The firelight danced over Matylda’s pretty face but did nothing to change the way she was staring back at him, stricken.

As if he’d hauled off and slapped her.

Zavier told himself there was no reason to feel as if he had.

He’d known this was coming. He should have reasserted reality a long time ago. The trouble was, he liked Matylda too much. All of her, not just small parts of her here and there like all the others. Though with some of them, he hadn’t even liked that much. They’d been as desperate to get the hell away from him as he’d been to see them go.

Today had been sunny and sweet. He’d been working out at the far end of the valley where his land met his old, bitchy mistress—the seething Atlantic sea. He’d seen Matylda coming from a long way off, bouncing over the fields in that old truck he’d kept running for years now. When she pulled up near him, her green eyes were sparkling and there were new freckles across the span of her nose, because she was that susceptible to the sunlight. Her hair had been caught back in a knot but strands of red had danced this way and that in the open windows of the truck. She’d looked open and free. She’d looked happy.

She’d looked like his.

And even though everything in Zavier had frozen solid at that, he hadn’t done anything about it. He hadn’t wiped that smile off her face the way he knew he should have—because he liked it. He liked the way she looked at him.

That was the trouble. He liked her too much.

Matylda had brought him one of her typical lunches, thick slices of the bread she baked herself with cold cuts of meat and the butter she’d churned. When he was finished eating and drinking the coffee she’d brought down in a pouch, still warm despite the long drive, he hadn’t been able to hold himself back from throwing her down into the new grass and getting his hands on her. He’d held her up and made her ride his face, and then he’d made her stay there on her hands and knees while she was still making that keening noise that made him crazy and meant her cunt was its softest and sweetest, so he could take her there with the sea spread out before her.

Zavier was a ghost. A betrayer. But in that moment, he’d felt like a lucky man.

He knew that he had no choice but to tell her the truth about how this would go, no matter how much he liked his life with her in it. Right now, before he forgot again. Before he got lost in this hot, sweet fantasy of a good life that he knew he didn’t deserve.

And she was still staring at him as if he’d already hurt her, so he figured there couldn’t be a better time to do just that.

“I’m a monster,” he told her fiercely. “I mean that.”

The hurt seemed to fade away from her expression then. She pressed her lips together, which made him wonder if they’d been trembling, and then she folded her hands in the lap of one of the skirts she’d made. The skirts she wore for him, he knew. Because he’d told her he wanted that access to her lush little pussy.

Sometimes he thought that she would do anything he asked. Sometimes he asked her crazy things just to test that, and sure enough, she did them.

Sometimes he thought she was perfect.

No, he knew she was. That was the trouble. She was perfect for the man he’d been pretending to be for the past fifteen years. But that wasn’t who Zavier was. Not really. The real Zavier didn’t deserve her. Not this life, and certainly not a woman like Matylda to make the endless, thankless work feel like a pleasure.

“I don’t believe in monsters,” Matylda told him.

“Then you’re very foolish, because they’re real.”

He didn’t close the distance between them, because he was afraid that if he put his hands on her he would lose his train of thought and bury himself in her the way he wanted to do. The way he always wanted to do. And she had to listen to him now. Because he couldn’t see himself ripping out her heart when he put her on that bus in a few short weeks. He didn’t think he’d be able to stand it. She had to know now, so she’d go quietly.

Like the others. When she’d never been anything like the others.

But he shoved that aside.

“My father was a shitty king, but that’s what he was. A king.” Matylda’s eyes widened, but she didn’t appear to have any other reaction to that. Zavier pushed on. “He was a much worse father. When the new king took over my clan, he gave me a thousand chances to pledge myself to him. But I didn’t take them.” He found his hand over the tattoo on his chest, hidden beneath his shirt tonight but still seeming to emanate that heat it always did. The brotherhood he’d turned his back on. The life he’d walked away from. “I could have redeemed myself. I could have redeemed my family name. But I didn’t.”

