In the end, it ended up being easier than she had thought it would be, surprisingly.

One afternoon, several weeks later, while she was lying in bed, plotting and thinking about things that she would probably never have the courage to do, the door to his room burst open, and he stormed through it.

"You were a nurse?" he asked, his tone more tense and clipped than it had ever been, his body language – which was usually so still and watchful – betraying a high level of nervousness and urgency.

It was the first concrete confirmation she'd had that her conversation with the crone had gotten back to him, but she tried not to let it show on her face that she'd caught that little tidbit of information.

"I was," she answered, distracted by how disheveled he was – face filthy, clothes torn, his shirt, in particular, hanging open, revealing a large gash near his shoulder that was seeping blood, making her wish for a suture kit more than she wanted to admit.

But he obviously considered it no more than a scratch. "Come with me."

He produced the same big caftan style garment he'd put on her when he'd first brought her here, being just as scrupulous – perhaps more so – about hiding her face and her hair than he had been.

Vaudt took her hand and turned to the door, then stopped and looked back at her. "I'm not sure exactly how much you're willing to admit you know about us, but let me make a few things clear before we leave: I am the most powerful person in the area for much further than the eye can see. I'm not saying that to brag; it's just a fact. You, however, are something that is so valuable that even a lot of my own men – even some of those I would trust with my life – would slaughter me without a second thought to have you. You smell like the best sex anyone has ever had in his or her lives, and your mere existence is a siren's call to men like me. And all of my men are men just like me – only the majority of them don't see much worth in you beyond that attraction. The majority of them might rape you – with no thought to your pleasure – while they had you, but then they wouldn't hesitate to sell you to the highest bidder, who is most likely to be a slaver who will put you into a breeding pen and use you for the sole purpose and hope of making more of your kind –"

"And that would make the slaver different from you, how?"

The sarcastic words came out of her mouth before she thought about them, and she regretted having said them – if not thought them – the moment she heard herself speaking them aloud.

Emmy then closed her eyes, figuring she'd earned at least a hard backhand from him for her impertinence.

But it didn't come. Her eyes opened and ventured a look up at him.

And then, he finished his sentence in a grim tone, while looking down at her with a deadlier than usual expression on his face.

"While you spend the rest of your life kneeling in your own waste, with your legs permanently spread apart, your wrists shackled together, rendered blind, deaf and dumb – just another cunt used to make another baby – an Omega baby or not – and he'll let them have you even when you're pregnant, so that you earn your keep." He jerked her hand hard, slamming her up against him as he whispered. "I might not be able to keep my eye on you every second while we're out, so I want you to think about that just in case you're considering wanting to leave me."

She forced herself not to gasp. How could he have known? She'd continued her conversations with the crone – whose name was Anja, she'd learned – but she had never once mentioned anything about trying to escape him to anyone.

Ever.

Emily continued to stare into his eyes, nodding slowly. "I'll stay where I'm put."

Then, real fear setting in at what he'd described, she tapped him on the back once he'd turned away from her. It was the first time she had touched him voluntarily that wasn't a result of that incessant need.

"Yes?" he asked curtly, turning back to her.

"You'll –" She swallowed hard, knowing she was asking a lot of him. "You'll keep me safe?"

He rose to his full height, his eyes locked to hers. "I will. Until my dying breath. That is one of the things it means to be bonded. One of my duties – one of my honors – as your Alpha is to lay my life down for you, if necessary."

Emmy was surprised to hear herself say, "Let's hope that doesn't become necessary, shall we?"

He looked pleasantly surprised at her words.

She was surprised, but much less pleasantly.

She'd never thought of him as hers. It was an interesting perspective, not that it changed anything about how she felt about him.

He kept her so well hidden while they were traveling to wherever that she didn't get to see anything about where they were or where they went. She was loaded onto some sort of wagon, she'd bet, only because she could smell and hear the horses and she wasn't riding, and she could tell that there were more men around her than just him – although he kept her clamped tightly to his side, even more so when he felt her shivering next to him.

