Edge of Control: (Viking Dystopian Romance) (13 page)

“The priests out there preached a lot about true compliance. That we were called to use the gift of the long, dark winters to work as hard on making babies as we’d spend working in the fields come spring and summer. And we all took that very seriously.” Lyla laughed at that, a low and rich sound. “The standard was three times a day. Just like any other farm chore. Wake up sex, midday sex with the noon meal, then more sex at night. Like clockwork. It was a very rare winter husband in that part of the world who didn’t think he was entitled to his three squares. Entitled and very, very noble for his efforts to replenish the human race. So he’d usually include a few recreational extra rounds whenever possible.” She laughed again. “For the good of the planet, of course.”

More laughter from the others, while Eiryn tried to keep her feelings off her face.

“That sounds extreme,” she said. Carefully, so as not to offend these women who she’d actually thought
soft
earlier. Clearly, she had to think of a different word, because
soft
didn’t apply. “It all sounds extreme.”

And very, very different from life in the clan. Especially for a member of the brotherhood.

But Lyla only laughed again, in her warm and happy way. “I actually enjoyed myself plenty. That’s the dirty secret about compliance, isn’t it? You’re not supposed to enjoy yourself, but of course you do. It’s sex. Priests can lecture you all day and night about how little you should feel, but then you go off and have all that sex. So what happens, happens.” She didn’t sound the least bit repentant. “What I minded were the restrictions on
how.
And having to restrict myself to one man per winter.”

“I think I would mind all of it,” Eiryn muttered.

“Because you’re thinking about it too much,” Lyla replied, easily enough. “When you’re a young girl you can’t wait to bleed so you can take part in the equinox ceremony and do your part, like a grown woman. The first time I had a winter husband I was
thrilled.
I’d been waiting for it all my life. A lot of people actually do enjoy it, you know. Probably more than you imagine.”

“And if you don’t, you don’t think there’s something wrong with the system,” Maud said from the other side. “You think there’s something wrong with you that you can’t submit as easily as everyone else does.”

“You
want
to comply,” Helena agreed. “Or you wish you wanted to, because it’s a lot easier and life is hard enough. The truth is, most winter husbands are fine. The act itself is maybe a little weird sometimes, but no one ever said doing your duty to humanity would be a great joy. Only that it was necessary.”

Eiryn didn’t know what got to her more. The stories these women were telling her or the
way
they were telling them. So matter-of-fact. With some laughter here and there. This wasn’t some outrageous tale of a rampage of terror that could be stopped by a blade. This was simply how people lived.

How most people lived, in point of fact.

And Eiryn had grown up a raider. Life had never been easy, but at least she’d always had sex as a joyful, sometimes even thrilling outlet from the darkness, if she wanted. It had never occurred to her that it could be anything else.

Or that most of the world lived in a gray, strange place where it was a chore. Did it make a difference if it was a chore they didn’t entirely hate? Or not all the time?

“Did you all . . .” She didn’t know how to ask the question delicately. But then, she wasn’t delicate, was she? So she just asked it. “Did you
all
enjoy it even though you weren’t supposed to?”

The three women laughed and Eiryn had no idea why her face felt hot. Aside from the fact she never, ever talked about these things. Or much at all. To anyone.

“Well, I did,” Lyla said dryly. “A lot, as I said. That was part of the problem. I was way too enthusiastic and that led to experimenting with things like blow jobs and, yeah. The priests didn’t like that much.”

“I didn’t hate my life,” Maud said after a moment. She made a small sound that was almost a laugh. Eiryn assumed it had to do with Gunnar and was likely nothing his sister wanted to know. “Life as a novice was complicated, but I wanted to become a nun because I didn’t like the alternative. It was the only life I knew. I was fine with it. I even liked parts of it. I just . . . wanted more.”

“I didn’t understand why anyone cared about sex,” Helena said in a small, strangled voice that Eiryn didn’t understand until it tipped over into laughter. The other women joined in. “I mean, it was a little messy and sometimes embarrassing and kind of boring, right? I preferred being on compost duty, frankly.”

Maud and Lyla laughed so hard they stopped working on Eiryn’s braids. And even Eiryn found herself smiling.

Tyr wasn’t shy. He enjoyed his woman in full view of the clan, and often, as many liked to do. However Helena felt about the war chief, which was none of Eiryn’s business, she certainly didn’t treat all the sex she had with him like
compost duty
. Eiryn had seen that with her own eyes.

“Not so much anymore, though,” Eiryn said. “I’m guessing.”

“No,” Helena agreed, her voice still bright with laughter. “I mean, the raiders take it to a whole new level, but let’s just say I have a greater understanding of why it is a lot of people care a great deal about sex. And don’t think it’s all that boring.”

Eiryn was still smiling when a shadow fell over her. She looked up automatically, expecting that another camp girl had come down the beach to help with the great unbraiding.

But instead, a complete stranger stood there, looking down at her.

Except he wasn’t a stranger.

