Edge of Power

by Megan Crane

  “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he told her, as if it hurt him.

  But he didn’t leave. He stayed.

  He taught her things that made her blush, then moan. He took her from so many different angles it made her head spin. He carried her into the bathroom and ran them a hot tub to soak in, and then ended it with her kneeling up over him again, sobbing out her pleasure to the walls.

  He wrecked her, he made her new, and he did it again and again and again.

  And when they finally drifted off to sleep together, curled up tight like locking parts of the same big piece, Kathlyn felt glorious. Battered in the best way, and finally, totally free.

  But when she woke up in the morning, Wulf wasn’t there.

  He’d left nothing behind except that dagger he’d thrown, still stuck in her wall.

  17.

  Wulf was already walking toward the great hall when the watch sounded the alarm, horns splitting open the otherwise calm afternoon in early May on the eastern islands. It meant that intruders had come ashore at False Harbor, the outpost the clan maintained on the western shore of the island for exactly this purpose, since the commonly held mainlander belief that raiders lived in caves like feral animals didn’t come from nowhere.

  He was down in the great hall of the sprawling Lodge within minutes, watching Tyr pull together different battlegroups to hold defensive positions in case this was a war party instead of a lost ship.

  The morning fog had only just given way to the uncertain spring sun, and everywhere he looked out the towering windows, Wulf saw nothing but the good life the clan deserved. Even with horns sounding in the air. The collection of thatched houses and shops at the foot of the mountain looked as prosperous as he knew they were. The Lodge itself, home to the brothers and the center of clan life, sat halfway up the mountain and claimed a commanding view over the clan’s island-clogged actual harbor, then on out to the seething Atlantic beyond. The boatyards were full this time of year, as the raider fleet was pulled out of winter storage, each vessel checked over carefully to make sure she was seaworthy and prepared for ocean crossings and the summer raids ahead.

  He saw Gunnar come up from his basement shop, his little nun walking behind him with her collar on her neck, a blissed out look on her face, and her swollen belly making the rest of her willowy body look that much more delicate. Yet she still managed to move with that church-taught grace, as if being pregnant came naturally to her. There were even rumors that perpetually grim Gunnar had been seen smiling for no reason these days, which was evidence enough that the world as whole was a little less shitty.

  Gunnar caught Wulf’s eye and waited for instructions. Wulf nodded, then watched his blood brother turn back toward the caves filled with the generators that kept the eastern islands lit and powered up. At least until he could figure out how to harness the electrical grid.

  Hope was a powerful drug. Wulf saw it taking hold in everyone around him as his council and the brotherhood debated how to split their time between the traditional raiding business of the clan and new considerations, like tracking down power stations and restoring light. Not to mention all of that dry land out there, all over the globe, that held power stations of their own and very likely people to go with them. They knew more about their world than they had before. Gunnar and Helena spent hours trying to map it out, using the Internet they’d connected again in King Athenian’s stronghold, determined to find a way to make it safe for the raiders to go further out into the asshole seas than they ever had before.

  Wulf couldn’t wait.

  Tyr belted out an order and a battlegroup of brothers set off on the twenty- to thirty-minute dead run that would get them to False Harbor. Wulf went all out, setting a blistering pace for the rest to follow. He trained harder and harder these days. As if he was preparing for his own, personal war.

  Are you sick? Tyr had asked him flat out the last time he’d declined the sweet offerings of one of the camp girls and gone out for a run instead. In the dark.

  Why are you obsessed with my dick? Wulf had replied lazily.

  He then he’d run. Hard. He ran and he ran. He trained like a maniac. And none of that seemed to erase Kathlyn the way it should have.

  The brothers ran all out with him, and they made it to the trees and rocks that lined the high cliffs over False Harbor in record time.

  “Not everyone runs ten miles uphill five times a night,” Eiryn complained from her place at his side. “In case you were wondering.”

  Wulf noticed she was breathing hard and raised his brows. “Maybe you need to start if you can’t keep up.”

  She gave him a murderous look, which made him smile. And then he squatted down to look at what the sea had brought them today, and everything inside him went still. As if he was in the middle of a lethal battle, steel and blood and skill.

  Wulf felt the deep quiet of it grip him and hold him fast.

  Two mainlanders were helping a woman in a long, hooded cloak step from the boat onto the beach. Wulf could tell a lot of things about them from this far away. The mainlanders were nervous, for one thing. They kept looking up at the raiders on watch, up in the cave they used to create those mainland rumors. Then around at the high cliffs as if they expected death to rain down upon them at any second. They wanted to get the hell out of there. Now.

