Jurin was a mighty warrior by trade, inclination, and the happy fact he’d been born as big and brawny and naturally athletic as his six foot four blacksmith of a father, who’d been loud like his bright red beard and rowdy like his booming laugh until the day he’d died in a flood when Jurin was still a kid.

And as far as Jurin could tell, he’d been raised in the only raider clan that mattered because he was one of the luckiest bastards on this drenched and misbegotten earth. Bring on the rains and the western kings and the assholes of all descriptions who cluttered up what was left of the ruined, waterlogged planet—shithead weather patterns or douchebag wannabe fighters alike. Put his clan at his back and his axes in his hands, and he was good.

More than good. There was no ass Jurin wasn’t highly prepared and wholly motivated to kick until it begged for mercy.

Hopefully nice and loud, just the way he liked it.

Jurin was a member of the raider clan’s elite brotherhood, the highly-trained, near-undefeatable men and a few women who defended the clan from anyone foolish enough to come at them. The brothers were also responsible for the summer raids—the only time the murderous seas were calm enough to cross without risking too much loss of life to make it worth the trip—all across the mainland settlements. The raids kept the clan rich in what few resources were left on this side of the Storms that had wiped out civilizations and leveled cities way back when. They were also useful for cementing the usual raider lore in the heads of the many scared, whiny, weak-ass little bitches who clustered together in their sad little domains all over the mainland, clinging to their church and their bullshit to keep the winter and the wolves at bay.

Raiders were nightmares. Raiders came in the night and took what they liked: fuel and women, weapons and grain. Raiders howled like wolves themselves and left the same bloody devastation in their wake.

Whatever worked to make a so-called perimeter guard piss himself at the sight of Jurin and his brothers coming over the wall, a swift and inevitable tide of certain death in the dark.

Jurin had made it into the brotherhood a decade or so ago when he’d been eighteen and green, swaggering all over the eastern islands like a local god. He’d earned that shit. He’d managed not to die out there in his first summer of raids, elevating himself from likely cannon fodder to an actual brother, worthy of the clan sigil he wore over his heart. Ever since those eye-opening first few months of actual battle—and the scars and kills to mark it that he wore all over his chest and arms—he’d dedicated himself to his art. Death in all its forms. Death to any fool stupid enough to stand against him.

He trained all year in various forms of bladecraft and battle tactics, honing his huge body into a sculpted, pointed weapon, all smooth muscle and heft. There was always harder and faster. There was always more. There was the swing of his blade and there was death, preferably not his, and the song of his axe through the air was the music of his life.

And Jurin fucking loved to sing.

He’d practiced his art in shitty little settlements all over the mainland, from the eastern mainland’s compounds bristling with upstart, greedy leaders to the far more settled kingdoms of the western highlands with all their snooty bullshit. He’d crossed the sullen bitch Atlantic more times than he could count, raining down mayhem on would-be kinglets and taking what plunder he could by his strength and skill and art alone. He stood sentry over the raider city when called, aided the mighty war chief Tyr in the training of prospective brothers day after day on the green outside the Raider Lodge through the grim winter rains, and was proud to count himself a trusted and loyal soldier to Wulf, his beloved king.

When he went out at last, it would be with great honor in a lethal, massive battle against a worthy enemy, as befit a great warrior of the brotherhood who had served his people well. They would raise his name in song when he was gone and drink to his many kills in service to the clan. He would die a hero, as planned.

What he absolutely would not do was go out like a punk bitch because a maddening, impossible, wholly oblivious female drove him to it.

No matter that the prospect looked more inviting by the day.

“Off to see your mate?” his brother Ellis asked as Jurin passed him on his way out the Lodge’s great front doors. And then laughed hard enough make the bones in his black beard dance when Jurin scowled at him, because Jurin didn’t have a mate and the asshole knew it.

Everyone knew it.

“Go fuck yourself,” Jurin growled, pushing his way out into the late April afternoon, cold and cloudy with only the faintest hint of a possible spring in the air, as if summer was as dim a possibility as Jurin ever claiming his woman.

But there was no telling his king to go fuck himself.

Not if he wanted to live.

