by Megan Crane
The truth was, people believed in the Internet and stars that were really man-made satellites the same way they believed raiders were truly monsters and wolves sometimes shifted into men given the right kind of moon. Usually, they laughed it off.
But Tyr wasn’t laughing. And Helena was both too aware of how dangerous he was and a little too invested in that seductive belief that he might help her, after all. If not with her primary purpose, than with the threat he already seemed to know about. Maybe Tyr and his raider brothers weren’t destined to be her allies or help her with her family’s work. But they’d make an excellent buffer against that demon Krajic, wouldn’t they? They might even manage to stop him—something she hadn’t realized, until this very moment, she’d given up believing could ever happen. She’d dreamed of outrunning Krajic. Outmaneuvering him. But she’d long since given up imagining he could be stopped.
Tyr made her imagine all kinds of things, it turned out.
“It’s okay if you don’t believe it,” she said, and her voice sounded strange, then. Too high, too thin. She noticed she was clenching her hands tight together in her lap and forced herself to stop. There was nothing she could do about the rapid, panicked drumbeat of her heart against her chest. “What you should know, though, is that there are people who do believe it. Bad people. And they’d kill to make sure that tablet—and I—disappear forever. They already killed my parents.”
There was a stunned sort of silence. A long, searing moment that dragged by, then another. His tough, sprawled out body was too still, too hard. His dark gaze seemed frozen on hers. And all she could hope was that the way her heart pounded wasn’t as loud and betraying as it seemed inside of her.
His mouth curved into a sharp, fleeting sort of smile that made her think of fangs.
“Someone killed your parents?” His voice was lower than before. Rougher. “Deliberately?”
Helena’s pulse kicked at her, making her feel dizzy and thickheaded—but she couldn’t seem to tear her gaze away from his. She nodded. Once. Then again, with more force.
“The marauders near Ferranti’s compound weren’t random scavengers,” she said. Or she tried to say it and it came out more like a whisper through a throat suddenly gone tight with fear. “They were … They were looking for that tablet. They were looking for me.” She tried to swallow. “I imagine they still are.”
Something black and terrible rolled over Tyr’s face, making that strange paralysis that gripped her clench down even harder. There was a violence in that gaze, a vicious promise that slammed through her like a blow—though he didn’t touch her. He stared at her for an instant as if he’d suddenly seen her true face and it marked her an enemy, and then he moved. He rolled to his feet from his prone position in a single, smooth jackknife motion that made her blink and catch her breath.
“Krajic.” It wasn’t a question. It was an epithet.
Helena couldn’t move. She could hardly breathe. She didn’t dare look away from him. “Yes.”
Tyr crossed his hard arms over his mighty chest as if worried what he might do with his hands if he did not. He studied her as if he was deciding how best to rip her limbs apart and she understood, then, how easy he’d gone on her before now. Even back in that courtyard. She wouldn’t have said there was a single soft thing about him and yet it was only now that she understood he’d been holding back.
This man was a monolith.
This was the war chief of the raider clan, and she fully understood, finally, what that meant.
He was her certain doom, staring down at her without a single shred of pity or even that banked hunger she’d come to expect. Every inch of him the lethal barbarian she should have recognized he was from the start.
“Is he following you, Helena?” he asked, and she could see the dark fury in his eyes, could hear it in his voice. “Or are you leading him—straight here?”
She shook at that. “Of course I’m not leading him. Anywhere. I’m trying to escape him.”
“Mainland scumbags have been trying to find this place for a hundred years,” Tyr gritted out at her. “They’ve all failed. But they never sent in a spy before.”
Helena shook her head, flushed and panicked in turn. “I’m not a spy. How could I be a spy? He murdered my parents.”
She’d never said that. Not so baldly. She usually blurred it a bit. They died. Krajic hunted them down. The brutal truth hurt too much.
Tyr looked wholly unmoved. Unsympathetic, even, with that fury making his dark gold eyes gleam ferocious. “That’s what he does.”
