This was beyond simply losing it. This was upper-level bullshit. The kind that would get the brotherhood arrayed against him and even his tattoos cut off his chest if he’d showed this kind of pansy-assed lunatic behavior in the Lodge.
He was gripping the steering wheel so hard he was surprised it didn’t rip off in his hands.
Gunnar was sure he could hear Maud swallow, hard and long, despite the way his own pulse was kicking up a racket in his chest.
“I understand,” she said, and that damned mask of hers was back. He didn’t have to look at her face to see it. He could hear it in her calm, serene voice, and he hated it as much as ever. “You want to kill me. You should have said so from the start.”
“I would have,” he threw at her, “but you were too busy sucking my dick.”
Now she laughed. Silvery and musical, like moonlight, and it slid all over him and made everything worse, because this time he knew it was an act as she did it. He wanted to rip it out of the air and burn it. He wanted his own words back while he was at it. He was coming apart at the seams and the worst part was, he knew it wasn’t her fault. This was all him.
He’d kissed her like he was her mate and he’d liked it. He’d more than liked it. He’d forgotten himself and his purpose here and there was no coming back from that. There was no pretending it hadn’t happened.
Just like there was no pretending that what he really cared about, even right now when his dick was no longer doing his thinking for him and he’d already messed everything up, was all the ways he’d failed his real mate. That would make sense. That would make him less of an asshole, certainly.
But what he was actually obsessing about was what was going through his little nun’s head while she aimed that laughter at him like the weapon it was. One more thing he’d have to deal with. Later. When he locked up this woman somewhere and had a little reality check with himself. And the cock that hadn’t listened to a single order he’d given it since she’d wandered up to him in that desert, like he was a kid again.
“That’s what I’m trained to do,” she told him, and he hated that even more. He wasn’t the same as those asshole priests. He wasn’t the goddamned church she’d walked away from. She shifted to look at him sweetly. So very sweetly it made him want to punch a hole in his own dashboard. “If it makes you feel better, I’ll even call you—”
“Don’t you fucking dare.”
He didn’t know where that came from. It was torn out of him, furious and dark. But he knew that if she called him master now, here, like this, he would never recover. He didn’t want to examine it. He didn’t care why, in that moment. He only knew he couldn’t let it happen.
“Will it be tonight?” she asked, what felt like years later.
He didn’t pretend he didn’t know what she was asking. “No. We have some shit to do first.”
“When?”
“Soon.” Gunnar navigated the truck around a tree, then headed down to the beach and the cove where he’d hidden his ship in a sea cave. He didn’t know why he didn’t tell her exactly when the ritual would take place, on that Kentucky battlefield under the full moon due in the beginning of August. But he didn’t. “After the June solstice.”
Maud nodded jerkily. She pulled in a loud breath, much too loud in the quiet of the truck between them, then let it out.
“Will it hurt?”
Gunnar hit the brake. The truck fishtailed to a stop on the sand, and when it stopped moving, there was nothing but the crash of the Mississippi surf against the shore and Maud’s harsh breathing.
He reached over and took her chin in his hand, swinging her face around to his, which was probably another mistake. But who was counting at this point? What could one more matter?
Touching her was always a bad idea. He got that now, even as that same fire rolled back into a simmer inside him and his cock stood at attention all over again. He should have dropped his hand. He didn’t.
“Everything worth doing hurts, little nun.”
Her eyes were big and too dark to read, and he knew he’d done that. He shouldn’t have cared.
But he still didn’t let her go.
“I know that,” Maud said softly.
Not serenely. Her voice was husky. Broken, he thought. It had the same effect as her kiss. It made his chest hurt. It cracked him wide open, damn her, and he didn’t have the slightest idea how to wrap that shit up the way he should.
Her blue gaze met his. Held. “Do you?”
7.
Maud woke up in a dawn so pale the stars were still visible high above her, etched against the sky like little windows.
