Edge of Obsession Read online

  The little man met Tyr’s gaze and for a moment Tyr thought this might have been worth it after all, that there might be a fight worth having, or a fight anyway—but the coward dropped his eyes like the cringing little piece of shit he was.

  “Where’s Krajic?” he asked the little wannabe king.

  The little man’s eyes bugged out in his head, as if not already finding himself skewered on a raider blade wasn’t enough deference for him. Tyr had to bite back a grin. Tiny, furious would-be tyrants were his personal favorite. They were so easy to play with.

  “I am Ferranti,” the small man belted out, as if he expected some kind of awed response to that. Tyr only eyed him as if he was too toothless to bother fighting, which was clearly also true. “This is my compound.” When Tyr didn’t bother to respond to that either, Ferranti sputtered on. “There’s no Krajic here. I’ve never heard the name.”

  “You’d recognize him if you came across him,” Tyr growled. The memory of that mercenary whore was burned deep into his head, like every other detail of that terrible battle up near the Great Lake Sea where they’d lost Zyron. They hadn’t found his remains for three days. What was left of them. “Shaved head, ugly scar down one cheek that my brother Zyron carved there himself, and a death warrant attached to his punk ass with my name on it.” He grunted. “Of course, if you had, you’d be dead.”

  “I’ve never heard of him,” Ferranti said crossly. “Is he another barbarian?”

  Tyr laughed at that sad little attempt at an insult, but he was already tallying up the waste of this night and imagining how he’d justify it to his already pissed-off king. They should have sailed for home instead of playing this pointless game, he knew. That was on him. He was the war chief and he should have known better, somehow. But the need to avenge his blood brother pounded in his veins, even now, louder every season Zyron’s death was not answered in kind.

  The longer Krajic lived without paying for his sins, the weaker Tyr looked for allowing it. That shit was unacceptable.

  “You think we’re the barbarians?” he asked, focusing on Ferranti one last time. “This is a tea party, dumbass. Krajic would already have stripped your red face from your skull and fed it to you.”

  He dismissed the little kinglet then and let his sharp gaze move over the rest of the crowd again, searching for any suggestion that mercenaries lurked in this out of the way place. But there weren’t any. There were only weaklings. He counted at least five pregnant women spanning a decade or two in age, and he grunted as the reality of this particular shithole hit him. Compliants. Of course. The descendants of all those poor, deluded souls who’d wanted so badly to believe in the pronouncements of the last body resembling a government in those mad days after the Storms when there had been nothing left but wrecked cities and bodies to burn.

  Compliant citizens—of what country, dumbasses? There were no countries left—were concerned about one thing only: repopulating the drowned earth. They had their churches and their devout and their grabby-handed priests with their speeches about the evils of technology and how their god alone brought light to the darkness. Whatever. They’d claimed one of the great protected valleys in the high west as their spiritual home—conveniently, said valley had been spared from the worst of the floods. It was also easily defended by the kind of self-proclaimed holy men who knew exactly how to manipulate generations of terrified people with made-up moral absolutes.

  Same old bullshit, brand-new world, Tyr thought derisively.

  They claimed they were acting in the best interests of humanity, what was left of it. Then they locked pretty young girls away and called them nuns, buying them from their families and claiming it was an honor to give their fertility to the church as a kind of tithe in the grand ceremonies they held when each girl turned twenty-one. Lucky priests, Tyr had always thought, to have all that pretty, virgin pussy at their disposal. They’d dictated that all the rest of the world should enter into winter marriages, so that was what compliant folks had been doing for three generations now. A long, stormy winter to fuck and then, if the woman turned up pregnant, another winter to have the kid and nurse it, claiming it as blood. Or a summer spent finding a new partner, if the fucking didn’t take.

  As stupid systems went, Tyr supposed it was fine. The rich dickheads who’d dubbed themselves the new nobility and claimed the high ground in the mountains took multiple fertile women apiece in support of their precious bloodlines and their even more precious property, the way rich people always had and always would. The poorest people were little more than vagabonds, keeping on the move and finding temporary shelter as best they could in their ragged-ass caravans, and who cared how they arranged their personal lives when the wolves picked off most of them like dessert?