“What did you do?”

“I was a dick.” Zavier let out a short laugh. “And then I left.”

“People leave,” Matylda said after a moment. “I grew up in a coastal village where my family had lived all my life, and it was hard to leave it. I knew everyone. I was comfortable and cared for. But sometimes there’s no other choice. Not if you want to live.”

“You don’t understand.” Zavier shook his head. How could he possibly describe the raider’s warrior brotherhood to a woman like Matylda who’d grown up without even knowing she ought to be afraid of raiders? There were no raiders here. None to threaten the plump little coastal villages like the one she’d grown up in, much less the cities in the higher elevations. Sometimes Zavier had dreams of returning to the raider city and petitioning Wulf for his own life, with all the unraided shores here as payment for his sins. But that would mean taking the risk that his new king would opt to cut him down for his betrayal instead, and Zavier could do that on his own. Year by grim and miserable and lonely year. “The penalty for breaking the kind of vows that I turned my back on is death. A painful, dishonorable, very public death.”

He didn’t know what he expected, but Matylda only considered him for a moment.

“If you knew that, then why did you break your vows?” she asked. “I assume you had a good reason.”

It told him things he wasn’t ready to look at closely: That Matylda automatically assumed he was an honorable man. That she instantly took his side when he’d never done that himself. Because the sad truth was that Zavier had altered the course of his entire life and burned every bridge. On a whim.

“Because I’m a monster,” he told her, because he’d concluded that a long time ago. Monsters betrayed their family and friends. Monsters had the blood of a bad king in their veins and acted it out. They betrayed their vows and stole from the clan.

His father had been a monster and Zavier was too. End of story.

But Matylda didn’t seem particularly impressed by his declaration.

“Grief is a terrible thing,” she said softly. “It sits on you, taking all your air, until it’s done. And nothing you do can possibly change that. It takes the time it takes. No more, and no less.”

“If you think I grieved the death of my father, cut down in the streets like the wild, rampaging animal he was, you’re wrong.” Zavier let out a short laugh. “I hated that guy.”

“I’m not sure a child can avoid grieving his father,” Matylda replied. “Especially if it doesn’t make sense. I think that kind of grief might be the worst. I’m not at all surprised that it could make you do foolish things. Regrettable things. But, Zavier.” And oh, the way she looked at him then. He would have given anything to be the man she saw. Anything at all. “It doesn’t make you a monster.”

He shouldn’t have started this conversation, but then, there were a thousand things he shouldn’t have done with Matylda. He should have put her back on that bus the minute he’d laid eyes on her and had known that he wanted her. Desperately. He should have left her in town after she’d initiated that first round with him in the front seat of his truck.

He should have acted on what he’d known instantly: she was different.

Because the truth was, he didn’t know if he could handle this. He didn’t know if he could let her go.

Not an issue he’d ever thought he’d have.

But she was still talking.

“My parents died when I was twenty,” she was telling him. “The only industry where we lived was fishing, but only men could operate those boats and the heavy nets safely. I had no choice but to pack up my younger sister and take us both to the higher elevations if I wanted us to survive. But in order to do that I had to leave everything I knew.” She lifted a shoulder, then dropped it. “Including all the memories of my parents. It was the hardest thing I ever did.”

Zavier had no good memories of his parents. He couldn’t relate. And still he wanted to gather her into his arms and soothe her. Take away her pain, no matter how old and far away it was.

All of this was crazy. Her smile made him a lunatic. All he wanted was to keep seeing it. Keep making her happy. Keep finding ways to make her laugh.

It was sheer madness. He knew it.

“Except then I had to build a life,” Matylda said. “I had to take care of my sister as well as me. And I had to do it while I was grieving in a place where no one knew me. Or what I’d lost. Or even the kinds of people that my parents had been.” Her eyes were gleaming when she looked at him then. “But I managed it. That was almost ten years ago. And sometimes I think the grief might still sweep me away, but it never does, not quite. And life goes on whether you want it to or not.”

