“I don’t think…” She couldn’t seem to finish a sentence. She didn’t know what she wanted.
You know exactly what you want. Your problem is, you can’t have it.
“You think too much,” Tyr told her, sounding as hard as he did lazy, somehow. “That’s probably how you end up telling lies to my face and imagining that’s a good idea. But no worries, baby. I can solve your problems.” He looked past her, frowning as he scanned the hall. “You just need to get another cock inside you like a good little camp girl. It’s like medicine. You’ll be right in no time.”
“Tyr. Please. I can’t—” His dark eyes were narrow when they met hers again, and somehow even more dangerous. She forced herself to continue. “Don’t I have … I mean, I thought I got to choose.”
“Then choose.” His voice was hard. Merciless. “Pick somebody. Anybody. Pick a whole group, I don’t care.”
She was hugging herself and she didn’t know when she’d started doing that. Or why she didn’t care as much as she should that he was wearing boots and trousers and she was standing utterly naked before him, only the mess of her thick hair hiding her, and even then, only a little. If anything, she liked it—or that was what the new slickening of her pussy told her.
It almost scared her, the way she yearned for this man.
That was a lie. It scared her a lot.
She coughed. “What if I choose no one?”
He tilted his head slightly to one side, treating her to more of that pitiless, intense focus of his, as if he was prying his way inside her head. As if he was in there with her, seeing everything. As if she had nowhere left to hide.
“Why would you do that?”
Helena blinked, then opened her mouth to answer him, but he kept going.
“Here’s the problem.” Tyr jutted out his chin, somehow encompassing the space between them as he did it. And all of her. “This is weird already. You’re not acting like any camp girl I’ve ever known. I told you it was a type and you’re not it.” He shook his head. “After the show you just put on, anyone here would fuck you, no question. But the brothers aren’t likely to keep you around afterward. You’ve got trouble written all over you, just like that redhead.”
She gritted her teeth. “I want to be a camp girl.”
“More bullshit. I don’t know what you want, sweetheart, but it’s not that. Or we wouldn’t be having this conversation, because you’d have another cock down your throat already.”
“Maybe not everybody in the whole world wants to have sex all the time!” she snapped. “Have you ever considered that as a possibility?”
“Sure,” Tyr said, that ferocious gleam in his dark eyes intensifying. “But we’re not talking about the whole world. We’re talking about camp girls, who do.”
“No one wants to have sex all the time. People go through different phases, or they change, or they—”
He shrugged. “Camp girls don’t become camp girls unless they have a pretty easy relationship with sex. All the time. Because if they weren’t about that, if they didn’t love it, they wouldn’t want to be camp girls in the first place. See how that works?”
“I don’t think you’re actually an expert on what anybody other than you wants,” she told him, and only then did she remember that she was probably supposed to be playing this differently. Sweet and soft. Helena doubted comfort pussy got mouthy. “Anyway, I’m easing into it. Like I did in that hot pool.”
“You’re driving me crazy, is what you’re doing.”
She told herself to breathe. To ignore the way that growl of his wound its way through her. “I don’t know how I could—”
“Ask me, Helena,” he gritted out. “You don’t want to fuck your way around the room? You don’t have to. You’re not cut out to be a camp girl and that’s fine. But you have to stop lying to me. You have to ask me to help you.”
She was shaking again, hard. There was no pretending otherwise, and his eyes were too hot, too fierce, his face hard and grim. And she hadn’t asked anyone for help in a long time. Not since the cries had come in the night in that empty stretch of farmland between two relay stations dressed up to look like temples. The fires and the screams. She and Melyssa had gone with the rest of the small compound to see what the commotion was and had found Krajic, bare-chested and wild-eyed, roaring his victory into the fire.
Standing over the bodies of their parents.
No one had helped Helena then. She’d taken her sister by the hand and they’d run with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They’d hidden in mud to hide their tracks and expected to die at any moment in those first awful weeks. They’d spent a night or two with a vagabond caravan talking about their plans to head north and had gone south instead, and had put a whole, long winter between them and the place Krajic had killed their parents. Then another. Helena had done all that on her own. She’d had no one she could consider trusting, not even Melyssa, who had become more and more mutinous by the day.
“I don’t need help,” she whispered now. Because she didn’t know what else to say.
Tyr glowered at her. “Everybody needs help sometimes, asshole. No one sails a ship alone. You know what happens if you do? You either feed your own dumb ass to the sharks or you run aground somewhere and wait for the carrion birds to pick your bones dry.” She thought the way he was glaring at her might leave another mark, the way his teeth had. “Or, Helena, you could ask for what you want.”
Her mouth worked, but nothing came out. She felt too cold, suddenly, as if he’d tossed her outside somewhere in the snow. And she didn’t know how to do this. Her life had been made up of secrets and lies, all for a better future but impossible to share with anyone in the present. Even with him, no matter what she’d imagined in that brief moment before. She didn’t know how to ask for anything. Her sister had taught her there was no point, that even family would betray her if it benefited them.
But Tyr wouldn’t do that, a voice deep inside of her whispered, like a bell ringing, low and true. Tyr was a man of honor, bound by his word. That was what his brotherhood meant, what his tattoos proclaimed. That was who he was.
