by Megan Crane
Now she wondered if she’d been trying to look as little like the ghost in this house, the one she didn’t believe in, as she could. It made her throat tight.
“The only thing worse than Gunnar off by himself with nothing but a long winter and too many wolves is this,” the man continued in that easy voice of his that she understood was not only a lie, but a finely honed weapon. Just as she understood she never should have relaxed around this intruder, no matter what tattoos he wore on his body. “Gunnar holed up with a stranger to the clan, playing all the same games and getting up to who knows what kind of bullshit. You know anything about that, sweetheart?”
Maud only stared back at him, feeling more like prey in that moment than she ever had before in all her life.
“Leave her alone.”
Gunnar’s voice was a low, hard growl from the direction of the stairs. Maud jerked her head around to see him flowing up the last few steps like a storm cloud, his blade drawn and in his hand and murder in his gaze.
Relief, pure and cold, washed through her. Right up until the moment Gunnar sheathed his blade, that ferocious expression of his shifting into something else. Not into anything she’d call welcoming, exactly, but away from that predatory sharpness that had promised nothing but instant destruction at his hands.
“You want to talk shit?” Gunnar continued, his scowl aimed directly at the stranger. “I’m right here.”
“Oh, I know where you are,” the stranger drawled. He seemed to take several long beats to turn his head and meet Gunnar’s gaze. He didn’t look all that pleased when he did. “I hauled my ass all the way here from the Lodge in a bitch of a storm when I should be knee deep in pussy to celebrate a good raid. Instead I get to play babysitter and drag your sorry carcass back where it belongs. Again.” He jutted his chin at Gunnar. “Maybe you forgot, with all the wolf killing and general douchery over the past year, that you have shit to do. For the clan, not just you.”
“I tried to forget. It didn’t work.”
That annoyed the stranger. Visibly. He shook his head.
“Too bad. Your blood brother wants to see you.”
Gunnar bared his teeth. “My blood brother can kiss my ass.”
“You should tell him that yourself,” the stranger suggested, something darker and sharper in his tone that made Maud glance warily at the blades he carried. “He loves disrespect. Especially from members of the brotherhood who haven’t done a goddamned thing for the clan in a year and are fast becoming a problem he’ll need to solve. Once and for all.”
“You and the brotherhood and my blood brother can line up and kiss my ass,” Gunnar retorted. “I’ll even grab an ankle to make it easier. And then you can all hold hands while you fuck off.”
The stranger laughed. It shocked Maud, since the only laughter she’d heard in quite some time was her own. He laughed with every appearance of delight and then he ran his hands over his face, but when he dropped them, the look he leveled on Gunnar was as hard as if he’d never laughed at all.
“You need to get a handle on your shit, Gunnar,” he said darkly. Soberly. “Fast. Because you keep shooting your mouth off about Wulf and people might start thinking you mean what you say.” He raised his voice when Gunnar started to speak. “And I know you don’t mean that crap, my brother, because if you did it would make you something a little too close to a full-blood traitor for a man who’s already been dancing on that line for the past year.”
“A traitor?” Maud interjected, and laughed a little nervously when both raiders turned their dark, fuming glares on her. She instantly regretted speaking, but there was no stopping once she’d started. “You keep using that word. That’s a little dramatic, surely.”
She smiled, hoping that might inspire either one of them to do the same. Gunnar looked grim. The stranger moved farther into the cabin then, his gaze sweeping around the way Gunnar’s had in that bandit city, as if he was looking for threats. Or maybe that was temper she could see crackling all over him, like a bolt of Gunnar’s near-magical electricity.
And she had the distinct impression she’d made it worse, not better.
“You going to explain what the fuck is going in here?” he asked Gunnar. But he didn’t wait to see if Gunnar planned to try. “You wouldn’t take comfort pussy last fall. Tyr saw you covered in blood and muttering about wolves at the end of February. But now you’re tucked up in a cozy little cabin playing house?”