Jurin came face to face with Wulf a few steps across the green, in a hail of shouts and clashing steel from the brothers practicing combat maneuvers in the gray chill. The raider king, who had taken his throne by force at eighteen and had recently taken down the worst of the evil-ass western kings in order to deliver electric power back to all those mainlanders who had done without it for so long, was wearing nothing but a weapon harness with a single blade, battle trousers, and boots. He gleamed with exertion, likely because he’d just finished one of the brutal trail runs he’d been taking two or three times a day since he’d come back from changing the world. Straight up the mountain that loomed behind the Lodge at a pace that could kill lesser men.

Behind him, his deadly half-sister Eiryn shadowed him as always in her role as Wulf’s personal bodyguard. She was one of three women in the brotherhood and had the distinction of being the fastest blade in the clan. She was always in peak physical condition, like all the rest of the brothers, and yet even she was panting a little today.

Jurin assumed that meant the run had been vertical. And much too fast, as was usual these days.

No one was foolish enough to talk about what the king was trying to outrun out there. To his face, anyway.

Her name is Princess Kathlyn. She tried to save him from her own dickhead of a father, and he fucking left her behind, the war chief himself had told Jurin during a training run when they’d returned earlier this month. He’d rolled his eyes as they’d powered down a long stretch of black sand beach toward the hanging fog and the snow-capped mountains in the distance. He’s been pissed about it ever since.

Tyr had abducted his own woman from the compound where he’d found her during a raid. It wasn’t surprising he didn’t understand his king’s choice. He was also one of the few who could question those choices.

Jurin was not.

“I wasn’t aware you’d claimed a mate.” Wulf’s voice was as lazy as always. It was also a lie. There was steam rising off his body in the cold air, making the sleeve of tattoos he wore down his right arm seem alive. “Without the formal acceptance of your brothers and your king?”

“I don’t have a mate,” Jurin gritted out.

“Instead he has a mainland girl who cries whenever she sees a raider, hidden away in a little hut in the forest,” Eiryn replied in a teasing voice that was obviously meant to get beneath Jurin’s skin. It worked, and she only grinned blandly when Jurin glared at her. Eiryn was afraid of nothing—especially not other brothers.

Given that she was one, was related to another, Gunnar, as well as the king, and was mated to yet another brother, Riordan. Just to make it a set.

“She’s not my mate,” Jurin managed to say without sounding outright furious, which could have been interpreted as disrespect. He wasn’t that suicidal.

Yet.

“And yet you dance attendance on this woman and her child,” Wulf murmured, as if he didn’t understand.

Jurin knew he understood perfectly.

“The child, I claimed,” Jurin said, though of course his king knew that too. He’d been there.

“As I recall, that claim took you mere seconds to make.” Wulf’s cold, clear blue eyes slammed into Jurin and made him brace as if the look was a blow. From his king, there was little difference. “And yet here it is, nine months later, and the mother remains unclaimed. What will you do if another decides to step up and do what you have not?”

Jurin’s jaw ached and he unclenched his teeth. “That will never happen.”

Wulf laughed, which was far more effective than anything he could have said. And then he continued laughing as he headed toward the Lodge’s great doors, Eiryn trailing behind him with a smirk on her face.

Because, Jurin reflected as he moved across the green and headed down the hill, nodding at those he passed, everyone knew that Melyssa was driving him mad. And brothers lived and died by their blades, so they relished the opportunity to sink a few well-aimed jabs into each other when the opportunity presented itself.

Jurin greatly disliked giving them all the opportunity.

A year ago he would have roared with laughter at the idea that a piece of ass—no matter how pretty—could ever get under his skin and into his head. Jurin loved women. All women. He liked fucking. He liked getting creative and a little wild, especially when the bloodlust had gripped him all day. He’d grown up a raider, lusty and free with his needs as they took him, the way everyone was in the eastern islands where life was rough and short and abundant sex was an excellent way to take that edge off.

When he’d met her, Melyssa had been a couple of weeks postpartum, dressed in rags and misery, in the company of the soon-to-be-dead little bitch kinglet who’d dragged her across the brooding asshole Atlantic Ocean in a doomed attempt to fight Wulf in his own hall. Jurin had helped Melyssa out, claiming her newborn baby as his to defuse a tough moment.

