Gunnar shoved the dangerous notions aside. He was horny and he was pissed and this woman made him forget his own goddamned name and everything else that was important to him. He should cut her down for that bullshit alone.
His hand was on his favorite blade, but he didn’t draw it.
He didn’t have any idea why he didn’t simply pull it from its sheath and fix this problem right here and now. It would take a single cut of his blade. It would be easy. He’d won far more complicated battles against actual, serious enemies before his balls had dropped.
But he didn’t do it.
I want to live, she’d said.
Gunnar glared at her as if she’d said it again. As if she’d proved her dedication to life anew, hot and wet all over his cock. She wasn’t going to live through this—through him. Not the way he imagined she’d meant that. Not intact.
Was that strange, clutching sensation that gripped him … regret? Impossible.
Gunnar couldn’t be conflicted about a plot a year in the making. A plan formed first in anguish on a battleground near the sea in Kentucky, then in a fury back on the eastern islands when so many men he’d thought had his back lined up to talk shit, and then perfected over the long course of a winter’s vicious, unceasing grief and anger. There was nothing to be conflicted about here. He was bringing Audra back, in this vessel or another one, and the only thing to regret about that was the fact he couldn’t do it sooner.
The little nun—if that was really what she was, when he could still feel her expert tongue on him—glanced at his dominant hand and the hilt of the blade it rested on, then returned her attention to him. There wasn’t so much as a hint of rebuke on her face, and yet he still felt as if she’d slapped him down. Chastised him without a word.
There wasn’t one single thing he liked about this woman. Not one.
Especially the fact that his cock wasn’t the least bit conflicted about her.
“I think the answer you’re looking for is yes, I was taught how to do that.” She shrugged; appearing so unbothered by the fact she knelt before a raider with his hand on a weapon that it should have raised all kinds of alarms in him. Not just his dick. “The priests teach us how to pray. They teach us what god likes and we perform at their will until we get it right.” She lifted one of her soft, elegant hands then and delicately wiped her mouth. There was no reason at all that that should go through Gunnar like another swirling run of her tongue down the whole, thick length of him, which was shoving at his pants even now. “Of course, it’s not the sort of thing you can ever get right, is it? So there’s usually a lot of punishment and penance first.”
“But no fucking?” He sounded brutal, even to his own ears. Too much like the beast who’d rutted in her mouth and shouted out his release into the desert night, and now was conflicted about what to do with her.
Or how to do it again, to be more accurate.
“No,” she replied in the same calm way, and Gunnar didn’t know if she couldn’t see any of that conflict and fury he thought was pouring out of him like a warning beacon, or if she was ignoring it. “A nun’s virginity is a gift to the church. She can give it to the church only at the appropriate time in the correct ceremony, or she’s deemed unworthy and unclean and punished accordingly. With banishment.” She studied him, and she was still too damned calm. It made Gunnar … edgy. “I’m not the most obedient novice, as you can tell because I’m out here instead of chanting in a temple, and it’s entirely possible that I’m not worthy, but I was never unclean.”
He’d never seen a woman who looked softer or cleaner than this one, and something inside him flipped over, then ran hot. He wanted to mess her up. Again. More. He wanted to mark her cream-colored skin and come all over her and leave tracks behind when he took her in every filthy way he could dream up. He wanted to learn a whole lot more about punishment and penance and how she’d practiced both. He wanted to tie her up and make her scream into that sweet spot where pleasure and pain was the same damned thing. He wanted to make her twist and moan and beg. He wanted to make that serene expression of hers crack into a thousand pieces and god help him, he wanted to get deep inside of her while he did it, and stay there a good, hard while.
He wanted.
Since the day he’d lost Audra, Gunnar had only wanted one thing. There had only been one thing. He’d wanted nothing else, thought of nothing else, been nothing else but his mate’s fiery vengeance waiting to happen.
Wanting this little nun—actually wanting her—was the greatest betrayal he could imagine. Of Audra. Of himself. Of his entire goddamned life so far.
Everyone else had betrayed her and him, too, once Audra was gone and couldn’t defend herself. He’d never imagined he’d become one of them.
And that shitty realization did absolutely nothing to make him want the pretty little nun with that gloriously wicked mouth any less.
Get a fucking grip, he ordered himself as he scowled down at her, fighting to keep his hands off her.
He’d thought she was a mirage when he’d first seen her. One more punch in the nuts from the ridiculous heat he’d been staggering around in, which had already been doing its best to kick his ass down the length of the western highlands—but he didn’t think mirages made so much noise.
He’d heard her shuffling through the desert from far off. Then he’d seen her come over the crest of the hill in front of him like she was a grand lady out for an evening stroll in stupid shoes and he’d figured he really was losing his goddamned mind after all. Because it was a strange mainland woman indeed who took a look at a man who had raider written all over him and promised a swift and certain death from every blade he carried—and then walked toward him.
Especially one as soft and sheltered as the little nun had looked. One whose milky white cheeks and shoulders were stained a faint red from the desert sun, suggesting she spent a lot more time inside the priest’s grim temples than out in the world. That was what the church did with its women, he was well aware. It locked them up so the world’s only crop of virgins could ripen on the vine in secret until the priests could claim them in their dumbass ceremonies that made their dirty sex acts into sacraments.
