by Megan Crane
But he didn’t say whatever harsh thing lurked there on his ruthless mouth or in those intense eyes of his. Instead, he loosened his grip. He scraped the pad of his thumb over the place where he’d used his teeth against her skin to leave his mark. Right there on that soft spot just above her collarbone in the crook of her neck. Where she was sure he could feel her pulse go wild. Then his mouth hardened as if he hadn’t meant to touch her like that. So close to a caress.
“You want to tell me the truth now?”
His voice was quiet, but no less vicious than before. That dangerous heat prickled harder and made her eyes go glassy. A lump grew in her throat. She didn’t know who she hated more in that moment. Him, for pushing this. Herself, for the weakness she’d never known she had until she’d met him.
But she had bigger, scarier things to worry about than one raider. Even if he was the war chief. Even if he was Tyr. “I already told you the truth.”
Tyr’s lips tightened, but he didn’t say anything else. He only dropped his hand, then nodded her forward.
Helena had no choice but to walk straight on toward her own execution. She tried to pretend she couldn’t feel her heart trying to climb out of her chest as they moved, Tyr a lethal force at her back. She walked toward the heavy stone and iron door she could see ahead of them, and kept her gaze trained on that telescope.
That inside-out sensation only felt worse as she moved, as if her skin had stopped working and she was nothing but raw and exposed. Her mind raced but she couldn’t work out how to save herself without betraying her family’s secrets. That meant Melyssa would be the only one left—and that was as good as surrendering here and now.
And clearly telling Tyr in the vain hope he and his raider brothers could help her was a mistake. A huge mistake. One that—if she lived through this upcoming encounter with Wulf—she didn’t plan to repeat.
She missed her parents. She missed her father’s silly jokes and his endless patience. She missed her mother’s wicked wit and perfect smell, honeysuckle and mom. She missed being part of something that mattered, that made their family’s difference from everyone else they encountered worthwhile. That made all the sacrifices worth it. She missed being around others who knew and valued what they did it for, whether or not they were successful.
And she missed the stars. She missed the cool press of the telescope against her eye socket and the mysteries of the sparkling night sky made distinct, knowable, wherever she looked. Planets and satellites, suns and galaxies, all the more wondrous when they were something better than simply light.
If there were other worlds, Helena told herself fiercely—just as she had as a girl, just as her parents had always assured her—than the ruin of this one couldn’t be as dire as it seemed. If this world really was one among many, it meant what happened here mattered less. And what happened to her mattered nothing at all. It was nothing but light from another star in another sky, a little bit of light that might make some unknown girl smile in some other faraway place someday.
Her parents’ telescope had taught Helena how small she was in the scheme of things. That, in turn, made what she’d suffered, no matter how giant and all-encompassing it seemed at the time, fade away. Sooner or later it all faded away. The stars remained.
Tyr would be one more thing she’d lose in that light, in the whirl of all those distant planets, and knowing how little he would matter, in the end—how little anything that happened here would matter—was the reason she could lift her head up high and walk straight toward her own certain doom.
She chose to ignore how much some part of her wanted to unburden herself even now, tell him everything despite his initial reaction to only a part of it, see what it would be like to put all the secrets she carried on his wide, tough shoulders—
That’s suicide, she told herself sternly. And you’re confusing sex with something that matters.
He herded her through the heavy door, all the light and airiness of the vast greenhouse giving way to shadows and lights flickering in lanterns along the walls. Real lanterns, she saw as they walked down another narrow hallway, made of flame, not electricity.
Because a raider king would not rely entirely on a generator that could be cut or a power grid that could go offline, she thought even as her lips formed the question. He, of all people, would know better.
Tyr drew open another iron-studded door at the end of the hall, and ushered Helena into yet another place that astonished her. She was expecting a dark, closed-in place, all tiny nooks and heavy stone walls, as befit a grim-looking warrior king’s fortress. But the space they entered was a marvel.
