“I care,” Helena said crisply. “I’ll cut off my own head before I go anywhere with either one of them.”
Wulf’s mouth curved. “One battle at a time, I think.” He nodded to the men before him. “I accept your challenge. Or all you all talk and no blade?”
Ferranti shifted uneasily. Krajic, on the other hand, let out a booming sort of laugh at that and then threw his hands out to the sides.
“Who dares?” he bellowed, his voice filling the hall. “Who thinks himself man enough to take me on?” No one moved. Krajic’s laugh got wilder. Louder. “Why am I not surprised that the coward king fills his hall with sheep who take their orders from a devious little cunt like this?”
And that was where Tyr’s patience ended abruptly. With what he thought might be an audible snap, rich with all the bloodlust he’d been holding back since this mercenary bitch had washed ashore.
“Any one of these sheep could take you without breathing hard, you dumbass,” Tyr growled from behind Krajic, his blade like joy against his palm and everything inside him going still. Ready at last to do what had needed doing for five years now. “I’m sure they’d line up for the privilege of killing you for your disrespect alone. But they know your ass is mine.”
* * *
Helena stood like a column of ice next to Wulf, who lounged in his great chair as if what was happening in front of him was hardly interesting enough to keep him awake. That might have outraged her, but she couldn’t focus on anything but the sickening inevitability of the nightmare unfolding before her.
The brothers were already lining the hall but they all moved back, creating a great ring at the center. Helena went as if to move forward, to do something when it seemed no one else would, but found Jurin blocking her way.
“If none of you will do anything, I will,” she threw out, her voice as fierce as she was afraid.
Jurin didn’t speak. But from beside her, Wulf did.
“You’ll stand still.” His gaze was cool, the way it was always cool, but she almost thought there was something like pity in it, and that was somehow worse. “You’ll do nothing but watch.”
“Krajic already killed my parents,” Helena gritted out. “I can’t stand here and watch him kill Tyr, too. I can’t.”
Wulf studied her for a moment. “You have no choice,” he told her, in that infuriatingly mild way of his that made her want to scream down the sky. “And when Tyr has finished carving that mercenary scum into tiny little pieces, you can explain to the war chief of the brotherhood why it is the woman who shares his bed has no faith in his skill.”
There was no particular reason that rebuke should strike her as oddly comforting. It didn’t make any sense. And yet, when Helena tore her gaze away from the king and back to the scene before her, she found she could actually breathe again. It was something.
Tyr and Krajic circled each other in the center of the hall. Each held a blade in his hand, and each let it point at an angle toward the floor. There was a strange tension in the air, and it took Helena a moment to realize it was anticipation. The raiders wanted this, she understood after a moment. They liked all this fighting and they loved Tyr. He was their champion. Their trainer. These past days when she’d accompanied him on his rounds of the Lodge and the brotherhood, he’d spent as much time listening to each one of them as he had running exercises up the mountain or teaching them blade craft out on the green.
Are you his confessor? she’d asked after a long hour with a brother who’d been seriously injured in a raid earlier that summer and was facing the potential loss of his place in the brotherhood. Or his friend?
Both, Tyr had grunted at her. And neither. I outrank almost everyone here. I give them all orders. They’re more likely to follow them fully if they know I give a shit who they are and what happens to them.
And maybe that was what Wulf had tried to tell her, in his own way. That loving Tyr meant loving who he was. And this, she understood in a flash as the two men in the center of the hall clashed their blades together and then moved away again, was precisely who Tyr was.
She’d known it the first moment she’d seen him in action, coming over the wall of that compound, slick and deadly and in total control of himself and his raider brothers and the situation.
This was who he was. This was what he did.
The promise of him was stamped deep in all those sleek, perfectly honed muscles and the way he moved his powerful body. He was the fight. The blade and the dance. The threat of blood in every thrust, every retreat. The sheer, lethal power he wielded as easily as he breathed.