Not that Gunnar was one to judge how other men policed their pussy, necessarily.
His mirage had kept on coming straight toward him, without a shred of fear or intimidation on her shockingly beautiful face and the pointless shoes that should have tripped her in three steps kicking up enough noise to alert half the western highlands to her whereabouts.
And she was perfect. More than perfect. One of the most stunning women he’d ever seen in his life, and Gunnar was a raider born and bred, with hot and cold running pussy all over him since the day he’d figured out what to do with his cock. He’d seen more beautiful women than he could count and he hadn’t cared too much about the math of it while he’d enjoyed each and every one of them in his own dark and twisted way. But this one was something else entirely.
The priests were famous for only ever picking the supernaturally pretty ones to do their bidding. This one fit the bill and then some, though she was dressed in loose clothing the color of mud that would make her nothing but prey to any fanged thing that ventured close, no doubt by priestly design. They wanted their women close, cloistered, and unable to even consider kicking any ass. They didn’t want them thinking that the biggest predators around were the ones dressed up in their black tunics and calling themselves holy.
This nun before him was long and lean, all legs and narrow arms and a delicate sort of neck that made her look edible despite the brand on her nape that proclaimed her church property. Gunnar didn’t really want to question why that raised, circular scar bugged him so much. Or at all. He thought instead about the benefits of very short hair. Raider women liked theirs long, and Gunnar had always liked the control long hair on a woman gave him. It could be a leash. A harness. It could be anything he wanted it to be when he wrapped it around his fist. But despite the hatchet job one of tho
se holy fucks had performed on her, he didn’t like the fact he didn’t hate how short her hair was. That instead it … intrigued him.
And that had been before he’d dug his hands in it to guide her mouth onto his cock.
Her tits were unbound beneath the loose thing she wore, surprisingly plump and juicy as they moved, and his mouth had watered despite himself even before he’d seen her nipples go hard. And she’d moved with a grace that was nothing at all like the way his raider brothers moved in battle, but it made him think of it all the same.
Light and loose. Like a kind of dance.
She knelt the same way now, looking up at him as if he was the thing of beauty while she sat so prettily. He knew too well what that wide mouth felt like on him and she was messing with his damned head.
All that mattered was that she was a virgin. Gunnar’s mission here was complete. Now he had to get her back to the eastern islands and finish putting together the ingredients for the one of Audra’s mysterious spells that he was determined would work, and no matter that he’d never seen any of his mate’s supposed old world rituals or claims of great mystical power do a damned thing. Gunnar would summon a little magic from the ruined air of this shithole of a world if it killed him and he’d get back the one thing he’d never intended to lose and couldn’t believe had left him, or die trying.
And he didn’t care who he took with him.
Because Audra was the only thing that had been his, only his. Not his father’s or his brother’s by default. And not that gorilla Dandro’s, either, no matter what his asshole blood brother had tried to tell him last summer.
His mother had been a captured mainlander who’d killed herself rather than deal with his giant dick of a father, Amos, after putting up with almost ten years of the old man’s crap. Amos himself was a treacherous old warrior who had been the war chief of the clan before Wulf had ordered him crippled for the rest of his miserable life, a fate far worse than death for a raider brother meant to meet his end with honor in battle. Wulf had always been headed for the throne he now occupied without caring overmuch what collateral damage he caused along the way, even back when Gunnar and he had been growing up together in the clan’s nursery system. Their younger half-sister Eiryn was one of the very few women lethal and tough enough to make it into the raider brotherhood—and widely held to be the fastest blade in the clan—but she was a creature forged in hate and fury and too busy acting as Wulf’s bodyguard to spend time doing much else. The winter rains were closer to Gunnar than any of them, no matter the blood they shared. Gunnar had always considered the rest of the raider brotherhood his family, but he never, ever forgot they all answered to their king.
Wulf came first, always, to everyone in the entire clan.
Except to his Audra, who had grown up in the eastern islands and had never been as enamored of Wulf as everyone else always was. She’d looked right past the man everyone had always known was headed for greatness and had seen Gunnar instead.
You are as powerful as he is, she’d told him not long after Wulf had become king. She’d straddled Gunnar in the great room of the Lodge and had ridden him there in the middle of a typical raider winter evening gathering, all flesh and food and light against the encroaching dark outside. His mate’s nut-brown skin had been smooth and soft beneath his hands and gleaming with her exertion as she rocked her hips against his in the tight, hard circle of the hands he’d kept on her waist to hold her where he wanted her as he’d thrust deep inside her. You make every last machine work all over these islands and your inventions have catapulted this clan far and above any who would stand against it. Why should he call himself a king and you his subject? He’s nothing but your younger blood brother.
Her words had been traitorous. Foolish. Mad and careless and incendiary besides.
