Page 7

She started walking, forcing herself to keep her eyes ahead, her steps regular and even. She wanted to dawdle and she wanted to run. The more space she put between her and the Wolf, the more the anticipation prickled her flesh, and she didn’t know how to alleviate it. Let herself be caught quicker? Give in to her fear and bolt?

No. No. That wasn’t the game…or at least not how the game was supposed to start. The game started with her innocently walking to the abbey. She didn’t know she was being hunted yet.

After another few minutes, she heard them. Footsteps from behind her. Lighter than any solider should walk, but they weren’t careful or measured. These were the footsteps of someone confident, someone cocky. Someone who felt like they had all the time in the world to do what they wanted.

Tate’s heart was beating faster than hoofbeats on the road when she turned to see Adelais’s shadow coming closer. Adelais wore only a tunic, hose, and boots, with her dagger belted at her waist, and Tate could see the tight power in those legs as she strode closer. She could see the small nip of her waist and the slight flare of her hips.

“Hold,” Adelais said. Her voice wasn’t higher or deeper than it normally was, but something about it sounded different to Tate. Maybe that was her own overactive imagination, already panting after what would come next. “Are you going to the abbey?”

Tate’s fingers rubbed nervously against her palm. “Yes.”

“Alone? At night?” Adelais stopped and cast a look around. It was a look a helpful stranger might give, a look that said, See how dangerous it is out here? I’m worried for you!

It also made it seem like she was checking to make sure no one else was nearby.

A chill ran up Tate’s spine and then down again, meeting the heat blooming between her legs.

“I know the way,” Tate managed to say.

“Any way is dangerous if the wrong people are on the road,” Adelais said, all concern. “Let me walk you there. I want to make sure you’re safe.”

“I promise I’m safe,” Tate said, and Adelais merely shook her head.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

Nodding her acquiescence, Tate started walking again, keeping to the side of the road so that there would be room for Adelais to walk next to her. The moonlight shone on them and on this next stretch of road before it dipped into a thickly wooded valley, a place of utter darkness despite the moon.

There. It would happen there.

But when Tate looked over at Adelais, she was still walking with the jaunty steps of a traveler on an easy journey. Not at all like she was planning what their game called for. Adelais was good at this, Tate realized. Good at playing the part, good at pretending. But it wasn’t pretending like priests did for the Easter plays, woodenly acting out a part already written for them. Adelais wore this self, this stranger-self, as easily as clothes, her entire body moving loose and carefree, her demeanor completely different from the blunt soldier of the camp.

It sent a strange sort of pang through Tate to see. It was beautiful, and it also filled Tate’s chest full of …tenderness? How many selves did Adelais have inside her? How many other people were privileged enough to see them?

“Where are you traveling to?” Tate asked, unable to keep her eyes from the Wolf for long. Adelais’s hair was as it was last night—the sides braided back and away from her face, the rest loose in long, scarlet waves—and her face was like something from a myth. A Valkyrie, an Amazon. Lovely and deadly to behold.

“Oh, here and there,” Adelais said lightly as her stranger-self. “Wherever my will to wander takes me.”

“This is a lonely place for wandering.”

“I find the loneliest places have the most arresting diversions.”

That last reply was said just as lightly, just as casually, but a darkness threaded through the words. Tate’s heart was beating so fast that she was sure Adelais could hear it. She couldn’t stop her eyes dropping to Adelais’s hands, long-fingered and strong. She suddenly couldn’t remember anything ever being more erotic than those hands, than the way they looked in the dark right now. Deceptively innocent.

The Wolf’s hands and a stranger’s hands at the same time.

“I don’t think there will be much to divert you here,” Tate said, not as good at playing her part as Adelais was at hers but liking the way it felt anyway. She wasn’t an abbess forced into a job she never wanted. She wasn’t the only person who could keep Far Hope alive in these cursed times. She wasn’t a murderer, still trying ten years later to claw God’s forgiveness to herself.

She was just a sister trying to get back home. A mouse hoping all the cats were asleep.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Adelais said. They were very close to the wooded section of the road now. Shadows were beginning to pool at their feet like the lapping waves of the sea. “I’ve already got my eye on something.”

Tate held her mantle closer, reached up and adjusted her wimple. Then, quicker than she could understand it happening, Adelais’s hands were on her head, one on her jaw and the other plucking at the pins in her veil and her wimple.

“What are you doing?” Tate said, trying to twist away. The hand on her jaw was too strong, however, and she couldn’t move without hurting herself.

