It was so easy, in the end.

Elenthea simply walked into the stores, helped herself to a huge jar of something pickled that had obviously been set aside for the House, and took her sweet time walking out. Timing it so she deliberately bumped straight into her mistress on her usual mid-afternoon walk around the house.

For a moment, everyone was frozen into place. Mistress Annet in shock, her eyes wide, while her ladies fluttered around her. Elenthea in an agony of waiting for the hammer to fall at last, holding out the jar that couldn’t be anything else. And that she shouldn’t have touched in the first place, much less carried out of the storage pontoon.

For a moment, it was as if the world caught it’s breath.

“You foolish, foolish creature,” the mistress said softly, eventually. Almost as if she was sorry.

But then she shook her head, and everything speeded up.

The Council was summoned. One of Mistress Annet’s ladies blew the horn, and it wasn’t only councilmembers who gathered. A crowd grew outside the House of Griggs as the word spread through the center of the city that a thief had been caught in the stores. Elenthea was brought outside and made to stand in the middle of all the commotion. There in the slick center of the pontoons that she’d thought were the whole of the world.

But she knew better now. She knew this was only a raft, not The Raft. That the world was bigger and wider and far more complicated than she’d ever imagined.

How could she possibly go back to thinking this was all there was? Much less living that way?

She knew she couldn’t. And anyway, it was too late now. The jar of pickled fish called her out, sitting there beside her mistress’s feet in silent accusation.

“Can you explain yourself?” Councilmember Lowanna stood before her, her pale double chins gleaming, looked at Elenthea as if she was little better than a shark, all gleaming teeth and dead eyes and circling the Raft with an intent to do harm.

“There must be an explanation,” Mistress Annet said from where she stood in the thicket of councilmembers and Houses who thronged about, all staring at the low-ranked girl who’d dared such a thing. All agog.

“The punishment for pilfering winter stores is drowning,” Lowanna said, with what sounded like a note of relish in her voice. Though it was possible Elenthea was a little oversensitive, as it was her own death by drowning they were discussing. “You will be escorted to the edge of the city where the waves are highest. First you will be stripped. Then you will be weighted. Then you will be dropped over the side, no songs sung to ease your transition or save you from the lurking sharks. Every citizen knows this penalty. Do you understand it?”

“Yes, Councilmember,” Elenthea said dutifully.

The other woman eyed her with distaste. “Unless you can offer some explanation for the fact that you were caught with the stores of the House of Griggs in your own two hands, I see no reason why we shouldn’t go ahead and carry out your sentence immediately. The Raft is no place for thieves.”

“The girl deserves to speak in her own defense, Councilmember.”

It was Mistress Annet again. And Elenthea didn’t understand it. She didn’t think the mistress would be able to pick her out of a group. She wasn’t sure the mistress even knew her name. She’d had semi-private interviews with Mistress Annet over the course of her time in the House of Griggs during which the other woman had seemed less interested in her existence than she did now. When it was too late.

The older woman met her gaze. Then nodded in some kind of encouragement.

“Speak now, girl. Tell them why you did this.”

Elenthea hadn’t thought this far. She’d known what would happen if she stole something and let herself be caught. She’d planned on it, because it would draw all the attention in the city to her. And she knew the end result, but that wasn’t exactly the same thing as living through each and every moment that led to the close of water over her head and no hope of surviving it. She certainly hadn’t prepared a defense.

She should have been terrified. Maybe, on a distant level, she was. But more than that, she felt a surpassing sense of calm. As if none of this touched her. As if none of this was even about her, really.

It was almost as if she’d finally figured out her life. Right here in its last few moments.

But she had to believe that was better than nothing.

She held her mistress’s gaze. “You don’t even know my name,” she said softly. Without any condemnation or accusation. It was simply fact.

She was dimly aware of the crowd all around them and the fact that they quieted to hear her speak. It was amusing—or almost amusing—that this was the moment they chose to listen to the ruminations of a low-ranked girl they’d looked straight through every other time they’d seen her. Here and now, where it couldn’t possibly matter.

“That’s a mistress you’re speaking to, girl,” Councilmember Lowanna snapped, bristling beside Elenthea. “Mind your manners.”

Elenthea looked away from Mistress Annet, but only to scour the crowd for a familiar face. Even Gerina’s dark little glare would have been something. But there wasn’t one. She knew some of the faces, but in the pallid way she knew anybody here. Ghosts to pass in the cold wind and pretend she didn’t see.