It was a wide-open, soaring loft space, as if someone had taken out the center of the building and left it as clear and free as possible. It rose at least two stories from the Lodge’s roof level where Helena stood to its top, where a spiral stair led out to what must have been some kind of viewing platform—and that telescope.
It took her a moment to get her bearings. There were different living levels built into the airy expanse of space and connected by steel staircases and stark metal girders that somehow complemented the thick stone walls and the dark wood beams and accents. One level set aside for the kind of athletic training she’d seen the raiders doing in their rooms, hung with bags like Tyr’s and a selection of heavy iron rods, and more. Another that was obviously the king’s bedchamber, with a vast and theatrical bed that looked more intimidating than any throne. A level that looked, incongruously, like an actual library containing real, paper books—but she told herself that must be an optical illusion. There were windows starting at the second level, hewn directly into the stone walls to let the light dance in. There were rich tapestries like the ones Tyr had all over his rooms, and even more weapons. It was less a king’s fortified castle and more of an aerie, a retreat.
And on the lowest level, spread out over a long table made of heavy, dark wood that took up most of the far side of the space, was Wulf.
He was not alone. He had a woman spread out before him on that table, her ankles up near her ears as he pounded into her, his own arms braced on either side of her and his long braid moving with him as he thrust and rolled.
And he didn’t stop at their entrance. He didn’t even pause.
His blue gaze flicked to Tyr, cut to the side, then returned to the woman below him. Helena would have stood there gaping, she was ashamed to admit, but Tyr steered her over to a comfortable seating area arrayed before a giant stone fireplace with a cheerful fire blazing, cutting the chill from the damp stone walls surrounding them. He pushed her—not ungently, but deliberately—down into an armchair, then sat on its arm with his strong thighs spread just enough to keep her hemmed in beneath him.
The threat was implied in that position. Because, of course, he didn’t need to state it outright.
He was the threat. Wulf was judge and jury, she supposed. But she had no doubt that Tyr was the executioner. No doubt at all. She’d seen the truth of it in his gaze two floors down.
Helena didn’t want to think about that. She stared at the fire instead. Yet all the snapping and popping in the world couldn’t help her pretend that she didn’t hear the woman’s high, wild, ecstatic cries. Then a very male groan, not long after.
She couldn’t keep herself from sneaking a glance, to see Wulf speaking softly to the woman. The woman laughed, and the king pulled her to her feet, then against him, angling his head to—
“Enjoying the show?” Tyr sounded grim. “You like to watch, don’t you? Is it so you can report back to your master?”
Helena jerked her head back around and scowled at the fire, sure she’d turned either bright red or utterly pale, or maybe it was both in rapid succession.
“No,” she bit out.
“No, you don’t like to watch or no, Krajic is not your master?”
It took everything she had not to turn her scowl on him. “Both.”
“Such a liar.”
Helena didn’t have time for the brigh
t coil of shame and need that pulsed deep inside her then, the way it did whenever she heard his dark voice. She had to ignore it, because she had to figure out what to do next if she survived this meeting. There was obviously no working with the raiders, so that meant she had to get away from them if she wanted to find her way to the Catskills. Letting one particular raider get beneath her skin was not only foolish, but dangerous—and it would keep her trapped here.
If you live. Helena had no choice but to assume she would. To hope she would. You have to live.
“Taryn, who I met on the boat, seemed to think that attracting the king’s notice was the best way to distinguish herself among the camp girls.” She forced herself to stop scowling. To sound something other than scared or desperate. To lift her head and meet Tyr’s gaze as if she wasn’t hiding a thing. “She had a whole plan.”
Tyr studied her in that unsettling way he had. “Then she won’t last long.”
“What do you mean?”
“You mean that angry redheaded one, don’t you?” Tyr shifted as he looked down at her, his dark gold eyes unreadable and his mouth in a firm line. “She should worry less about her plans and more about keeping the brothers happy.”
