by Megan Crane
“Better things she can do with her mouth,” Riordan agreed, his greedy gaze all up on that see-through T-shirt and that confirmed it. Tyr didn’t like it. He didn’t want to share her. Not until he’d fucked his way out of this madness—and that was going to take more time. Maybe a whole damned winter.
What the hell is the matter with you? he asked himself then, not at all sure what was going on inside him. You’re not going to keep her.
He’d thought he’d finally found Krajic and he hadn’t. That meant Zyron remained unavenged, which made Tyr continue to look like he couldn’t handle his business, and they still had no idea why that blade-for-hire scumbag was burning down raider settlements like he wanted a bigger target on his back than the one that already lived there. Tyr was bored and pissed off, and this woman had challenged him. And it was going to be a cold day in this hellish world of theirs before Tyr backed down from a challenge from some half-drowned woman who didn’t know enough to keep her mouth shut in the middle of a raid.
The call came from down near the now-open gate then, and that was it. They were done. There was nothing to find here. It was time to leave this shithole behind and set sail toward the rising sun.
It was time to go home, without some drowned rat of a woman with too much mouth and too little sense. Challenge or no challenge.
“Who else wants to die tonight?” roared Jurin, making all of the captives cringe back and cower as the brothers prepared themselves to leave. Especially Ferranti, the dipshit kinglet. “Give me an excuse!”
Tyr doubted any of these pathetic creatures would even look at Jurin again, much less give him an excuse to do anything.
But the woman in front of him clearly had a death wish. He saw her chin go up and her eyes go dark, which shouldn’t have been quite so fascinating. Tyr knew a tell when he saw one. He watched her suck in a breath like she was planning to dive into battle—
Then she reached out a hand, slapped it in the center of his chest which was tantamount to begging him to chop it off right there, and then made it all that much worse by shoving him.
Him.
She might as well have shoved the side of a mountain, for all he moved, but that wasn’t the point. Next to him, Riordan actually growled. Tyr felt his blood pound through his body at such an insult, such a foolish act of sheer suicide, and the look he gave her then should have dropped her to her knees.
He saw her shake, but she didn’t back down, and when her hand started to slide off his chest he slapped his own hand over it, holding her there. Imprisoning her in a place she never should have gone in the first place, his fingers like iron over her soft little hand, and so what if he could feel that touch of her palm like it was wrapped around his cock instead of flat in the hollow between his pecs.
“You think you deserve the privilege of touching me?” he demanded, his voice a terrible thing. He could hear the echo of it off the concrete all around them, and in the way the captives all around them stilled, then stared. “You dare?” She flinched, but there was no getting away from him now. There was no stopping this. He couldn’t imagine that she didn’t know she’d just bought herself a one-way ride to the eastern islands. “Tell me your name.”
She only gaped at him, those fine lips slightly ajar, and it took a fury of will to keep himself from shoving his mouth over hers the way he wanted to, then tasting his fill. Taking whatever he needed to take to ease the thunder in him at her astonishing disrespect.
“Tell me your name, woman.”
And there were way too many mysteries in that gray gaze of hers then, which Tyr didn’t like at all. What the hell was going on in this place? Red-faced Ferranti was turning something like purple as if Tyr had his hands deep in the other man’s gold, and the woman before him had that same crazy glint in her eye that Tyr had last seen on the brother Gunnar, so ransacked by his grief he’d taken on a pack of vicious wolves by himself and somehow lived. None of this made any sense.
“Please.” Her voice was husky, and her hand tensed against his skin as if she’d have made it into a fist if he hadn’t been gripping it, which made that begging tone she used sound like a lie. “If you have to hurt somebody, hurt me. Not my sister.”
“I didn’t ask for your permission to hurt people,” he bit out as the second call sounded from beyond the walls. There wouldn’t be a third, and he wasn’t spending any extra time in this shitty place, surrounded by these weak ass people and this woman who was obviously trouble and maybe just as insane as the one still moaning on the wet ground. “I asked you for your name.”
“Helena,” she threw at him, too quickly, like she didn’t want to tell him at all and hoped he might not catch it if she threw it out there, fast. “That’s my sister, Melyssa, and she doesn’t mean to do any of this. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. She’s terrified of you.”
He studied her, using his hold on her to jerk her closer to him, as fascinated by that wildly beating pulse in her neck as by the red flush he could see spreading across her cheeks, then down her throat. Arousal, not fear. His cock knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt. “Why aren’t you?”
Her mouth opened, then shut. This close to her, beneath all that soggy hair, he could see the delicate bones that made her so pretty, and then that whore’s mouth to make a man sweat, and he knew he could break fragile things like this woman as sure as he breathed. But she didn’t feel breakable under his hands. Not at all.
And she was as afraid of him as she was aroused, if not as terrified as she should have been. He could see that, too. But she blinked it away, as if she wanted to hide it from him. As if she wanted him to do what he was doing, no matter if it scared her.
This was not the way the usual pieces of ass approached the raiders. For one thing, they weren’t afraid at all. They were just horny.
