Edge of Obsession

by Megan Crane

  That and the insistent pulse between her legs.

  And she still didn’t look away.

  She watched.

  She watched Jurin as he looked down the length of his massive body, a hard and greedy sort of satisfaction stamped deep on his face as he pounded into the woman’s mouth. Over and over and over again. He held her head still, and Helena thought it must have hurt, the way he gripped the woman by the hair like that and slid deep into her—so deep, she realized with a shuddering jolt, he must have been thrusting himself all the way into her throat.

  He said something Helena couldn’t hear and the woman arched her back, tilting her face up at an even sharper angle. The firelight danced all over her voluptuous curves, played up to perfection in the tight tunic she wore that slicked over her hips and thrust out her very full, cream-colored and blue-lined breasts, and a pair of leggings tucked into high boots. Jurin moved her backward, then went down on his knees in front of her, never stopping that rough, rhythmic, mesmerizing thrusting into her mouth as he did it.

  “This is the fun part,” Tyr murmured in her ear, his voice a rough kind of silk that made her eyes glaze over and her lips part.

  Or maybe it was the scene in front of her. Or then again, maybe it was that hand of Tyr’s that she hadn’t noticed had snuck beneath the wool covering she wore to hold her, his callused palm so hot and so good against her bare skin. The fingers of his big hand almost but not quite reached the very top of the triangle of hair between her legs. His thumb swept back and forth over the slope of her belly beneath her navel in a lazy little rhythm that seemed to echo deep inside of her and in that heavy, aching pulse in her pussy.

  “This is how camp girls audition,” Tyr told her, like her own, personal demon crouched there at her shoulder, whispering things she was afraid would lodge themselves inside her head and change her forever. “Be nice to us, we’re nice to you. Maybe you should take some notes. Improve your attitude.”

  Helena knew she should respond to that, but she couldn’t seem to make her mouth work. Or her brain, for that matter. She couldn’t seem to do anything but stare, shocked and something like starved at once, and even the dark, delicious thread of Tyr’s mocking laughter in the heated space between them did nothing to change that.

  The man she’d seen earlier with the bones threaded through his long black beard dropped to his knees behind the woman. He ran his hands up over her hips, pushing the hem of the tunic up and out of his way, then hooking his fingers in the waistband of the woman’s leggings. He tore those down, exposing the woman’s pale ass to the night, shoving the leggings down to bunch around her knees.

  “You’re shaking, Helena,” Tyr murmured at her ear, then laughed when she tried to shrug him away. But she hardly blinked and she didn’t glance away from the scene in front of her for even a second. “Want to ask me something? Express some of those obnoxious thoughts of yours?”

  His thumb moved up, down, nowhere near her pussy and yet it was if his wicked fingers were deep inside her again, playing with her, making her ache and shift and yearn. She felt drugged. Helena told herself it was the reason she couldn’t tear her gaze away from what was happening in front of her. That was her excuse.

  The black-haired man ran his hands over the woman’s ass and then slapped her on one cheek, hard. Helena jerked at that, but Tyr only laughed—and the woman moaned louder around the cock in her mouth, wiggling her hips at the man behind her in an invitation so obvious even Helena couldn’t mistake it.

  The man laughed, too, then plunged his fingers between the woman’s legs, deep into her pussy. The woman shuddered, and Jurin only held her there with his cock deep in her mouth, giving no quarter. He said something to the man behind her, and they both laughed. The black-haired man pulled his fingers out of the woman and then, impossibly, licked them clean.

  “You like that.” That wasn’t a question from the wicked man holding her. He said it as if it was fact.

  It occurred to Helena that he might not have his hands in her hair, much less his cock in her mouth, but she couldn’t exactly free herself of his hold, either. And worse, that there was something deeply, terribly twisted inside of her that she couldn’t bring herself to mind it as she knew she should.

  “It’s unhygienic at best,” she said primly, and Tyr let out a belt of laughter, the sound making her body temperature climb another degree or two.