There was no reason her throat should have gone dry again, or why Helena should feel suspended there, lost in the way he was looking at her. As if he was rendering some kind of personal indictment. Another one.
“How hard is it to keep a brother happy?” she asked, though she knew she shouldn’t. Something in the way he watched her told her she shouldn’t. But sitting here waiting for Wulf to pass sentence on her was unbearable, and this seemed better than that. “It seemed easy enough in your bed.”
Tyr’s gaze was a flinty thing, harsh and dark. “I’m a simple man. All I require is honesty.”
Helena would never know how she managed to smile at him, only that she did. “Easy,” she repeated. “Just as I thought.”
He shook his head. “The moment I met you I knew you’d never be camp ass. You’d suck at it. First, because you lie. You have a smart mouth and you talk back. You think about yourself and your bullshit first.” She must have made a noise, because he shrugged. “Camp girls don’t do that. They give. They serve. They’re comfort pussy, not another problem.”
“You said your mother was a camp girl.”
If Helena could have reached into the air between them and snatched those words back, so unnecessary and challenging, she would have. Tyr’s gaze sharpened, that mouth of his went grim, and he considered her for a very long moment as if he was thinking about crushing her like an insect where she sat.
It went without saying they both knew he could.
Why did she have to remind herself that her goal here was to survive, not commit suicide-by-war chief? Why couldn’t she seem to keep that straight?
“Still is,” he said, long after she thought he intended to bore a few holes in her skull with that glare and never say another word. “What’s your point?”
“I just … How could she have been a good mother and a camp girl if she only thinks about the brothers?”
“She was a great mother,” Tyr gritted out, “and she’s an excellent woman, because she knows who she is and she never pretends otherwise. She doesn’t lie, for one thing. She doesn’t try to provoke anybody into doing shit they wouldn’t otherwise do. She doesn’t tell three lies to every one truth.”
Helena couldn’t hold his searing dark gold gaze then, and she didn’t understand the great, aching sob that swelled in her and that she had to fight to swallow back, as if she wanted this man to think highly of her and even to defend her like that. No matter how masochistic that was. Tyr was a means to an end, nothing more. What did it matter what he thought of her or anything else?
But it did, she acknowledged as she frowned into the fire again and tried to breathe normally. And just like the fact that she’d never been as terrified of him as she should have been, it didn’t make sense. It all seemed to tangle together in her bones, making her feel rigid with all the feelings she couldn’t understand or process or worse, shove aside.
You understand, a small voice accused her, deep inside. You don’t want to understand. That might mean dealing with the fact this man is exactly what you always dreamed—
She stamped that nonsense back down. Hard. Go to hell, small voice, she thought.
“Where’s the king’s bodyguard?” she asked, because the silence that swam between them was worse, and might encourage Tyr to keep making those terrible accusations she couldn’t refute. That maybe she didn’t want to refute.
Maybe you want him to find out the rest of your secrets, so you don’t have to worry about the responsibility of trusting him with any of them. That time, the voice sounded a lot like her sister’s, harsh and unfriendly. What a coward you are.
She could feel Tyr’s gaze move over her again, and she had the semihysterical notion that he could hear that nasty little voice the same as she could. Or maybe she wanted that, too. Any escape from the burden of taking care of her own damn self the way she’d been doing all this time.
Maybe she was more like her sister than she’d ever allowed herself to admit.
Helena kept her eyes forward.
“Where do you think she is?” Tyr asked. “The woman deserves to get a restorative fuck in after a long trip. Get her land legs back, like everyone else.”
Helena realized her hands were cold and balled them up in her lap. “From the camp girls?”
Tyr snorted. “Now that’s funny. Eiryn would chew those poor sweet girls up and spit them out. Also, she doesn’t play that way.”
“Are there camp boys?” She risked a glance at him to find his expression stern, yet unreadable. “What? You have all the variety you could possibly want. Why shouldn’t she?”