She didn’t know what she was expecting. Her mother? She hadn’t seen that woman in years, since shortly after she’d miscarried that second baby and been forced to start anew in the house rankings. The last time they’d encountered each other, her mother had averted her eyes.

Elenthea was alone. As she had always been alone. She thought she should have felt something, some reaction to that inevitability, but there was nothing but that same calm. It wasn’t even a particular emptiness, she noted with a certain, distant amazement. It was a kind of steel-laced serenity that allowed her to ignore the Councilmember who’d snapped at her and this predicament she was in—of her own design—in turn.

“The Raft is not the world,” she said, pitching her voice to carry into the crowd. A skill she hadn’t known she possessed until just now. “It’s just a raft. It floats wherever the ocean takes it, with no will or direction. And we’re all as passive as it is.” She shook her head, looking at all the gray faces beneath the gray sky out here in this sullen, terrible ocean that wanted to sink them. “Am I the only one who’s ever wondered why we don’t ask for more?”

Her answer came in the stinging in her cheek, a hard shock, and the confused realization a moment later that the Councilmember had slapped her. Hard. She had to check her palm to see if Lowanna had drawn blood the way her mother had years ago, but there was nothing. Only the bloom of hot, red pain and a ringing in her ears.

“Life on the Raft is a privilege, not a right,” Lowanna sneered, her chins wobbling with obvious spite, though her voice was also loud enough to be heard out in the boatyards. “Citizens float, but dissidents must drown.”

Elenthea stared back at her with a defiance she’d never felt before. And it must have showed on her face. It must have transformed her, she thought, because the other woman’s gaze went flat. Something like a murderous.

This time when she lifted her hand, Elenthea not only saw it, she saw that it was a fist instead of a palm.

That’s going to hurt, she told herself, bracing for the blow.

“Touch her again, woman, and I will cut that hand from your body and feed it to you, and between you and me, I don’t imagine you’ll like the taste of mean old bitch.”

Tait.

It was impossible, but Elenthea would recognize his voice anywhere. She didn’t simply hear him, every part of her body shivered into awareness. Or welcome. Or some odd space between the two, where her breasts ached and her heart lurched and she wanted him as badly as she ever had, in the same moment that she was terrified that he was here.

Because he shouldn’t have been here. He should have been in that boat of his, already heading for home.

She didn’t pay attention to the ripple that went through the crowd. The muttering voices, the shocked exclamations. She whipped her head around, trying to find him in the throng of women and the few round Houses, but then followed all the wide-eyed gazes to the pontoon behind her. The House of Griggs. Her most recent home on the Raft.

Tait was crouched there on the roof, his blade in his hand and expression she had never seen before on his face.

And he was only one man before so many of her people, no matter how fierce and lethal he looked.

“You can’t be here,” she threw at him, desperately.

The word raider snaked its way through the crowd. The same way they might have whispered dragon. Or Australia. A fairytale come to life, shaped like everybody’s worst nightmare and pointing that deadly weapon straight at them.

She didn’t understand how he’d managed to walk right into the center of the Raft, with no one the wiser. Had he climbed along the roofs all the way here? Someone that big should have made a racket, but of course he hadn’t. She knew somehow that no one heard Tait unless he allowed it.

“This looks a whole lot like a dumbass, boneheaded sacrifice, baby,” Tait said, sounding mean and dark and somehow more delicious than he ever had before. It shuddered through her, and she suddenly felt a whole lot less calm. “Since when do you get caught stealing shit?”

Elenthea ignored that trembling thing deep in her gut, that made her want to do nothing more than run to him. Or run toward the side of the pontoons to hasten the death she’d already signed up for, so he could escape the way he was supposed to do.

“You need to go,” she told him, and ignored the hiss from Lowanna. “What are you doing here? This is all so you can go. Safely.”

“Or what?” Tait looked around, the corner of his mouth crooking up in the sort of smile that would make a wise person’s blood chill. “There’s no army here. What few men you have are soft and weak. If I wanted to I could sink the whole damn Raft, and nobody would ever care. Or lift a single finger to stop me.”

Griggs coughed a bit. The House to his left frowned. That was the entirety of their response. Mistress Annet clutched at her ceremonial blade, but didn’t pull it free of its sheath. No one else seemed to breathe.

