Chapter 36 Goran
GORAN
Rada spoke for an hour or more about the women and children she’d rescued, and the Alphas and Betas she’d fought and often killed to make her mission a reality. I was stunned at how vast her goal was.
“I can’t stop until every Omega in the world is safe,” she admitted.
“I can’t sleep some nights, wondering if I’m working fast enough, hard enough.
Once, I arrived at a farmhouse where I’d heard three women were being kept inside.
I’d put off going there, because no one even hinted they could be Omegas.
The owner of the inn I was staying at just said that Farmer Michaelin liked to keep his daughters close to home.
They were uncommonly pretty, or had been, the last time anyone in the town had seen them.
I spent the night in the inn and slept in the next day.
Went shopping for some new vials and a knife-sharpening stone.
Finally, I thought about what the innkeeper said and rode out to the farm.
“As it turned out, he was keeping them close. In his barn, under the floorboards. Their scent was covered by the stench of manure. Three Omegas, one who looked about twenty, and two others who were no more than eighteen. Of course, I couldn’t ask their ages, or even names, since they were all freshly dead.
” She struggled to go on. “Farmer Michaelin had terrible handwriting, but he’d left a note.
He’d hanged himself for what he did to them before they died.
He was an Alpha, of course, and when their perfume began, he lost his mind.
” She whispered the rest. “He was still warm. I got there no more than a few hours too late.”
“You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“Can’t I? That sort of thing happened again and again. Every time I stopped to relax, every time I ignored that voice that drove me, someone died. Each time, it felt like it was one of my own sisters who I’d failed.”
She’d never let me see her weaknesses before, and I wasn’t prepared for how thoroughly she broke, leaning against me. Still, she cried silently, as if she needed to hide her grief from the Beta who sat behind us.
I pulled her close and kissed the top of her hair, knowing better than to say anything. She’d always hated empty words and sympathetic sounds, more than any warrior I’d met.
Warrior. The title I’d given her in my thoughts left me blinking. I’d heard more than one battle-hardened warrior voice these exact thoughts, about the comrades they’d been unable to save on the field. Suddenly, I realized something vital about my wife I should have known long ago.
She wasn’t only a woman. She was a warrior, and she’d been fighting a war. Not on her own, if what the Beta had said was true. The Goddess had been watching out for her, though that discovery had broken Rada even further. And the kraken had given her the pendant.
But now, she was planning to walk into the pit of the lowest hell, alone again. For some reason, an image of a ladder being lowered down into a fiery volcano flashed in my mind, then away.
“Do you see why I have to go to Pict?” she asked, her silver-gray eyes gazing up into mine.
“You can’t save them on your own, Rada. You have to know that.” The gray grew stormy as she began to withdraw. “I’ll go with you,” I continued, not giving her time to grow angrier. “I’ll go with you. I’ll march into Pict, if you promise to give me another chance to be worthy of you.”
“Worthy? Is that code for getting to play hide the knot?” When she wrinkled her nose in mock suspicion, I almost smiled.
“No knot-hiding required. I’d march into the maw of the fire god for a kiss from you, my brave, deadly wife.
If you haven’t figured it out, I love you more than my own life.
I’ll go with you, for nothing but the hope that you’ll let me love you from closer than a thousand miles for the rest of our lives. ”
She tilted her head. “There has to be a catch. I can imagine us fighting together. Do you really think you can watch me fight and not jump in front of me? You’ve done that more than once, though I’d thought the solid kick in the balls I gave you last time might’ve cured you of the habit.”
I tapped her on the nose, knowing how much she disliked that, then dodged her snapping teeth. “I vow it on my name, on my honor, and on my country. I will follow your directions.” Her mouth opened again, and I used my finger to close it. “I’ll be your foot soldier, and you can lead me into battle.”
“You mean that, don’t you?” Her words were wondering, though her eyes held a hint of something that still frightened me.
“I do.”
She sighed, then reached behind her and pulled my shirt off so that she was naked. “Beta, go into the cabin. I don’t need a spy right now.”
Alexios didn’t answer, just obeyed instantly, without question.