And she couldn’t imagine letting anyone else touch her the way he had. She didn’t want any raider hands on her but his. She had to imagine that no matter how terrifying, admitting it wouldn’t be the end of her. It couldn’t be.
While she knew somehow the other choice would break something in her she doubted she’d ever fix.
“I…” She had to take another shuddering breath and she tried to swallow down the panicked dryness in the back of her throat—and he did absolutely nothing to help her. He only watched, the bastard, his dark eyes glittering. “I don’t want to be a camp girl.”
“That’s a good start.” He waited, and when she only stood there, trembling, that hard expression of his edged over into a scowl. “But that’s not all you want, Helena. Spit it out or you’re not going to get it.”
“You.” She threw it out there and it left her in a dizzy rush, like tearing off part of skin. But then it was done, and the relief that surged through her behind it changed everything. She stopped shaking. His eyes gleamed. Helena stood taller, and her voice was finally hers again, like this was magic. “I want you. To myself.”
And maybe for other things, like trust—but one impossibility at a time.
“Yeah,” Tyr growled at her. “I know.”
* * *
He knew the moment she woke that next morning, though his back was to his wide, comfortable bed piled with furs and one exhausted compliant girl—who was not, in any sense of the term, compliant any longer.
Tyr was pretty damned proud about that. He thought he might have to punish her a little more often, if this was the result.
He’d already woken her up once much earlier this morning in a fashion he thought he could get used to pretty fast. He’d liked coming awake in his usual instant rush to find Helena’s tempting little ass pressed tight against his morning erection. He’d like
d sliding into her even more and getting off on the sweet pleasure of the way she got wet for him at the faintest touch of his cock now, even before she fully woke. And he’d really, really liked making her crumble and shake all around him before she’d even opened her eyes.
“Come here,” he said now.
He heard her shift on his bed, and it pleased him more than he could let himself acknowledge when she came to his side naked, not trying to cover herself or hide or any of the crap she’d been dancing around down in the great hall. But then, it had been a very long, very educational night for his mainlander.
All the best punishments were opportunities to learn and grow. Or so his own hard-ass teachers had always assured him.
She peered past him out the glass doors, where the murky storm clouds were already advancing over the harbor, the bitchy gray sea all white caps and gloom in the distance. Out on the cliffs, the evergreen trees were bending into crazy shapes, dancing wildly in the wind.
And the rain pounded down. Punishing and ferocious but even so, it was nothing like winter.
Helena moved closer to him, and Tyr was screwed, he really was, because he liked that, too. And then she wrapped her arms around his waist and he knew there was no coming back from it. He’d never felt this shit before. But he knew what it was.
Maybe he’d known before, because why else would he have been so angry at her for lying to him? Betraying him, even? All things captives could pretty much be depended upon to do, no matter how hot they were.
Depending what happened when Riordan brought Gunnar back, what was on that damned tablet, and what secrets Helena was still keeping from him—it might not matter anyway. Tyr told himself to ignore it, despite everything that roared in him to do something. Mark her. Claim her. Keep her. If there was one thing his life in the brotherhood had taught him, it was this: there was no point jacking himself up about maybe. There was only right now and who knew? Something could kill him long before maybe rolled around. A great many somethings had tried.
“Every time it rains like this I worry it will last forever,” Helena said softly, almost as if she was talking to herself. “That it will wash away what little is left.”
“This is nothing but a summer squall,” he said, and he … wanted things he couldn’t remember ever wanting before. For the first time in his life, he wanted to comfort a soft and breakable woman himself, not let one bang him into a better state of mind. That thing kicking at his chest just then had nothing to do with sex. Nothing at all.
Tyr was a man made of battles and blades. Blood oaths and blood honor. He was about as comforting as the bastard rain that was already coming down in sheets and trying to rattle its way through his glass doors, and squall or not, Helena was probably right. It wanted to kill them all.
It had never occurred to him to worry about the fact he had nothing soft in him to give anyone, because he’d never wanted to give. He’d eradicated all that nonsense, called it a weakness a long time ago, gone to great lengths to beat it out of himself as a brother should.
And this was a summer storm, not a philosophy exercise.
He had one thing to give her. One thing he knew could take her mind away from the secrets she kept or the things that worried her. One thing that would make them both happy in whatever space they had before the next crisis.
And there was always a next crisis.
“It will be a few days,” he said gruffly, smoothing his hand down her back and liking the way she let out a breathy laugh at that, leaning into him at the same time. He liked far too much about this woman. That was the trouble, when he still didn’t know what she was hiding. When he might never know, or not in time. “We might need to sit out the worst of it.”
“That sounds like a recipe for boredom and cabin fever.”
“Oh, baby,” he said, turning her to face him, and she was so pretty all messed up from sleep and from him that Tyr wished—for the first time in his entire existence—that he was a different kind of man. The kind who could deserve her, but he wasn’t that. He wasn’t ever going to be that. He thought he’d keep her all the same. At least until Gunnar came back. “You don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, as usual.”
And he took great pleasure in showing her exactly what he meant.