“I don’t know,” she said, and she was lying. He could practically smell it on her. One more mystery in this grim and weird day, and Tyr was done. Enough shit that didn’t add up usually equaled all of that shit blowing up in his face, sooner or later. A mystery was nothing more than a coincidence wrapped up in ignorance, and Tyr had seen very few coincidences in his life that didn’t end up with someone’s blade at his throat. Was that her game? Was she angling to take him out? The thought of fighting her off, wet and hot and slippery against him, made his cock join the conversation the way it liked to do. Hard as hell and way less civilized. “I’m supposed to be, aren’t I? That’s the whole point of this, I assume. The pillaging and the marauding and the kidnapping at will. Isn’t that what you do to feel like a big man?”
Beside him, Riordan shook his head, his dark eyes hard. And for the first time since they’d jumped the walls tonight and found no sign of Krajic and the place more or less theirs to plunder at will, Tyr smiled. Then harder still, when he saw how the sight of it made her jolt.
“You’ve figured me out,” he growled at her, getting his mouth close to her ear and making no attempt to temper the ferocity in it. “I’m the monster in the shadows behind you after all, little girl. Maybe you should think twice before you taunt me.”
Her gray eyes moved over his face, got under his skin, and he watched awareness bloom all over her pale skin, where he could already imagine leaving his mark. Oh yeah. He was going to tear her up, figure her out, and teach her exactly why soft and pretty women from the conservative, compliant mainland averted their eyes when he walked by and prayed for deliverance rather than shooting off their mouths.
She still didn’t know any better, staring at him like she really did want to take him on. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It means, Helena,” and he held that gaze of hers until she shivered again, not from fear this time, and oh yes, he was going to enjoy this, “that you’re pretty much fucked.”
And then he picked her up, throwing her over his shoulder and holding her there with a heavy hand on her sweet little ass, and carried her off like she was the spoils of a far more interesting knock-down, drag-out war t
han the one that had failed to materialize here tonight. A war he’d won, of course.
Because whatever else happened and whatever it took—even the years he’d put into tracking Krajic so far without getting any closer to that scumbag’s much deserved bloody death—in the end, Tyr always won.
2
She’d slapped her hand on a raider’s chest.
That was maybe not the brightest idea Helena had ever had—and no matter that it had been conceived in a dizzy rush when she’d seen that the men who’d taken Ferranti’s little stronghold were not the terrifying ones who’d killed her parents. Not, thank god, that horrifying band of stone-cold killers she and Melyssa had been running from ever since.
To say she was already regretting her actions was putting it mildly. Her mother had always told her that her rashness was going to be the death of her—maybe right now. Tonight. Out here in these woods she’d been trying to get the hell out of for the last year, at the hands of the scary raider she still couldn’t believe she’d provoked.
Deliberately provoked, that stern voice that was so like her mother’s said inside her head, as if she’d be likely to forget the feel of him, tough and unyielding and made entirely of stone—his hand around her neck, her palm flattened against that impossibly hard wall of his chest, that ruthless gleam in his curiously golden eyes—
She was so screwed.
But it’s still better than the alternative, she reminded herself fiercely. This whole night would have gone a lot differently if it had been Krajic and his men who’d come over that wall. For one thing, she’d be a whole lot more dead right now after what would likely have been a great deal of suffering, and her parents’ sacrifice would have meant absolutely nothing at all.
Helena staggered down the dark path that led through the thick woods, in the endless rain that reminded her of fall, though the summer solstice had only just passed, with that giant brute of a man behind her and a thousand second thoughts pounding through her head so hard it made her temples ache. Her feet had gone numb at last, thank god, after she’d stubbed her bare toes and tripped over rocks and roots about a thousand times since he’d unceremoniously tossed her down in front of him and ordered her to walk.
She’d almost tipped right over when he’d done that. She’d reeled back, away from him, and might have gone right on falling if he hadn’t reached out and grabbed her arm—without so much as a flicker of an expression on that dark, hard face of his that made her shudder deep inside each time she looked at him.
Like he was made as much of fate as stone—and that was exactly the kind of stupid, fanciful thinking that her sister engaged in, which had helped get them in this mess in the first place. She couldn’t allow it. Helena told herself she was dizzy from the whirl of it all, nothing more.
He’d thrown her over his shoulder as if she weighed less than one of his sharp and scary blades that had been right there in her face while she’d hung upside down, draped over him like that. He’d reached over and slid her tablet out of her back pocket and then tucked it into his like he had no clue at all how important it was to her. Or maybe he did, she’d thought, when he’d warned her not to reach for it in that voice of his that was all dark threat. Then he’d sauntered out through the gates without a single backward glance as if he’d known no one in the courtyard would try to stop him.
He was right. No one had moved. The last she’d seen of these people she’d lived with through the last winter, and one she’d lived with her entire life, was them doing absolutely nothing to help her while a huge, scary raider toted her off into the woods to do god knew what with her. Helena had been forced to remind herself—repeatedly—that she’d wanted it that way.
That it was a better choice than any of the other ones available to her.