  “Only if you do it right,” he assured her.

  Helena realized she was breathing too hard. Much too hard. And then she stopped breathing, because the black-haired man was pulling out his cock, very thick and long, and lining it up with the woman’s entrance. He said something to Jurin and then he slammed into her.

  Maybe Helena convulsed a little. Maybe it was the smoke, the fire. The events of this insane day. Maybe Tyr really had drugged the food he’d given her. She didn’t know. Time and space seemed to disappear, sucked into the scene before her. Two huge, scarred, tattooed men, kneeling down on either side of a curvy woman on her hands and knees, thrusting into her from each end. Hard.

  It was the filthiest thing Helena had ever seen. It was far beyond even those unacceptable little fantasies she’d never told another living soul that she’d entertained inside her own head all these years. It was twisted and terrible, against everything she’d ever been taught.

  And she couldn’t look away.

  Jurin’s thrusts became jerkier, wilder. He dropped the woman’s hair and took her head between his hands instead. His own head fell back as he pumped. Harder and then harder and then he roared into the night, his head dropping back as his hips kept on thrusting.

  All the while, the black-haired man kept slamming into the woman from behind, his hands gripping her hips and kneading the globes of her ass. While Jurin roared and then slowed, he kept the same rhythm. But when the redheaded man sat back, pulling his cock from the woman’s mouth and settling back on his haunches, the black-haired man grinned. Then got faster. And much, much harder.

  Helena shifted restlessly, trapped between Tyr’s hard body and much harder cock, and that warrior’s hand that taunted her and held her fast. And she didn’t know if the woman moaned or she did. Either way, it felt as if every hair on her body shivered into awareness.

  Without Jurin’s cock in her mouth, the woman looked blissed out. Something far happier than simply lost. She hung her head down in front of her, bracing herself with her hands in the sand, as the man behind her pounded into her pussy again and again. After a time she closed her eyes, and even though Helena could see tears leaking down her face she knew, somehow, the woman wasn’t crying. Not out of sadness, anyway. Not out of fear. The dawning ecstasy on her face meant this was something else entirely, tears or not.

  The man behind her groaned, a low and edgy kind of sound that made the restlessness inside of Helena grow. She shifted, rubbing herself against Tyr’s hard cock before she remembered herself and made herself stop and goddamn it, it was more difficult than it should have been. Tyr let out that dirty little laugh of his again, then traced a pattern over the soft, sensitized skin of her belly as if he was tracing the outlines of that same intense need inside of her. As if he was marking her. But he didn’t say a word.

  Maybe he didn’t have to.

  The black-haired man reached around and started rubbing at the woman’s clit, in exactly the same way Tyr had done out in the woods, and Helena couldn’t help the noise she made then, a kind of high-pitched moan she cut off almost as soon as it started.

  But Tyr heard her, of course. He laughed yet again, that dark, male sound that made her nipples so hard they stung. The electric charge of that small, sensual pain seemed to roll over her like thunder. Then he grazed his teeth down the side of her neck and made that storm in her that much worse.

  “Do your little bitch winter husbands make you come, Helena?” Tyr asked. The black-haired man rubbed harder while the red-haired woman’s moans grew louder and more intense, and all the while he pumped that thick co
ck of his into her from behind. “Do they even know where your clit is?” The woman arched her back so hard it should have broken, but it didn’t, and she tossed her head back. Then she screamed. “Do they have the slightest idea how to make you scream? Ellis never met that woman before tonight. He’s probably never seen her face, with Jurin’s cock so far down her throat. But look how hard he’s making her come. Yet you mainland assholes call us the barbarians.”

  Helena understood what she was witnessing was that shattering she’d felt in the forest, that wild falling apart, that hard fist of so much pleasure it had scared her to death in the moments before it had claimed her completely—that was what made the woman sob into the night, going stiff and then limp, and all the while the man behind her slammed into her, over and over, harder as she cried out, his hand working between her legs until she stiffened a second time and sobbed all over again.