Gunnar made a low noise. “I’m not playing anything and it wouldn’t be your business if I was.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” the man bit out. He nodded at Maud. “This would be fucked up enough if she was a camp girl or even a local farmer’s daughter, but unless that bastard of a storm made me blind as well as pissed, she looks a lot like a nun. Where do I even begin with the follow-up questions?”
“Did you come all the way out here to shoot your mouth off?” Gunnar growled. “Or to make unsolicited observations about shit that doesn’t concern you? That’s a long, wet walk.”
“What do you think that tattoo on your chest means, asshole?” the stranger threw at him.
“I ask myself that same question all the time.”
“Newsflash, douchebag: There’s a world out there that’s a whole lot bigger and more complicated than you and your bullshit and your treacherous, two-faced—”
“You think I won’t draw on you, but you finish that sentence and I will.” Gunnar’s voice was the harshest Maud had ever heard it, and his eyes blazed as he faced off with the other raider. “You can toddle back and give your report with my blade stuck up your ass.”
The stranger shook his head, laughing again, but not in a way that suggested anything he felt anything but pure fury.
“The brotherhood won’t tolerate this game. Not again.” The stranger glared at Maud. “Do you know who he is? What half the clan thinks he did?”
“I don’t know any games,” Maud said, like an idiot. She could have slapped herself. The look Gunnar sent her way suggested he wished she had. “And of course I know who he is.”
“Yeah?” The stranger looked skeptical.
“Gunnar,” she said. “He’s Gunnar.”
“That’s his name,” the stranger agreed, and then his attention was on Gunnar again, hard and dark. “You devious little prick. What are you doing?”
“Maud.” Gunnar’s voice was taut. Furious, she thought—because she’d seen a lot of scowling and a lot of anger from him, ferocious and cold, but she’d never seen him look like this. Pure rage made his eyes darker and his grim mouth stone. It made her want to sink into the floor. “This is Riordan. He’s one of the king’s little buttmonkeys. In his case, often literally.”
“The king,” she repeated, and she felt almost as unsteady as she had on the boat, suddenly, and as unable to control it. She didn’t like it. She looked back and forth between the two men, each as fierce and dangerous as the other, but that didn’t help. “What king? Why are you talking about a king like you know him?”
“He’s talking about the raider king.” But Riordan’s gaze was hard on Gunnar as he spoke. “The head of the warrior brotherhood. The leader of our clan and the better part of these eastern islands. Undefeated in combat since he was small. May his justice be as mighty as his blade.” He shook his head, that smile of his deadly. “Oh yeah. He’s also Gunnar’s blood brother, in case you didn’t pick that up. And Gunnar’s dead mate, missed by not one fucking person outside this room, plotted to have him killed and her little boytoy put on the throne in his place. Maybe Gunnar knew more about that than he’s saying. No one knows, since until now we thought he was off communing with wild animals. What about you, Maud? Do you know?”
The tension in the room skyrocketed then. Maud couldn’t quite breathe. It was like hands around her throat, choking the breath out of her body, and not in the way that made her feel as if she were safely held and yet flying at once. And both Gunnar and Riordan were staring at her as if they expected some kind
of response. A specific response.
She’d seen that exact sort of expectation before, usually from someone in the church with the power to hurt her. It never ended well.
And she had a number of questions of her own. They seemed a lot safer.
Maud swallowed, then found Gunnar’s gaze. It made her feel calmer. Just enough to speak.
“Does that make you a prince?” she asked, with her usual blast of brightness, as if she’d never heard anything so wonderful. It was only partially feigned.
And for another moment, that tense silence stretched on, making the hair on the back of her neck prickle and her eyes glaze over with anxiety.
Until an actual miracle happened.
Her mouth dropped open and her poor, foolish heart sank to her feet, then bounced right back up, the better to flip back and forth and ruin what little part of her she’d been holding in reserve. It told her things she refused to let herself consider too closely.