The fire seemed loud then. Or maybe that was the noise in his head. The clatter in his chest.

The fact he couldn’t look away from her, no matter how he tried.

“In the meantime, I’m all right,” Matylda said softly. “And the life I built is pretty good. I have no complaints. Grief always feels like it will win, Zavier, but it never does.”

And for a moment, Zavier just looked at her, his beautiful wife who wanted to comfort him—and was managing it, somehow. And he wondered how the hell she’d ever ended up stashed way out on the backside of nowhere with an angry ex-raider like him. A man women like her should have found too terrifying to look at directly.

But then he frowned, because the truth was he didn’t know the answer to that question. And he should.

“Your life in the city was good?” he asked.

“It was.” Matylda wrinkled her nose. “But it’s such a different life. There are so many people and nothing is yours. You work because you have to, not because you ever see the fruits of your labor, or have any connection to what they yield. I didn’t know any of that was possible.”

“But you were happy.”

She frowned at him. “Yes. But not like—”

“Sweetheart.” Everything in him had gone still, as if he was preparing for battle when he knew very well he was not. Not the way his body seemed to think he was. “If you were so happy in the city, why did you come here?” She blinked at him as if that question made no sense, but that battle sense was kicking in him and he pushed on. “The women who come here have no other options. They’re running from something. They’re always desperate. No woman sells herself into marriage with a complete stranger on the other side of the world, far out in the wilderness where no one could ever hear a scream for help, if she has another choice. So tell me, Matylda. What in your happy little life down there in the cities were you so afraid of that you came here and threw yourself on what passes for my mercy?”

He told himself to calm down. There was no reason for him to be reacting this way. Maybe she was like him, and had strolled into the bride coordinator’s office on a stupid whim. And then found herself on the bus halfway up the mountains with ample time to think better of her imprudent actions once it was too late.

But he didn’t think so.

Because he knew his wife. She was practical, not hotheaded. She had her moods and tempers, but she kept herself on an even keel despite them. He thought she worked them out during sex, which he could only approve of. If she had a problem, she told him about it, the way she had once early on when she’d thought he could take a moment or two to explain things before growling at her about it. And she’d been right. There were no angry silences from Matylda. No passive aggressive slamming around the house, waiting for him to lose his shit. It was as if she’d intuitively known that the only way this could work was if she treated what she did here as being as important as what he did. As if they were two halves of the same whole, and that whole was the life they built together.

And she’d been so good at it. Too good to be true, he’d found himself thinking more than once as the days had passed.

But it hadn’t occurred to him that he might actually be right about that. Literally correct.

“My sister Nicoline is younger,” she told him, and he understood that was confirmation without her having to say another word. But she kept talking. “Ten years younger. Which means she’s old enough to remember our parents and the fact that I am definitely not her mother, but too young to truly recognize how much of a parent I was to her this past decade. I don’t blame her for that. That’s just how it is.”

Zavier found that he took against this younger sister Nicoline, that easily. It was something in the way Matylda spoke so carefully, as if she was trying to be respectful of Nicoline’s feelings. When it was Matylda sitting here, too many vertical miles out into the untamed frontier, not her sister. Matylda who’d lit up Zavier’s entire world no matter how he tried to pretend it was the coming summer. Matylda who had made him imagine . . .

But that was the point, he was forced to remind himself. None of this was real. Matylda most of all.

“She’s such a charming girl,” Matylda said, still talking about her sister. “And so pretty people stop to comment on it. A great beauty, some even say. There are a lot of pretty girls, of course. But Nicoline is also fertile. She began bleeding only this past year and is already pregnant.”

“I’m sure her lord holds her in high regard, then,” Zavier said. Perhaps a little too dismissively. “How do your sister’s looks or fertility lead to you out here on the frontier, married to a stranger?”

