by Megan Crane
It was incredibly satisfying to sit down at a table and eat food she knew she’d had a part in creating. And even more satisfying to have that meal ready for Zavier when he came in from his long, long hours tending the land. He would wash up while she piled the food high on the table, and then they would eat in a happy sort of silence, broken only by occasional conversation—usually about the land and the livestock.
After dinner, Zavier tended to whatever equipment needed fixing before morning while Matylda tidied up the kitchen and got the following day’s breakfast ready to go. That was when she turned down their bed and set out Zavier’s clothes for the next day, a small task that made her feel sunny, deep inside.
It made her happy to take care of this man. She didn’t know where to put that. She’d taken care of her sister for years, but Nicoline hadn’t exactly appreciated it—and look what Nicoline had gone and done. If she cast her mind back, it reminded her of the way her mother had used to sing as she tidied the house and did many of these same tasks for Matylda’s father. As if she took pride in making her man’s life a little easier.
That was what it was, Matylda knew. Pride.
She didn’t want to lose that again. She didn’t want to give it up in June and go back to what she’d had before, which was a whole lot of labor and no quarrel with it, but no pride in it either.
Zavier was supposed to be a difficult man, but she liked him. She liked this high mountain life. She liked how rewarding the hard work was here. And she loved sharing the sweetness of it, tucked in between the unrelenting nature of it and its harshness, with a man who she knew appreciated it too.
He might not say much, but she knew he did. He grinned more. That corner of his mouth got quite a workout.
The evenings were dominated by the fire in the living room and whatever took Zavier’s fancy. Some nights he watched one of the old movies on his screen. Other times he poured himself a drink and stared into the fire. Sometimes he read a book, or toyed with an instrument he was building and only occasionally played.
Still other times, he got a particularly intent look in his cool blue gaze and softly ordered her to strip, and those were the nights she could remember every detail of. The games he liked to play. The scandalous things he liked to do to her, until she was sure she screamed loud enough to bring down the mountains.
On nights he didn’t want to play games in the living room, he made up for it in their bed. They never stayed up too late, given their long days and early starts, but Zavier was always last to bed. When Matylda started yawning he tipped his head, his order to get to bed, and he checked the house one last time before following her. She was always naked when he climbed in, and no matter how tired she was, he laughed and took his fill of her. And her of him. Sending her right off into her dreams with a smile on her face and a huge, dangerous man wrapped all around her.
Some nights she faked her yawning earlier, to hurry them both to bed, because she was greedy for him. So greedy that some nights it was all she could do to sit quietly in her chair next to the lantern and pretend to read, or sew, or whatever else she was using to fill her time until she could touch him.
May was edging into June, and she didn’t know what she’d do if he sent her back. And her shame was that she knew that had far less to do with Nicoline than it should have.
Tonight she was reading one of the small journals she’d found on the crowded bookshelves, written in tiny, cramped handwriting that told of life in this very same house a generation or two ago. Zavier was lying lengthwise on the couch opposite her, frowning at one of the thick books he preferred. The only sound for at least the past hour had been the crackle of the fire.
Matylda didn’t know what made her look up, but when she did, Zavier had put his book down on his chest and was studying her with his usual intensity.
“Is it time for bed?” she asked, and then smiled. Maybe a little too brightly, the way she did more and more, because this was her favorite time with him. These long evenings felt like a kind of glue, and the things that happened in their bed before they fell asleep felt like honey. And she wanted both. Desperately.
“You make everything easier,” he said in his rough, low way. “No other woman ever did that for me.”
Something flipped over inside of her and glowed.
“Good,” she said, her smile deepening. “I’m glad it’s me.”
And for a moment she thought the heat between them might overpower the fire.
But then Zavier shifted, lifting himself to sitting position and then swinging around to face her, and something cold trickled down her spine when she saw he was frowning.
“You won’t be here past the solstice,” he told her, his voice harder than before. “Don’t succumb to any fantasies about that.”
She pulled in a breath. “That seems unnecessarily cruel after a compliment,” she said softly. No matter that her stomach was in a knot. “If I make your life easier, isn’t that the point? Why not let me keep doing it?”
“Matylda.” She didn’t want to meet that intense blue glare filled with warning, but she did. Because there was something in her that wanted to obey him. That needed it. That felt safer when she did. Zavier’s mouth flattened. “Whatever you do, don’t fall in love with me.”
But, of course, he was much too late.
6.
The firelight danced over Matylda’s pretty face but did nothing to change the way she was staring back at him, stricken.
As if he’d hauled off and slapped her.
Zavier told himself there was no reason to feel as if he had.
He’d known this was coming. He should have reasserted reality a long time ago. The trouble was, he liked Matylda too much. All of her, not just small parts of her here and there like all the others. Though with some of them, he hadn’t even liked that much. They’d been as desperate to get the hell away from him as he’d been to see them go.