Helena stopped trying to appeal to a raider’s sense of sentiment, a doomed enterprise at best. “Even if I was a spy, which I’m not, I’d have already failed. How could I possibly communicate with Krajic from here? I don’t even know where here is.”
That was not entirely true. She had a vague idea where these islands must be, having spent her whole life studying maps. But it hardly seemed in her best interests to say so.
“Maybe,” Tyr threw at her, “you’re using that goddamned tablet you love so much. Maybe it’s broadcasting our location even now. Maybe while I was all distracted fucking you, you were screwing us in a far more creative way, satellites and the Internet and who knows what else. Is that about right?”
He wasn’t touching her and still, she could feel his hands pressed tight around her throat. She felt cold, hot. Terrified and something like bereaved all at once.
“No.” It was a strangled sound, tangled in her mouth. “No. I’ve been running from Krajic for two years.”
“And you let me bring you here,” Tyr said softly, with nothing but mayhem in his dark gaze. “How convenient for you both.”
“I didn’t think you’d take me anywhere!”
“Yet here you are, dressed in raider clothes deep in the heart of the clan. My clan.” He sounded something so much worse than furious that Helena could hardly bear to hear it. She thought it might shake her wide open. But she still couldn’t bring herself to look away. “There are only two possibilities, and in either scenario, you’re bait.”
“Bait?” She knew the word, of course, but couldn’t seem to make any sense of it—and she still sat there in that same, stiff position, looking up at Tyr as he passed his sentence on her from above. Sentence or execution order, and she couldn’t read him either way.
“You’re the trap or the lure, Helena,” he growled at her. “Which is it?”
Her palms stung and she realized she was digging her nails into her own flesh. It took her longer than it should have to recognize that, too. But the tiny bites of pain were a good thing. They cut through the fog of panic and that wild drumming of her pulse and reminded her that once again, as scary as he was, Tyr could have struck her down instantly—and he hadn’t.
That didn’t make him merciful or her safe. But it was something. She’d have to cling to it.
“I can’t control what that demon does,” she managed to say.
Tyr laughed then, and it was a sound like the smoke that had danced over Ferranti’s courtyard since the winter rains cleared. Thick like fright. Dark and black like doom.
“I hope that’s true,” Tyr said after what felt like years. “For your sake. But you don’t have to convince me. You need to convince Wulf. He views any and all betrayals as a personal attack and believe me when I tell you, the raider king is not the kind of man you want to attack.”
Helena wanted to argue that—or scream, maybe, or dissolve into tears as much from her fear as the mess of her other emotions—but she gulped it all back down when Tyr simply leaned down, wrapped one of those war-crafted hands around her arm, and hauled her to her feet. As if she weighed less than one of his pillows and was as inconsequential.
“Now?” she asked, her voice little more than a panicked croak.
“There’s no good time to tell the king an enemy has a foothold inside the clan, Helena,” Tyr grated at her. “Why not now?”
“He might—” She cut herself off. “Is h
e—” Tyr’s hand was so hard, as if he’d never touched her the way he had. As if he’d never moved in her, opening up whole new worlds of sensation she’d never imagined existed, only to take it all away again. Was she scared or was she mourning? How could she not know? “Is he going to hurt me?”
Tyr’s dark eyes flashed, but she couldn’t read the expression she saw on his face then. It was too hard. Too unforgiving. And his tough fingers gave her no quarter as he started to walk, steering her toward the door as he went. “Let’s find out.”
Helena didn’t mean to dig her heels into the floor in some doomed attempt to stop his forward momentum. She didn’t know how it happened. She should have walked along as if she’d never been so unbothered by anything in her life, as if she enjoyed finding herself in a raider’s grip being marched off to her doom, again. But all that mess and panic inside of her took her over and before she knew it she was trying to straight-leg her way out of his grasp.