When they stopped, she could hear the others exit the wagon. Then he lifted Emmy down from it, guided her into a building and down several corridors before he lifted the robe from her face. She saw that she was in a makeshift operating room, and that a man, she supposed, who passed for a doctor, was prepping for surgery.

Well, as close as it got nowadays, which was a far cry from how it ought to be.

It was surprising how quickly her medical instincts kicked in, and she was even able to kind of push aside that all encompassing need she always felt to have him inside her whenever he was anywhere near. But she ignored it as best she could and forced herself to focus and began to do things without even thinking, even though she had never been a surgical nurse.

There was a patient on the table already, and he looked to be bad.

Very bad.

The room was far from sterile, but she tried to make it as close as she could, going so far as to slip the robe from her body – leaving her naked to the gaze of about four men, who she fervently hoped were all doctors and all, therefore, uninterested in her – and began ripping it into strips.

Someone produced scissors, and along with bits of twine, she fashioned something like a surgical mask for all of them.

Gloves were a loss.

"Did you wash your hands?" she asked the doctor she recognized pointedly.

"Why?"

"Just do it before you touch your patient – soap and hot water if we have it and scrub till your skin feels raw." Then she began to question why there were so many of them there, and Vaudt explained that they were observing, in hopes of learning from the older doctor.

Emmy humphed at that, although she didn't demand that the men leave, she did tell them, in no uncertain terms, to keep their hands to themselves during the operation.

They were busy looking from Vaudt to her then back again, as if expecting him to rescue them from this termagant.

Vaudt's smile was one of the few genuine ones she'd ever seen him wear – he seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the other men's discomfiture. "You're on your own, gentlemen. I'd suggest you do as she asks."

He did, however, produce a pair of scrubs for her to wear.

"I thought you said doctors were all eunuchs," she pointed out as she donned the garments he was holding out to her. Scrubs had never been her favorite, but they certainly did bring back memories. That, and being covered, helped her immerse herself even further into that once familiar role.

"They are," he answered unhesitatingly, "but they were male at one point, and I still don't trust more than one of them at a time with my naked woman."

She didn't ask why the doctor he'd identified as being a "breeding doctor" – the equivalent, she guessed, to an ob/gyn – was conducting a surgery on a man. When someone was injured, any kind of doctor worked in a storm.

The operation was laboriously slow, due to lack of equipment and trained personnel. They might have been called doctors, but she had more real medical knowledge then all of them together. Emmy found it sad how quickly basic medical information had been jettisoned from the culture in favor of superstitions and rumor, as the battle over keeping as sterile field as possible raged on throughout, with some of the doctors literally poking their grubby fingers into the wound.

Finally, she reached out and cuffed the one who did it the most often, and the rest of them fell into line right afterwards, as she heard Vaudt snickering from his position not far behind her.

When they were done, all he said to her was, "So?"

He was looking to her more than to the doctor who had sewn the man up for a report on his condition.

"He'll live, if we can keep him from getting infected."

She said the same thing at the same time as the other doctors did, although as she was being bundled up to leave, she could hear them grumbling about her presence – and her bossiness – among them.

But Vaudt – he was exactly the opposite of disgruntled at her performance. He was highly amused.

No, she revised her assessment of his mood. He was happy. He might not have been grinning ear to ear – that would have gone entirely against type – but she could feel how elated and relieved he was in the way he touched her.

They got back to his room without incident, for which she was thoroughly grateful, considering what he'd told her.

She had a lot of thinking to do. She might have to revise her entire plan.

Although not – she had already decided – in favor of staying with him, no matter how amazing the sex was. She had no interest in being any man's baby maker. There had to be more of a role for her, somewhere. She had to be able to exist in this world as more than a man's brood mare and sex object.

But she was rudely reminded of her status as soon as they walked through the door and he held out his hand to her.