With me?

But he didn’t ask that last bit. He had some small shred of pride.

Matylda smiled. “She’s in love. She wants to marry the father of her baby. And because she’s in love and wants to marry the father of her baby, she also has a four-month tithing debt at the bell towers.”

Zavier didn’t like where this was going. He surged to his feet and found himself roaming over to stand in front of the fireplace. He crossed his arms over his chest to keep his damned hands to himself. But his gaze was still pinned to Matylda.

“I thought you had to go every week.”

“You do. If you don’t tithe twice a week, every week, the seneschal marks you down in the books and you have to make it up. Or face the consequences if you don’t.”

Zavier definitely did not want to picture Matylda “making it up.” Much less facing the sort of consequences he was sure he could imagine all too well on his own. Men who liked to control access to pussy always let their imaginations run wild when it came to punishments. Because that was when they could strip off their masks and stop pretending. He’d seen it a thousand times. He scowled, as much at his unexpected surge of possessiveness regarding his wife as at the images in his head.

“But your sister didn’t want to do that, I’m guessing.”

“Her debt is too large,” Matylda said. Quietly, he thought. As if she was sensing that he wouldn’t like this very much either. Or maybe because she didn’t like it all that much herself. “She’s freshly blooded and pregnant so quickly. Her fertility price is outrageous, of course. No common person could ever pay it.”

“But you can, can’t you?” Zavier gritted out, past that iron thing in him that felt too cold and too hard and entirely too much like a blow. “Let me guess. You thought you’d mail yourself off to the most difficult man on the frontier. What’s the going rate for that?”

But this was Matylda. She didn’t cringe away or bow her head in shame. Her eyes didn’t well up with tears. She faced him straight on, her gaze cool and her chin high.

“As you say, no women come all the way out here unless they have a great need of the frontier. And what it can give them. You already know this. I don’t know why you’re acting surprised that I have similar needs.”

“I’ll assume that means it costs a lot to come placate me.”

“My fertility price was set to match my sister’s,” Matylda said quietly.

Zavier had lived here long enough to know what that meant. The lord didn’t actually pay these women anything. He forgave presumed debt. That meant that he’d set Matylda’s debt astronomically high—and this on top of her sister’s existing price. Which meant it was all bullshit.

“How long do you have to suffer out here?” he gritted out. “Handling my egregious crap?”

Her chin rose higher and her green eyes flashed. “I am not suffering.”

“Answer the question.”

“For every year I stay out here, I earn a year of my sister’s life.”

Zavier laughed. It sounded to him like a death rattle. And he could tell from the look on Matylda’s face that she liked it about as much.

“What a martyr you are,” he managed to scrape out and throw at her. “It’s not even your own need that brought you here. It’s a vague threat to your sister’s life.” He spat that out like a curse. “That’s what sends you running straight to the worst monster on the whole of the frontier.”

Matylda shrugged. Helplessly, he would’ve said, if she was anyone else.

“I raised her. If I can help her, of course I will.”

And something in him broke.

“I knew it.” He dragged his hands through his hair, staring at her as if she’d stuck him in the chest with the sharpest of his blades. He wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t. “I knew you were too good to be true. And of course you are.”

“I love it here,” Matylda said fiercely. She shot to her feet, her hands in fists at her sides, though she was wise enough to stay where she was. Zavier didn’t know what he would do if she crossed to the fire and put her hands on him. Not right now, when for the first time in his life, he wasn’t entirely sure that he could control himself. He didn’t care for the sensation. “And I love you.”

That slammed into him. It made him ache, everywhere. It made him furious.

“Bullshit.” He threw that out the way he’d throw a knife across a room to bury it in an enemy’s neck. And she shook as if he done exactly that. “I don’t trust a single thing you say. All of this is a lie. Everything you’ve done. Everything you said. All to save your worthless sister who I doubt has thought of you at all since the day you left.”