Tyr stared down at her, incredulous. But he also stopped a few feet from the door—and not because of anything she’d done to make him stop, she was all too aware.
“I…” Helena had no idea what she could possibly say. She only knew that Wulf scared her almost as much as Krajic did. At least she knew what Krajic wanted from her, and what he’d likely do.
And this man before her, for all he had her in a grip that might as well have been a chain, was her only hope of protection from either one of them.
“You want to give me anything else to work with here?” Tyr’s voice was soft again. Furious, she realized with a jolt. He was darkly, blindingly furious, and there was nothing the least bit like mercy in his granite expression. “Or do you really expect me to believe that a piece of shit like Krajic cares what the hell you do with an ancient tablet and a satellite feed?”
Helena closed her mouth with a snap. Tyr’s dark gold eyes glittered.
“That’s what I thought,” he growled, making no attempt to hide the menace in his voice, and then he started moving again. He hauled her out his door and back into the long hallway that stretched the length of the wing and led back into the great glass and wood center.
It was different this time. The rooms that lined the hall were occupied. And it was better to concentrate on that, Helena thought, than what waited for her.
There were more lights in the hall despite the afternoon sun pouring in from the windows. There was music spicing up the air and clashing in the middle, some of it from old speakers, some of it from men with actual guitars, some of it just very loud, off-key, masculine singing. That was the first thing she noticed.
The second thing, of course, was what was happening in the rooms. None of the raiders seemed to care too much about privacy. Or at all. One room with very little in the way of furnishings featured a single raider, stripped to a pair of shorts like the ones Tyr had been wearing earlier, performing grueling one-armed push ups in the center of his floor. The next room Tyr dragged her past had a tangle of bodies on the bed, a raider and two women, all of them groaning as they writhed and sucked and rocked into each other. Across the hall, a raider stood leaning in his doorway while a woman knelt before him, her head bobbing on his cock. He jerked his chin at Tyr in greeting as they passed. The woman didn’t pause.
Helena tried to keep her attention on the man beside her and where he was leading her—but there were too many fascinating things happening right in front of her, every time she peered through an open door. A lot of half-naked raiders performing various athletic feats, slicked with sweat that made their tattoos gleam and seemingly filled with endless energy to keep lifting heavy stones or hefting huge iron bars through the air to spar with each other in the common areas.
And then there were the raiders engaged in some or other kind of sex act as if their five days at sea had been a hideous drought and they needed to go at it as hard as possible to recover from it. Three rooms in a row were thick with low male grunts, muttered instructions, and warriors’ hands sunk deep in the hair of the women kneeling before them. Helena’s eyes felt scalded, but she couldn’t seem to stop staring.
“A man likes getting his cock sucked, Helena,” Tyr said, a low, tantalizing demon’s voice at her ear, guiding her through this sexual gauntlet as if it was as much her punishment as whatever waited for her at the other end. “Especially after a long sail. It helps him get his land legs back. Even if she’s nothing but a traitor.”
Her mouth actually watered, remembering his taste and all that smooth power against her tongue. And that was what she couldn’t figure out—her own body’s response when she should be nothing but petrified right now. Her tension and anxiety and fear seemed to swell in the face of everything she saw, but it was tangled up with that same ravenous hunger Tyr had brought out in her from the start. There was too much sensory overload. The raider’s ass she could see pumping hard between a woman’s spread legs. The woman hanging from some hook on a bedroom wall, her pale brown body a perfect arch, while a raider held her with her legs thrown over his dark black shoulders and his face buried deep in her pussy. Everything inside of Helena seemed to wrap around itself and pulse out into heat. Licks of fire and need that didn’t make sense, that poured through her, stirring her, making everything seem to ball together and burn too hot, too bright—
Tyr nodded at a raider who seemed to be looming for no particular reason in the middle of the long hall, then he slapped open the door beside the man. Expecting a room like the ones they’d passed, Helena was taken back when she found they’d entered a stairwell instead. It began at Tyr’s floor and went up two flights, narrow and close, the opposite of everything else in this lodge.