Today had been sunny and sweet. He’d been working out at the far end of the valley where his land met his old, bitchy mistress—the seething Atlantic sea. He’d seen Matylda coming from a long way off, bouncing over the fields in that old truck he’d kept running for years now. When she pulled up near him, her green eyes were sparkling and there were new freckles across the span of her nose, because she was that susceptible to the sunlight. Her hair had been caught back in a knot but strands of red had danced this way and that in the open windows of the truck. She’d looked open and free. She’d looked happy.
She’d looked like his.
And even though everything in Zavier had frozen solid at that, he hadn’t done anything about it. He hadn’t wiped that smile off her face the way he knew he should have—because he liked it. He liked the way she looked at him.
That was the trouble. He liked her too much.
Matylda had brought him one of her typical lunches, thick slices of the bread she baked herself with cold cuts of meat and the butter she’d churned. When he was finished eating and drinking the coffee she’d brought down in a pouch, still warm despite the long drive, he hadn’t been able to hold himself back from throwing her down into the new grass and getting his hands on her. He’d held her up and made her ride his face, and then he’d made her stay there on her hands and knees while she was still making that keening noise that made him crazy and meant her cunt was its softest and sweetest, so he could take her there with the sea spread out before her.
Zavier was a ghost. A betrayer. But in that moment, he’d felt like a lucky man.
He knew that he had no choice but to tell her the truth about how this would go, no matter how much he liked his life with her in it. Right now, before he forgot again. Before he got lost in this hot, sweet fantasy of a good life that he knew he didn’t deserve.
And she was still staring at him as if he’d already hurt her, so he figured there couldn’t be a better time to do just that.
“I’m a monster,” he told her fiercely. “I mean that.”
The hurt seemed t
o fade away from her expression then. She pressed her lips together, which made him wonder if they’d been trembling, and then she folded her hands in the lap of one of the skirts she’d made. The skirts she wore for him, he knew. Because he’d told her he wanted that access to her lush little pussy.
Sometimes he thought that she would do anything he asked. Sometimes he asked her crazy things just to test that, and sure enough, she did them.
Sometimes he thought she was perfect.
No, he knew she was. That was the trouble. She was perfect for the man he’d been pretending to be for the past fifteen years. But that wasn’t who Zavier was. Not really. The real Zavier didn’t deserve her. Not this life, and certainly not a woman like Matylda to make the endless, thankless work feel like a pleasure.
“I don’t believe in monsters,” Matylda told him.
“Then you’re very foolish, because they’re real.”
He didn’t close the distance between them, because he was afraid that if he put his hands on her he would lose his train of thought and bury himself in her the way he wanted to do. The way he always wanted to do. And she had to listen to him now. Because he couldn’t see himself ripping out her heart when he put her on that bus in a few short weeks. He didn’t think he’d be able to stand it. She had to know now, so she’d go quietly.
Like the others. When she’d never been anything like the others.
But he shoved that aside.
“My father was a shitty king, but that’s what he was. A king.” Matylda’s eyes widened, but she didn’t appear to have any other reaction to that. Zavier pushed on. “He was a much worse father. When the new king took over my clan, he gave me a thousand chances to pledge myself to him. But I didn’t take them.” He found his hand over the tattoo on his chest, hidden beneath his shirt tonight but still seeming to emanate that heat it always did. The brotherhood he’d turned his back on. The life he’d walked away from. “I could have redeemed myself. I could have redeemed my family name. But I didn’t.”
“What did you do?”
“I was a dick.” Zavier let out a short laugh. “And then I left.”
“People leave,” Matylda said after a moment. “I grew up in a coastal village where my family had lived all my life, and it was hard to leave it. I knew everyone. I was comfortable and cared for. But sometimes there’s no other choice. Not if you want to live.”
“You don’t understand.” Zavier shook his head. How could he possibly describe the raider’s warrior brotherhood to a woman like Matylda who’d grown up without even knowing she ought to be afraid of raiders? There were no raiders here. None to threaten the plump little coastal villages like the one she’d grown up in, much less the cities in the higher elevations. Sometimes Zavier had dreams of returning to the raider city and petitioning Wulf for his own life, with all the unraided shores here as payment for his sins. But that would mean taking the risk that his new king would opt to cut him down for his betrayal instead, and Zavier could do that on his own. Year by grim and miserable and lonely year. “The penalty for breaking the kind of vows that I turned my back on is death. A painful, dishonorable, very public death.”
He didn’t know what he expected, but Matylda only considered him for a moment.
“If you knew that, then why did you break your vows?” she asked. “I assume you had a good reason.”
It told him things he wasn’t ready to look at closely: That Matylda automatically assumed he was an honorable man. That she instantly took his side when he’d never done that himself. Because the sad truth was that Zavier had altered the course of his entire life and burned every bridge. On a whim.
“Because I’m a monster,” he told her, because he’d concluded that a long time ago. Monsters betrayed their family and friends. Monsters had the blood of a bad king in their veins and acted it out. They betrayed their vows and stole from the clan.
His father had been a monster and Zavier was too. End of story.
But Matylda didn’t seem particularly impressed by his declaration.
“Grief is a terrible thing,” she said softly. “It sits on you, taking all your air, until it’s done. And nothing you do can possibly change that. It takes the time it takes. No more, and no less.”