Matylda jerked. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Nicoline loves me. I love her. We’re family.”

“Here’s what I know, baby,” he bit out. “Family doesn’t sell family to pay their debts. If your sister has a brain in her head—which I fucking doubt, given the fact she sold her only family member into a mail-order marriage that everyone knows is a last resort—she’ll ditch the lover and please the lord.”

“What do you mean?” Matylda shook her head. “She loves Fernando.”

“Only a fool wastes away in a poor, common marriage when she has the option to be a great lady instead,” Zavier growled. “Is your sister a fool?”

“No, but—”

“She’s newly blooded and newly pregnant. You said she’s pretty besides. Let me guess, the lord graciously offered to let the would-be husband work off the debt somewhere.”

“Yes, but Fernando is just as happy to help as—”

“So the husband he sent off to some work camp forever, and the only remaining family member he sent to the meanest fucking frontiersmen out here. Because don’t kid yourself, sweetheart. Your lord knows exactly what I am. He knows where I came from and he knows what I can do. He expects me to break you.”

Matylda blew out a breath. “To what end?”

“Don’t be so naive.” And Zavier didn’t know who he was angrier at. The asshole lord or the faithless sister or Matylda herself, for believing this crap. “He wants your very pretty, very fertile sister for himself. This way he can claim her and make good on the debt she owes him, all without lifting a finger. That’s what lords do. They’re dicks.”

Matylda looked a little pale. She had her hair up the way she liked to do, so he could enjoy taking it down again, and that meant he could gauge her moods by the red flushes that gave her away, up and down the soft skin of her neck. But he couldn’t even enjoy that tonight. There was nothing left to enjoy, because all of this was bullshit. All of this was a game she was playing. Of course she’d taken to him and his life faster than anyone else ever had. She had no escape route. She had to make this work.

He couldn’t believe he’d fallen for it.

“I didn’t know any of that,” Matylda was whispering. “I don’t even know if what you’re saying is true and even if it is, I don’t think Nicoline would go for it. But this is true, Zavier.” And she opened up her hands to take in the old, restored church. The valley all around them, stretching from the highest peak in the region down to the bitch sea he could hear laughing at him, all this way, for imagining he could escape the things he’d done and what it had earned him. “Everything that happened here is real. Especially between you and me.”

“Between you and me?” He laughed again. “There’s a whole lot of fucking between you and me, Matylda. And nothing else.”

“That’s a lie.” She threw it out like a serious accusation. Like she was calling him out for a fight and expected him to answer her on a field of battle. She had no idea how much he wished he could. “You know it’s a lie.”

“The only lie here is you.” And he didn’t question that wild, raw thing inside of him. Where iron met pain and made him a stranger to himself all over again, the way he’d been when he’d washed up on Esteban’s shore in the first place. He didn’t question it. He only knew that she was the reason he felt this shit. And she had to go. “I’m not going to wait for the solstice, Matylda. I’m taking you back now. Tomorrow.”

He saw her sway on her feet. And every part of him wanted to go to her, but he refused to let himself do it. She didn’t care that he was getting rid of her. She cared that her precious sister might be at risk.

He told himself he might give her another chance if she’d admit that. Just once.

“Zavier . . . I’m not lying to you,” she whispered. She lifted one of her hands as if she wanted to touch him, but didn’t dare. Then she dropped it back to her side. “I love you.”

But he knew that was the biggest lie of all. Because he knew it was impossible.

And he hated her for making him imagine otherwise.

Even for a second.

“Go to bed, Matylda,” he ordered her. In the voice he used when he needed her to obey. Instantly.

She shuddered.

And it still took her a minute. A wealth of emotion crossed her face. He could read it right there in her wide green eyes, glazed with a pain he didn’t want to recognize. He didn’t want to recognize any of it. But finally, she went.

And for the first time since he’d met her bus, Zavier didn’t follow.