by Susan Grant
“You redeemed yourself in my eyes for speaking up today about the pyro. I forgive you, Despa. Is that what you need to hear?”
She shook her head. “I’d rather you forgive Ayl, for going with me the night you were together. Back when we were young.”
Val’s face burned with embarrassment. The humiliation was so old, but hearing the woman remind her dredged it all up again. “Despa, I don’t want to talk about this—”
Despa blocked her from leaving. Her expression was fervent. “I gave him sharken that night. A very potent batch. He was on his way to the springs to fetch you water. He meant to go back to your bed, but I got to him first.” Despa’s eyes filled. “I baked cookies laced with sharken. I told him to choose a few to bring back to you, but I made him taste one first. He couldn’t fight the booster—or me. I seduced him, not the other way around.”
Shocked, Val thought back to all the times Ayl had insisted that was the case, and how she’d laughed at him, accusing him of lying. He’d become the butt of clan jokes, until he finally gave up trying to set the record straight. He could no more explain his attraction to Despa over the years than he could his cheating on Val.
“The poor sot had no idea,” Despa murmured. “Still doesn’t.”
“Why did you do it when you knew it would hurt me?”
“Because you had everything,” the healer admitted. “You were the princess of our clan. Everything you attempted to get you got right. You were so perfect.”
“I was never perfect, Despa…” If only the girl knew.
“But Conn loved you. And then Ayl loved you. I didn’t think it was fair to always have everything you wanted, so I stole what I wanted.” She pressed her pretty pink lips together and sighed. “I’ll never live down my sins against this clan and you, Val, but I will spend the rest of my life making up for them. I hope I did a little of that today.” Wiping her tears, she began to walk away.
“Wait,” Val called out.
Despa turned.
“Why did you finally decide to confess all this?”
“You don’t have everything. I finally saw that. You’ve lost more than I ever had. Instead of envying you, I realized I’d started to admire you. And I figured out you can’t force a man to love you, no matter how much booster you bake in his cookies.” She offered Val a small smile. “Ayl’s free to be yours.”
Val blinked as she watched Despa walk away. But she didn’t want Ayl. She wanted Dake.
It left Ayl with no one.
An Ayl who was a different man than she’d thought, driven to be insecure and defensive over something he hadn’t intended to happen.
Fates above, what else would she learn this day? It didn’t seem as if there were any secrets left. Val strode home at full speed, her brain spinning from the day of life-changing revelations.
She bypassed the house and went straight to the garden. Somehow it didn’t surprise her to see Sashya waiting for her by the ebbe apple tree planted outside the back door, the same tree they’d looked at the day they learned Val was pregnant with Dake’s child. The child he still knew nothing about.
“I knew you’d end up here,” Sashya said.
“I’m glad I’m so predictable.” Closing her eyes, Val leaned back against the smooth trunk to catch her breath.
A hand came to rest against her cheek, cool and soft. Not a hand that bore the calluses of busting hatches and wielding weapons, but one that was just as skilled and strong…with love. “I was so proud of you today. You’re Conn’s girl through and through. You’ve got his courage. His passion. His principles. Aye, and his stubbornness—in spades. His precious Valeeya, he loved you so.”
Val smiled wanly as her mother searched her face. “Do you know what he told me the day you graduated from your raider apprenticeship?” Sashya asked. “That you deserved to be leader when he was gone. Tradition made him pick Sethen, but it was you he felt was most worthy.”
“You never told me this,” Val whispered.
“Had your brother lived, I never would have. A good mother doesn’t play favorites.” Sashya smiled with teary, tired eyes. “Dake Sureblood’s busy trying to extricate himself from the celebration and find you. When he does, don’t you run him off again.”
“Oh, Mama—”
“Don’t you ‘Oh, Mama’ me. Make it right between you. For the sake of your boy.”
Jaym. Her heart stumbled as she realized their words would carry. “Where is he?”
“I walked him to Hervor’s house and told him to play with Yanney. We’ll both stay there overnight, so you two can have the house to yourselves.”