It took her a minute to remember where she was and what had happened—especially when the crash of the waves so close by tempted her to imagine she was back in her uncle’s caravan. As if Father Tiero had never appeared that day and spirited her away. No church, no bishop, no desert fox. She closed her eyes again and drifted into that thought, smiling when she heard a seagull call from high above.
It would be nice to get up and have no chores more onerous than tending to the family fire and doing her part with their meals. No prayers, no penance, no shame or sin. No thundering lectures about her duty to the church and no harsh paddlings to remind her what a disappointment she was and ever would be. Just the unspoiled, unsettled Oklahoma coast, empty for miles in all directions. That rattling old caravan with scavenged plastic bags to fill the holes that only seemed to get wetter and gloppier come the winter rains and offered precious little insulation either way.
She’d hated that caravan. She’d spent long nights wishing the caravan had been carried off and sunk in the Storms like so many other things best forgotten¸ and so what if her mother told her daily that they should count themselves lucky they had any kind of shelter at all. She’d still hated it. Along with her bed on the sofa in their cluttered living area that offered her no privacy at all, to say nothing of the drafty walls that brought the winter chill in no matter how she’d tried to patch them up.
Still, somehow, she thought she’d like to see the beat-up old place again, which would have shocked the eleven-year-old version of herself who couldn’t leave it fast enough. And far more than that, she’d love one more visit with her bold, theatric mother, who’d ringed her eyes in dramatic soot from the campfire no matter if there was no one there to see her besides family. She’d taught Maud how to dance around the fire to the accompaniment of otherwise grumpy Mikolaj on his guitar, his most prized possession in all the world, that he sometimes crooned to as if the smooth instrument was his mate.
Maud could almost hear the notes her uncle could pluck out of nowhere and make sing so sweetly. She could almost hear the words her mother sang along in what she and Mikolaj had always called the old language. The language their grandmother had handed down to them from her grandmother before her, going back through the Storms to that other, divided world of hundreds of different languages and cultures, or so the stories went. Maud could almost imagine herself back there on the cold Oklahoma beach, aping her mother’s graceful steps around the crackling fire, dreaming of the day she’d grow into her mother’s thick, heavy hips and large breasts, little realizing she’d inherited a reedy body like her uncle’s instead—
But that means no Gunnar, a different voice whispered inside of her, and she snapped her eyes open at that.
Because that kiss—all that kissing, if kissing was even the right word to describe the way he’d taken her mouth and taken her over—still hummed inside of her, even all these hours later.
She sat up from her makeshift bed, which had been only a length of thick wool to cover her and one of Gunnar’s shirts for a pillow as she huddled in the dry sand. She’d drifted off to sleep aware that this man planned to kill her, that he’d told her so with no apparent confusion or regret of any kind, but comforted nonetheless by the unmistakable scent of him on the shirt balled up beneath her head.
She had no desire to untangle that mess.
Maud looked
around the beach where they’d stopped last night. The tide was low and Gunnar was maneuvering the truck into the back of his boat as if the truck and the boat were two interlocking puzzle pieces, built to snap together into one. She pulled her legs up so she could wrap her arms around her knees, she tugged the wool closer around her to keep her warm against the brisk sea air, and she watched him.
She couldn’t pretend she didn’t enjoy the view, no matter what his plans for her were.
He’d stripped down to his bare chest again, which a stronger woman than Maud might be able to ignore, she supposed. Or a blinder one, anyway. The man planned to sacrifice her in some ridiculous black magic ritual and she still couldn’t manage to keep herself from ogling him. He was beautiful on such a grand scale it made her eyes sting, no matter how she told herself it was the salt on the breeze. It was much too easy to get lost in the intricate dance of his smooth muscles and the tattoos that seemed as alive as he was, as he moved in and out of the water and on and off his ship, doing whatever it was he was doing with lines and connections and indecipherable metal things Maud didn’t particularly want to identify.