“They clearly didn’t build this with raiders in mind,” she said, forgetting that this wasn’t a pleasant little stroll, but a march toward her own end. Maybe if she acted as if it wasn’t happening, it wouldn’t.
Tyr made that sound of his, not quite a grunt and not a laugh, either. “They didn’t build this. We did.”
He propelled her up the second flight toward the narrow door at the top that didn’t look as if it would fit his shoulders straight on.
“It seems a little small. Claustrophobic, even.”
“It’s for defense, sweetheart. It’s supposed to be small. Try drawing a blade in here.”
But he didn’t give her the opportunity to try anything so foolish. At the top of the stairs, he twisted sideways to push through the door and then paused to scowl at the two raiders—young-looking ones, Helena thought in a flash, despite all the different blades they wore with puff-chested pride—who stood tall on either side of yet another door at the far end of a square, windowless chamber.
“You hesitated,” Tyr growled at the one on the right. “If I was an enemy, you’d already be dead.”
He didn’t wait to see the younger man’s reaction to that, he simply hauled Helena through the far door and let it slam shut behind them.
At first she thought she was outside. The pale afternoon light tumbled all over her and she didn’t understand why it felt warmer instead of colder, and smelled of the dark, fertile soil of springtime. It took her a moment to realize that she was surrounded by glass.
So much glass.
It rose up like a wall, surrounding what would otherwise be the roof of the Lodge and then rising high overhead, where it slanted upward toward a thick center of forbidding stone, a real fortress slapped down in the middle of the glassed-in rooftop. Helena was dazzled. The afternoon poured in through the glass shell, lighting up the rows of what looked like fruit trees and great, wide planter boxes filled with rich, black dirt and too many green growing things to count. Greens and reds, yellows and oranges and deep purples. The true raiders’ treasure, she understood. Fruits and vegetables were unimaginable luxuries in some of the places she’d lived. They made endless piles of warm, cozy furs seem almost common by comparison.
Outside the glass enclosure, the views in all directions made her heart soar a bit in her chest. Unlike Ferranti’s com
pound in the woods, water was everywhere. The glum sea in the distance, the deep blue bay marked with all those evergreen islands, and foamy waterfalls cascading from far away cliffs on the rocky heights. Different variations of pine trees were all over the island, next to ghostly white birch sentries, stout elms and ridged oaks, and sugar maples with leaves already starting to hint at different colors though it was still late summer. The tiny islands clustered in the bay below and the chain of much larger, likely inhabited ones slumbering where the ocean met the sky. Everywhere she looked there was another sweeping, impossible view over untouched, unmarred land. No crumbling ruins of the lost world as phantom reminders and markers of the dead, only the stark beauty of proud, tough nature this far north.
It took her forever to pull her attention back to the enclosed rooftop, to look where Tyr was leading her through the lines of earth-filled boxes, and when she did, her heart stopped.
Because on the very top of the stone fortress they were headed for sat a telescope.
Helena realized she’d slowed when Tyr scowled down at her. She was lucky she hadn’t tripped. It took everything she had to look at him, not keep her eyes trained on that telescope like a starving creature who’d just sighted food for the first time in days. She hadn’t seen one in such a long time. Not since she and Melyssa had escaped from that horrible little farmer’s enclave on the plains three steps ahead of Krajic and left all of their parents’ belongings—and their parents’ bodies—behind.
She felt heat prickle behind her eyes and knew she was on the verge of an emotional breakdown she absolutely could not afford. Not now. Hold it together! she snapped at herself. There would always be time to cry. Later, when she was alone. Or not at all, should the worst happen here.
When so much didn’t hang in the balance.
When she wasn’t turned inside out by the man beside her.
Helena made herself meet Tyr’s gaze, and she had the same sinking feeling she always did—that he could read too much. That he saw too much. That he knew things he couldn’t possibly know.