She let herself look at Krajic, really look at him. She hadn’t laid eyes on him directly since that awful night two years ago. She was dimly aware that Ferranti was here, too, and that yes-man Rolland she’d dutifully spent the winter with, but it was if they were insubstantial in comparison. Mere shadows near the bigger man’s feet. Ferranti was annoying, grasping, and greedy and willing to dress up all his needs and call them imperatives, but he was nothing next to the seething evil that was Krajic.
He was as big as she remembered him, roped in thick, dense muscle that made him nearly as wide as he was tall. He was not covered in blood or soot today, but the fact he was marginally cleaner didn’t exactly make him look approachable. He and Tyr were the same height, though Krajic’s arms were meatier and he lacked a neck. He swung his blade so hard it made a whistling sound in the air and he roared every time he connected.
He was her living, breathing worst nightmare. That close-cropped hair made him look like little more than a grinning skull with that vicious, ugly scar down one side of his face and that nose of his like a bird of prey. He was worse than a nightmare, because he was real. He was real, and he was here, and once again he was threatening what Helena loved.
Only this time, it wasn’t an unmatched slaughter of two innocents who’d never lifted a blade in their lives. Helena couldn’t let herself think of that, of her poor parents in those limp and broken heaps on the hard earth. She couldn’t let herself go there. She focused on Tyr instead.
“Are you so hard up for a woman?” Tyr asked him, whirling out of the reach of a deadly thrust and swinging back with one of his own. “You had to cross the sea to steal one back from a raider clan?”
The blades slammed together. Krajic threw an elbow, making the raiders growl, but Tyr only grunted when it hit his shoulder before forcing the mercenary back with a hard kick. Then a vicious swing of his blade. Krajic caught it with the edge of his own and laughed as metal met metal and scraped loud.
“Is she yours? Perfect. That will make the things I’m going to do to her that much sweeter.”
Tyr’s blade caught Krajic’s arm. Blood welled from the mercenary’s skin, and both men bared their teeth. The tension in the hall seemed to pull tighter.
“First blood, asshole,” Tyr growled. “Is that the kind of sweetness you were looking for? Enjoy it.”
“You raiders are such children.” But Krajic wasn’t laughing as he said it. “You’d let all your enemies walk in here of their own free will, wouldn’t you? As long as they asked you for safe passage. What will your honor do for you when I burn this place to the ground, I wonder?”
“Try it,” Tyr suggested, his voice so cold and harsh that it made goose bumps shiver all the way down the length of Helena’s spine. She thought she’d seen Tyr furious. She thought she’d seen him lethal. She hadn’t seen anything. “You’re the asshole with no honor who stranded himself in the middle of the raider brotherhood and doesn’t know enough to keep his mouth shut. I have to tell you, I don’t like your odds.”
They’d separated at that, back to another wary circling of each other. Each man gleamed with exertion. Tyr tossed his blade from one hand to the other, the way he had on that long ago night in Ferranti’s courtyard, his gaze searing and intent on Krajic. He didn’t look at Helena. Even so, she felt as if she was tucked there somewhere on his mighty chest, in between the tattoo of his clan sigil that matched
the one on the wall above him as well as on every single one of his brother’s chests and the scars that marked him no one else but Tyr. As if she was as much a part of him as they were.
“I’ve been killing raiders since my balls dropped,” Krajic sneered. “All over the mainland, wherever you animals roam. You should worry about your own odds, not mine.”
“Yeah?” Tyr sounded unimpressed. Their blades flashed in the air, then clashed together in a loud tangle of steel that made Helena flinch. “How’d you get that scar?”
Krajic growled at that and then attacked, hard. For long moments there was nothing but the metallic shout of the blades and the grunts from the two men, and the gasps here and there from the spectators as this parry or that feint almost ended in blood or dismemberment or worse.
Tyr ducked a blow that would have taken his arm off. Krajic twisted away from a downward thrust that almost rid him of his head. Both men’s muscles bulged. Both men were breathing heavily.
But only one man was Tyr, Helena thought fiercely, unable to look away for even an instant. Only one man could win.
She couldn’t accept that there was any other possible outcome.
“I do know you,” Krajic growled. “You were there when that pissant raider bitch tried to hack off my face.”