  They deposited the woman on the beach and then they were wading back to their boat with the sort of ungainly speed that might have been funny at any other time. Wulf could hear his brothers laughing all around him.

  But his attention was caught on the woman they’d left behind.

  He knew the tilt of that head, elegant and fine. Even before she pushed the hood back to expose her impossibly pretty face. He knew her from her delicate feet to those graceful wrists, even when he was too far away to truly appreciate the gleam in her dark gold eyes.

  It felt like an answer to a question he’d steadfastly refused to answer himself for weeks.

  And there was absolutely no reason that Princess Kathlyn should be setting foot on his island when he’d gone to all the fucking trouble of doing the right thing and leaving her in her mainland palace where she belonged.

  “I have this,” he said shortly, aware it rebounded like a bellowed order through the battlegroup. He couldn’t bring himself to care about that.

  Wulf pushed up from his squat and stalked over to the single path that led down to the water, making no attempt to conceal himself from the beach below. He heard the brothers talking behind him, and what sounded a lot like Tyr’s booming laugh, but he didn’t give a shit. He kept his eyes on his princess.

  He descended that path like he was going to war, waved off the brothers on watch, and he didn’t stop until he was directly in front of her.

  “Hello, Wulf,” Kathlyn said serenely, as if she’d last seen him hours ago, instead of more than a month ago and on the other side of the goddamned ocean.

  He was so furious it made his chest ache. But he only smiled, letting his mouth curl a little bit in one corner.

  “These are the eastern islands, not some mainland palace,” he said lazily. “What use could I possibly have for a princess?”

  She smiled in that way of hers that made him want to raze whole cities to the ground. More than he usually did, that is. “I thought you might be in the market for a queen.”

  He didn’t give her an inch. “Did your brother give you an upgrade, princess?”

  “Not at all,” she said, so calmly it set his teeth on edge. “But between you and me, I’m hoping to marry well.”

  Wulf rubbed a hand over his jaw. He glanced up to see that there was no sign of any brothers anywhere—which he was aware didn’t mean they weren’t concealing themselves and watching since the entire point of False Harbor was that they couldn’t be seen.

  But he didn’t care. For all intents and purposes, Wulf was alone on this beach with a woman he’d told himself he couldn’t have. He’d been absolutely certain he
’d made the right decision, and he wasn’t a man who entertained a great deal of regret or tore himself up about shit he couldn’t change.

  And yet it was only now that she was standing here before him, looking entirely too beautiful after at least three weeks at sea, that he felt something shift inside of him. As if this whole time he’d been missing parts of himself and it took her, here, to realize it.

  “How the hell did you get here?” he asked coolly, as if his ribs weren’t betraying him and letting his treacherous heart kick its way straight through. “And I’m warning you, princess, if you say ‘in a boat’ . . .”

  Something wicked passed over her face, but then she merely shrugged. “Biyu.”

  “Biyu, the courtesan.”

  “She’s very resourceful. It turned out she had no trouble at all finding a boat. Not from Kansas City,” Kathlyn murmured, her gaze sparkling. “Where you might have heard there were terrible fires at the equinox.”

  “I had heard that.”

  “Apparently, in addition to running the stews of my brother’s kingdom with an iron fist, Biyu also knows all sorts of people with private marinas.”

  Wulf couldn’t seem to stop himself from reaching out and tracing the shape of her jaw then. And once he had, it seemed impossible to him that he’d waited so long. “And what did you promise her this time?”

  “A bigger favor.” Kathlyn’s smile brightened. “She seems to hoard them. And she was happy enough to do it simply so you’d owe her one, too.”

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said quietly. “It was hard enough to walk away from you on the mainland.”

  “I have a radical suggestion.” Her voice was very soft, but very clear. “Why don’t you stay instead of walking away?”

  He shook his head and caught her scent, sugar and something buttery. It made him hot. It made him hard. It made him feel like she’d kicked him in the head, and he wished she had. Because he knew how to handle a kick to the head.

  “I left you so you could choose,” he told her. “Something. Anything.”

  Her dark gold eyes glittered then, and her smile faded. “I can understand how you might not have believed me in the palace. Stuck in that same room in the dark.” She lifted up her hands and looked around False Harbor. “But look where we are. I came across two oceans. No one made me do it. But guess why I did?”