For which he had never received adequate thanks, he thought now as he bypassed the village, all its shops and cottages winding this way and that on the hillside, and headed toward the woods. Especially not from Melyssa.

She had been dressed in the ill-fitting clothes of a compliant back then, one of the mainland’s easily led fools who listened to the smug church when it told them that sex was only for procreation in this ruined, waterlogged world where there were so few humans left. And more, that they owed that sex to the winter husbands or wives they took every September equinox, before the winter rains came in and tried to wreck the planet all over again. If there was a child out of it, they’d spend another year together, getting through the birth and those first tricky months when vicious weather and few resources could kill them all. No baby when the March equinox rolled around? No problem. Then they could all move on to a new winter arrangement in the fall, though no one involved called it what it was: institutionalized comfort pussy.

Melyssa didn’t dress like a compliant now, two years later. Jurin had spent entirely too much time thinking about her clothes—her clothes, for fuck’s sake—only yesterday. These days she looked like a raider. All those soft curves of hers wrapped in the tight, stretchy trousers and layers of shirts the raider women preferred, sometimes with another bit of fabric wrapped around her hair to keep it off her face. She was shorter than her sister, the famous Helena, who’d not only caught the war chief’s eye on that raid last summer but had more or less saved the world with the information on the old tablet she carried around. Or at least changed it, since a shitty world like this one was pretty far past saving.

Melyssa had long, dark hair that had grown shinier over the winter months with regular access to the clan’s hot water, hot spring baths deep in the caves, and the sweet soaps and shampoos the women made. She had big, soft dark eyes that made him want to bring Ferranti, the little kinglet who’d dragged her here, back to life so Jurin could kill him this time, slowly and more painfully than Tyr had last summer. Her skin was light gold and had more color now than when she’d arrived, dehydrated and scared. Even better, she was plush and round everywhere else, in all the ways that made Jurin’s cock twitch.

And she was driving him insane.

If she was any other female, he would have dealt with this in the time-honored raider fashion. He would have tossed her over his shoulder, locked them both in the nearest bedroom, and handled it.

There were any number of reasons he hadn’t done that, and none were that he was the little bitch everyone seemed to think he was. There was the fact that she was sister to the war chief’s claimed woman and Jurin had no desire to meet the sharp edge of Tyr’s blade if he messed around with Helena’s only remaining family member. Or the fact that Melyssa had come into the clan brutalized and scared and had watched the whole lot of them with nothing but wary suspicion ever since, which made her an unlikely candidate for the sort of sex for sport that Jurin enjoyed most.

He followed the level path away from the cluster of buildings that tumbled down the hill toward the shipyards—busy this time of year as the clan prepared the fleet for the summer crossings—and headed toward the small cottage set apart from the city, out where the woods began to take over. It had once been a healer’s cottage. While Jurin had been a kid, it had been where mean old King Donovan’s tottery mother had spent her final days. And now it was where Helena’s mainlander sister lived with her daughter, protected by the clan but not of it.

Still not of it.

Still not his.

Jurin had come to look forward to this walk. The breeze off the bay was crisp, smelling of salt from the brooding water and pine from the many tree-studded islands that made the bay the raider city’s first line of defense. Even if would-be attackers managed to find the narrow opening in the cliff face out there where the Atlantic Ocean threw itself against the rocky shore, all they’d see was those islands and those trees. Usually they ran aground and died of exposure, which was the better way to go.

Because the alternative was facing the full fury of the brotherhood, who would know the moment anyone entered the channel thanks to the round-the-clock surveillance they mounted for exactly that purpose. Jurin had spent many a frigid shift out there on the barrier islands in winter, glaring at the roiling sea while he froze his ass off.

Jurin entertained himself with charming fantasies of dumbasses rolling up to the docks, under the impression they were launching a stealth attack when the entire city would be on high alert and ready for them, all the way to the cottage.

And then slowed when Melyssa appeared, stepping outside and closing the door behind her. Then crossing her arms with great determination and standing there in front of it. As if she was blocking it.

The sight of her hit him the way it always did. Like a sucker punch, even when he was expecting it. She made his chest feel tight and his mouth water. She was round and small and breakable and he had no idea why his cock acted like she was the only woman on the eastern islands.

Then it occurred to him that she really was blocking her door.

From him.