The sculpted lines of his beautiful face were more pronounced with no braids to frame it. He was a brutal masterwork of brown skin stretched over fine bones, that hard and lush mouth and that bold jaw of his with its short, tight beard only emphasizing its power. His eyes blazed, dark brown and mesmerizing, and there was nothing to soften them now. His hair was short. So short on the sides it looked almost as if he’d shaved it, and slightly longer on the top, showing off his thick and tight black curls.

He looked . . . compliant. Except hotter.

And so damned beautiful Eiryn’s mouth went dry, even as the rest of her body exploded into an absurd furnace of need. She felt herself flush again, and that was bad enough, with him so close and three women close enough to notice. Her pussy ached and went soft and slippery, almost making her moan out loud. But the worst was that heavy, swelling feeling in her breasts, because her nipples pinched into greedy little points.

And he could see it, thanks to the damned T-shirt she wore. She could feel the fabric like a rough lick across each tip, and though she didn’t look down, he did.

Of course he did.

And then he smiled.

“Don’t worry,” Riordan said, in that dark and rich voice of his that made her flush anew and, worse, shake somewhere deep inside as if there was nothing she wouldn’t surrender to him. Nothing she wouldn’t lose. And when had she become a person who lost anything without a pitched battle? What the hell was happening to her here? “It won’t be boring. I promise.”

Riordan was usually much better at retaining information, but tonight it seemed to pour in one ear and straight out the other, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to mind that as he should.

It had been a long day.

He’d fucking traumatized himself cutting off his braids, but he’d done it because his king had asked him to do this—or hadn’t objected when he’d volunteered, which felt like pretty much the same thing—and Riordan was nothing if not a goddamned team player. But that didn’t mean he liked it. He’d worked his whole life—and sacrificed his entire family—for the things those braids represented.

The blade. The blood. The battles.

His brain knew that he was merely serving his king and the brotherhood in a different way now that the braids were gone. That the fact he no longer looked like a warrior at a glance didn’t mean he wasn’t one. But something deep inside of him mourned, all the same.

And then there was Eiryn, wedged under his skin like an itch he couldn’t quite reach.

It had been bad enough down the beach, listening to Helena, Maud, and Lyla talk about life in the compliant part of the world while they’d worked on combing out Eiryn’s braids with their fingers. Compliance was certainly more multilayered than Riordan had thought—especially given that until today he’d figured it entailed little more than petty little jackasses ordering women to have sex with them and women obeying because they didn’t know any better. A dynamic Riordan did not get or find hot at all, but then, he’d never had any trouble finding willing, wet pussy. But he’d found it almost impossible to process anything the women had said in specific, because he’d been too busy sitting there and pretending not to be stunned as a completely different Eiryn emerged the longer they worked on her.

It was a problem. Not a small one.

When they were finished taking out her braids, Eiryn’s dark hair cascaded down her back in a glossy, gleaming shimmer that she clearly found irritating. Or maybe she was mourning the loss of her braids, same as him. Either way, she’d shoved it this way and that. She’d gathered it into an unwieldy knot at her nape and she’d braided it loosely over one shoulder, the way the rest of the raider women did. She’d sat cross-legged beneath one of the shade trees, wearing jeans that fell low on her hips and a T-shirt that rode a little high, meaning Riordan found himself a little too mesmerized by that pale, creamy expanse of her toned abdomen she kept flashing every time she shifted position.

Yeah. A problem.

The truth was, despite the bad blood between them, Riordan always liked Eiryn the way she was, tough and lethal and entirely ruthless, all hard-cut muscles and deadly intent. His cock had a particular fondness for watching her in action, swinging that blade of hers and taking down assholes twice her size. He’d always found her beautiful, no matter how raw and fucked-up he felt when he was near her.

But this braidless Eiryn was like a sucker punch. She was a memory come to life when Riordan had spent a lot of time telling himself he’d put all of their shit behind him for good. Her hair loose and free fell around her face and made her seem softer, somehow. Prettier, if that was possible. No less dangerous, but less obvious about it, the way she’d been before she’d joined the brotherhood and hardened into the sharp, steel blade of a woman she was now.

Her hair down and unbraided, sitting like a fit and finely formed woman instead of the king’s favorite black-draped assassin—it was like falling down a hole, straight back into that long-ago summer.

Riordan had spent the afternoon so damned hard—and reeling a little bit, if he was honest, which was a whole lot worse than a cock gone wild at the sight of a hot piece of ass—he was surprised he hadn’t damaged himself permanently. He’d told himself it was just the shock of having short hair again, like the compliant bitch he was having a little trouble pretending he was.

By the time the shadows had started to lengthen into the soft August evening, the three women had imparted what had to have been every last detail of life in all those sad mainland settlements. Riordan now knew more than he’d ever wanted to know about the intricate politics of bullshit situations ruled by vague threats instead of the very real promise of swift justice delivered on the edge of a raider’s blade.

“What happens if you call a little shitcan king on his bullshit?” he’d asked at one point.

