Edge of Obsession

  “She hasn’t really acted much like the kind of woman who’d let sentiment get her kidnapped by a band of raiders,” Tyr had said gruffly.

  Wulf had nodded, his shrewd blue eyes seeing far too much, as usual.

  “Keep watching her.” His cool gaze had punched into Tyr. “I don’t like that I can’t think of a single good reason why a woman like that would throw herself in a raider’s path the way the brothers tell me she did and then not fuck him at her first opportunity. Not when my settlements are smoke and ash and Krajic roams unchecked. And I don’t like things that don’t make sense.”

  Tyr hadn’t asked how the hell his king knew whether or not he’d had sex with Helena last night. He also hadn’t told Wulf what he could do with that observation, which he would have heartily and profanely suggested any other brother do—because he was reasonably certain he could take any of the other brothers in a fight. Wulf, on the other hand, had been wholly undefeated since he’d come of age. Unbeatable. King of their clan of brothers because he’d earned and held his throne with blood.

  And that had been all his own doing, his own sheer ruthlessness, and nothing to do with the seething darkness that was Eiryn, who melted along beside Wulf with that creepy-ass walk of hers that made her almost look as if she were floating above the earth. Tyr knew that no matter how otherworldly she appeared, forever dressed in all black with her dark hair in long braids to match—she was always, always ready and waiting and yearning for the slightest hint of a chance to take her revenge.

  He might not like her much, but he understood her. He felt the same way about Krajic.

  Tyr had settled for a murderous glare rather than any sort of threatening comment that might encourage Eiryn to come at him then in supposed defense of Wulf, and had made the raider king laugh.

  Awesome, he thought now, in his place at the prow of the ship. He barked out his orders, overseeing the rest of his brothers on the raiding party’s lead ship. Tyr set a course north and east along what was left of the jacked-up coast and tried to get his head on straight. He was acting like he was pussy whipped and he hadn’t even had actual sex with the woman in question yet. Maybe this was what a nervous goddamned breakdown felt like.

  The brothers were at the oars as the sun finally showed itself, guiding the sleek, silent ship out toward the open sea and home, the other two ships falling in line behind them. Tyr scowled back at the cove like it might tell him something, but the truth was, he was imagining Helena beneath him again, coming and coming and making that cute little noise while she did.

  You’re such an asshole, he told himself, but then he locked that up when Wulf came to stand at his shoulder.

  The king was without his lethal shadow because, like the bonfire last night, contained spaces filled with the brotherhood meant she didn’t have to be right there on top of him. No matter how much Tyr thought Eiryn liked getting in his face just because she could.

  Wulf didn’t speak. He jerked his chin toward the shoreline and the far ridge as the brothers rowed out of the cove, and Tyr forgot about the king’s asshole bodyguard. And then he scowled harder.

  It looked like a hunting war party, which was hilarious. A band of armed men grouped together a few steps past the tree line, some bearing marks from yesterday’s boring attempt at a raid in that sad little courtyard.

  Tyr slid a look at his king, who returned it. There was no good reason for anyone in that pathetic compound to chase after raiders, ever. Much less raiders who’d spanked them like they were little bitches and had taken nothing of any value but one woman and some old guns.

  Tyr snorted. Next to him, Wulf smiled in agreement.

  But then a familiar figure stepped out of the woods behind the ragged little band, and everything changed from one heartbeat to the next.

  Krajic.

  He wasn’t covered in Zyron’s blood this time. Five years later he still had that fierce beak of a nose that made him look like some kind of bird of prey, cold black eyes that marked him dead inside, and the heavy, martial build that allowed him to wreak his destruction with such seeming ease. Blades and assault rifles hung all over his massive chest, free of any tattoos because men like him took no vows and wore no ink to mark that lack. Today he wasn’t laughing wildly into the flames of the fires he’d caused in that compound on a hill overlooking the Great Lake Sea. He hardly moved out of the trees, while behind him, three men dressed in the same dark colors and with the same shorn heads stood braced for battle. Bastards.