  Compliance kept those in the middle occupied.

  But even people without vast stores of gold and grain at their disposal—or massive Rocky Mountain valleys they conveniently claimed were sacred—were twisted and liked power over each other. That was the way of things, and these arrangements had long since turned into extended bartering sessions for food and shelter. Fertile women were currency; barren women had better hope they had other sources of wealth. And Tyr had met more than one leader of a compound like this one who thought all the potentially fertile women in it were his to trade for status or favors as he chose, the same as his grain or his gas stores or the clothes he wore.

  Tyr preferred to get his dick wet where and when and how he pleased. His great-grandfather hadn’t carved his way out of the carnage that followed the Storms to live in a brand-new world under the rule of tiny, red-faced kinglets and their pocket-sized priests. His great-grandfather had helped form the raider brotherhood to stay free of the kind of idiots who couldn’t defend themselves without an assault rifle and a fleet of self-proclaimed holy men to pray on their every move and then help themselves to the spoils. He hadn’t followed any rules he hadn’t chosen himself.

  And neither did Tyr. He’d fought his way to the right hand of the brotherhood’s king—Wulf, the man Tyr respected most on the whole of the cursed earth and had since they were all kids running wild together. He’d served as his clan’s war chief ever since he’d won that role when he’d turned twenty by crippling the undermining, backstabbing asshole who’d held it before him. Tyr had always been very, very good at his job. And when he wasn’t in battle or training for future battles, he liked to fuck. The way he felt like doing it, not the way a collection of busybody priestlings told him he should.

  What did he care about repopulating the earth when there was so much pussy on tap and all of it hot and sweet and his whenever the hell he wanted it?

  Especially during the long, stormy winters, when the seas raged too high to cross and there was nothing to do on the eastern islands but fuck. Fuck and drink and fight and fuck, that was how the raider brotherhood made it through the darkness each year, and they didn’t need any winter marriages to tell them how to do it. Tyr doubted he’d live long enough to give a shit about making himself sons, and the thought of an actual mate, a wife, was about as appealing a prospect as chopping off his own balls and hand-feeding them to the next wolf he saw. Screw that. It had been bad enough losing Zyron years back. Gunnar, blood brother to Wulf, had lost his wife in a shitty raid the previous summer. He’d shortly thereafter lost his mind, which Tyr couldn’t help thinking was a warning to the rest of them.

  Tyr liked his balls where they were. He didn’t like wolves at all. And he didn’t have a single thing left in his life that he couldn’t survive losing. He preferred it that way.

  “These monsters will eat us whole! They’ll slit our throats and drink our blood!”

  Again, Tyr’s hopes were cruelly dashed, as the dumbass moaning that crap into the wind was not the little kinglet Ferranti who needed a kick in the face, but one of the pregnant women. She was on her knees, rocking back and forth like a lunatic with her eyes rolled halfway back in her head, her face a twisted smear of pale white against the r
ain.

  Perfect.

  “Shut her up,” he ordered, but no one was really listening to him.

  The brothers were bored, already talking about the journey back home across the sea or the far more interesting battles they’d fought in the past, as they restored their weapons, gathered up the guns because metal was metal, and maintained their perimeter in case there was an actual threat lurking somewhere in this lame-ass place. The prisoners were muttering and shifting in reaction to the moaning, and Tyr checked an irritated sigh as he ran a hand over the top of the thick braids he wore that marked him a raider—should the tattoos and scars all over his body fail to do the trick—because this kind of shit always ended the same way. There was always some weak-ass fool who imagined himself a hero and Tyr liked to fight. He liked to win in battle. If he’d liked slaughtering dumbasses for no reason he would have sold his loyalty and his blade to one of those rich bastard kings in the mountains and spent his days hacking a bloody path through the western lands for fun and profit.

  But that would make him scum like Krajic.