“I want to see your face,” Adelais said simply. With brisk, expert movements, she had the fabric unpinned, and soon Tate’s entire head was bare. “There, isn’t that better? Don’t you feel better?”

The minute Adelais released her jaw, Tate reached for the crumpled fabric, but Adelais held it out of Tate’s reach.

“Now, now,” tutted the Wolf. “I’ve just gone to all that trouble to see you. No sense in covering up again. Who’s here to see? Your sisters? Your abbess? Surely, they’ve seen more. Surely they’ve seen you bathing, in bed at rest. They won’t be shocked by the sight of your hair.”

“It’s not proper,” Tate protested. That part wasn’t just for the game; it was true. Uncovered hair meant wantonness to most people, and however much Tate knew about the secret holiness of what other people might consider wicked, wearing a veil was a hard habit to break when she was outside the abbey walls. Which was rarely.

“Do you think a lot about what’s proper?”

Not in the way Adelais meant, not in the way the game meant…but did Tate find herself consumed with duty, with penance, with forgiveness?

“Yes,” Tate said. “I try to do what’s right. It’s dark here,” she added hesitantly. “We should keep walking.”

“Are you afraid of what will find you in the dark?”

Nothing could be more frightening than her own memories, and it was in the dark that they visited her the most. “Yes.”

Adelais clucked. “Poor thing. I’ll keep you safe.” Adelais’s hand found Tate’s, clutched it. The possession in the seemingly innocent touch sent heat flaring up Tate’s arm to her throat and face. “You’re cold.”

“I’m fine.”

“I could warm you up.”

Tate tried to pull away. “I’m not cold, I promise.”

“You’re lying,” Adelais-the-stranger said. “I don’t like lies.”

“I think—I think I should go on alone.” Tate didn’t have to fake the tremble in her voice; it was there all on its own. Partly lust, yes, but partly fear too.

The difference was that she wanted to be afraid.

“Oh, no, that won’t do at all,” Adelais said softly. “I can’t let you go, sweet thing. We’ve only just gotten started.”

Now . Tate knew the moment to run was now.

She turned and bolted deeper into the darkness, able to make out the shape of the road only from the occasional pool of moonlight through the thick branches above. She heard Adelais’s delighted laugh as Tate forced herself to run harder, faster, pumping legs that were too short. It was like racing Heorot as children, knowing she would lose because she was pointlessly, eternally, shorter than everyone else.

Adelais seemed to know it, too, her laughter echoing off the trees as footfalls pounded on the road. She was chasing Tate now, and doing so easily, judging from the sound of her laughter. “Slow down, little nun! I won’t hurt you!”

It was dark, so dark, and the flashes of moonlight made everything all the more disorienting. How would Adelais capture her? And what she would do when she did?

The footfalls were so close that Tate knew Adelais was only a few feet behind her now, close enough to?—

Arms, strong enough to wage war, wrapped around her waist, and both Adelais and Tate tumbled to the ground. Adelais turned, catching them on her back as they fell, although the fall was still abrupt enough to drive the breath from Tate’s chest. She tried to find it again, struggling against Adelais’s hold, and then, just as she drew a sharp inhale, Adelais flipped them over so that Tate was on her back looking up and Adelais was on top of her, braced on her calloused, battle-nicked hands.

“Now, look at us,” scolded Adelais. “On the ground like animals.” But the scolding was belied by the wicked smile on her face—visible only as the shine on the blunt edges of her teeth in the dark. She dipped her face to Tate’s and stamped a bruising kiss on Tate’s mouth, and then moved to Tate’s neck, where she sucked at the skin. It was hot, tickling, and then sharp when she bit at the tender skin above the collar of Tate’s mantle. Tate arched underneath her, needing—needing something. More pressure, more friction.

Just…more.

Adelais seemed to know, because she slipped a muscled thigh between Tate’s legs as she skated her teeth along Tate’s neck, and Tate couldn’t tell if she was squirming to get away or squirming to rub her herself against Adelais.

Adelais grabbed the hem of Tate’s habit and shoved it past Tate’s waist so that Tate was naked below. She hadn’t bothered to wear hose underneath; there hadn’t seemed much point when she was going to the Wolf’s tent. And now she was bare to the open air of the night, naked calves, naked thighs. Naked hips and cunt.

Adelais found Tate’s seam with her fingers and probed. Tate could hear how wet she was, and she let out a broken noise when Adelais swept those wet fingers over the pearl of her clit. “Don’t fight me, sweet nun. It’s easier if you don’t fight.”