Maud was doomed. She understood that. But then again, she always had been, one way or another. What did it matter how?
And she didn’t care anyway, because Gunnar was laughing.
Laughing. His head thrown back, a sound of pure, if scratchy delight in the rubble of it, and his whole body given over to it in a way she’d only seen happen when he was coming.
He was laughing.
And nothing else seemed to matter.
9.
Gunnar couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed.
And he couldn’t decide if it felt good to indulge something that had seemed so beyond possibility for so long or if it actually almost hurt on its way out of him because he was so damned rusty. Or because the laughter was such a deep and abiding betrayal of Audra and was probably leaving marks while he did it. Maybe all of the above, and yet he didn’t stop.
That was starting to be some kind of fucked-up theme in his life.
“He’s a prince all right,” Riordan told Maud, a dark note in his voice that Gunnar recognized and disliked. Intensely. “Maybe you can get him to wear his special tiara, if you ask real nice. Or answer the goddamned question.”
And his little nun wasn’t a raider, despite her occasional attacks on hapless trees, so she didn’t respond to Riordan’s bullshit with the rude gesture it deserved. She wasn’t a raider. That key fact echoed in him, leaving a few more marks. She didn’t know who Gunnar was or who his blood brother was, something Gunnar hadn’t thought about explicitly since he’d found her wandering in the desert¸ and he should have. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to handle the implications of that. He still didn’t.
Here, now, she was soft and breakable prey in the presence of a deadly predator and this time, unlike the desert, she had the good sense to know it. He watched with something a bit too close to pride—or maybe it was possessiveness, which he didn’t like at all—when she inched a bit farther back toward the stove as if she thought that cast-iron monstrosity might save her from Riordan.
Besides, that was Gunnar’s job.
Gunnar ignored the obvious inconsistencies in that line of thinking, mostly because it seemed to roll out from somewhere deep in his gut, as automatic as his hand on his blade. As if it was a part of him—a part of him that didn’t really care that he was going to sacrifice her. And soon.
Maud’s smile looked nervous, then, with her attention on Riordan as if she was waiting for him to strike.
“I’m always nice,” she said, and maybe only Gunnar could hear that she didn’t sound as serene and unflappable as usual. “It used to be a major requirement of my existence.”
There was a considering gleam in Riordan’s dark gaze as it moved over Maud.
“Does that mean you really are a nun?” he asked.
Maud nodded. “A novice. Almost a nun, but not quite.”
“And is that why you’re here?” Riordan asked. But his attention was back on Gunnar, in that same probing, suspicious way that set Gunnar’s teeth on edge. “To save my brother’s immortal soul in the name of the church? I’d love to know what sins Gunnar’s confided in you. What he thinks is so bad it calls for the intervention of the actual goddamned church.”
There were so many things she could have said then, Gunnar knew. She could have told nosey-ass Riordan all about what she was doing here and what Gunnar’s plans for her were. She could have listed whatever sins she thought Gunnar was guilty of, which Riordan would have loved to hear. Another raider brother wouldn’t give a fuck about a blowjob but the fact Gunnar had taken a solo ship to the western kingdoms without clearing it through Wulf? And had run into Krajic, known enemy of the clan? That would definitely interest him. It would more than interest him. Maud could have asked Gunnar what Riordan to tell her some more about what had happened with Audra. Or flat out asked him if Gunnar’s mate, the one Gunnar planned to sacrifice her for, really had turned traitor. And little as he wanted to have any of those conversations at all, much less suffer through Maud having them with Riordan, Gunnar wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d started them. He expected it.
Audra would have, if the situations were reversed. She would have already been in Gunnar’s face, thumping him in the chest the way she always had, demanding to know what the hell was going on and why he hadn’t come clean with her from the start. Then she would have taunted him, the way she’d liked to do—and Audra had always been as relentless with her taunts as a brother was with his blade.
But Maud was a very different kind of woman than his mate had been. She glanced at Gunnar very briefly, then returned her attention to Riordan.