She had actually been dressed – in two layers, no less – for longer than five seconds. It had felt good. It had made her feel safer. Emmy tried to explain that to him, but nothing she said made any difference to him. The fact that she'd helped him save that man was not a mitigating factor, either, apparently. He simply stood there with his hand out until she did what she knew he wanted her to, handing over the cloak and the scrubs, which he immediately tossed out the door, locking it behind them.

Then he stalked over to her, and it was all she could do not to back away from him, but she'd discovered that was never the right thing to do with him – that it triggered his prey drive, and that never ended well – at least as far as she was concerned. When he was in that kind of a mood, he kept her in positions that were even more submissive than the usual ones, prolonging the both of their orgasms as long as he could, deliberately hurting her – slightly – then soothing those hurts with more sex, creating a devastatingly vicious cycle of pain and pleasure, one never quite satisfying the other.

So she stood her ground, and he cupped her cheeks in those huge hands, gently, kissing her as if to do so in too cavalier a fashion would cause her to shatter into a million pieces.

In a way that reminded her – painfully – sharply – of how Dan used to kiss her.

As if she meant everything to him.

"Thank you for helping me tonight. You will never know just how much your assistance meant to me. You may ask me for anything you would like, and I will do my best to get it for you."

He wasn't just a warlord, she'd learned from Anja – when he wasn't either actively warring with or defending them from other tribes, he was a raider who had a reputation for procuring whatever his people most needed. It could be drugs, food, and even the occasional special request, depending on who made it and how he felt about them.

Emmy looked up at him and answered him with the utmost honesty, knowing her answer was probably going to put a big damper on his elation.

"You have no need to risk your life to get me what I want from you – what I will always want from you."

"And what is that?" Vaudt asked blithely.

He was still smiling, and she knew that he thought she was going to answer him with something that women nowadays might want – a healthy baby, a shiny trinket, his undying love.

But that was not her, and it never would be.

"I want my freedom."

He snorted, looking down at her with disbelief plain on his face. "Did you not hear what I told you as I took you out of this place? Would you really prefer to be dead than with me?"

Emmy's voice was soft and clear when she answered him, her eyes downcast. "I would really prefer to be left alone to live out whatever remains of my life, whether that's another five minutes or fifty years."

He balked, physically, at her answer. "That's unnatural. How could you not want to have a mate and a child? It's what you were born to do."

"It's not unnatural for me. It's not unnatural for a woman of my time to want to be the leader of the entire world. Where I came from, women could – and did – do anything men did, sometimes much better than they did."

He didn't bother to try to stifle his laugh at that, and that incensed Emmy.

"You were there this afternoon. Who do you think was the person in that disgusting operating theatre with the greater medical expertise, hmm? The most experience, even though I wasn't a surgical nurse? Who do you think is really going to be the reason why that young man is going to live – and I'll give you a hint – it's not any of the so called doctors who were there." She wasn't able to keep herself from poking her index finger into his chest to make her point, or, more accurately, stabbing it against a brick wall – that probably would have hurt less.

With a heavy sigh, Emmy closed her mouth. She didn't know why she even bothered to try to explain such things to him. He didn't want to hear them. She was just a receptacle to him, just someone to rut into and, hopefully, impregnate.

Simple as that.

Basic biology.

Lowest common denominator.

Things had reverted right back to where they had been on the planet for hundreds of thousands of years – the cave man went out and slayed the dragons, and the little woman stayed home in the cave and took care of the hoard of kids he got on her, whether she wanted him to or not. That was her only role – her only real value to society.

She hadn't even noticed that she was crying, but he had, apparently, because he came to stand in front of her and brought her into his arms, holding her wonderfully tight and doing his best to dry tears that just wouldn't stop coming, not even when he lifted her into his arms and carried her to his bed.

Only this time – for the first time – he didn't make it sexual, although that unmistakable buzz was always humming away in the background any time they were near each other. He simply held her, rubbing her back soothingly as she cried, kissing her damp face gently and offering a square of toilet paper – which doubled as facial tissue – for her to blow her nose.