He’d left on that hat for some reason, which only seemed to call attention to his perfect, strong profile and the thrust of his dark beard. The wolves’ teeth he wore around his neck moved with him, bouncing lightly against his chest, and everything else was his strength. His sleek muscles and that surprising grace of his, when he was such a big, tough, massive man. It was astonishing that he could jump from the upper deck of his boat and land on the beach, as light and easy as an enormous cat, but he could. He did.
And all she could think about was his mouth on hers. His tongue stroking hers. The way he’d bent her back and taken her over—
She blinked herself back to the here and now, aware that her face had flushed a screaming red. She could feel the heat singeing her cheeks. And when Gunnar threw a dark look over his shoulder from down at the water’s edge, she was sure he could see it, too.
Her pussy flooded, scalding hot and so wet she felt bright. She was filled with a kind of anticipation that his murderous intentions should have crushed. But no. She definitely wasn’t crushed. She felt … swollen and molten and needy.
So needy it hurt.
And worse now she knew how he tasted.
Gunnar only glared at her in his usual bad-tempered way that shouldn’t have made her heart flip a little bit in her chest. Then he tilted his head slightly, very slightly, to one side.
As if he’d barked out an order, Maud was up and on her feet and walking toward him. With no thought at all, as if he still had that chain in his hands and that collar around her neck.
He didn’t speak when she drew close and somehow that only made it worse. Her instant compliance. The fact her pussy pulsed with that terrible hunger. The fact that despite what he’d told her the night before, if he put his hands on her again and drew her in close to that mouth of his, she wouldn’t think twice about losing herself in him all over again.
She must have swayed closer to him, because he scowled.
“You’re going to get your ass on the boat,” he told her, harsh and low. “There will be no repeating any of last night’s mistakes.”
That slapped at her.
“Do you mean the kissing?” she asked, and she didn’t like that it was an effort to keep her tone civil and sweet, when any novice worth her salt should have mastered that years ago. She’d thought she had. “Or the explanations about your murderous intentions?”
“Do not—” He stopped abruptly, as if it occurred to him that his show of temper might tell her things he didn’t really want to share. He breathed in, then out. Maud watched his pulse pound in his neck, and it took every last thing she’d ever learned from the church about control to keep from leaning in close and licking it. “Don’t talk like that. Don’t be flippant about shit you don’t understand.”
She laughed because she knew it would annoy him, and it did. She could see the flash of temper in his blue gaze, and there had to be something deeply bent inside of her, that it felt so much like a victory.
“If there’s one thing I understand, Gunnar, it’s black magic. Or as we called it in my uncle’s house, black magic bullshit.”
“Maud.” He sounded darker and looked meaner. Far more dangerous, suddenly, and it sent a trickle of something half apprehension and half fire down the length of her spine, then curling around to tease her where she already ached the most. “Get the fuck on the boat.”
Maud obeyed that order, too, no matter that she’d been enjoying needling him. She didn’t even think twice.
And there was very likely something she needed to think about there. Something she needed to look at deep inside herself, where the girl who’d danced so wildly around the fire with her mother and hadn’t cared that she didn’t know the steps had turned into the creature who followed whatever orders this raider gave her. Without a single thought or twinge of conscience or regret. Without even the quiet rebellion deep in her heart that had made her such a terrible novice in the church.
She’d chosen Gunnar before he’d told her what his plans for her were. And she hadn’t tried to escape him once she knew. Maud had never let herself want anything, because nothing was hers or could ever be hers if she was the property of the church and nothing more than a vessel, so what was the point?
And yet she wanted Gunnar. She could admit that to herself. He might not know that he was hers, that all those twisted things in him matched up to the bent things in her, but she did. She knew.
Maud didn’t know why she was so sure of that. Only that she was.
But in the days that followed, with her head in a bucket and her stomach staging an endless and horrible revolt that made her wish any and all of her many promised deaths would hurry the hell up and come to pass already, she forgot to think about anything but her own misery.