Elenthea was forced to ask herself why she’d submitted her entire life to these people.

“You have no business here,” Lowanna finally chimed in, glaring furiously at Tait. As if it had only just occurred to her to speak—or more likely, she’d only just found her tongue in the face of a real, live, raider warrior right there in front of her.

“I never asked you to sacrifice yourself for me,” Tait growled from his high perch, his gaze on Elenthea. If he’d heard Lowanna, he gave no indication. “Sacrifice is nothing but cowardice dressed up with a purpose. It’s bullshit. And you know it is, or you would have told me what you were doing.”

“While you were so busy leaving?” Elenthea flared back at him, from the part of her that was definitely no longer the least bit calm. “I must have missed the opportunity for a heart-to-heart while you were so busy telling me you didn’t have any feelings and sex was just sex.” She ignored the muttering from the crowd, no doubt all scandalized that she’d defiled house property—herself—with this terrifying raider. She lifted her chin. “But you’re right. I’m the coward.”

That was probably a mistake, she thought, a little dazed at her own temerity. And more than a little afraid of what his reaction would be.

But Tait grinned.

“You showed me every part of you except your temper, baby. You’re going to pay for that.”

And then he reached out his hand as if he expected her to take it.

As if the payment plan he was suggesting was the kind of price Elenthea would greatly enjoy paying.

And Elenthea didn’t think twice.

Even if the Raft was the world, she liked the world she’d found with Tait better. Even if there was nothing out there but a little more time with him and a watery grave, it was better than this.

Anything with him was better than this. And better than anything else she could imagine, either.

She didn’t hesitate. She took the two or three steps that put her within his reach, moving fast in case any of the stunned citizens around her thought to reach out and detain her. Then she threw her arms up so he could take hold of her.

He grabbed her and hauled her up onto the roof with him as if she weighed no more than a length of wool. And as his strong arm went around her to haul her to him, she knew the truth.

She’d lived in these houses, but she’d never had a home. Until now.

Until Tait.

But he wasn’t looking at her. He was holding her at his side and glaring down at the assorted throng.

“I wouldn’t,” he said in a menacing growl.

He was already moving as Elenthea turned her head, her gaze finding Lowanna and her angry-chins—and the pistol she’d pulled from her layers of wool and was aiming straight at Tait.

“Raiders do not belong on the Raft,” Lowanna barked out. “And neither do thieving collaborators!”

But there was blade in the air, gleaming and bold, in the split-second it took Elenthea to realize that the old woman was really going to shoot at them. She felt her heart kick at her. She sucked in a quick breath—

And then there was nothing.

Another kick of her heart. And another, as she frowned slightly, trying to make sense of that blurry thing in the councilmember’s forehead.

Tait’s blade, she thought in something like wonder, and that was when the woman collapsed in a heap.

“Come after me,” Tait snarled at the crowd. “I dare you.”

And then he wrapped his hand around Elenthea’s wrist, tugged her with him as he turned, and ran.

Tait ran the way he did everything else. With effortless athleticism and that astonishing male grace.

He moved like the wind across the tops of the pontoons, then leapt down gracefully when the covered part ended and the outer pontoons stretched out toward the marina. He held out his arms and caught her when she jumped, too, and something flared between them then. Dark. Addictive and intimate and entirely theirs.

He took his time putting her feet on the ground, and even when he did, Elenthea felt like she was floating.

And then they were running again.

Elenthea let Tait draw her along in his wake, not wanting to stop moving. Not wanting to let go of him for an instant. Not wanting to blink and discover that this was all a little fantasy in the last moments of her life and she was even now being stripped and weighted.

She had never seen a violent death before. She’d never seen a blade sticking out of another person. And yet with Tait’s strong fingers wrapped around her wrist, urging her on, and his perfectly glorious body moving beside and ahead of her, all she could think was yes.

Yes to running on rooftops. Yes to the exhilaration of a pounding heart and an uncertain future. Yes to the unknown, bright and changeable and hers, instead of all this gray.

Yes to sex that wrecked her and made her and, in turn, calmed her and exalted her. Yes to whatever this was, this reckless love, this impossible raider. This life he was leading her toward that she couldn’t understand or even picture. Yes.

All she could think was yes.

When they got to the marina, Tait let go of her wrist only to encircle her hips and haul her up against him, then toss her up and onto the boat.