Overnight. It was happening so fast. Way too fast. After so long holding on to hatred and guilt as an anchor, she was afraid she’d lose herself if she let go. Lose herself in Dake. “I need more time.”
“Time for what? For thinking?” Sashya groaned when Val nodded. “Now you’re sounding like the typical bachelor in this village. You were in love with that Sureblood boy, and probably still are. You surely hated him hard enough.”
Val shoved her thumbs in her weapons belt. “At the gathering, I’d just met him. I hardly knew him.”
“You knew enough. I was no more familiar with your father when we started our life together. Deep down, that’s what you wanted with Dake. A future. But life didn’t turn out how you wanted.”
You never know what life’s going to hand out. Dake told her more or less the same thing when relating how he’d lost his mother and sisters to a fire, and his father in an accident.
“Aye, I did want him, and it didn’t turn out like I wanted,” Val admitted, her heart full. “I wanted it to be different. Not like this.”
“It hasn’t always been easy for you, girl, I know. You’ve had to carry a lot on your young shoulders. But you gotta roll with the punches life throws you, not run from them. And throw your own while you can. Conn used to tell me that when times were hard.”
Val’s gaze flicked up. “You and Papa had hard times?”
“Plenty. Back when the clans first started fighting, when your father would be gone for months out raiding and me here minding the hearth fires, raising you and your brother, there were days I thought I’d die of loneliness. Then, when he did come home, Conn acted like a stranger, his head filled with what he’d seen out there and from what he had to do to make sure we Blues made it through another winter. I hated myself for feeling unhappy because of everything he was sacrificing for us. Aye, girl, times were hard.”
Faced with her mother’s frankness, Val burned with embarrassment. How naive and self-centered she was, sulking about her bad breaks, wallowing in them as if she were the only one to experience hardship. She’d always envisioned her parents’ life together as a fairy tale. Apparently there were realities she could hardly fathom they’d shielded her from so well. Just as she’d shielded Jaym from the precariousness of his existence.
A day of revelations.
“But we loved,” her mother said, softer. “We loved well, your papa and I. That and having you and Sethen made all the hardship worth it. Girl, you’ve got to stop blaming yourself for Conn’s death. It’s time to let it go, Valeeya. I was able to, and Conn was the love of my life.”
“You weren’t responsible for what happened to him, that’s why.”
“Neither were you. None of us were. No matter where any of us were that night, on duty or off, that no-good outsider bastard was aiming to murder our Conn and would have.”
Accept it, Val’s conscience willed her. Make peace with it. No more indulging yourself with guilt, hanging on to it like it’s the only thing you’ve got, when all you have to do is look around and see you already have what really matters. Your clan, your family. And this man, she thought, as the garden gate opened and slammed closed, allowing Dake Sureblood into the yard. “I was looking everywhere for you, Val.”
Val’s heart melted. Then she glanced around as if looking for an excuse to escape.
Sashya frowned at her reaction to
Dake. With a big sigh, she tossed her shawl around her shoulders and glided over to Dake. She was more than a foot shorter, but might as well be six feet taller the way he acknowledged her with a respectful nod. “You’d be a fool, boy, if you agree to any of her silly reasons why it won’t work between you and let her slip out of your hands a second time. You’ve got the house to yourselves tonight. Use it.” A moment later she was gone, sailing out through the garden gate.
Then they were alone, or as alone as two people could be on Artoom. The hush of the summertime woods surrounded them. In the distance, the sounds of a celebration in full swing could be heard.
He started across the yard, his boots sinking into the thick turf. She’d forgotten how tall he was up close, how big. He wasn’t the brash and boyish young raider she knew, but his eyes were still as gorgeous as she remembered, still as able to steal her composure—and her wits. His grin was still as sly, his teeth white, his lips no doubt still capable of making her dizzy.
