“What is it, exactly, you don’t like?” Jurin asked then, as if he had all the patience in the world.

Melyssa knew that no one else seemed to find him a particularly patient man. She always found that so strange. She’d sit at those big dinners around all the tables thrown together in the Lodge Hall and she’d pay attention to the way they all spoke to each other. All the raiders of the brotherhood and the camp girls who serviced their needs. She heard how they felt about each other, and what they thought about each other, and all the rest. It was there in the way they taunted each other and dared each other. It was in the stories they told of far-off battles while they were gathered around the fire. It was how they moved around each other—some comfortable, some not. And she knew that no one thought Jurin was as calm as she did.

But to her, he was like a foundation. The only one she’d had since she’d come here.

She shoved that strange little thought away.

“I don’t see how anybody likes it,” she confided in him because she thought, somehow, that because he was a raider he might understand. Or at least not condemn her outright.

No one else back home—not that she really thought of any of the places she’d stayed over the years on the mainland as a home—could ever have understood her feelings because they’d all been compliant. And compliant people always said the same things about sex, touching, and everything that went along with it. It was a duty, nothing more. How Melyssa felt about it never signified. She’d always known to do what was expected of her: lie back, stay still, and think about the repopulation of the drowned and battered earth—not what was happening to her.

What happens to you is less important than what happens to the human race, the priests always told them. Because compliance was a duty and a glorious chore. The fate of humanity was entrusted to the compliant, who set aside childish, outdated notions of “passion” and “love” for the greater good and a better future for all. It was selfish to think her feelings should supersede any of that.

Melyssa had always done her duty. Wasn’t that how all this had happened in the first place? She and Helena had been on the run all their lives. First with their parents, but then they’d been killed and Melyssa and Helena had ran. They’d always ran. There was no settling into a place, no finding their feet. They’d always had to stay one step ahead of the people who wanted to kill them for their family secrets, and so they had.

And Melyssa had never been the smart one. That had always been Helena’s job. So maybe she hadn’t understood the driving necessity of it all—and after their parents had died so horribly, she couldn’t pretend she cared—but she’d understood that running and running and running did nothing but exhaust them both. She hadn’t wanted to end up dead, so she figured they should do the exact opposite of what their parents had done. Namely, their duty.

I have a radical idea, she’d thrown at Helena once as they’d hidden beneath some awful, smelly bridge while death marched above them and the thick, half-frozen mud threatened to suck them down into its depths. Why don’t we try to be normal for a change? Maybe fewer people would chase us if we weren’t running.

And maybe, just maybe, she’d been a little bit jealous of her sister. She’d never understood how Helena had found it so easy to ignore all the things they’d been taught as children. Helena hadn’t seemed to care how many priests told her what a good woman ought to have spent her time hoping for. She’d always been ranting on about satellites and server farms while Melyssa had wondered if she’d ever find a mate.

And look where it had gotten them: run down like dogs by terrible men.

Melyssa had been so thrilled when she’d gotten pregnant. She’d thought that finally, finally, she got to prove her worth. That Helena might be smarter, but Melyssa was fertile, and in the places they’d grown up that should have made all the difference.

For a while, it had. But then the raiders had come and everything had changed, and now Melyssa was here.

Her sister and she had never been as close as they should have been, and that hadn’t changed with their relocation across the Atlantic. They’d spent a lot of time together here, as they always had, but here it wasn’t fraught with peril and their own imminent demise. Here, they weren’t running from certain death all the time. The raiders were dangerous, lethal machines, but they rarely killed their own, which made Helena safe and Melyssa something like . . . safe-adjacent. Melyssa even thought that maybe someday, she and Helena might be better friends than she’d ever imagined possible back on the mainland.

Rhiannon helped with that, as with everything. Because who couldn’t adore her daughter’s beautiful, chubby little face?

The raider clan loved babies, like everyone else, but they didn’t treat fertile women the same way that they were treated back on the mainland. For one thing, the women here had babies when they felt like it. Otherwise they took herbs to keep those babies at bay. Or so the camp girls had told her while she’d still lived in that room in the Lodge, down in the lower rooms tucked up on the other side of the kitchens where the less lofty folks lived. The cleaners and the cooks. The lower-ranked healers. And the brand new camp girls, who were kept separate from the others until they found their footing in their lives of sexual surrender.

You get to be in control, love, one of them had said, as she changed Rhiannon’s diaper in those early days, when Melyssa was still reeling as much from giving birth in the first place as from the crossing over the sea she’d been forced to endure. All she’d been capable of was curling in a ball on her bed and staring in awe at her child. Babies should be loved and cherished, not forced upon anyone. Here, we get to control when we get pregnant. Or if we get pregnant at all.