“I’ve never spent that much time thinking about how and where she gets her rocks off,” Tyr said, repressively, and that hard gleam in his eyes made her feel unsteady, despite the fact she was sitting down. “You should tell her you have this obsession with how she makes it happen. I’m sure she’ll appreciate that kind of concern from a two-faced captive who’s led our enemies straight to our door.”
“My sister prefers farmers.”
Wulf sauntered into view then, his dark trousers low on his hips and not entirely fastened. They were the only thing he wore. He dropped into the armchair across from them, his cool blue eyes moving over Helena in a way that made her push as far back into the leather chair as she could get to put more distance between them—not that it helped. Just like getting a good look at the raider king’s half-naked body didn’t help anything, either. The golden hair on his chest narrowed to dark gold as it moved beneath his unbuttoned trousers, and he was made of impossible sinew and sculpted into lethal art, even his bare feet. His tattoos swirled and leapt as he breathed, and there were vicious scars carved all over that body made of smooth, deadly steel.
He looked relaxed and casual, and yet he was still indisputably a trap.
He is always a trap, something inside of her, something far smarter than she’d proven herself to be of late, whispered harshly.
“The bigger and the brawnier and the more afraid of her, the better,” Wulf continued, as if this was a polite, pleasant conversation among friends. “She has her own stable of hard dicks and heavy shoulders and, I’m told, all the variety she can handle. Just like any other members of the brotherhood who prefer men.”
He propped his head on one fist as if worried he might lapse off into sleep, when Helena doubted that was a possibility, no matter how relaxed he pretended he was. Then Wulf smiled. It was chilling. “But enough about my sister. Did you mention my enemies?”
* * *
Tyr was aware there was a large, unacceptable part of him that didn’t want to do this. Sure, Wulf had told him to find out Helena’s secrets. They’d seen Krajic come after her back on the Atlanta coast. This confirmation shouldn’t have come as any huge surprise.
It felt like
a betrayal. And Tyr found he wanted to deal with it—with her—with his own two hands.
“Krajic is likely approaching as we speak,” he gritted out, because this man was his king and it was his goddamned duty to share what he knew, no matter what his hands longed to do. “He’s been following Helena for years.”
“Years,” Wulf repeated. Icily.
“Two years,” Helena added, and then flinched when they both looked at her.
“It seems unlikely that after killing her parents and chasing her around for two years, he’d let a little water hold him back,” Tyr said. “What’s an ocean to a douchebag like Krajic?”
Wulf stroked his beard, his hard gaze on Helena—and Tyr was not at all comfortable with how much he didn’t like that. How much he wanted to place himself between his king and this woman he should want to drop-kick back to Atlanta.
“Why did he kill your parents?” Wulf asked Helena. “Who were your parents?”
And Tyr felt the way she gathered herself and then sat straighter. He saw the way she tilted her chin up. Steps one and two of the way she lied, he knew. It was fascinating—and deeply foolish—for her to try it on Wulf. The king had killed much bigger men for far less.
“The Internet,” she said, and it sounded even less convincing here. “They wanted to reconnect it. I guess you could say Krajic is a Luddite. A violent, psychopathic Luddite.”
“Is that another word for liar, or is that just you?” Tyr asked in a growl. Wulf looked faintly amused when he looked at Tyr, but then returned his attention to Helena, that little gleam of humor gone as if it had never been.
“Krajic came to the water’s edge to see you off when we left the mainland,” Wulf said after a moment, in his soft, lazy way, his gaze on Helena. In the chair beneath him, Tyr felt her go rigid again, and this time, not to spin one of her stories. Good. Fear might actually keep her alive. “Like a pining lover might. Tell me, did you trade his bed for Tyr’s? Is that what this is about?”
Helena went pale, then faintly green around the edges, and jerked so violently that Tyr thought for a second she might vomit. Or try to take a swing at Wulf, which would be … unwise.