Then he gathered her back into his arms – which she was beginning to find disturbingly comforting – encouraging her to lay her head on his chest as he kept her by his side with a casual arm around her shoulders.

"Tell me about where you come from," he asked, and she thought it was probably just a diversionary technique, meant to lift her from her doldrums and stop her crying all over him for a while.

But he had – inadvertently – opened the floodgates. She didn't care if he didn't believe what she was saying. It still felt good to say it to someone – even to him. She didn't know how she could prove it to him – she wasn't even sure if that was something she wanted to do – or should want to do. But she got a lot of things off her chest that she hadn't even said to Anja, who she knew did believe her.

Why it felt so much better to say those things to him than to her, she didn't really want to examine too closely. Like so many things in this time, the only explanation was that it just did.

And when she'd expended what felt like every last word she'd ever need or want to say, they simply lay there, with him rubbing his hand up and down her back in a motion that was pure, soothing comfort.

Then he asked her something that surprised her to her core.

"Would you like to feel me inside you? Would that help you feel better – having your legs spread around me, your woman's sheath stretched and filled to overflowing, to be tied to me as you are in those moments, unable to think or believe or worry or breathe – to just let go of everything and indulge yourself in our connection?"

She wanted to say yes – and this time – for the first time – it wasn't just her body urging her to do so. It was her beleaguered, stressed, worried mind, too. She knew what he could do for her, what he could give her, simply by being himself. He was never going to be as smart as Dan was. He couldn't even read, through what she suspected was no fault of his own.

But then, that was a skill that was much less important in her current reality. What counted were strength, resolve, and the willingness to get one's hands very dirty indeed.

And he possessed all of those qualities – in spades.

Much like he possessed her.

When she hadn't responded to him in what became a long while, Vaudt lifted her onto him. Not forcing her to stay there, as he might, but simply holding her there, supporting her as she lay there, stretching herself out over him, like a kitten atop a draft horse, one paw in her hair, where he loved to have it, the other at the small of her back, tracing lazy patterns on her bare skin.

Finally, she lifted her head; her eyes for once not filled with tears, and met his eyes, breathing but one soft word.

"Please."

And it was everything it should have been – this one time. He knew her well – had learned her body, her likes and dislikes – had made such a study of her that he knew not to really bite her nipples. That turned her off, but instead to nibble gently on them, but knowing, too, that she loved to have them pinched – and twisted – hard, or to trap them firmly between his long, sharp canines and tug till she begged him prettily not to.

He knew that she adored being kissed, but didn't like it to get too sloppy, and that kissing her neck – biting it less than gently – could make her howl if he did it just right.

And he did everything just right for her, concentrating his whole being on making sure that she felt everything he was doing to her to the utmost. Almost drowning in her tribute to him as he teased and tickled her clit, one big finger delving into that still very tight, wet cavern while she clenched the bed sheets in her fists so hard she nearly ripped them open.

When the time came to join them together, he rose over her – imposing, commanding, magnificent, but not threatening – watching every nuance of every change in her expressions as she welcomed him into her body for the first time, finding himself at least as caught up in the almost holy feeling as she was.

But then he surprised her by stopping just short of staking his final claims on her, reaching down to cup her cheek and whispering roughly, "Tell me you're mine," with much less command than there ever had been in his voice.

And, after only the slightest of hesitations, Emmy responded quietly, seriously, "I am yours, Vaudt," her eyes on his the entire time. And she said the words with no trace of irony or remorse, knowing the truth of them in her heart, but, at the same time, also recognizing that her feelings for him – whatever they were – did nothing to mitigate the fact that she would do anything she had to do to get away from him.

Then, and only then, knowing nothing of what she was thinking at that moment beyond what he assumed she might be, did he truly sink himself into her. Drinking in the familiar cries of distress she always emitted at the end, when he had to truly make her his in every manner within his power, knowing that those sharp mewls would quickly turn into groans of ecstasy.

And – as usual – he wasn't at all wrong.