But that was the thing. Melyssa had no idea how to be in control or even why that was something she should desire in the first place. She’d never been in control. Her parents had been, then Helena, with her insistence that they continue their parents’ mission. And Melyssa had been much better than Helena at assimilating into her winter situations. Maybe she’d always been good at handing someone else control.

But Jurin wasn’t compliant, and it wasn’t as if she could be in much less control than she was now. She lived in the middle of this clan, but it wasn’t lost on her that she was an outsider, and with no way to make herself an insider the way she’d done in other places—with a winter husband. Still, she thought it was very unlikely that Jurin would throw her out of the city and let the wolves have her if she admitted all the things she’d always felt, yet could never admit to another soul.

“You don’t know how anybody likes what?” Jurin was asking. “Be specific, baby.”

Had he always called her baby? Melyssa wasn’t certain. She thought she ought to dislike it, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do that. Not when it seemed to land like his hand on her, so warm and oddly fascinating.

“Sex,” she told him. Because why not? They’d had nine months to hurt her and no one had. She doubted something she said now would make a difference. “It made sense on the mainland. Of course anyone can succumb to a few moments of pain and unpleasantness if it means you save the human race. But I don’t understand what happens here. All the time. For much, much longer.”

Jurin shifted again, and she was sure she’d read his expression wrong. Why would he look something like . . . sad? He pulled her away from the wall and she was so busy looking for condemnation or censure on his face that she forgot to be afraid that he was holding onto her. He moved the few steps over to the foot of the bed and sat down, drawing her to stand between his knees.

And Melyssa had never been close to him like this before. She’d never been able to look at him directly, no craning of her neck or tilting of her face. She was surprised that she didn’t mind the way his big hands settled on her hips, holding her in place.

Keeping you safe, something in her whispered.

The way he always had, she thought, and then felt herself flush more.

“You don’t like sex?” he asked.

“Of course not,” she said severely. Then cleared her throat when he only kept looking at her in that mild way of his. “You’re not supposed to.”

“But you know that people secretly do, Melyssa.” His hands seemed to grip her hips tighter. As if in response, something deep inside her spun over and tied itself into a bright, hot knot. “Behind closed doors, it’s amazing how much people like the things they pretend to hate.”

“I was never pretending.”

He nodded as if he was filing that away. “What, specifically, don’t you like?”

“Sex,” she said again.

She thought he was laughing at her, though he never made the sound. It was that light in his amber eyes.

“Describe a typical round of sex to me,” he ordered her.

Melyssa tried to back away, but he held onto her. And somehow she ended up with her fingers wrapped as far around his heavy arms as they would go, which wasn’t far. He was so different from other men. So hard. Hard and heavy, as if he was made of steel. But he was so warm, despite the weather outside. She could feel the heat of his skin through the long-sleeved henley he wore beneath his usual weapons harness.

“I can’t describe it,” she finally said, scandalized.

“You can.”

And he waited.

There was no reason that his waiting should be worse than actual, shouted commands she’d received in the past, to say nothing of the odd cuff. She licked her lips, not surprised to find them dry.

“It’s pretty much the same everywhere,” she said after a moment. “Especially when you share sleeping quarters with your winter husband, which you do in the smaller compounds because there isn’t much space. At least it happens at night there. The places where you have to fit it in during the day are always worse. You have to leap back up and get back to whatever tasks you were doing when you feel so . . .”

She didn’t supply a word there and Jurin just watched her. Still and ready, as if he was keeping watch. And she didn’t know why that made it easy to keep going.

“But when you have to share a bed, it’s easier to get it over with. And you can hide in the dark. If you go to bed first, he’ll come in when he’s done sitting by the fire or whatever else men do in winter when there’s nothing but the dark. Or he’ll come in with you, but that’s usually only in the first part of fall.”

“When he’s excited about a new piece of ass so soon after the September equinox, you mean.”

She trembled and she knew he saw it, but Jurin held her still when she would have pulled away. Melyssa could feel the heat in her cheeks.

“No one is excited,” she whispered. “That’s not allowed.”

“If you say so.” He kept that steady gaze of his on her. “So he comes in and you get in the bed. Then what? You talk about the weather?”

She frowned. “There isn’t much discussion. And what would anyone say about the weather? It’s always raining.”

“So what happens?”

Jurin pulled her closer and closed his knees a bit, holding her with his legs. Then he slid his big hands from her hips to her waist, slow and easy, as if he was exploring her.

She didn’t know if she was flushing or was simply one great big heated thing, but she couldn’t seem to look away from his steady gaze to investigated it.

“He generally pulls out the oil and starts . . . you know.”

“Tell me.”

She felt much too hot. And Jurin’s hands were everywhere and yet somehow she felt . . . unfinished. As if those long, sweet strokes up her back and over her hips, even testing the shape of her bottom, weren’t quite enough, somehow

“He oils himself up.”