“If you think I grieved the death of my father, cut down in the streets like the wild, rampaging animal he was, you’re wrong.” Zavier let out a short laugh. “I hated that guy.”
“I’m not sure a child can avoid grieving his father,” Matylda replied. “Especially if it doesn’t make sense. I think that kind of grief might be the worst. I’m not at all surprised that it could make you do foolish things. Regrettable things. But, Zavier.” And oh, the way she looked at him then. He would have given anything to be the man she saw. Anything at all. “It doesn’t make you a monster.”
He shouldn’t have started this conversation, but then, there were a thousand things he shouldn’t have done with Matylda. He should have put her back on that bus the minute he’d laid eyes on her and had known that he wanted her. Desperately. He should have left her in town after she’d initiated that first round with him in the front seat of his truck.
He should have acted on what he’d known instantly: she was different.
Because the truth was, he didn’t know if he could handle this. He didn’t know if he could let her go.
Not an issue he’d ever thought he’d have.
But she was still talking.
“My parents died when I was twenty,” she was telling him. “The only industry where we lived was fishing, but only men could operate those boats and the heavy nets safely. I had no choice but to pack up my younger sister and take us both to the higher elevations if I wanted us to survive. But in order to do that I had to leave everything I knew.” She lifted a shoulder, then dropped it. “Including all the memories of my parents. It was the hardest thing I ever did.”
Zavier had no good memories of his parents. He couldn’t relate. And still he wanted to gather her into his arms and soothe her. Take away her pain, no matter how old and far away it was.
All of this was crazy. Her smile made him a lunatic. All he wanted was to keep seeing it. Keep making her happy. Keep finding ways to make her laugh.
It was sheer madness. He knew it.
“Except then I had to build a life,” Matylda said. “I had to take care of my sister as well as me. And I had to do it while I was grieving in a place where no one knew me. Or what I’d lost. Or even the kinds of people that my parents had been.” Her eyes were gleaming when she looked at him then. “But I managed it. That was almost ten years ago. And sometimes I think the grief might still sweep me away, but it never does, not quite. And life goes on whether you want it to or not.”
The fire seemed loud then. Or maybe that was the noise in his head. The clatter in his chest.
The fact he couldn’t look away from her, no matter how he tried.
“In the meantime, I’m all right,” Matylda said softly. “And the life I built is pretty good. I have no complaints. Grief always feels like it will win, Zavier, but it never does.”
And for a moment, Zavier just looked at her, his beautiful wife who wanted to comfort him—and was managing it, somehow. And he wondered how the hell she’d ever ended up stashed way out on the backside of nowhere with an angry ex-raider like him. A man women like her should have found too terrifying to look at directly.
But then he frowned, because the truth was he didn’t know the answer to that question. And he should.
“Your life in the city was good?” he asked.
“It was.” Matylda wrinkled her nose. “But it’s such a different life. There are so many people and nothing is yours. You work because you have to, not because you ever see the fruits of your labor, or have any connection to what they yield. I didn’t know any of that was possible.”
“But you were happy.”
She frowned at him. “Yes. But not like—”
“Sweetheart.” Everything in him had gone st
ill, as if he was preparing for battle when he knew very well he was not. Not the way his body seemed to think he was. “If you were so happy in the city, why did you come here?” She blinked at him as if that question made no sense, but that battle sense was kicking in him and he pushed on. “The women who come here have no other options. They’re running from something. They’re always desperate. No woman sells herself into marriage with a complete stranger on the other side of the world, far out in the wilderness where no one could ever hear a scream for help, if she has another choice. So tell me, Matylda. What in your happy little life down there in the cities were you so afraid of that you came here and threw yourself on what passes for my mercy?”
He told himself to calm down. There was no reason for him to be reacting this way. Maybe she was like him, and had strolled into the bride coordinator’s office on a stupid whim. And then found herself on the bus halfway up the mountains with ample time to think better of her imprudent actions once it was too late.
But he didn’t think so.
Because he knew his wife. She was practical, not hotheaded. She had her moods and tempers, but she kept herself on an even keel despite them. He thought she worked them out during sex, which he could only approve of. If she had a problem, she told him about it, the way she had once early on when she’d thought he could take a moment or two to explain things before growling at her about it. And she’d been right. There were no angry silences from Matylda. No passive aggressive slamming around the house, waiting for him to lose his shit. It was as if she’d intuitively known that the only way this could work was if she treated what she did here as being as important as what he did. As if they were two halves of the same whole, and that whole was the life they built together.
And she’d been so good at it. Too good to be true, he’d found himself thinking more than once as the days had passed.
But it hadn’t occurred to him that he might actually be right about that. Literally correct.
“My sister Nicoline is younger,” she told him, and he understood that was confirmation without her having to say another word. But she kept talking. “Ten years younger. Which means she’s old enough to remember our parents and the fact that I am definitely not her mother, but too young to truly recognize how much of a parent I was to her this past decade. I don’t blame her for that. That’s just how it is.”