  “Beautiful,” Tyr said, right there against her ear, dark and much too hot. “That’s the point of sex, Helena. That’s always been the point. It’s not sacred unless someone sees god.”

  The black-haired man gritted his teeth and threw his head back, pounding wildly into the woman on her hands and knees before him, until his own cry tore the night apart.

  And Helena was quivering against Tyr as if she’d run for miles. Or maybe was still running, if the clatter of her pulse was any guide.

  He shifted behind her, making her head fall back as if he owned her body and could make it do as he liked, and he took her mouth. He ate at her, rougher and wilder than before, opening his mouth over hers and shoving his way inside to taste her, tempt her. To drive her wild all over again.

  His taste, his sheer mastery of her and of this, exploded inside of her, raw and hot and carnal. She was rubbing against him again, meeting his tongue with hers, hardly aware of how easily and totally and exultantly she surrendered herself to this dark man who hovered on the edge of brutality.

  His hand gripped her belly, holding her against his cock as he plundered her mouth, as if a kiss alone between them was the same as what they’d watched two raiders and one woman do in front of them with such abandon. It roared inside of Helena, need and desire, that ache in her pussy that was spreading all throughout her body, making her desperate the longer he—

  Tyr pulled away and she imagined that his breath wasn’t as steady as it had been before … But she was likely just flattering herself. This was a man who could take down strongholds and battalions with his bare hands. Why should a kiss affect him? Still, there was no mistaking that hard heat in his dark gold gaze, or how fraught the tiny space between them was then, her head pillowed on his massive shoulder and her lips wet from his.

  She thought he would say something. Mock her for how desperately, how heedlessly she’d kissed him back. Or point out all the ways her body was betraying her, all of which she had no doubt he knew. That devouring ache between her legs that nothing seemed to ease. The soft, wet heat of it. That restless shiver that started there and snaked throughout the rest of her body that she couldn’t seem to shake.

  But Tyr only studied her for an eternal moment, his own mouth somehow grim, then sat back again. Helena swallowed as she slid back into her previous position, propped there between his legs. She felt … outside herself. Altered. Drugged, something inside her whispered, like the herbs they gave the girls who freaked out before their first winter marriages to make them happy and docile … But she knew better. She felt not the least little bit like docile. It was as if a great and terrible north wind was trapped inside of her and it was ripping her open where she sat, tearing her apart, making her feel hollow and edgy and a total stranger to herself.

  Even her lips felt like someone else’s in the aftermath of that kiss. Swollen—but not enough. Not nearly enough.

  She didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want to think about her feelings. In truth, she didn’t really want to accept that she might be having some over the behavior of a raider who’d abducted her from her home, done things to her body that made her flush a scalding-hot red only remembering them, and took her mouth whenever he felt like it simply because he could.

  And then undercut all of that by carefully, gently outfitting her poor, bare feet in a pair of wool socks that felt a little too much like an embrace the more she didn’t think about it.

  Helena rubbed her hands over her face and for once, Tyr didn’t laugh at her as she did it. She had to force herself not to twist around, not to confront him, not to push. Instead, she made herself look back outside this little circle of want she sat in with him, and tried to lose herself once again in the raider version of the more staid and boring community bonfires she’d known all her life.

  It wasn’t exactly hard.

  Jurin and the black-haired man were tending to the woman they’d shared, holding her limp, well-pleasured body between them as they used wet cloths on her. Helena jerked her attention away from them when she saw that Jurin’s cock was already starting to harden again.

  Again? she thought with some awe. But there was much more to see.

  Across the fire was Wulf, still lounging in front of his log. But now he had a naked woman sitting astride him, her dark copper body sleek and supple as she worked herself back and forth on his cock. He had his hands on the woman’s hips as she rocked herself against him, making it look like a sinuous dance. He still looked lazy, Helena thought, but it was that heavy-lidded, focused laziness that for some reason made her stomach flip over.

