But Maud knew it was okay, somehow. This moment, anyway. She let out the breath she’d been holding.
Gunnar looked back at his king, his blood brother with those same damned eyes, and nodded.
But he wrapped that chain a little too tightly around his fist while he did it. Maud got the message. She’d have to pay for this. And she had the feeling it might be a little less fun than last night’s spanking, but then, they both might need it more. Now that she thought about it, that large X he’d kept in his bedroom at the cabin was the perfect size and shape for a man of certain tastes to tie someone up. Maybe, if she was lucky, he had another one here.
She only hoped none of the assembled raiders could see how instantly hot and wet that notion made her as Gunnar led her down the great length of the hall. There was a commotion as they left, the rise of voices telling her exactly what and whom the conversation was about, but Gunnar led her away from the noise. He stalked through the kitchens, nodding at some of the workers who stood still as he passed, and then led her down a set of stairs in what she imagined had to be the very back of the great Lodge.
Down and down they went.
“Are you taking me to the dungeons?” she asked. Politely. The long day’s anger had deserted her at some point between their conversation in the rain and the very unsettling king, and there was a different sort of bubble inside of her then. It made her feel very nearly buoyant. Giddy. It felt somehow more dangerous than the disaster she knew they’d just averted.
“In a manner of speaking,” Gunnar replied, and she was sure there was that thread of dark amusement in his voice.
Then he pushed through a heavy door with an intimidating sort of steel grate in it, as if it really was a prison down here, and into … a basement. He slapped on a switch near the door and lights bloomed into being all throughout the vast space, making it no less a basement, but somehow far more appealing.
It was a crowded labyrinth stuffed full of towering remnants of … everything. Gunnar strode into the middle of it with confidence as if expecting a path to appear before him, and of course one did. Maud followed, but her eyes weren’t on him for once, rather she was captivated by the marvelous things stacked up all around them. It was like being in one of the ancient museums her uncle had told her about, having read of them once in a stack of old books he’d found in an abandoned house somewhere. Mikolaj had told her about grand mansions dedicated to stuff of every possible description, that people in other times had visited for the sheer joy of wandering around looking at things they could never possess.
This was the closest she’d ever been to such magical places. And she knew it wasn’t a museum, not really.
It was Gunnar’s brain.
It was a huge space that didn’t feel cavernous, despite its size, because it was so filled with extraordinary objects and fanciful machines. It was all in blacks and reds, and as Gunnar moved through the stacks he obviously knew well, he switched on more electric lanterns that spilled pools of light here and there. He led her around pillars and beneath the spiderwebs of more lights that danced and winked as they walked
Everything looked like myth and magic to her. A thousand stories waiting to be told. There were crates of weapons next to piles of sumptuous fabrics that shimmered gold and green. There were whole pieces of buildings, great glass windows and old wooden doors. There were sudden, unexpected living areas in the middle of car parts and a tower of tires. A long red train car. The prow of a ship, filled with furs and lounging pillows and festooned with colored lights.
He led her past great metal closets bursting with clothes in a variety of styles and textures and fabrics, and wild collections of old paper books tossed haphazardly wherever there was space for a pile. He led her through an area with another leaning X like the one in his cabin bedroom, this one commanding a space that featured only an odd-looking bench and a great big wooden cabinet on a thick rug. It made her shiver.
Gunnar stopped when he reached the tech area of his domain, covered in huge screens and equipment Maud couldn’t begin to identify. He tossed his great cloak over a chair, and then turned his stern attention to her.
“Did you imagine you could protect me from the raider king himself?” His voice was as dark as that look in his blue gaze. “He has been undefeated in battle since he was a boy, and the last person who managed to best him was me.”
“Is that why he’s so angry with you?”
Gunnar blinked. She had the impression she’d surprised him. He reached over and tested the collar, running his fingers over the edges, making certain it didn’t cut or pinch.
“No, little nun,” he murmured after a moment. “He knows I’m angry at him. He can’t bear it. He feeds on the loyalty of his grateful subjects or he withers away.”
“Don’t all leaders?” She didn’t back down when he raised his dark brows. “Loyalty or fear. What else do they have?”
“Were you loyal to your church?” he countered. “When I found you wandering in the desert, making yourself a meal for coyotes and scorpions?”
“That was fear,” she said, and she realized as she said it that she’d never put it quite that way. She hadn’t even thought it. “I didn’t want to die there. In the church. Whether at the solstice ceremony or years from now, a cast-off nunwife sold to the highest bidder and forced to perform my holy duty until I was traded in for a younger model and condemned to life as a drudge. I didn’t want it. I wanted…”
“What?” There was an urgency in his voice. Something dark and stirring. “What did you want?”
Maud was breathless. He was so close, his hands were on her, and her body knew exactly what it wanted from him. It always did.
But she was afraid to admit the things she wanted. Or how much she wanted them, from him. None of them could happen; he could never give her any of it for more than a night here, or some sex there. Her role had been defined from the start. There was no point articulating the things that moved in her, urgent and overwhelming. There was no point torturing herself that way. The kind of safety she craved, that she knew she could only get at Gunnar’s hands—literally—wasn’t likely to matter much to the dead girl she’d be in a few short weeks.