  Tyr recognized them all. Mercenary scum. Blades-for-hire. Walking dead men calling out for the sharp edge of his blade.

  “Turn this boat around. I want his blood.”

  Tyr didn’t fully comprehend that he’d just snapped out a direct order, if not actually to his king, close enough as to make no difference. Wulf had the grace not to behead him on the spot, or even growl at that. His eyes narrowed, at the shoreline rather than at Tyr, and he merely raised his hand, forestalling the order.

  Everything in Tyr roared out a denial at that. He could feel his favorite blade in his hand. He could feel the swipe of it through the air, the thud when it hit, then the glory of that bastard’s head on the ground where it belonged, Zyron avenged at last and his weakness in allowing Krajic to live no longer even a whisper in anyone’s mind. He could see it as if it had already happened. He could taste it, copper and adrenaline—

  “Not today, I don’t think,” Wulf said after a moment, his considering blue gaze on the shore. On that sadistic piece of shit who did nothing to hide himself, nothing to pretend he wasn’t staring straight back at them as the ships headed for the open sea—issuing his challenge as surely as if he still had Zyron at the point of his blade. Wulf put a hand on Tyr’s shoulder as if he’d heard the howl of fury Tyr had checked at his words. “We have stores and women I’d rather not chance losing to that asshole and his men. But what can he want that he would show himself now?”

  Because he could have hidden. He could have watched them sail away without showing himself. That would have been the smart and stealthy move. And Krajic might have been a sick fuck, well deserving of the bloody death Tyr planned to deliver to him, but he’d never been anything less than smart. Until now.

  They didn’t need to turn back to look at Helena then. Tyr knew Wulf was likely fully aware of exactly where Tyr had put her with the rest of the captives from this raid, on the deck between the two masts where they all huddled together out of the way of the oars or the rigging. And when his raging fury ebbed enough for him to think past the urge to throw himself overboard and swim toward his enemy right now, the need for blood justice an endless scream in his veins, he knew Wulf was right. This didn’t make any sense, not even for Krajic, who loved taunting and jeering his way across the battlefield. The only possible reason Tyr could imagine he’d done it was that Krajic must imagine his presence might taunt the raiders enough that they’d turn back and potentially put themselves at a disadvantage. And he would only want to risk such a thing—because even the raider brotherhood at a disadvantage was a force to be reckoned with—if he wanted something they had enough to chance it.

  It had to be about Helena.

  Helena, who’d looked guilty as hell when they’d talked about the treasure that hadn’t been in Ferranti’s compound. Helena, who hadn’t identified herself as pregnant —the way compliant women usually did if they were, as their universal get-out-of-jail-free card—which meant she likely wasn’t and therefore no men should be pursuing her to secure their blood claim on any child she was carrying. Helena, with her unusual attitude problem that could have gotten her killed around a brother less open-minded, accommodating, and generally thoughtful than Tyr. Helena and the tablet computer she was a little too interested in getting back, given everything else that had been going on around her, despite how useless such devices were these days.

  Helena, who claimed she didn’t want to have sex with him, but hadn’t tried to escape him, either—and hadn’t exactly been beating
him off with a stick while she suffered through her first night of captivity.

  Helena, who was the only thing they’d taken from that compound and away from that little red-faced king, who’d now found himself some very interesting friends. Krajic hadn’t been there last night, and he wasn’t the sort to hide himself away from a conflict. Why was he here now?

  “I want to know what makes your captive such a draw when all I saw was a small woman, covered in mud and out of her element,” Wulf said, his hard gaze on the shore. Only the loss of something precious and irreplaceable could lead men to do something so foolish and doomed as come after raiders or ally themselves with such scum while they did. “No warrior, no princess. No pregnancy. I want to know what makes bands of desperate men chase a woman like her to the water’s edge and risk an encounter with three raider ships. And I want that piece of shit to wonder exactly what it is we know.”

