He’d probably forget about her too. He’d been assuring himself of that all morning—while he stood around playing grab-ass in the winter wind, waiting for her to show up so he could say a proper goodbye.
Meanwhile, if any part of what he’d told himself was true, he would have left at first light.
He willed her to turn around and come back to him, but she didn’t. Just as she hadn’t broken down into tears or begged him to stay or any of the other things he’d been sure she would do. Not his girl. Not Elenthea. He’d seen a gleam in her too-blue eyes that had suggested the sort of emotion he’d expected, but she hadn’t shown it. If anything, she’d gotten steely, not soft.
It made him just as hard, because his cock was like a homing missile focused entirely on Elenthea. But that didn’t mean he liked it.
His problem was he couldn’t tell if what he didn’t like was his battle senses engaging, telling him that something wasn’t right and that he needed to handle it, or if he was the one who’d gone soft.
Worse than that, he wasn’t sure he cared either way.
He’d been ready to go since morning. He could have simply left, but he hadn’t, and he needed to stop lying to himself about why. And he knew Elenthea was probably right. The little douchebags who passed for some sort of Council here would see the boat eventually once he got underway. Someone would look up from their squalid little pontoon life and see what looked like one of their fishing boats out at sea, and no doubt that would cause a commotion. But it wasn’t as if they could have caught him even if he hadn’t cannibalized all their boats and left them the worse for it. It wasn’t like any of these piece-of-shit boats were fast to begin with. And no way could any fucker here sail like a raider.
He could have left at any time. He should have.
But there was that thing in him that he didn’t recognize and he didn’t think he liked, because it felt too much like softness, and it had insisted that he stay here. He’d convinced himself that no real man would simply disappear without saying goodbye. That was the province of the kind of little punk bitch Tait had never been in his life.
Then Elenthea had showed up looking vulnerable and hopeful, determined and crushed all at once, and he’d realized exactly how badly he’d been lying to himself.
The truth was he didn’t want to go. Well. He wanted to get the fuck off this raft like an itch he couldn’t scratch and that got worse every day. But no part of him was ready to be done with Elenthea. And the fact that she seemed more than ready to wash her hands of him didn’t exactly sit right.
Tait ordered himself to leave. Again. But he still didn’t move a muscle.
Again.
“Fuck it,” he muttered out loud.
He was a battle-trained warrior. A brother of the clan. The veteran of more summer raids than he could count. He did not leave untrained girls behind in sad little shitholes to do his dirty work for him. If she thought she was going to mount some kind of distraction, Tait needed to see what the fuck that was before he left her to handle it.
Because there was no way he was letting his girl hurt herself or get in any real trouble over him. No way in hell.
There had been something in her gaze that he’d chalked up to the fact he was leaving. And the fact that neither one of them seemed to know what to do about how much that sucked. He would have put his hands on her the way he’d wanted to, more than he could remember ever wanting anything else in fact, but he’d known better.
He’d known that if he had, there was no way he’d leave. He’d want one last taste. More than one. And then where would he be?
Not back in the raider city in time to help his brothers and his clan, that was for sure. And Tait didn’t wear tattoos all over his chest and arms for fun. They shouted out the vows he’d taken. They reminded him, and anyone else who cared to look at him, that he was a man of honor.
No matter how much he might want to, he couldn’t stay here any longer. Not even for Elenthea.
But he couldn’t throw a soft, pretty little female into the shit just to make his own escape.
That was not how Tait rolled. There was no honor in that at all.
He wouldn’t have let a woman he hated do it. There was no way he was going to let Elenthea do it, when the things he felt for her ran so deep and were so complicated that no word even approached—
Except the one, that was.
Tait took the wallop of that like the blow it was, but what was funny was that it wasn’t a body blow. He didn’t keel over.
Almost as if it wasn’t exactly a surprise.
He considered it from all angles, but Tait had never been about strategy. That wasn’t his strength. He was about finishing the damned job.
He’d started something with Elenthea. He’d called what he was doing teaching her a few tricks, but that wasn’t what it had turned into. He was teaching her, all right. How to please him. How to be his personal wet dream. And she was.
His first clue that he wasn’t done should have come when he’d realized he hated the idea of her sharing all that with anyone else.
Tait had never been possessive of anything in his life except his blades.
But that was the good thing about being the brother who cleaned up all the messes. He had a lot of time to watch different, flashier brothers go down in blazes of glory—or the opposite, crumpling like a whole lot of nothing much. He’d watched it on the battlefield. He’d watched it all summer with the parade of sudden claimings, too. He hadn’t understood it then, but every brother who’d claimed a mate—from the war chief, who never seemed bothered by anything, to Eiryn, who was always bothered by everything, to Gunnar, who went out of his way to bother everyone else—was better for it. Happier. More settled.
In love, asshole, he snapped at himself. Stop being a little bitch and face the truth. This is love or you’d be halfway home by now.
So he didn’t swing himself up into his boat the way he should have done hours ago and throw himself into the sea’s rough grip. Instead, he set off for the center of the lashed-together pontoons despite the fact it was daytime. A stormy, cloudy daytime, with rain threatening and what looked like a thunderstorm in the distance, to be precise.