“He was my blood brother.” Tyr’s voice was a snarl and he struck out at Krajic, getting his blade close to the other man’s face—but Krajic shoved it back and spun away. “His name was Zyron. He was a hundred times the man you’ll ever be. And you’ve been little more than a walking ghost since the day you took him down.”
“A ghost with a significant body count.” Krajic laughed. “You pompous jackass. I know all your raider tricks. How do you think I keep killing so many of you?”
And he struck out then, slicing Tyr across his chest, leaving a bright red trail. Helena gasped and clapped her hands over her mouth. But Tyr only sucked in a breath, throwing a dark gold look at Helena from across the hall’s floor as if she’d made that sound in his ear.
Everything seemed to well up between them then, in that lightning instant. Blood and blades and that simmering thing that wound them together, even here. Even now. Even when all Helena could do was stand there and watch.
It made her feel as breathless as if he’d kissed her.
“Do you enjoy the taste of my blade?” Krajic roared. The corner of Tyr’s hard mouth curved slightly, then he shifted his focus back to the mercenary. The loss of his attention made Helena feel bereft and anxious at once, even though she knew she was the last thing he should be worrying about just then. “Do you want a deeper cut?”
Krajic swung but Tyr moved with him, avoiding Krajic’s blade on one side and then punching him hard in the face with his free hand. Helena’s heart leapt in her chest as Krajic staggered back.
“I’ll take that out on your bitch’s skin,” Krajic snarled as he regained his balance. He lunged toward Tyr. “I’ll enjoy making her scream.”
Tyr punched him again, harder.
Blood arced from Krajic’s nose and splattered across the floor as he lurched backward. He started to swing his blade at Tyr’s legs, but Tyr jumped into the air and kicked Krajic’s wrist with a move that was somehow graceful and lethal at the same time. The blade flew from his grip and the mercenary fell backward at the same time, hitting the floor with a thud as his blade clattered and spun and slid out of his reach.
He grunted, and tried to roll for his weapon, but Tyr was there, kicking the blade even farther away. He tried to pull one of his guns from his harness, but Tyr stomped on his hand until he howled and let go.
“Guess what, you piece of shit?” Tyr growled.
Helena’s pulse was like a drum in her ears as Tyr stood there, looking down into Krajic’s face. She didn’t believe this was real. She didn’t believe Tyr could truly kill the nightmare that had haunted her and chased her all this time. She didn’t believe this was happening, that Krajic wouldn’t rise up and take Tyr down the way he had her parents.
She could still see their blood on his hands. She could still see the fiendish thrill he’d taken in the spilling of it, transforming his face and making him every bit the demon she’d always thought he was.
Sure enough, the mercenary lunged to the side, but Tyr kicked him hard in the ribs. There was a crunching sound and a heavy groan, and then the evil bastard who’d murdered Helena’s family and Tyr’s alike lay still.
“I taught these raiders all the tricks they know,” Tyr told Krajic with lethal precision and a certain hard gleam in his eyes. “And not one of them has beaten me yet. And neither will you.”
He lifted his blade so it gleamed in the light of the raider hall, right there before Helena and the brotherhood alike, though Helena thought she was the only one who risked tears at the sight of it.
Then he slammed it down, straight through Krajic’s chest.
16
Finally.
After all these years, Krajic was where he belonged: at the end of Tyr’s blade and at his feet, blood answering blood the way Tyr had vowed it would over Zyron’s funeral pyre.
“I hope it hurts,” he told the marauding bastard beneath him.
The hall was hushed. He heard the ragged breathing of one of Krajic’s mercenary buddies nearby, but he didn’t look up. He was focused on the piece of shit below him, whose mouth gaped open in disbelief around a bubbling sound that told Tyr exactly how little time he had left. Minutes. Seconds, if he was lucky.
Tyr had imagined this scene a thousand times. The thrust of his blade, the sweet and fitting bloody end of this scumbag who’d killed Zyron. He’d wanted nothing else.
But everything was different now, and the truth of that kicked at him, making him lift his gaze once more to the woman who stood there on the raised dais next to his king. His woman. His king.