Gunnar’s ship had sails, but when he wasn’t using them he didn’t take to the oars the raiders usually used to navigate their long, sleek ships in and out of rocky, otherwise protected ports that would wreck most boats that dared approach. Gunnar’s ship had a motor. Big and quiet, but so powerful Maud could feel it hum through the bottom of her feet. He used it to leave Nebraska behind, steering the boat out into the Mississippi Sea as easily as if it was that truck he’d driven all the way from the red desert.
She started feeling ill as Gunnar cast them off from the shore, but she chalked it up to anticipation because she’d never been out on a boat before. By the time they cleared the breakers she knew she was going to be in trouble. And once they lost sight of land, forget it. Her body took over, with a vengeance, and she didn’t think it was possible to feel any worse.
Her stomach rose to that challenge. Literally and repeatedly.
“It passes,” Gunnar told her gruffly as he pressed a bucket into her hands that first day.
It didn’t.
Maud tried to stay on the deck, because Gunnar muttered at one point that fresh air helped. But all it did was leave her as cold as she was sick. Beneath the deck in the passenger cabin was no better. She should have enjoyed the cabin. It had a washbasin and clean water she could pump in with a foot pedal. It was even pretty, with polished wood and gleaming metallic fixtures. There was an actual toilet—the height of luxury—and more than that, a bed built into the wall with a real mattress and a pile of soft blankets. For a girl who’d spent the last ten years on various pallets on the hard floors of the convent dormitories, this should have been heaven.
But it was hard to enjoy anything with all that rolling, hideous nausea that took over her entire world. Just as it was hard to do much but cling to her bucket when the nausea won, wish for death, and wonder how exactly she’d managed to walk off into a desert and yet had ended up in the middle of an ocean on a boat from hell.
One day bled into another, all of them as miserable as the next, until Gunnar threw out an anchor near a shoreline bristling with scrubby trees. He’d come below t
o carry her out into the gloomy and humid day, and propped her up on the forward deck. It occurred to her to worry that she couldn’t seem to sit up on her own, but like everything else, that thought spun away.
Her head was whirling, but Maud was certain that for once it wasn’t anything to do with him. Quite a change, that. She laughed at her own internal joke, and it exhausted her. This made her stomach lurch anew, which had her shoving her face in her ever-present bucket once more.
When she looked up again and could focus, however weakly, Gunnar was crouched down before her with his attention on something he was stirring in a small pot.
And she knew she must have been in serious, potentially life-altering trouble, because the fact he was so close to her did absolutely nothing for her at all. For once. Except make her feel absurdly … cared for, somehow.
“Am I dying?” she asked him. Her voice was rough and scratchy and a whisper besides, and she could hardly get the words out. Her lips felt cracked and dry.
His grim blue gaze shifted from the concoction in his hands to hers, then held.
“I forbid it.”
It was a trial to keep her eyes open. Maybe she stopped trying.
“Okay then.”
“Maud.” He sounded stern, and that moved through her. It made her try to sit up straighter and pay attention, because the need to please him was stronger than whatever was happening inside of her. And she liked the sensation, because it felt as if that was the only thing about her that was strong at the moment. “You’re seasick. You’re not dying. You’ll die when I want you to die, and not before. Do you hear me?”
She thought she smiled. She meant to—and maybe she did, because his expression changed. It grew somehow more intense, though all he did was gaze back at her.
“That’s actually almost comforting.”
“But you need to keep something in your stomach,” Gunnar continued, his voice dropping. Becoming lower and gruffer. “Or you might get sicker, which will not make me happy.”
He reached over and righted her with one big hand, gently returning her to an upright position. She hadn’t realized she’d started to slump over. It felt heady and strange to sit up, and even in her weakened state she enjoyed his matter-of-fact display of strength. Not because it made her feel hot and wired through with that need this time, but because again, it made her feel cared for. Any illness in the church was treated as evidence that the novice in question hadn’t been praying with an open heart. The cure was isolation in the healer’s chapel where the nuns sometimes checked in and sometimes didn’t, and penance when better. Gunnar had already taken better care of her than the church ever had.