But it wasn’t the dark of night. Tait wasn’t exactly hiding.
He slid his favorite blade from its sheath, grinned at the weight of it in his hand where it belonged, and decided it was high time to introduce these soft motherfuckers to their very first raider.
And claim his woman, while he was at it.
8.
It was so easy, in the end.
Elenthea simply walked into the stores, helped herself to a huge jar of something pickled that had obviously been set aside for the House, and took her sweet time walking out. Timing it so she deliberately bumped straight into her mistress on her usual mid-afternoon walk around the house.
For a moment, everyone was frozen into place. Mistress Annet in shock, her eyes wide, while her ladies fluttered around her. Elenthea in an agony of waiting for the hammer to fall at last, holding out the jar that couldn’t be anything else. And that she shouldn’t have touched in the first place, much less carried out of the storage pontoon.
For a moment, it was as if the world caught it’s breath.
“You foolish, foolish creature,” the mistress said softly, eventually. Almost as if she was sorry.
But then she shook her head, and everything speeded up.
The Council was summoned. One of Mistress Annet’s ladies blew the horn, and it wasn’t only councilmembers who gathered. A crowd grew outside the House of Griggs as the word spread through the center of the city that a thief had been caught in the stores. Elenthea was brought outside and made to stand in the middle of all the commotion. There in the slick center of the pontoons that she’d thought were the whole of the world.
But she knew better now. She knew this was only a raft, not The Raft. That the world was bigger and wider and far more complicated than she’d ever imagined.
&
nbsp; How could she possibly go back to thinking this was all there was? Much less living that way?
She knew she couldn’t. And anyway, it was too late now. The jar of pickled fish called her out, sitting there beside her mistress’s feet in silent accusation.
“Can you explain yourself?” Councilmember Lowanna stood before her, her pale double chins gleaming, looked at Elenthea as if she was little better than a shark, all gleaming teeth and dead eyes and circling the Raft with an intent to do harm.
“There must be an explanation,” Mistress Annet said from where she stood in the thicket of councilmembers and Houses who thronged about, all staring at the low-ranked girl who’d dared such a thing. All agog.
“The punishment for pilfering winter stores is drowning,” Lowanna said, with what sounded like a note of relish in her voice. Though it was possible Elenthea was a little oversensitive, as it was her own death by drowning they were discussing. “You will be escorted to the edge of the city where the waves are highest. First you will be stripped. Then you will be weighted. Then you will be dropped over the side, no songs sung to ease your transition or save you from the lurking sharks. Every citizen knows this penalty. Do you understand it?”
“Yes, Councilmember,” Elenthea said dutifully.
The other woman eyed her with distaste. “Unless you can offer some explanation for the fact that you were caught with the stores of the House of Griggs in your own two hands, I see no reason why we shouldn’t go ahead and carry out your sentence immediately. The Raft is no place for thieves.”
“The girl deserves to speak in her own defense, Councilmember.”
It was Mistress Annet again. And Elenthea didn’t understand it. She didn’t think the mistress would be able to pick her out of a group. She wasn’t sure the mistress even knew her name. She’d had semi-private interviews with Mistress Annet over the course of her time in the House of Griggs during which the other woman had seemed less interested in her existence than she did now. When it was too late.
The older woman met her gaze. Then nodded in some kind of encouragement.
“Speak now, girl. Tell them why you did this.”
Elenthea hadn’t thought this far. She’d known what would happen if she stole something and let herself be caught. She’d planned on it, because it would draw all the attention in the city to her. And she knew the end result, but that wasn’t exactly the same thing as living through each and every moment that led to the close of water over her head and no hope of surviving it. She certainly hadn’t prepared a defense.
She should have been terrified. Maybe, on a distant level, she was. But more than that, she felt a surpassing sense of calm. As if none of this touched her. As if none of this was even about her, really.
It was almost as if she’d finally figured out her life. Right here in its last few moments.
But she had to believe that was better than nothing.
She held her mistress’s gaze. “You don’t even know my name,” she said softly. Without any condemnation or accusation. It was simply fact.
She was dimly aware of the crowd all around them and the fact that they quieted to hear her speak. It was amusing—or almost amusing—that this was the moment they chose to listen to the ruminations of a low-ranked girl they’d looked straight through every other time they’d seen her. Here and now, where it couldn’t possibly matter.
“That’s a mistress you’re speaking to, girl,” Councilmember Lowanna snapped, bristling beside Elenthea. “Mind your manners.”
Elenthea looked away from Mistress Annet, but only to scour the crowd for a familiar face. Even Gerina’s dark little glare would have been something. But there wasn’t one. She knew some of the faces, but in the pallid way she knew anybody here. Ghosts to pass in the cold wind and pretend she didn’t see.
She didn’t know what she was expecting. Her mother? She hadn’t seen that woman in years, since shortly after she’d miscarried that second baby and been forced to start anew in the house rankings. The last time they’d encountered each other, her mother had averted her eyes.