“You don’t have any idea what to do on a boat, do you?” But Tait wasn’t really asking her a question. She knew he already knew how little she knew about boats and anything to do with him. “Don’t worry about that. Just keep an eye out and let me know if anyone from one of your houses gets close.”

Elenthea looked back toward the city. Toward the center pontoons where she’d thought she would die today. How funny, she thought, that she’d been fully prepared for her death and yet here she was, with Tait again, and now she would have fought to prevent it.

Things changed so quickly.

She saw what could have been people moving toward them, but it was hard to tell. It was so far in the distance and none of them had a raider’s speed.

Tait laughed when she reported it.

He was moving around the boat, loosening the ropes that held it to the dock. Then he swung himself on board, climbing quickly to the captain’s berth and the wheel that stood there, covered by hard-shelled canopy.

“Sacrifice isn’t cowardly,” she threw at him, climbing up to the captain’s berth to sit beside him, on the passenger seat he indicated with a jerk of his chin.

He slid a glance her way as he turned on the ancient motor that sounded a whole lot smoother than the boats she remembered hearing last summer. She wouldn’t be surprised if he’d fixed that, too.

“Isn’t that what your brothers do?” she asked, choosing to ignore that warning glance. “Your raider warriors who protect your clan?”

He laughed again, and it was a warrior’s laugh, deep and mighty. And full of himself in a way that should have rubbed her the wrong way. But didn’t.

“I win my battles, little girl.”

“No one wins every battle.”

“You’re welcome to try and best me.” Another dark glance. “In fact, I encourage it.”

“No one wins all the time,” she said again, as if it was important he admit that. as if it was necessary. “Even you.”

“Baby, you’re so used to a small life that you have no idea what it means to expect that you can win when you have to.” There was a stirring sort of note in his voice then and it connected, hard, with all that ached in her heart. “But don’t worry, we have nothing but the open sea and a whole lot of topics to cover while we go. A thousand things to teach you.”

Elenthea heard the threat in his voice. The menace. But she felt it slick and hot between her legs, where only he had ever made her glow. And it didn’t seem to matter anymore that he admit anything. Only that he keep on teaching her.

“You should have left me,” she said as fiercely as she could, while he backed the boat out of the slip, then gunned it into the open water beyond the docks. “Now you’re stuck with me.”

“That sounds a whole lot better than dying,” Tait retorted, his eyes on the vast sea ahead of them and the high swells that waited there. “Maybe we should see exactly how stuck we get.”

Elenthea felt gripped by something she couldn’t begin to define, then. She sat in her passenger seat, and looked back over her shoulder as the Raft grew smaller and smaller. She stared, trying to make sense of it when the whole world she called hers disappeared, and then there was nothing but the sea. Walls and walls of the gray, brooding sea. Nothing but winter sky and cold water all around.

And the man in the center of it, so bold and unapologetically bright that she found she didn’t mind the gray at all.

“You done saying goodbye to that shithole?”

Tait sounded something like amused. And Elenthea realized she was holding her breath. That she’d been holding it, then letting it go just to hold it again, this whole time. She let her lungs fill and this time, she didn’t hold it. Then she turned to look at Tait again.

He patted his lap, and she didn’t think twice about that either. The roof of a pontoon, the captain’s chair, what did it matter?

She knew that she would always go to him. That whatever else happened, that was what made sense.

He was home.

“We sink when we are many,” she whispered as she settled into his lap, looping her arms around his neck, and unable to keep herself from smiling into his strong, beautiful face. His dark brows and fierce dark beard. That rough mouth she wanted to taste, always. Tait. Her Tait. “We float as one.”

“I think that’s your fucked up rafter way of telling me you love me,” Tait rumbled at her. But he was grinning too.

“I love you,” she agreed, and she frowned at him. “And it’s not fucked up.”

“I love you, too,” he told her, as if it was a random fact. Like the color of the sky. He grinned wider when her mouth fell open. “And raiders don’t float, baby. They fucking sail.”

He kept one hand on the steering wheel, but he tangled the other in her hair. Then he tugged her mouth to his, for a swift, deep, life-altering kiss.

Like every other kiss they’d ever shared, or would.

“Don’t worry,” Tait said against her mouth. “I’ll teach you how to sail. I’ll teach you how to be a raider. I’ll teach you everything.”

And Tait was a man who kept his promises, as Elenthea came to find out. Because that was exactly what he did.

Forever.