  Moving past Wulf, she saw a tangle of naked women and raiders, too many parts thrusting and groaning and heaving for her to pick out more than a cascade of images. Dark skin and light. Freckles and tattoos and wine stain marks, all worn as decoration. Hard cocks and open mouths, breasts and asses and hard hands against soft flesh. Moans and laughter and the slap of flesh against flesh, a counterpoint to the pop and crackle of the bonfire.

  She could see shadowy figures farther out from the fire’s inner ring and she understood, finally, what those low cries had meant earlier. There were fewer men around the fire now, which likely meant that some of them had taken their evening prizes out into the darkness. It made that edgy thing inside of her coil tight to think of the reasons a raider might want privacy.

  Here in the heat and the light Helena saw sex in more forms than she’d known existed, all in a single sweeping glance. A raider held a woman in the air, his arms wrapped around her waist with her legs locked around his, lowering her in hard, controlled thrusts onto his cock as he stood upright. Blow jobs with women kneeling, with women lying down, with two women taking turns. A group of raiders lounged around with each other, talking and telling stories, each with a woman at work on the hard cock between his legs. One raider had a woman tipped over his lap, her trousers pulled down as he walloped her ass, again and again, so it gleamed scarlet in the firelight while she writhed against him and moaned in a manner that suggested it wasn’t painful. Or it wasn’t only painful. One raider rode a woman’s face while another thrust into her with her legs draped over his shoulders and her back arched over a log.

  It was too much. It was insane and it was oddly beautiful and it made everything inside of her shatter over and over again, yet stay tight and hot and coiled into a fist within. Helena was panting openly. She didn’t know how to stop. She didn’t try.

  Nearby, a small space cleared when a raider tucked his gleaming dark cock into his trousers and then slapped the ass of the woman he’d just ridden hard while she’d bent over and grabbed her ankles. The woman straightened, shoved the mass of her blond hair back from her face, and then giggled when another raider grabbed her by the wrist and tugged her into the shadows. Helena watched them go, then realized that she recognized the man she could now see through the smoke.

  It was the raider who had stood next to Tyr in the courtyard and had been as furious as Tyr had been when she’d so foolishly shoved at him. He stood completely naked, the fire licking over his dark brown skin. He looked gilded and bea
utiful, his cut muscles covered in tattoos and a very hard cock standing straight out in front of him. He held a flask of oil in his hand and was rubbing it up and down his thick length, his intent gaze on the naked woman who knelt before him, her nose to the ground facing away from him and her ass high in the air.

  “It’s nice that one of you bothers to use oil, like a compliant gentleman,” Helena said to Tyr, though her voice didn’t come out nearly as sharp and unmoved and analytical as she’d thought it would. “It’s only polite.”

  Tyr didn’t quite laugh, though she could feel the dark thing that moved through him, like a kind of amused tension. “Riordan isn’t polite, sweetheart. Not even close.”

  Helena didn’t understand what that meant. Oil was civilized. It eased entry and made everyone feel that much better about things like doing one’s duty to humanity. She didn’t understand why Tyr was so sure that wasn’t what his brother was doing. She watched, frowning, as Riordan dropped behind the woman and poured out more oil into his hand. Then he began to rub it between the woman’s ass cheeks.

  There was a sound. Helena realized she’d made it, exhaling a little too hard. Behind her, Tyr’s erection seemed to twitch against her, and that sent a spiked heat rolling through her, making her cheeks—and everything else—flame.

  The kneeling woman shifted, moaning into the arms that cradled her head, and Riordan’s hard face cracked into a smile as if that was the response he wanted. Half distress, half longing. But he didn’t stop dousing the woman’s asshole with the oil and rubbing, rubbing, rubbing. Until, Helena realized with a swooping sort of sensation in her belly, he was thrusting his finger into the woman’s asshole.