She cannot stop thinking about the Viking warlord who burned everything she knew to the ground, though she has tried. His eyes find hers across every crowded hall, every shadowed passageway, and she feels it in her stomach-that liquid pull, that ache that opens her legs beneath her skirt when no one watches. She hates what he did. She hates worse that she waits for his footsteps, for the door to creak, for his rough hands to finally take what his glances have already stripped bare.
His warriors are no better. They move through the settlement like wolves who have tasted penned meat, and they have chosen her. The first time they corner her against the grain stores, she tells herself she has no choice. By the third, she stops pretending. Their mouths taste of salt and mead. Their beards burn her inner thighs. They take her together in the watchtower while the sunset bleeds across the fjord, and she bites her own wrist to keep from begging for more.
In the caves beyond the settlement, where torchlight carves shapes on stone, they teach her what her body was built for. She learns to kneel properly, to hold herself open, to ask in a voice she does not recognize for things she once would have struck any man for suggesting. The warlord watches longest. He makes her say his name while another fills her mouth, and she comes apart knowing he will never share her fully, only loan her out to remind her who she belongs to when the torches burn low.
Her people need the grain his raiders took. Need the protection his longships might offer against worse raiders coming behind. Every surrender she offers across furs and damp stone is negotiation, she tells herself. Every morning she wakes bruised and leaking, smiling into the dark, is strategy. The lie holds until he spreads her beneath him alone, no audience, no performance, and she breaks anyway-sobbing, clinging, begging him to stay inside her until she cannot remember her father's name or the smell of her burning village.
She does not know anymore if saving her people is why she spreads her legs. She stopped counting the reasons nights ago.