“Will she take care of you?” she heard herself ask.
Gunnar started. He repressed it so quickly, so ruthlessly, Maud almost thought she’d imagined it, but she knew better. She’d seen it. She’d hold on to it, what little good it would do her, for as long as she could.
His blue gaze darkened. “What do you mean?”
“Your mate. When you get her back, when you perform this ritual and raise her from the dead and deposit her in my body the way you want … will she care for you?”
She didn’t say, the way I do. She didn’t know she meant it until it hung there in the scant, breathless space between them. Revealing everything. Surely she would have hidden it better, if she’d known.
Gunnar didn’t reply. His gaze was dark on hers. His forbidding mouth didn’t soften in the least. And yet when he breathed out, slowly, and tugged her closer to him, she melted.
He didn’t kiss her. He didn’t put his hands on her body in all those devastating ways or remind her how easily and totally he could control her. He didn’t need to do any of those things. And though she could tell he heard the sound of that heavy door of his from all the way across the basement, scraping open and admitting what sounded like half of the people from upstairs, he didn’t so much as glance toward it. He kept his eyes trained on her.
“At the moment,” he said, “you’re my mate. I claimed you before the brotherhood and the king himself. Do you want to take care of me, Maud?”
There were so many things she could have said to that. She didn’t say any of them. He was looking at her in that steady, certain way of his, and she felt it deep in her gut. The real chain that bound them, that had nothing to do with iron or a collar or the fact she couldn’t quite grasp, that he’d claimed her. Made her his mate.
The real chain was that power
he had over her. The thing that blazed between them and made them what they were, knitting them together, keeping them both safe and free.
“I do,” she whispered.
“Good girl,” Gunnar said, his voice low and approving. “Then whatever happens, whatever you hear and whatever I do, I want you to stay quiet. Can you do that?”
“Yes.” She remembered herself. “Yes, sir.”
And he smiled at her for that.
A real smile, bright and real and only hers.
Maud took that with her, as the sound of heavy feet and hard male voices drew closer. She held his rare, perfect smile in her heart and she kept it close as Gunnar led her to the corner of his little office of screens and machines, sat her down on a pillow, and then chained her to the wall.
13.
Gunnar only kept Maud chained up for fun.
Partly because it kept her off balance, which suited him, given he’d lost his balance right about the time she’d gone to her knees in that desert. Partly because he didn’t want to think about what had happened between them up there in the hall, in full view of all the men and women who were meant to be his family, yet had stood prepared to cut him down if he hadn’t yielded. He didn’t like that she’d managed to pull him back from the brink of disaster with only a look and he definitely didn’t like the fact that what he’d felt then, with all his brothers arrayed against him, wasn’t that same fury that had worked in him for a long while and had blazed uncontrollably this whole last year, but something else. Something a lot like loss.
But mostly he wanted to keep her in chains because it unnerved the hell out of the specially selected members of the king’s council, male and female full members of the brotherhood Wulf had chosen to serve as his advisers, who crowded into his basement that night.
Gunnar found he couldn’t resist.
They’d all dutifully trooped down from the great hall to discuss the war chief’s woman and the secrets she’d kept on one of those old, pocket-sized computer tablets that Gunnar had never seen used for much more than ancient games, photographs, and the odd e-book. Riordan hadn’t been making things up back in the cabin, which Gunnar wouldn’t have put past him, the shit-stirring asshole. Tyr’s mainland woman, her dark hair in a long braid in the raider style, pale gold skin, and defiant eyes the color of smoke, really did think she could access the Internet.
And more than that, turn the lights back on all over the dark and lonely mainland.
Despite himself, Gunnar was drawn in.
He released Maud once they’d filed out again the following morning, leaving the basement empty save the echoes of his blood brother’s harsh words. It had been a long night. To say Wulf had not exactly rolled out a welcome wagon was an understatement, and things had veered between tense and dangerous the whole time. Eiryn had kept her hand on her blade a little more than necessary. Even Tyr had growled a few warnings. But Gunnar wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, he told himself staunchly. He hadn’t come back here to make their lives easier. This was nothing but a stop on a much more important journey.
He squatted down before Maud, who looked drowsy and edible, still naked and gorgeous and chained up to his wall like she was really his.
She is, a stern voice inside him insisted. It doesn’t matter what happens. She’s yours.
Maybe it should no longer astonish him that he wanted that to be true. With every particle of his being.
He expected her to ask him about the bad blood that had been on display this whole long night. Between Gunnar and … everyone. Wulf. Eiryn. Tyr. He expected questions about the way his blood brother’s council had eyed him suspiciously when they’d first filed in, as if the most elite men and women of the warrior brotherhood were braced for a different sort of evidence—the kind that would convict Gunnar as a traitor, perhaps. And he was sure she wanted to know how, despite all of that, they’d all settled down and listened as Gunnar had explained what he could about the tech aspects of the things Helena, Tyr’s woman, wanted to do.
But Maud was never what he expected.