  Tyr was a raider by birth and choice and trial. He believed in the honor of his blade, the truth of his swing. He didn’t back down from a challenge, but he also got no particular joy out of mowing down cowards.

  Which was too damned bad, really, on a night like this.

  “They’ll pick their teeth with the bones of our babies!” the crazy bitch howled, getting louder with each word. “They’ll burn us out and eat our ashes!”

  Tyr addressed the pack of prisoners again, with much less patience this time. “Shut her mouth or I will.”

  The muttering stopped among the rest of the captives like he’d flipped a switch, but crazy was crazy no matter how creative the content of her carrying on, and the moaning kept right on going. And got louder still.

  “She can’t help it. She’s in labor.” A short pause, like a quick breath. “That means she’s about to give birth, in case you wondered. To a baby.”

  Tyr scowled at the source of that voice, crisp and clear into the damp air, like the clean slice of a perfect blade. Another woman, sitting next to the moaner, with eyes like smoke that widened slightly when he focused his formidable attention on her far less pale white face.

  “Thanks for the translation, asshole,” he said, doing nothing to control his voice, the brute strength or the power in it, because what was wrong with the people around here? They should know better than to come at a raider—at him—full on like that. This woman should tremble like the rest. Like her impotent little king was doing even now. “Especially with the snotty tone. I know what labor is.”

  “My apologies.” She didn’t look sorry at all, the little shit. She was kneeling, too, but it was impossible to tell where she ended and the moaner began, because she had her arms wrapped around the crazy lady and was holding her upright. “We were taught that ancient demons raped the wolves when the waters were high and left behind a wet spot. And when the seas rolled back, the raiders were there in its place, ransacking and wreaking havoc everywhere the wolves once roamed.”

  His brothers had started paying attention again, Tyr was aware, but he didn’t shift his focus from the woman with the smart mouth. Because, just like that, he’d started enjoying himself.

  “Stand up,” he ordered her. He’d gone still, he realized. Hard and darkly intent, like he was about to fight.

  Or fuck.

  She took her time getting to her feet, and he knew somehow that it was neither fear nor awkwardness. It was more of her obstinate crap, her little rebellion, and he shouldn’t find any of it amusing. Disrespect couldn’t be tolerated, ever. But what the hell, it had been a slow night, and his blood brother’s killer was still in the wind.

  She unfolded before him, rising up to her full height, which would probably come up to somewhere near his shoulder. Maybe. Her long dark hair was soaking wet, part of it clipped back behind her and the rest falling down around her pale gold face. She wore a soaked-through white T-shirt that slicked over her like a man’s greedy mouth, clinging to a small pair of unbound tits and the soft expanse of her flat belly below. A pair of wet jeans clung to her hips and looked uncomfortably stiff all the way down to her bare feet, and she had what looked like one of those old, small tablet computers shoved in her back pocket in a plastic waterproof case. She was bedraggled and about the farthest thing from sexy he’d ever seen in his life, despite those nipples of hers that seemed to poke at her shirt and at him, too, but that wasn’t the problem.

  The problem was that gleam in her smoky eyes that said fuck you very loud and very clear, directly to his face. That plus that sulky, sweet mouth of hers and the shit that came out of it, and Tyr could have taken down ten armies tonight, he’d still want to get inside her and ride them both blind.

  For a start.

  When the fuck you gleam in her eyes started to edge over into something more appropriately nervous, given the fact he was a scary bastard and she was small and infinitely breakable, Tyr lifted two fingers from the top of his crossed arms and ordered her to move forward.

  To him.

  Below her, clinging to her wet cuff, the moaner let out another loud wail of gibberish and bullshit, but fuck you eyes extricated herself neatly enough and stepped away from the pack of mewling captives. He kept his gaze on her, challenging and fierce, and had the satisfaction of watching her shiver.

  And then obey his unspoken command anyway, which made his cock ache.

  He was a simple man, truly.

  “Tell me that story again,” he suggested when he could see it dawn on her that she’d put herself within easy reach of him, which was not in the least bit safe. Or wise.