“Not at all,” she said quietly. “Gunnar saved me.”
And Gunnar had the strangest notion she was trying to protect him.
From Riordan, who was far deadlier than Maud might imagine, but who was also one of Gunnar’s brothers, thanks to the vows they’d taken to king and clan and the tattoos they wore proclaiming their fealty to both. It was just like the cocky fuck to walk into another man’s territory and start shooting off his mouth as though it had never crossed his mind he might have something to fear.
Gunnar had heard the too heavy tread on the floor that had announced the presence of an intruder from all the way down in his workshop, and he didn’t really want to poke at the way he’d charged up those stairs, nothing but mayhem on his mind.
God help the bastard who puts a hand on her, he’d thought in a blistering rage as he’d taken the steps three at a time. I’ll tear him into pieces.
Then he’d heard Riordan’s familiar and highly unwelcome voice, and he’d known instantly that this was a lot worse than some washed-ashore fool from one of the other island clans wandering into his cabin to sit out a storm and beg a meal. Riordan was the clan’s best tracker, which meant he spent a lot of his time finding lost and hidden things. Secrets were what he did. He was also an asshole of epic proportions when it suited him, it was true, like every other member of the raider brotherhood. That was the warrior way. If there wasn’t a battlefield, they made one wherever they were. But the most important thing about Riordan was that he didn’t go around concerning himself with the affairs of other clan members unless he was ordered to do so. He’d be the first to tell whoever asked that he didn’t want to know anyone else’s business, thank you. It was his job.
Gunnar had known their time here was up before he’d even made it all the way to the top of the stairs. Some part of him thought that maybe that was a blessing, despite how little he believed in that crap. He was getting … comfortable here. With Maud. And he couldn’t allow it.
He shouldn’t have allowed it to begin with. What the hell had he been thinking?
“Are you coming in or not?” he asked Riordan, who was still standing there in the entryway with his attention a little too focused on Maud. “I know you’re not waiting for me to beg. You must have me confused with one of your other little bitches.”
He almost said, like your little bitch of a king. But that would only have caused unnecessary drama.
Riordan made an insulting show of looking around as if he expected armed men to leap out from behind the sofas and attack him. Such a trap would mark Gunnar as a coward and a traitor and any number of other shitty things, but he supposed that was Riordan’s point, the dick. They’d branded Audra a traitor and that meant Gunnar was suspect, too.
He wanted to burn the whole island down. But he didn’t. He hadn’t last summer and he didn’t now, and he knew it was because of Maud.
Because you’ll use her to fix this, a sharp voice inside him reminded him. That’s what you mean by because of Maud.
Anything else was unacceptable.
“If you want to take your ass right back into the storm, go ahead,” Gunnar gritted out when Riordan dragged the whole thing on for a few more minutes, because apparently he wasn’t opposed to unnecessary drama. “I don’t care if you’re wet, cold, or hungry. You’re not here on my orders.”
The man whose orders Riordan was actually following seemed to hang there between them, like a shadow, and that was almost worse.
“Can a man safely take off his weapons in this house?” Riordan was still smiling, but the truth was in that deadly serious gleam in his dark eyes. “The last time I visited you here on the ass end of the world you tried to gut me in my sleep.”
“I declined your thoughtful summons, you drama queen. If I’d wanted to gut you, you’d be gutted.” Gunnar shrugged. “You don’t take no for an answer, you suffer the consequences.”
Riordan took his sweet time unbuckling his harness and then carefully hanging it over the back of the chair nearest him, his trademark curved blade gleaming in the cabin light. He caught the length of wool Gunnar tossed at him and toweled himself off, then dropped into the seat, stretching out his legs and grinning widely as if he’d never been more comfortable in his life.
“If you really questioned my loyalty you’d never sit there so comfortably,” Gunnar gritted out, unable to help himself. “Weapons off, neck exposed, begging to get shivved.”