And he was finding it hard to convince himself that the restless, edgy feeling inside of him that got worse every moment he spent with her was his temper. His fury. Or even thoughts of his dead mate, the way it should have been. He suspected that instead, it was all Maud.
“Can you really turn the lights back on?” she asked as he unwound the rope from around her wrists. It had been for show, that binding, and she could have taken it off herself at any time. That she hadn’t made his pulse drum in him, wild and dangerous and as unacceptable as ever. “Just … flip a switch somewhere and change everything?”
“I don’t know why not,” he said gruffly, checking her wrists to make sure she was unmarked, unharmed. “That’s more or less the plan.”
Helena, Tyr’s woman, had maps on that tablet of hers. Maps of the world before the Storms. Maps of power stations that the priests had claimed and called temples, the better to take what was left of the old world and claim only they could help people survive the new one. Typical church bullshit. The question Helena posed was a simple one, really: Could the raiders locate the remaining power plants with the necessary server farms attached that would let them access the satellites that still circled the earth, and in so doing gain control of the power grids?
The simple answer was yes. Theoretically.
But of course, nothing was simple in a drowned world filled with desperate survivors and the priests and mercenaries and western kings who took advantage of them so easily. No one knew what was left of the mainland. Not definitively. The raiders had formed their own makeshift maps over decades of navigating the coastlines and sailing the new seas, but they were as much legend and lore as anything else. And there was no telling what shape the power plants in question would be when they were found, after centuries of neglect and the unchecked battering of the Storms.
“It’s funny what you believe because you don’t know any better,” Maud said then, as Gunnar took the collar from around her neck and set it on her pillow. She sounded dreamy. Vague. But when he caught her gaze it was neither. “I spent the first half of my life sure of all kinds of things. That people who lived inside compounds were cowards. That electricity was a myth, at least in any widespread sense. Oh sure, every now and again we’d hear about this or that local big wig who had a generator and lights in the winter, but I thought that was as much a fairy tale as any of the other stories my uncle told me. Vampires. Werewolves. Fairies.”
Gunnar didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, so there was no reason his heart should clap at him like some kind of alarm. He was tired, that was all. There was a lot of shit in this Lodge, much of it the kind he’d have been perfectly happy to ignore forever. He didn’t want to deal with his relationship with his king or the brotherhood. He didn’t want to explore his thoughts about his blood relatives, Wulf or deadly, unhappy Eiryn. He didn’t want to think about Audra, especially not here. Especially not now.
He stood, pulling Maud to her feet as he went, and then he gave into an urge he wanted to explore even less than the rest and lifted her into his arms, holding her against his chest. She looped her arm around his neck and Gunnar realized his mistake immediately. Her face was right there. She was warm against him, naked and soft, and she even snuggled closer to him as if she’d been put on this earth for the precise purpose of fitting in his arms like this—
Get a fucking grip, he ordered himself.
“Gunnar.” He liked his name in her mouth, especially when he could have tasted it if he wanted. He could have bent his head just that last little bit and fit his mouth to hers. He didn’t know how he kept himself from doing it. “Why did you claim me as your mate?”
He could have said any number of things. He moved with her then, carrying her out of his study and back through the winding paths to the boxcar that served as his bedroom. He could have told her that the brothers would have been all over her, that she was the sort of pretty morse
l they would have eaten whole and he wasn’t as big on sharing as he’d been once. He could have told her that he wanted to keep her safe, from everyone but him. He could have told her that he had his own flair for the dramatic and it had come out while they’d stood there in front of his brothers after so long, or that the clan was more careful about executing members with claimed mates because that tended to inspire revenge scenarios. All of those things were the truth, more or less.
But he told her the simple truth that encompassed all the rest of them.
“I had to.”
He carried her inside the boxcar, pausing to turn on the small red lamp as he entered. It cast the long, rectangular space in an inviting, crimson-hued shadow. The huge four-poster bed looked even bigger in here than it really was, piled high with wool lengths and furs that the cleaners must have kept fresh this past year, because nothing smelled musty. Outside the boxcar, the basement was crowded. Piles on top of piles. Obsolete machines and ancient wheels and intact walls from old buildings and whatever else had taken his fancy out there. But in here, it was stark. Cool. Clean and uncluttered.
It was a place for sleep and sex. His desires filled this space and he made them real here, in a thousand deliciously twisted ways. He didn’t need to stuff it full of extraneous, unnecessary things.
Gunnar set the only necessary thing in his life just now on the bed before him, pleased when she sighed a little as she came into contact with all that fur and tightly woven wool. The temper that had fueled her on the long drive was gone now, and he couldn’t tell if it was gone for good or only buried beneath the fatigue he could see in the dark, bruised-looking skin beneath her eyes.
“I owe you a punishment.” His voice was harsh because he wanted to skip that part and get straight to the reward, and that was unlike him.
But then, everything about the way he was with her was unlike him.
Gunnar had promised himself he’d never take her again the way he had last night, and yet he was already imagining that thick, oiled slide deep into her, his hands full of her plump tits and her rounded ass cheeks flush against his groin. The tight clench of her ass around his cock.