  He saw the nervous way her eyes flicked from one side of his broad, tattooed and branded chest to the other, then slammed back to his face as if afraid he might have moved on her while she was lost in his flesh. He waited until she swallowed, hard, and only then did he hook his hand around the nape of her neck and haul her closer.

  Not to hurt her. But he liked the way her breath rushed from her lips, and the way she threw out her hands to keep from careening into him but then curled them into fists at the last second rather than touch him. No one touched a raider without a direct invitation or suicidal tendencies. It was the only thing dumber than shooting at one in a forest. But it brought those cute little almost-tits that much closer to the bare skin of his chest right there beneath his weapon straps, something he was maybe a little too fixated on, suddenly.

  “It was only a children’s fairy tale,” she said quickly then, her voice still that clean, crisp thing though she was breathing harder now and her smoky eyes were wider, as if she liked the way his heavy hand cupped the back of her head and held her still as much as he did. As if she could feel, the way he could, how easily he could crush her and yet how gently, if implacably, he held her there instead. As if she was hungry, too. “Did I say we were taught it? I meant I read it. In a very waterlogged book.”

  “Monsters are always real, girl. They’re not always as cuddly as I am.”

  She started to laugh, but must have realized in the same instant that it was unwise because she choked it off, and Tyr let go of her because he didn’t want to let go of her at all, not after that little laugh punched its way through him, and what the hell was that? She slid a hand up to hold her neck where he’d just had his palm, like it burned her, too, and that did shit to him. Or maybe it was those eyes of hers, the color of that bitch of a sullen sea that had claimed so much of his life already. Or that wide mouth of hers that was messing with his head.

  He wanted her to choke on his cock if she was going to choke on something, and he wasn’t too bothered if that happened right here, right now. He wanted to lick that smart mouth of hers, eat those words she threw at him right off her sharp tongue. Teach her the consequences of disrespecting the war chief of the brotherhood in public like that.

  Who was he kidding? He’d toss her up against the wall and fuck her right now if
he thought simply getting his dick wet was going to do the trick. The fact that he hadn’t thought about anything but getting inside of her since she’d stood up suggested otherwise. He’d want a little time with this one, to make sure she understood the error of her mouthy ways. Space to spread out and settle in. Maybe a couple of toys besides.

  “A cuddly rapist, you mean?” she asked him, and her eyes had gone cool even though her voice stayed light, and that, he thought, was real fear at last. He should have reveled in it. “I doubt that. I didn’t think they handed out tattoos like yours for a nice nuzzle.”

  “I don’t do cold pussy,” he told her gruffly, and he shouldn’t have. It was true, but since when was he making sure the hostages weren’t afraid of him? What was next, asking that punk-ass kinglet for permission to jerk his own dick? “That’s not my thing.”

  She shook slightly, but she didn’t bolt, and he had to get this under control. This woman didn’t look like a particularly enthusiastic candidate for becoming another camp girl, the women who lived out on the islands with the brothers and liked going from brother to brother, taking cock wherever they could fit it and working the chill out of the long, cold nights. This woman was something else entirely; for all that she had no tits and looked half-drowned besides.

  And she was another goddamned mystery. What woman challenged a raider? He’d understand it if she’d come at him with her tits out in invitation, like the rest of the volunteer pieces of ass they’d rounded up on this trip. But this one hadn’t offered herself pussy first. She’d mouthed off to him.

  Tyr really hated mysteries.

  “Your problem, brother”—Riordan’s amused voice came from off to his side when Tyr hadn’t seen him move from his previous position across from him, which was a serious concern. That amused indentation in his brother’s brown jaw told him Riordan knew it too—“is that you like your women smart.”

  “You think any woman who speaks at all is ‘smart,’” Tyr retorted, not looking at Riordan’s smirk, and not entirely sure he wanted his brother this close to the woman anyway, running his filthy eyes all over her and lingering on her ass. God knew, Riordan liked to do them in the ass. And Tyr’s actual problem was he wanted to figure this one out, smart or not.