13
The storm raged for days, just as Tyr had promised.
Summer storms were never as bad or as long as the ones that had battered every place Helena had ever lived throughout the long winters, but the same protocols had always been followed. Everyone had hunkered down and anxiously waited them out. She’d once spent ten days in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, sitting with a collection of complete strangers in a mostly dry cave as they’d all waited out a nasty thunderstorm chain that had pummeled the mountains. It had been smelly and uncomfortable, yet no one had complained, because the alternative had been worse. The alternative had always been worse. No one wanted to actually go out in a storm.
Mainlanders hid from bad weather. They barred themselves away from the rainstorms and they waited out the blizzards. Shelters weren’t simply choices, they were necessities. No one tempted fate. No one tested themselves against the howling winds. There were too many ruins across the whole of the mainland, many that people still lived in, however uneasily, to take any storm lightly.
Raiders, Helena discovered, were far less cowed by a little rain.
Tyr had said they’d sit out the worst of it, but he never seemed to think that point had arrived. The return celebration continued for days. Then merged into what she imagined was real life in the Lodge and the raider city arrayed at its foot without so much as a hiccup. Instead of hiding themselves away, the raiders merely went about their business. Damply. Tyr and all the rest of his raider brothers seemed to find the storm refreshing. He actually used that word.
“How is it refreshing? It’s just wet,” she said as they ate in the great hall one night.
Tyr’s mouth curved. “It’s not hot like summer. And it’s not cold as balls like it is all winter long.” He popped a cut of venison into his mouth. “That’s refreshing, Helena. These are the eastern islands. It’s always wet.”
And there were so many things she needed to think about. Plans she needed to form. Decisions she needed to make before Riordan came back, she told herself as she ate from Tyr’s hand the way captives did. To force a captive’s bond with her captors, she was well aware, and to reinforce her helplessness and ignite her desire to please him. She didn’t think she needed any extra help in that area.
But he sat her on his lap at every shared meal anyway and he fed her as he liked, and there was a part of Helena that knew she should have been plotting how to escape this even then. No matter that she’d closed the door on the most obvious solution. No matter that sometimes, as stormy days bled into long nights, she forgot that she was a captive at all.
She’d only surrendered to him temporarily, she told herself throughout the days that blurred one into the next while the rain pounded down outside. That didn’t mean she’d surrendered entirely. Of course not. She chanted that to herself sometimes, but that didn’t make it feel true—and it didn’t change the fact that the only thing that made her feel any better was the way he touched her.
He did it all the time. Sometimes with the intensity and intent that always led to her screaming out his name and him sunk deep inside of her. But other times, almost absently. He kept her by his side as he walked around the Lodge, performing his war chief duties, which mostly seemed to involve knowing a great deal about all the other raiders’ business and ordering them in and out of battle exercises. He kept his hand on the back of her neck as they walked, his thumb sweeping back and forth in a slow, sweet rhythm as they moved, making what should have felt like a collar seem a lot more like a caress.
She was beginning to crave it. To need it. All of it.
Him.
Every early morning, he woke her in the same dark and delicious way, no matter how many times
he’d had her in the night. He rolled them over in the dark and surged inside of her. And she was coming almost before she knew where she was, held securely in the grip of his powerful hands and pressed down hard by that steel and granite body of his. Then he left her gasping out his name in his bed while he headed out into the wet to play his war games. He called it training.
Helena went out on his balcony one still-dark morning instead of drifting back into sleep. She bundled herself in one of his fine wool sheets and she stood in the rain with the wind cutting at her. What daylight there was shone a faint and cloudy gray in the distance, and she stood there for longer than was wise, watching all the raider warriors charge up the steep, rocky mountainside that towered behind the Lodge. They almost looked as if they were in a race.
“Of course it’s a race,” Tyr grunted when she asked him later, stripping off his soaking wet clothes in his luxurious bathroom. “The race is against your honor and your honor had better win. If it doesn’t, you’ll get your ass kicked.” When she only stared at him, he’d relented and smiled. Just a little. Just that wicked tilt in the corner of his hard mouth that made everything else fade. “A slow brother is a liability to the whole brotherhood. His lazy ass could get us all killed. No one wants to be the brother who gets an entire raiding party killed, Helena. Ever.”
He usually woke her up again when he returned from his daily race, his honor intact and his ass unkicked. He either pounded on that swinging bag of his until she woke to the drumming sound of it and sought him out in his living room, or he simply hauled her out of his bed and into his shower with him, where he generally had even more energy to burn away in all that exultant hot water.
It turned out a man built the way he was always had energy to burn. And was always finding ways to burn it—and to make sure his body remained the finely honed weapon it was. Helena learned that the raiders ate and fought as much as they had sex, and with the same level of focus and enthusiasm. They used iron bars to mimic blades and hacked away at old tree trunks or propped-up logs out on the green, no matter how hard it was raining, a thousand cuts a day. Usually with Tyr yelling at them to go harder, faster, smarter, and then demonstrating his controlled fury when they failed to impress him. They fought each other, inside and outside, up and down the halls, with fists and with furniture, with blades and with more iron, and then they laughed uproariously and pounded each other on the back as they bled.