And much worse than all of those things had been the feel of it while it was happening.
His wide shoulder under her, hard and ruthless against her belly. Him all around her, hot and hard and decidedly male in a way most of the men she’d dealt with her whole life were not. The close, personal survey she’d found herself taking of the miles and miles of hard, golden, steel-hewn muscles and intricate, fascinating tattoos that made up his mighty back, moving beneath her as if he were a lethally sleek and finely tuned machine.
The strange heat that was thick and hot and shooting out like fire from where his hand gripped her ass, hard, and didn’t let go.
She hadn’t understood any of it. And her heart had been clattering so hard against her ribs it had made it hurt to breathe, something that should have gotten better when he’d put her down. But didn’t.
At all.
“Walk,” he’d said again, in that deep voice of his that made her whole body seem to … bristle to a different sort of aching attention than she’d ever felt before. “Now. And pay attention, sweetheart. I don’t like repeating myself.”
She’d only been able to stare up—and up and up—at him, still dizzy and more terrified than she’d been since the night two years ago when her parents had died without giving up their daughters, in service to the family mission, and Helena’s whole world had been completely destroyed. More terrified than all those nights in between, panicked and running with Melyssa, hiding where they could, even that one time they’d had to cover themselves in layers of spring mud and crouch in the shadows of an old, shattered bridge while Krajic and his men roamed right there above them. More terrified than she’d been these last few months in Ferranti’s awful little compound, waiting for Melyssa to hurry up and have her baby while the stories of marauders burning and pillaging their way south came in with every trader after the March equinox and she’d known exactly what—who—they were looking for.
The raider had laughed, but not like anything was funny. He’d wrapped that big, hard hand of his around her neck again and ignored the sharp little sound she hated that she’d made, especially when she couldn’t tell if it was fear or that raw, needy thing she didn’t recognize inside of herself. But all he’d done was turn her around, shoving her ahead of him through the woods.
He wasn’t exactly rough, but he wasn’t particularly gentle, either.
It’s okay, she’d thought as she’d stumbled forward. It’s not a kidnapping if I made it happen. This is my choice. This is the first choice that was all mine in years. I’m fine.
Sure she was.
Helena thought whole lifetimes might have passed since then. A million lifetimes in one dark, barefooted scramble through these horrible woods choked half to death by ancient kudzu vines left unchecked. Ample time to rethink her split-second, completely insane decision back there in the courtyard.
But she’d known what would happen if she’d stayed. Krajic and his men would find her, and that would be the end of that. The end of everything. Of her, certainly—eventually. She couldn’t think of it without that terrible lump threatening to choke her and take her down. Imagining it meant imagining what her parents had gone through in that desolate temple in the western highlands that last night—and she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t go there.
But even if Krajic had somehow passed them by and continued his trail of terror in a different direction, Ferranti had been eying Helena too closely since March. Melyssa had been so close to giving birth and he’d obviously started to pay attention to all the different, careful refusals Helena had been handing out to his minions at every bonfire. Helena had understood that there was no way in hell she’d manage another nice, easy winter marriage come the fall, like last winter’s unremarkable union with Rolland, one of Ferranti’s henchman. A man like Ferranti who considered himself a king might also imagine it was his right to take more than one wife the way all the great kings did out west. He’d made reference to the privileges a king enjoys more than once, and Helena had thought that suffering through anything like that with that man might actually kill her. A line of thought she’d been unable to keep from her expression when in public, especially lately.
There’d been no escaping t
he fact that Ferranti was onto her. Maybe in more ways than one.
Damn you, Melyssa, she thought now, that old fury washing through her, shoving her off balance as if it were the raider’s unforgiving hand against her neck again. Her sister was the only family she had left in the world—until that baby was born, anyway, which for all she knew was happening right now. And still, no one alive made her more furious. It was Melyssa’s fault they’d fallen into Ferranti’s clutches in the first place after they’d lost their parents and had been on the run that whole summer—
But there was no point thinking about ancient history or her sister’s jealous bullshit now. So far this summer, the very thought of surrendering herself to Ferranti had made Helena want to kill herself—compliance be damned—and sometimes she’d thought the only thing keeping her from it was that her death would defeat the purpose of everything that had already happened and all Helena had already lost. And it was already midsummer and she’d done absolutely nothing in service of the family mission this year, and there was so little time left before the fall. So little time to find the temple she needed to find and to make it what it was supposed to be, not what the priests had decreed all such places were since the Storms.
Then there were the rumors. The tales of burned-out settlements and bodies hung from the trees up and down the eastern coast, left as food for the ravenous crows. Stories of blood and torture and the roving band of men with short-cropped hair and ghoulish eyes who were responsible for so much carnage they might as well be demons in truth. And Helena had known full well that it wasn’t the fall equinox she needed to worry about, but the real life demon who was already much too close to finding her.
Tonight, in that rainy courtyard with a raider who knew Krajic’s name and spoke it like the vilest curse imaginable, she’d thought, What the hell? It can’t get any worse than it already is.