  Tyr grunted at that. Particularly because he not only wanted to know the same things himself—he wanted to tear the answers out of her with his teeth. And that strange sense of something like betrayal that worked in him, too, when she hadn’t promised him a thing. She’d made no vows. She’d given him nothing but her strange attitude and the smallest taste of her sweet body. There was no betrayal there. It was absurd that he felt anything like it.

  But Krajic was right there on the shore, somehow connected to Helena or he wouldn’t have been anywhere near the raiders at all, and the insult of it—whether it was an actual betrayal or not—roared in him like a battle cry.

  “So would I,” he gritted out.

  Wulf grinned in the way he had that made little bitches everywhere piss themselves in fear.

  “Find out,” he said coolly. It was nothing less than a direct order, not that Tyr needed it when he had every intention of cracking her open and seeing what was inside. “And let’s discover what we have that brings a pack of carrion crows running to see us off this early in the morning.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t that Helena had never been on a boat before.

  That was the problem some of her fellow captives were having as the endless journey over the water slid through one day straight on into the next. Two burly-looking farmer types from deeper inland were moaning and writhing on the ground in the cargo area set aside for the nonraider human cargo, occasionally tossing up the contents of their stomachs. Many of the women—some who Helena had to work very hard not to recognize from around that bonfire—were a bit green in the face themselves.

  “Do you really expect us to sit here like this, cooped up on the deck like a bunch of farm animals?” she’d asked Tyr when he’d directed her to her spot right near one of the masts with one unsympathetic hand hard in the small of her back. He’d put her right in the center, she’d realized after everyone had boarded and the ships had left their moorings, where he could keep an eye on her while he prowled around growling out orders at everyone.

  “The farm animals are below deck,” he’d retorted in that low voice of his that she couldn’t pretend hadn’t rolled right through her like a delicious sort of thunder, no matter if he was being an ass. “Want to join them?”

  When they were near shore the brothers lined up along the sides of the narrow, sleek raider ship with the upturned ends and set their powerful strength into the oars making the ship seem to hurtle across the surface of the water. Now the sails were up and filled with wind and that felt the way Helena thought flying must.

  The ferryboats that crossed the relatively narrow Mississippi Sea—connecting the west mainland to the east across the water that stretched from the arctic Great Lake Sea in the north all the way down to the same Atlantic Ocean that lapped at the Atlanta shore—were squat and slow. Raider ships were like speeding bullets in comparison.

  Helena had to keep reminding herself that she shouldn’t have been enjoying this one bit as the three raider ships danced with each other up the long stretch of the east mainland’s craggy shore. The mountains that dominated the landscape were rounder and lower than the ones Helena knew from her childhood spent on the move in and around the western highlands. What few people had survived the Storms had retreated into the hills here, the same as everywhere else, looking for higher ground and the relative safety that came with it. Most, of course, hadn’t made it and sometimes when the sun was out and the wind calmed down, Helena caught stomach-dropping glimpses of the ruins of lost lands and whole cities submerged beneath the ocean’s surface as they skimmed right over it.

  Far up into the forests, there were hints of settlements in the bonfires she could see in the distance as night fell and the raiders moored themselves safely off shore where no one could sneak up on them. Though the east mainland was far less settled than the west, especially the farther north they traveled, remains of ancient towns and cities were littered everywhere, deep beneath them in the water and on land. Chunks of half-destroyed buildings hunkered half in and half out of the water along the coast and some settlements had been reclaimed there, the way Ferranti had done in Atlanta. Helena could see the signal fires and the flickering hint of far-off screens at night and in the day, the usual signs of habitation: guards on the heights of refurbished buildings or at the mouths of valleys, and now and then people down near the water trying to fish for their dinner.