Sunlight filtered the tree’s lush leaves and tiny ebbe apples. So pretty, she thought, taking in the sight for a moment to blunt her reaction to Dake’s proximity. “My father planted this tree. I come here sometimes when I need to think. Maybe we need to…think about this first.”
“Bah. Behind bars there’s plenty of time for thinking. Too much. I’d say I’m pretty much all caught up.” He brushed his knuckles over her cheek. “Blue girl.” The look on his face made her shiver. “I want you.”
She knew what she wanted, too. Him.
Then she remembered they had a son together that he didn’t know about.
“Blast it, Val. Every time you frown like that it makes me want to kiss it right off your mouth.”
Heat flared in her face and spread throughout her body. “Then what’s stopping you?”
The soles of her boots skidded over the damp grass as he hauled her close, his tongue sweeping into her mouth, making her head spin and her body melt. His scent filled her nostrils, spicy and exotic, and she sensed his desire for her on an elemental, almost animal level. She flattened her hands on his uniform shirt, stretched tight over his chest, and tried to hold on to some impression of control of the kiss—of everything.
But the embrace was too many years in the making. She was as ravenous for him as he was for her. She half thought he intended to take her right there under the tree when they managed to recover enough common sense to move inside to the cool silence of the house.
Kissing, they stumbled to her bedroom. His rough and scarred hands stroked her upturned face as he shoved the bedroom door closed with his boot. She unhooked her weapons belt as he tore open his uniform shirt, the breeze from the ceiling fan whispering against their locked mouths. Off came their boots and her jacket. Still, it felt as if the clothes weren’t falling away fast enough. She reached for his pants. Her knuckles grazed over the huge bulge straining his fly. The pants were gone and he trapped her between his hard body and the cool wall.
She untied the binding around her braid; he combed it out with his fingers. Her lips found his throat and traced a scar; he quickly and tenderly slid the strap of her camisole off her shoulder. Together they yanked off her bra.
Hot skin to hot skin, the kissing grew frenzied, him pressing her up against the bedroom wall. It was as if they feared they’d never have enough time to be together, the clock ever ticking, and that they somehow had to draw enough from this encounter to last another five years.
“And Ayl?” he rasped in her ear, his breath hot. “He’s not sharing that bed, is he?”
“Would it matter?” Ravenously, she kissed him all over his face.
“If you’re here with me, then it means your heart’s not his.”
“It never was,” she murmured fervently against his lips. “Nor was this bed. Ever.”
Dake seized her mouth fully, lifting her, his fingers sinking into the flesh of her thighs to hold her close, as if he feared she’d disappear before he could take her. A harsh grunt and he sank himself home.
He caught her cry with his mouth as they grappled for each other, skin slick and mouths hungry. No time for talk, they let their caresses speak for them. An exquisite pressure began to build deep inside her as she clutched at his heaving shoulders, gripped in his arms, riding the tidal wave that was her response to him.
That had always been her response to him, she thought. There’s no stopping it.
She was too hungry for him, too frantic, to worry about making it last. All too soon she was arching into his body, muting her cry of surprise against his shoulder as she came apart, her thighs trembling with exertion. He lowered his head and let himself go, lasting only a few more plunges, his body shuddering, his breaths hissing as he swore at the intensity of the moment. Then, finally, quivering and incredulous, their bodies wrapped together, they sagged against the wall.
The fan whispered a breeze over their overheated skin. He stroked her hair and she held him. He didn’t need to tell her it would be all right now that he was back. Every beat of his heart promised it was true.
Finally, Dake lifted his head and searched her face with opalescent eyes and a lazy grin. “Again, Blue girl?” he dared, falling with her onto the bed. “You’re asking?”
Laughing, he took her head in his hands and dragged her back to him.
THEY SAVORED EACH OTHER as the afternoon deepened into evening, and finally padded to the kitchen to eat when it was late. Val cast a glance outside, hoping Jaym was okay, then got busy foraging for the food Sashya had thoughtfully left for them. The simple act of readying a meal seemed to bring Dake to his knees.