Elenthea was alone. As she had always been alone. She thought she should have felt something, some reaction to that inevitability, but there was nothing but that same calm. It wasn’t even a particular emptiness, she noted with a certain, distant amazement. It was a kind of steel-laced serenity that allowed her to ignore the Councilmember who’d snapped at her and this predicament she was in—of her own design—in turn.
“The Raft is not the world,” she said, pitching her voice to carry into the crowd. A skill she hadn’t known she possessed until just now. “It’s just a raft. It floats wherever the ocean takes it, with no will or direction. And we’re all as passive as it is.” She shook her head, looking at all the gray faces beneath the gray sky out here in this sullen, terrible ocean that wanted to sink them. “Am I the only one who’s ever wondered why we don’t ask for more?”
Her answer came in the stinging in her cheek, a hard shock, and the confused realization a moment later that the Councilmember had slapped her. Hard. She had to check her palm to see if Lowanna had drawn blood the way her mother had years ago, but there was nothing. Only the bloom of hot, red pain and a ringing in her ears.
“Life on the Raft is a privilege, not a right,” Lowanna sneered, her chins wobbling with obvious spite, though her voice was also loud enough to be heard out in the boatyards. “Citizens float, but dissidents must drown.”
Elenthea stared back at her with a defiance she’d never felt before. And it must have showed on her face. It must have transformed her, she thought, because the other woman’s gaze went flat. Something like a murderous.
This time when she lifted her hand, Elenthea not only saw it, she saw that it was a fist instead of a palm.
That’s going to hurt, she told herself, bracing for the blow.
“Touch her again, woman, and I will cut that hand from your body and feed it to you, and between you and me, I don’t imagine you’ll like the taste of mean old bitch.”
Tait.
It was impossible, but Elenthea would recognize his voice anywhere. She didn’t simply hear him, every part of her body shivered into awareness. Or welcome. Or some odd space between the two, where her breasts ached and her heart lurched and she wanted him as badly as she ever had, in the same moment that she was terrified that he was here.
Because he shouldn’t have been here. He should have been in that boat of his, already heading for home.
She didn’t pay attention to the ripple that went through the crowd. The muttering voices, the shocked exclamations. She whipped her head around, trying to find him in the throng of women and the few round Houses, but then followed all the wide-eyed gazes to the pontoon behind her. The House of Griggs. Her most recent home on the Raft.
Tait was crouched there on the roof, his blade in his hand and expression she had never seen before on his face.
And he was only one man before so many of her people, no matter how fierce and lethal he looked.
“You can’t be here,” she threw at him, desperately.
The word raider snaked its way through the crowd. The same way they might have whispered dragon. Or Australia. A fairytale come to life, shaped like everybody’s worst nightmare and pointing that deadly weapon straight at them.
She didn’t understand how he’d managed to walk right into the center of the Raft, with no one the wiser. Had he climbed along the roofs all the way here? Someone that big should have made a racket, but of course he hadn’t. She knew somehow that no one heard Tait unless he allowed it.
“This looks a whole lot like a dumbass, boneheaded sacrifice, baby,” Tait said, sounding mean and dark and somehow more delicious than he ever had before. It shuddered through her, and she suddenly felt a whole lot less calm. “Since when do you get caught stealing shit?”
Elenthea ignored that trembling thing deep in her gut, that made her want to do nothing more than run to him. Or run toward the side of the pontoons
to hasten the death she’d already signed up for, so he could escape the way he was supposed to do.
“You need to go,” she told him, and ignored the hiss from Lowanna. “What are you doing here? This is all so you can go. Safely.”
“Or what?” Tait looked around, the corner of his mouth crooking up in the sort of smile that would make a wise person’s blood chill. “There’s no army here. What few men you have are soft and weak. If I wanted to I could sink the whole damn Raft, and nobody would ever care. Or lift a single finger to stop me.”
Griggs coughed a bit. The House to his left frowned. That was the entirety of their response. Mistress Annet clutched at her ceremonial blade, but didn’t pull it free of its sheath. No one else seemed to breathe.
Elenthea was forced to ask herself why she’d submitted her entire life to these people.
“You have no business here,” Lowanna finally chimed in, glaring furiously at Tait. As if it had only just occurred to her to speak—or more likely, she’d only just found her tongue in the face of a real, live, raider warrior right there in front of her.
“I never asked you to sacrifice yourself for me,” Tait growled from his high perch, his gaze on Elenthea. If he’d heard Lowanna, he gave no indication. “Sacrifice is nothing but cowardice dressed up with a purpose. It’s bullshit. And you know it is, or you would have told me what you were doing.”
“While you were so busy leaving?” Elenthea flared back at him, from the part of her that was definitely no longer the least bit calm. “I must have missed the opportunity for a heart-to-heart while you were so busy telling me you didn’t have any feelings and sex was just sex.” She ignored the muttering from the crowd, no doubt all scandalized that she’d defiled house property—herself—with this terrifying raider. She lifted her chin. “But you’re right. I’m the coward.”
That was probably a mistake, she thought, a little dazed at her own temerity. And more than a little afraid of what his reaction would be.