That was what I had just sworn to do. “What are your orders, ma bohinya?”
“Take off your clothes and give them to me.” I did it more quickly than gracefully.
When I handed them to her, she took them and began placing them on top of the gray cloak that formed the base of her nest. My shirts and trousers made terrible pillows, and for a moment, I longed for the velvet cushions and satin fabrics I’d purchased for the nests she’d built for us in the caves of Starlak.
It had been the only soft thing about those dark places we’d been forced into because of her wildly attractive scent, though I’d tried to make sure they were as comfortable as I could make them.
Rada sat cross-legged in the middle of her rough nest, and I took her in.
The vines and flowers on her arm were every bit as bright as they had been when I’d given her the tattoo.
There was a small, pale scar like a miniature snowflake just below her belly button that I’d never seen before.
The bite mark on her upper bicep gleamed like twin crescent moons, and her skin flushed pink when I let out a low curse.
My cock was already throbbing, and I prayed that I could make this good for her. Whatever “this” would be.
I kneeled in front of her, waiting for her instructions, and she held up one hand. “Warrior, you may enter my nest.”
“Ma bohinya, my love, my life. You honor me.”
Her lithe arms slid around my neck, and I lifted her to meet me in a kiss.
I closed my eyes and tasted her, my tongue dipping into her mouth, tracing her lips, relearning her.
She was every bit as sweet as she had been, but more mellow, her mint smoother, and her scent like the smell of distant rain after a drought.
I tasted salt on our joined lips, but with my eyes shut, I wasn’t sure if they were her tears or mine.
I kissed her until she softened, lying back in my embrace.
I’d never felt so strong or so weak. So powerful.
So helpless. My hands traced every line of her form, lingering on the places I’d longed for most: her shoulders, the curve of her hip, the silken skin where her thighs met just below her mound.
She’d once teased me that I was edging her, taunting her by not touching the places other men would have gone toward first off.
I’d told her then that what I’d wanted was to know her more deeply than any other man could. “You’ll have other mates. They’ll want to claim your breasts, your luscious ass. I want to love the parts of you that any other man might overlook. That’s how a queen should be worshiped.”
“Make love to me, Goran,” she begged now, her hand sliding around my cock, fingers counting the nine rungs of the ladder I’d put there to prove myself.
“Yes, my goddess,” I replied and slid my hips toward her.
She was already drenched, near-sobbing for me to enter.
I ignored her murmured threats and curses and rubbed my fingers in the old patterns we’d learned together at the top of her mound until she was almost fragmenting, then I slid into her.
Each rung of the ladder that entered her erased a year of the absence that had stretched between us until my knot was flush with her slick opening, and she was shuddering.
“Please,” she whimpered.
“You never have to beg,” I replied, thrusting my knot forward, the final year disintegrating as she cried out with her climax.
I had not been the best lover when I’d finally earned the Goddess’s approval, as well as Rada’s, and lay with her.
I’d been like many younger men: quick to finish, focused too much on my own pleasure rather than hers.
She’d trained me out of that, though, and the long, pleasurable lessons came flooding back now.
After our first knotting, I made love to her again and again, until the cloth of her nest was fragrant with our mingled scents, and neither of us had energy to do more than stroke each other lightly, then fall into sleep.
For the first time in years, I didn’t dream.
The only dream that mattered had already come true.
When I woke, she was dressed again, and the wind was hotter than before. “I can see the islands,” she said, leaning over and pressing a kiss to one of the gemstones on my braid, then tied a piece of cream-colored cloth over her mouth and nose.
I sat up, choking on ash. She handed me a strip of cloth that looked like it had been cut from…
I glanced at the small cabin. Alexios had come out at some point, and nodded silently to me.
His robes were shorter now, and he had a cover over his face to match Rada’s.
He pointed silently to the horizon, and I gasped, then went into a fit of coughing that lasted until I fashioned my own mask from the cloth and put it on.
“That’s not possible. It takes weeks to reach Pict.” My words were muffled as I spied what Alexios had pointed out. On the horizon were the unmistakable shapes of two islands, with a jagged peak on the one farther away, spewing smoke into the flat, gray sky.