But Gunnar had wanted the heedless, reckless woman who had wanted him, not his famous blood brother, no matter how mad or foolish or even traitorous she might have been. He’d wanted the woman who had seen only the crazy brother who lived in his basement lair beneath the raider Lodge and tinkered with things, not the great and glorious king everyone else fought to please. He’d wanted the woman who called herself a witch and danced through the raider halls, wrapped in scarves and painted in the blood of her sacrifices, chickens and small woodland creatures. He’d wanted the spectacle she’d created wherever she went, because she’d made Gunnar a part of that pageant. Sometimes the central part of it.
He did not believe what they’d told him about her, once she’d been dead and couldn’t defend herself. That when Gunnar had failed to act against Wulf the way Audra had wanted—And you did fail to act, did you not? Wulf had asked in that mild, quiet way of his that wasn’t in any way as lazy as it sounded, with all that steel and mayhem in his gaze. Or do I have my own blood brother’s blade in my back to look forward to yet?—she had moved on to Dandro, a brand-new member of the brotherhood who’d been no match for her powers of persuasion. He didn’t believe that shit and he wouldn’t. Audra had liked playing with boundaries, that was all. She’d never actually crossed them. He’d never have claimed her unless he’d been certain that she was loyal to him.
It gives me no pleasure to tell you these things, Wulf had told him gruffly on the ship as they’d sailed for home, leaving Audra’s remains behind them on the mainland because, as an enemy of the clan, she deserved no funeral pyre. I get no joy in the fact your woman was a traitor. But that doesn’t change the facts.
That could not be true. Gunnar hadn’t accepted it then and he didn’t accept it now. Audra had been a complicated woman, but she had not been an actual traitor. To him or to the clan.
He could not have been so deceived. It was impossible.
It was impossible.
Gunnar reached down and wrapped his hand around his nun’s upper arm, so smooth and warm beneath his palm. What the hell did the priests do to these women? Bathe them in precious oils and anoint them while teaching them the art of cocksucking for god? He’d never felt anything so deliciously soft in his life, and his dick had a number of ideas about how best to explore that, but he hauled her up and onto her feet instead. As if she were nothing but a raider child after a session of roughhousing, not a tempting woman who was fast becoming an obsession he couldn’t afford to indulge.
She will make the perfect sacrifice, he told himself when his cock shoved at the fly of his trousers, ravenous and needy all over again, the bastard.
And only when Audra was restored to him at last, her spirit recaptured and leashed into this lithe blond vessel, would he surrender himself to his greed for the nun’s soft, unmarked body that would house his mate. Over and over again, until he was finally sated.
After which, he had a number of questions for his woman. Starting with what the hell she’d been doing with that idiot, Dandro, who no one had expected to live out a full year as a brother.
He’s strong and he’s dumb, the clan’s canny war chief, Tyr, had said last year with a shrug during the brothers’ annual meeting at the March equinox, when they chose the new members of the brotherhood from the many hopefuls. As the brotherhood’s foremost trainer, he knew the prospective brothers better than anyone. Probably nothing more than cannon fodder. But as long as bitches keep burning down our settlements and getting in our face all over the mainland, we need some fucking fodder.
Back then, Gunnar had still believed in acceptable losses.
He realized he was moving his thumb back and forth against his nun’s upper arm, tracking her buttery soft skin beneath it. He stopped, though he couldn’t quite bring himself to let go of her. Not just yet. She tilted her head slightly to one side, though she didn’t shift her gaze from his.
“No matter how long you stare at me, I’m still a virgin,” she said, and her voice was a shade less calm than it had been before. Thicker in a way that had nothing to do with where his dick had been, which only made him want to revisit the experience. “Every other woman in the entire world does her part, but no
t me. My virginity and fertility was promised to the church. I couldn’t be compliant if I wanted to.”
Compliance. Gunnar snorted. What was left of the world was wet and cold and mostly underwater, but the church didn’t let that little detail slow them down. Why should it? The douchebag priests had built their central church in the one big, western valley where the water had never really risen and called it an act of god—proving, they claimed, that god was against all the technology that had caused the end of the world in the first place.
Embrace the dark the lord has given us, they crooned to dumbasses who didn’t seem to get that for some people, like the westerns kings in the Rocky mountain kingdoms, it was only as dark as they chose. It was amazing how many people wanted to believe whatever crap was handed to them, as long as it sounded like a reason. People loved a reason. They loved explanations, and it didn’t seem to matter if it was anything like true.
So the priests delivered their sermons to all the morons desperate to make meaning out of the cold, dark decades since the Storms had stopped tearing cities apart and submerging continents. They lectured the people on how best to live their pale little lives in the short summers between brutal winters, and how to survive the long rainy seasons as well. And they collected pretty virgins only to squirrel them away like spoils of war between towering rocks the color of blood, and called it their due.
“Compliance is bullshit,” Gunnar retorted.
Compliance was one of the finest creations the church had come up with, assuming the goal was to trick as many people as possible into doing their bidding. It was all about repopulating the earth, the priests claimed, all these long years after the Storms had wrecked it, reshaping the land and totaling cities and cutting the population down to a fraction. It was about the winter marriages the common people engaged in during the dark, wet months, getting together at the September equinox to fuck their way through the long, cold winters straight through to March, where they were free again if they weren’t pregnant or bound for another year if they were.