How had he believed there was nothing left in his life he couldn’t survive losing?
He had his honor, and he’d reclaimed Zyron’s. He’d defended his king and his clan against its enemy. He’d have his woman, too. But he caught her eyes, smoky gray peering at him over the hands she held to her mouth, and they looked slicked with emotion. For him, he knew. That was all for him.
And when he pulled his blade out of Krajic’s chest and then slammed it back in, through the heart this time to kill him instantly, it wasn’t for Zyron.
It was for Helena.
He stood then, the adrenaline still cartwheeling through him, mixing in with the thrill of victory and that new thing. That other thing. That pressure in his own chest that felt a little too precarious and huge for his liking.
Enough, he thought then. He was finished playing games.
He met Wulf’s gaze, and realized he’d taken a long time to do that. Something he was sure his king had noticed. But Wulf only studied him a moment and then turned his attention to the mainlanders who still stood there before his throne.
“If you wish to grieve him,” he said almost offhandedly, “I’m afraid I can’t allow it. He desecrated the bones of a brother of this clan. He will receive no proper burial.”
The ragged group exchanged glances, but no one said anything. The rest of it came back to Tyr then, and he tensed, remembering there was still the other part of this circus to handle. He considered the blade in his hand for a moment, eyeing the back of Ferranti’s head. It would be so simple …
But no. He couldn’t pick and choose his honor to suit his mood. That would make him no better than the piece of shit at his feet.
“We’ll leave,” Ferranti said, and he sounded slightly chastened. The two mercenaries who had come with Krajic looked at each other, then moved away from the little kinglet. A wise move, in Tyr’s opinion, and not surprising from two scumbags whose entire existence was for sale. “But we’re taking the woman. She’s mine.”
That red haze descended again, like a gut punch. It would take so little. A simple swing of his blade and the jackass kinglet would be another puddle on the floor fo
r the cleaners to take out with the trash. The end. And Tyr would not have to suffer the indignity of hearing other men claim his goddamned woman again.
A man had only so much patience. Tyr’s had run out.
Wulf sighed. “You could not defeat a mosquito in battle, much less my war chief.”
Tyr somehow got a hold of himself at that, and didn’t smite the red-faced upstart. Yet.
“This isn’t a challenge,” Ferranti sputtered. “This is a claim. A prior claim.”
“The woman already said you have no claim on her,” Tyr growled, because maybe he didn’t have a hold of himself. Or maybe it was a very loose hold.
Ferranti scowled at him, then back at Wulf.
“I don’t. But she’s already married.” He waved at the man to his left, the narrow-shouldered bitch who had muttered about blisters on his pansy feet all the way from False Harbor, and who had no idea he’d just earned himself a place at the end of Tyr’s sword. Married. He hated that word. “This is her husband. My loyal man Rolland.”
Wulf eyed the loyal Rolland, who shrunk before him, his light brown face looking more ashen and less loyal the longer the king stared at him.
“That seems unlikely,” Wulf murmured, sounding lazy and unbothered, as if he didn’t care either way.
And Tyr would ordinarily love him for these games he liked to play. But today it seemed he had no sense of humor at all. And as if he could smell it in the air, Wulf shifted his gaze to Tyr’s in warning.
And he tried. He did. He tried to calm down. But that seemed about as unlikely as this soft little twerp being anyone’s husband, much less Helena’s. What was likely was that Tyr would take off his head if he touched her.
More than likely.
“Listen,” Ferranti said, his voice growing louder. “I don’t know how you do things here, but I’m not just some guy. I’m Ferranti. I’m as much a king as you are!”
His eyes bugged out with rage as he threw that at Wulf. Then even more as the brothers around him laughed.
“Would you have to announce it, do you think, if you were?” Wulf asked, silken menace in every syllable. Unmistakable this time, no matter how he played at indolence. “You’re nothing but a greedy little man with a very small compound filled with the sort of people who always end up in such places, too exhausted to go anywhere else. I don’t mind if they bow to you. Small people always find small gods to hear their tiny prayers. But you and I are not the same. Don’t forget that again.”