than crash into my back. Smart, reasonable people. Something not right in your head?”
“What’s funny is that you’re not the first person to ask me that, believe it or not.” She shrugged, as if this were all a big joke to her. “I guess I have that effect on people. It must be my—”
Gunnar didn’t want to listen to her talk like that, in a light tone like this was something other than serious. It was too easy to go along with, too slick, as though he was someone else. As though all that sparkle was contagious.
“If you’re defective you’re of no use to me,” he rumbled at her.
“Hey.” She frowned. “You told me to prove myself. I thought I did.”
“I don’t like shit that doesn’t make sense.”
That wasn’t necessarily true. But he had to do something about that restless thing in him, that itch. Something other than the one thing he wanted to do about it, which was give his cock what it wanted.
Again and again, until he’d finally had his fill.
He figured that would take a while.
“As a matter of fact,” his nun said softly, though still not as seriously as she should have, “there’s a lot of debate on this topic. Bishop Seph maintains that I’m willfully disobedient. Deliberately provocative. He thinks I like the attention I get from being the worst-behaved novice anyone can remember, even though all of that attention is negative. In his opinion, I’m headstrong and secretive and much too proud, which makes me destined for nothing but the desert.”
Gunnar grunted. “He sounds like a douche.”
And this time when she smiled, he didn’t feel the curve of it against his back. He saw it. It was aimed right at him.
For a moment he couldn’t tell where her smile ended and the stars began, and Gunnar felt himself … slip. He didn’t move. He didn’t reach out and put his hands on her. He didn’t betray himself that completely.
But inside him, something lost its place.
He shook that off, furious. He didn’t know what the hell was wrong with him, but this wasn’t the right time to try to figure it out. And it didn’t matter anyway, because this wasn’t about him. It was about Audra.
“What’s your name?” His voice was loud in the dark, and gruff. And he hadn’t meant to ask her because it didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. It wouldn’t change a single thing.
“My name is Maud.”
Gunnar studied her. “The priests give you that name?”
That smile of hers had dimmed a bit, but it bloomed again. Why the hell had he asked her in the first place? No possible good could come of him knowing her name, using it, thinking it. She was his virgin nun, nothing more.
“No.” Her voice was warm, too, as if that was what her smile did. As if it warmed up the air around her, and he wanted to smash things. “That’s all mine. Or anyway, that’s what my mother called me long before the church took me.”
“How long have they had you?” he asked, and he still didn’t understand what he was doing. Or why he couldn’t stop.
“Had me?”
“The priests.”
She pressed her lips together as if they were dry. They likely were. Gunnar reached down and pulled his water from the loop on his harness and handed it to her, abruptly. He watched her frown slightly as it as she took it, as if she’d never seen a carved water bottle before—or maybe it was that abruptness that got to her. Maybe the frown was another one of her quiet rebukes, and Gunnar didn’t know why that should get to him. Why he should feel like some hulking, dirty beast next to her. Why he should care if that was exactly what he was.
Or why that feeling eased in him when she took a big gulp. Then another before handing the bottle back to him.
He took a deep drink himself, his mouth where hers had been, and he felt that everywhere like it was something much more sexual—or intimate—than it was. Then he hated himself for that bullshit, too.
“I wasn’t kidnapped, if that’s what you mean,” Maud said after a moment. “My mother and uncle traded me when I was eleven. We were living rough near the sea down in Oklahoma, trying to make a fish or two last a week. The priest offered them enough for me that they wouldn’t have to worry about a winter again, not for years. I can’t blame them.”
“Meaning you did nothing but blame them.”
Something moved over that pretty face of hers. “I don’t blame them much,” she amended. “Anymore. This isn’t a kind world. People do what they have to do.”
“Were you this supernaturally coolheaded and practical at eleven?”
There was a glitter he couldn’t quite read in her gaze then. “The convent was an upgrade, actually. A ratty caravan held together with repurposed plastic isn’t actually the most delightful place in the world to grow up, especially during the winter. Plastic doesn’t keep anything out. Wind, rain. Snow. Wolves. At eleven, I loved the convent. It was warm. Dry. There was always food. I thought it was heaven.”
He considered that, and that quiet way of hers. That defiance she hid in an airy laugh and an easy smile. In what she didn’t quite say. She couldn’t have been more different from Audra, who had never been the least bit quiet or reserved, ever. Who had never been anything less than dangerously direct. Who had—
Why the fuck was he making comparisons? Between two women, one who wasn’t going to stay dead and ano
ther who was?
“When did they brand you?” he grunted out, even though he knew he should end this. Throw her in his vehicle already and get the hell out of this desert. He didn’t know why he was standing here playing grab ass in the late spring night instead.
And yet he didn’t move.
Maud shifted, and slid one hand up to cup the nape of her neck. He knew her fingers must be on the raised insignia he’d found there, the church’s mark. He wondered if she traced it or merely held it, then wondered why the hell he should give a shit. For all he knew she treated the church’s mark the way the raiders treated the sigil they all wore stamped on their chests. With reverence and pride.
He told himself he didn’t care either way, but he still didn’t move.
“They brand us when we’re sixteen.” She didn’t move her hand, though she seemed to stand a bit straighter. “They find the girls who’ve been called to the life at any age, but at sixteen we either graduate into the second phase of training or they release us into the western kingdoms to participate in secular society like anyone else.”
“You mean a life under some petty kinglet and stupid-ass winter marriages with whatever little bitch you can find every September? Is that the participation you mean?” Gunnar shook his head. “There are other ways to live, little nun.”
“For you, maybe.” But she didn’t sound bitter. Why did Gunnar feel that she should? She dropped her hand from her neck. “If we graduate into the second phase of training, they brand us, because whatever happens next we’re always a part of the church.”
“Did it hurt?”
“You have brands yourself. You must know it hurts.”
The searing of flesh. That taut space between the brain’s understanding of what was happening and the inkling that pain must surely follow—and then the pain itself, like a vast, thick, unconquerable wall. A blistering suffocation. Impossible, bright and vicious and worse every second, not better.