Jurin’s mouth twitched as if he was biting back a smile. “His cock, you mean.”

“Yes.”

She licked her lips again and this time he tracked the movement, then returned his gaze to hers. But his eyes had gone molten. And she found herself talking without knowing she meant to continue. As if she couldn’t help herself.

“So you lie down and get ready. Sometimes he’ll try to talk about something to make it less awkward, but it’s . . . what it is. And really, it’s better to just get it over with.”

“How do you get ready?”

“I would have thought you’d know this,” she said, a little hotly, and Jurin smiled then. A real smile that she felt like a flame.

Everywhere. Where his hands smoothed over her so hypnotically and everywhere else, too.

“Oh, baby. You have no idea.” His smile widened. “Go on.”

“You pull off your night clothes,” she said crossly. “It’s annoying because it’s always so cold. It’s winter. It’s best to sleep in something that doesn’t have to be completely removed, but sometimes they prefer it when you’re naked. So you do whatever they want.”

“Do you?”

She blinked at that. “Well, yes. It’s easier.”

“What about what you want?”

“What I want is for it to be over as fast as possible,” she told him with more raw honesty about of all those unpleasant couplings than she’d ever allowed herself to show anyone, ever. “Sometimes they offer you a little oil too. If they’re nice. You can put it on to make sure everything’s easy.”

“And if they’re not nice?” he asked in that rumbling way of his.

Something about that made her skin prickle, or maybe it was the way his fingers splayed out over her belly, almost grazing the undersides of her breasts, but she ignored it either way.

“Then they don’t. Either way they crawl on top of you and push it inside. Then they move it around until they’re done. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes they go on forever and you have to stare at the ceiling and try not to make faces where they can see them. Sometimes they make strange noises. Sometimes it’s all very fast and neat. You never know.”

Jurin watched her for a what seemed like a very long time, and with every passing moment, Melyssa found it harder and harder to breathe.

“You think I’m a terrible person,” she said when she couldn’t take it any longer. “I can tell.”

His head tilted to one side, and the warrior’s braids he wore tied back in a knot seemed almost unbearably fascinating to her, as red as his beard.

“Would you care if I did?”

“Of course,” she blurted out without thinking about it. She didn’t know why that made his amber eyes gleam with a kind of approval. “Who wants people to think of them as a terrible person?”

“You need to think about this shit differently,” he told her, drawing her even closer. She had no choice but to brace her hands on his wide, hard shoulders or topple straight into him. “I come over a lot of walls with an axe in my hand and believe me, the people who see me coming aren’t exactly members of my fan club. How much do you think I care about that?”

“Very little,” Melyssa ventured.

“I don’t care at all.” He shrugged and it seemed like a massive shift of the planet. “The world is divided into enemies, potential enemies, and clan. I care what my clan thinks about me. I destroy my enemies.”

“What about potential enemies? What happens to them?”

“I wait. I watch. I reserve judgment, but the minute they head the wrong way? You better believe I handle it with a blade in my hand and nothing but pure, sweet mayhem in my heart.”

“That sounds like more threats.” She shook her head. “Everything here is threats.”

Jurin shook his head, and there was that amused light in his eyes again, shining everywhere and messing her head up.

“You’re used to small, petty men who bluster. They make threats, baby. I don’t. I am the threat. I don’t need to make them.”

“But—” Melyssa stopped herself, but she couldn’t seem to stop trembling. “This is about sex, isn’t it? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“I’ll make you a promise,” he said, his voice low and rich and entirely too good as it washed over her. “I will never throw down my trousers and start oiling up my dick. I will never throw it in you and keep at it while you make faces at the ceiling in the dark. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said, and then thought that was a mistake, because it sounded as if they’d agreed on something. Made some sort of vow. “Wait—”

“Here’s what we’re going to do, Melyssa. You’re going to lean over and put your pretty mouth on mine. That’s all. Easy.”

“I . . . am?”

Melyssa felt as if she was crushed in his mighty grip, struggling for air—but she wasn’t. His hands were on her, but he didn’t push. He didn’t hold her too tight or shove her. He simply sat there, waiting. Like he could do it forever.

“You are,” he said, his voice a deep rumble.

And Melyssa had never kissed anyone. Kissing was frowned upon. Kissing didn’t lead to procreation, so decent, dutiful people avoided it.

But maybe, just maybe, she was tired of being so decent all the time. She was sick of the duty that had led to her being tossed in the hold of a ship and taken across a sea against her will, then stranded in this strange place where the things she’d achieved didn’t matter at all.

She was sick of everything, but Jurin was bright and his beard was so red and he filled up the cottage. The city. The world. And she wanted to run her fingers through his beard. She wanted to move closer, not further away.

Melyssa didn’t know what any of that meant, but she believed he did. He must.

So she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.