“It’s been so long since I was in a home, eating a homemade supper.” Harsh emotion cut off the rest of Dake’s words. He’d slipped back to a dark place, a place she didn’t want him being.
She slid a hand down his cheek and jaw, summoning him back to the moment. “I want to know everything that happened, what the hells those outsider bastards did to you.”
He shook his head. “No, you don’t.”
“But how did you survive it? No pirates do. How did you escape the Drakken? How did the Unity come to find you? You’ve got too many stories to keep them all under lock and key. Besides, our raiders can learn from them.”
He was quiet for some time before he spoke. “There were times I wanted to lie down and die and be done with it all,” he began. “But it would have meant never seeing my clan again, never seeing you. Never achieving our fathers’ dreams.”
What details he left out his body revealed. And what those scars and brands didn’t say, his eyes did.
He’d suffered. He’d survived. And now he was back.
“We’ve got work to do, Val, plans to make.” He tore into a hunk of bread and cheese. “Meetings. Another gathering—but this time in secret.”
“We can’t pass the word around the usual way, Dake. Nezerihm’s listening. Eavesdropping. He intercepts our comms on raids. I’m sure of it. How else does he always seem to know where we’ll be?” Dread crept in. “How long before he knows where you are?”
“Johnson fooled him with a story to throw him off the trail, told him I was going back to prison. If we’re careful, he’ll stay fooled.”
“If we’re silent,” she cautioned.
“Aye. There’s always good old-fashioned note passing and talking face-to-face,” he said as he dangled a morsel of meat for her to nibble right from his hand. “Starting tomorrow, no one touches any of the Nezerihm mining transports. And no more fighting between ourselves. The zelfen must remain free-flowing. We can’t risk spooking the Triad, and that means Johnson, or we’ll find ourselves sleeping in donated boxes someplace no one else wanted to live. Everything we do from here on out has got to inspire confidence. The better we look, the worse Nez does.”
He used a blade to hack off more meat that he dredged in gravy and devoured. His appetite didn’t abate a specken as he shared his vision. “From what I can figure from listening to Johnson, we can stay here in the Channels, as
long as we quit fighting and keep the zelfen going where it needs to go.”
“And live on what—air? Dake, we gotta be able to raid to eat.”
“Not necessarily. We pirates signed a treaty with Nezzie’s ancestors so long ago no one remembers anything about it.”
“When zelfen was discovered,” she said, nodding.
“More like when the Drakken and the Triad discovered we had it. Zelfen had no value to the Nezerihms until it had value to them. We signed that treaty to stop fighting each other so we could fight them. What does it say? Maybe we own those mines. We gotta find a copy.”
Her heart beat faster as she saw what he was getting at. Independence. Freedom. Not having to leave. “We have to ask the grand-elders if any of them remember hearing about it from their grand-elders. But, Dake, we’re not dirt scratchers. We’re pirates.”
“Hells. Let Nezerihm scratch the dirt for us. We’ll just take the booty and sell it. Right now he’s keeping it all, and that’s not right, not when it’s our rocks he’s digging.”
Pirates as legitimate, law-abiding business owners. It was an idea so revolting that she instinctively recoiled, yet one so bold it shocked her that no one had ever proposed it before. Having a share in the mines would end worries of hunger and the pressure of the ever-increasing risk of raids she’d never have attempted if times were better. She could give Jaym a future he’d lose if the Triad made good on their threat to evict them.
Dake wolfed down huge quantities of food like a starving man as he relayed his dreams, his eyes glowing with his passion.
Not all that different from Ayl and his passion, she thought, pushing around the food on her plate with a crust of bread. Dake wanted unity, but Ayl wanted power. He expected to marry her to get it. Now Dake was back, and she wanted him. More than she could ever have imagined. What would happen now?
She’d have to do what was right.
And not necessarily popular.
Dake’s voice trailed off as she got up from the table and walked to a window, moving aside the curtain to peer outside in the direction of Hervor’s house.