  He took her face between his hands, fierce and stark.

  “You have no idea the world of hurt you’re getting yourself into here. If you’re with me, you’ll always be a target. They killed a girl I barely knew and a child I’d never met. What do you think they’ll do to the woman I—”

  Wulf cut himself off. But Kathlyn slid her hands up to cover his.

  “You would fight anything that came at you. Anything that threatened your clan, your people. Me.”

  “Without question.”

  “Then fight for this,” she said, low and urgent. “Fight for me. I came all the way across the world to fight for you.”

  Later, he thought, he’d tell her that he’d made her three scratches into a tattoo. Later, he’d ask her what the hell she was thinking, to come this far on another deluded mission to protect him or save him or whatever the hell it was she kept doing that no one else ever did unless they’d sworn him their fealty and marked it in blood. Later, he’d want to know what she’d left behind, the mainland and her brother and the strange, insular world of the bastard western kings. How the people were reacting to the loss of a tyrant. What was left of the Cathedral that he’d seen smoking with his own eyes. Later.

  Here, now, he stood on a cold beach on an island with his heart beating much too fast. But there was no screaming inside him this time. He might not deserve her, his brave princess, but there was no doubt she was his. He felt whole again, touching her. He felt like himself again. At last.

  Because he’d been a king for twenty years. He was good at it. But Kathlyn made him feel like a man. Just a man.

  And Wulf had never lost a fight. Not a single one since the age of fourteen.

  But he didn’t have it in him to win this one.

  “Leaving you was bad enough,” he told her, drawing her mouth to his. “I love you, Kathlyn. I can’t lose you.”

  And she smiled so he could feel it.

  “Then don’t. You’re a mighty king. You changed the whole world. How hard is it to keep me?”

  Wulf resolved to show her exactly how easy it was to keep her, right there beside him, every day for the rest of their lives.

  But first he tasted her, there on the beach with the sea in the air and her hands on his chest, like a vow.

  And then he took her home.

  On the June solstice he married her, in the copper dress she’d brought with her for exactly that purpose. They said proper mainland vows and then he claimed her the raider way, in front of his clan.

  But Kathlyn thought her true victory was that he danced with her on the top of the raider Lodge, just the two of them beneath the greenhouse roof that let the stars in.

  Later that night he took her in their bed, high on a platform in his marvelous rooftop fortress that looked like any old stone tower from the outside, but inside was light and airy. He took her urgent and fast, then let her have her way with him, sweet and slow.

  “You’ve done it now,” he told her, holding her sprawled on top of him. She ran her fingers over the marks she’d made and he’d made permanent, and couldn’t seem to do much more than smile. “You married me. You let me claim you. You’re basically fucked.”

  “Literally,” she murmured against his chest.

  He nipped at her chin and she laughed, and she was caught in the wonder of it, suddenly. Trying to imagine what her life would have been like if he hadn’t walked into her father’s stronghold that day. Trying to imagine a world where she’d never seen all that arrogant, marvelous blue.

  It didn’t bear thinking about.

  “You were the most famous princess in the western highlands,” Wulf said lazily. “Now you’re the first queen of this clan. My queen.”

  “You changed my world the moment I met you,” she told him, piling her hands beneath her chin and rocking her hips to feel that great length of him still lodged inside of her. “Then you changed the rest of the world because you could. What could possibly be next?”

  “The world has been ruined for a long, long time. We didn’t fix it.” Wulf smiled at her, then rolled her over to her back, surging deep inside her and making her sigh. The way she thought he always would. “Next, princess? We get to work.”

  About the Author

  Courtney Lindberg Photography

  USA Today bestselling, RITA nominated, and critically acclaimed author Megan Crane has written more than sixty-five books. She’s won fans with her women’s fiction, chick lit, and work-for-hire young adult novels as well as with the Harlequin Presents she writes as Caitlin Crews. These days her focus is on contemporary romance from small-town heat to international glamour, cowboys to bikers, and beyond—including her take on futuristic Vikings. She sometimes teaches creative-writing classes both online at mediabistro.com and at UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally utilizes the M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest with a husband who draws comics and animation storyboards and their menagerie of ridiculous animals.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

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  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  EDGE OF POWER. Copyright © 2017 by Megan Crane. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Cover art © Patricia “pickyme” Schmitt

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  e-ISBN 9781466885356

  First Edition: March 2017

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