  Several days into the journey, the ships navigated the treacherous, ghostly stretch of the Manhattan sea stacks Helena had only heard of and never seen before, where hollowed-out old buildings loomed up from the depths miles from shore, covered in marine deposits and battered by the wind and the waves alike. Some of the local kings used them as prisons, the rumor went, because the only escape was into the mouths of the ever-circling sharks or the vicious currents. But though the wind whistled and sighed through the creepy old structures, making sounds like the groans of the damned, there were no signs of life as the raiders snuck by in their swift, silent ships.

  And the hills in the far distance were the Catskill Mountains, Helena knew, because she knew her maps. The very hills she had to navigate to find the power-station-turned-temple she needed to complete her family’s work. Slipping by and out of reach as she was trapped on this damn boat headed to god only knew where. It made her stomach twist and plummet to the deck beneath her as the ships moved farther north and east and out to sea, showing her where she needed to go and keeping her from it at the same time.

  The raiders were … fiercer on the ships, Helena thought when she could think of anything but her lost opportunities again. She’d had day after day to observe them. It was hard not to admire the camaraderie, the easy way they moved as one and operated as a single unit. The more she could differentiate between them—instead of seeing nothing but monsters in the dark—the more she recognized that when they called themselves brothers, they meant it. She tried to ignore the little pang of something like longing that echoed in her every time she saw evidence of that brotherhood.

  It reminded her of her family before her parents had died. All united—or so she’d thought—and focused on a common purpose. She’d lost so much since then. Her parents to that vile demon Krajic and her sister to a little toad like Ferranti. And with them that sense she was a part of something larger and better than herself, something important and necessary. Now what was she except alone?

  Helena found it was better to concentrate on the raiders. She had to know them to escape them, she told herself. That was surely the only reason she found them fascinating.

  There was a lot more hard work and less creative sex out at sea. The brothers took turns at the oars and manning the sails, and when they shifted positions, staggered to eat and sleep in the same central area as the camp girls and captives. Though there were many blow jobs and the occasional sex act right there in front of everyone, most of the men seemed more on edge on the boat than they’d been around that bonfire, and some of them—including the king and Tyr—didn’t touch the women at all.

  But Tyr didn’t seemed interested in her questions when
Helena tried to ask them, on one of the occasions he tore himself away from either issuing commands to his brothers or huddling up with the terrifying Wulf and the tall, dark-haired, deceptively slender woman who followed the raider king everywhere he went and was, as far as Helena could tell, the only female raider. With eyes like knives to match her unusual profession.

  “You offering to relieve the tension?” Tyr asked in his dark, blunt way, his hands moving to the waistband of his trousers. And something in his gaze made the back of her neck prickle.

  And some tiny little sliver of self-preservation—or maybe it was that warning look in his dark gold eyes, or the sense that he was even less approachable than he’d been before, which beggared belief—kept Helena from responding to that the way she might have if they’d been alone. She stared back at him, her mouth very wisely shut.

  Tyr only smiled in that slow, hard way of his that made her keenly aware of the danger she was in, and left her with one of his little pouches of dried meat and nuts and no information.

  The other women were more forthcoming, especially as the days wore on and there was nothing to do but try not to be disgusted by the open, communal toilet situation or the monotony of the same dried food. A shared eye roll to commiserate felt like a whole friendship forged in blood—though even thinking such a thing made a shaft of guilt spear through Helena, as she recognized how little she’d considered her sister at all since Tyr had taken her. And it didn’t much matter that she was certain Melyssa had thought about her even less than that. Communities were communities, and she hadn’t realized how much she’d missed the little one she’d grown up in. She’d been running for so long. She’d been scared and worried and sleepless with dread more often than not. She didn’t know why the company of these savage people, on a ship headed far away from everything she’d ever known, should feel like an end to all that.

  “I didn’t realize that raiders could be women,” she said one misty afternoon to Joelle, the blond, busty woman beside her. She’d first seen her at the bonfire with her hands wrapped around her ankles while some raider had pumped into her from behind.