The words were like a flame to a wick, or oil to fire. Tate couldn’t breathe for the fire roiling through her, and she couldn’t stop her hips from arching to the Wolf’s touch. Pleasure seared up from Adelais’s fingertips, all the way up into Tate’s belly and chest, but Tate wanted more than this, even, more than the dark and the road and Adelais’s vicious words.

She tried to roll away, bucking pointlessly under Adelais’s weight, and Adelais laughed again—gleeful, vicious. “We haven’t even gotten to the good part yet.” Her free hand went all the way up Tate’s habit and squeezed her breast. Hard.

The touch was a wave of pleasure crested with a flash of pain. Adelais did it again, and again, squeezes and then hard cups, like Tate’s breasts were some sort of payment that Adelais had been too long denied.

“Let me go,” Tate gasped, loving how her protest made Adelais grin wider, made her touch harder and greedier.

“I’m not done with you, pretty thing,” Adelais-the-stranger informed her. “Hold still.”

“I won’t,” Tate breathed, twisting as hard as she could and managing to break Adelais’s hold on her. She flung herself to the side and got up to her knees, so close to getting to her feet, and if she did make it, if she did run, maybe Adelais would be even meaner, even rougher?—

She didn’t make it to her feet, though, not even close. Adelais was on top of her again, this time with her chest to Tate’s back, and she bore them both down to the hard dirt of the road, her thighs caging Tate’s legs and her hand snaked around Tate’s hip to hold her sex. To rub her. All their weight pressed Tate’s cunt into Adelais’s touch, adding more pressure, more force, and then Adelais reached her free hand under Tate’s chest to collar her throat from underneath, which meant Tate felt held, trapped, bound . Everywhere. The hand wrapped around her throat, the body on top of hers. The knees fencing her legs in, the hand moving hard and merciless between her legs.

“Make my hand wet when you come.” Adelais bit at her ear, her jaw, her neck, like a wolf in truth. “You can do it. I know you want to.”

“No,” Tate moaned. “You can’t make me.”

Adelais’s weight shifted a small amount—her hand between Tate’s legs went still. “No…or stop ?” Her voice—still Adelais, but the blunter, slightly warmer cadence of her natural voice.

“Not stop,” whispered Tate. “Just no like…like I want not to want it.”

Adelais nipped at her ear again, but gently this time. An acknowledgement. And there was another pang in Tate’s chest, something she only felt when she thought of her childhood home or stared out at the moors on a sweet summer’s day.

I play fair.

Adelais was playing fair. Even when the game was this.

Her hand moved once again between Tate’s legs, rubbing her stiff pearl with hard caresses, making Tate’s toes curl in her boots. The warm weight of her, the hand on her throat. The rough fucking with her habit shoved up to her waist…

“You’ll be my whore, won’t you?” the stranger whispered in her ear. “I’ve been looking for one to play with for so long.”

“I—” Whatever she was going to say turned into a moan. The climax was clawing at the base of her spine now, clawing all the way down her thighs. It felt better than sin and better than forgiveness; it felt like the knotted cord on her back and the whisper of God’s love at the same time.

“I’m going to keep you,” the stranger swore. The stranger was unstoppable, selfish, living hellfire. Tate’s entire body from her chest to her knees was rigid with the trammeled orgasm, and she was almost terrified of it, terrified of how it would wreck her if it was left to charge free. But Adelais gave her no choice. A monster in the dark, with even more monstrous words. “I’m going to keep you forever and fuck you whenever I want, and your God can come to England and fight me for you himself, because I’m not giving you up.”

Tate did as Adelais asked and soaked her hand as she came, screaming, bucking, wild. The orgasm almost hurt , clenches and contractions that took work to live through, like her entire body had become a vessel for this monster’s will, like she was being possessed by Adelais from the cunt up.

Adelais didn’t let up a single bit—not the grip on her throat, not the cruel stroking of her hand, not her weight pinning Tate to the cold ground. And Tate thought she could love Adelais for it, for giving her this thing that was a sword of shame and a cup of relief all at once. Like a creature out of a myth, Tate had to be torn open and reborn, and this was her rebirth, right here in the cold, dark night. With a Norman on top of her, with her country broken, with the never-ending wheel of hunger, sickness, and violence creaking over her life.

But this —this was hers. This was hers to have right now: the sharp, clean gasps of air into her lungs, the urgent shudders of her body, the earth beneath her face, and the branches of trees older than Wessex itself waving around her.

Yes, Tate could love Adelais for giving this to her. For giving it so easily and without judgment.

And that was something far more frightening than any footsteps in the dark.