Helena had smiled in that way she did, as if he was being funny when he wasn’t.

“You don’t.”

“Give me a hypothetical.”

She’d shrugged. “There’s no hypothetical because it would be dumb. Challenging kings—and it doesn’t matter if the only thing they’re king of is their vivid imagination—isn’t something you want to do unless you want to call attention to yourself.”

Riordan had thought of the dumbass mainlanders he’d encountered in his time. “Maybe I do.”

“
You
do, sure,” Helena had replied patiently. “But you’re not going to be Riordan, the best tracker in the clan, high-ranking member of the brotherhood, and close personal friend of the king. You’re leaving that man here. And random Riordan who’s wandering around the mainland for no particular reason, the way people do, does not want to call attention to himself. He wants a dry place to spend the winter and a winter wife for a little companionship to make the dark feel better. That’s it. He’s not going to challenge his source of food and shelter during the dark months.”

Riordan had sighed. “Random Riordan sounds like a punk ass bitch.”

Now they all sat around the campfire again, debating the best routes toward the western mainland as Maud once again cooked the day’s hunting yield with a few of the camp girls helping her out.

“Do they all cook on the mainland?” Riordan asked Gunnar, his eyes on the man’s mate. He’d sampled Maud’s cooking before, far away in Gunnar’s cottage on the eastern islands earlier in the summer. She was a talented woman in more ways than one. “Is that a compliant thing or a nun thing?”

“Maud likes to serve,” Gunnar murmured, with a shit-eating kind of gleam in his eyes as he looked at his woman, pure male satisfaction stamped all over his body and in that possessive curve of his mouth.

Then he slid that gaze to Riordan and let it sharpen.

“Me,” he amended. Gruffly.

Riordan laughed. “Is that a warning? Because cast your mind back, brother. I wasn’t the one who was confused about your situation.”

“I’m not warning you about shit,” Gunnar said, his voice a dark rumble. “I’m clarifying.”

Another night, Riordan might have pushed the brother to see how far he’d go—a favorite pastime in the brotherhood. Especially with someone like Gunnar, who’d gone off the rails there for a while. He’d lost it after his first mate had died in a raid, and Riordan hadn’t been sure the Gunnar he’d known since they were kids would make it back. And possessive motherfuckers shouldn’t pretend they were something other than psychotically possessive, the way Gunnar had done earlier in the summer.

But for some reason, he couldn’t muster up the energy to mess with the man the way he could have. The way he probably should have. It was one more clear indication that he was fucked in the head.

“I don’t need any clarification that you’re a dick,” he said instead. “That’s been obvious for years.”

The old Gunnar would have stormed off or gone dark and broody at that. This Gunnar only shrugged, made a rude gesture that Riordan felt was half-assed, then returned his attention to the conversation that was still going on over the fire. And more to the point, to his woman.

Riordan tried to focus, because there would be no rewinding this and paying better attention to it later, when it mattered. He’d be out wandering around the western highlands like an asshole, wishing he’d gotten out of his own head when it would have been helpful.

“There are ferries from a couple of the eastern coastal cities on the Mississippi Sea,” Helena was saying. She was using her tablet as reference, the way she often did, enlarging the map to point at dots on it that marked cities and ignoring all the swathes of land and cities that had sunk in the Storms. “The quickest and biggest runs between Louisville and Kansas City at least once a week. That’s your best choice. They round everyone up like cattle and throw them onboard for the crossing. It’s miserable and completely anonymous.”

“Sounds awesome,” Eiryn said dryly.

Helena made a face. “It’s not my favorite, but it’s how you cross the Mississippi Sea when you don’t have access to the raider fleet.”

“So we go to Louisville,” Riordan said, as much to advertise that he was paying attention to this conversation as to actually take part in it.

“It will take a while to sail down and around Atlanta,” Tyr pointed out, from where he sat behind Helena. “We’re running out of summer.”

“I’m not sure that appearing in Louisville Bay in a raider ship is the best way to start a secret infiltration of the western highlands,” Marcus said from where he lounged, a replete-looking camp girl on either side of him. “We tend to cause a little commotion.”

“Are there land routes to Louisville from here?” Ellis asked, stroking his long black beard and the bones he wore in it.

“They won’t be any faster,” Gunnar said, shifting his attention from the fire and his mate. “There are no well-maintained roads on the eastern mainland. You can’t ever get up to a decent speed no matter what vehicle you might have and that means you’re sitting out in the open, begging bandits and highwaymen to come along and fuck your shit up.”

“Bandits and highwaymen aren’t compliant, though,” Eiryn pointed out. “We could fight
them.
”

Riordan caught her gaze without meaning to or thinking it through. But he felt it, electric and unexpected, when their eyes met. There was laughter in all that midnight blue and he was screwed, because all he wanted was to forget. To pretend they were other people, without their past. To do what he could to make this searing, electric thing that snapped between them last. Grow. Take over the whole damned world—

But that was the crazy in him talking. That and his cock, the mouthy bastard. He shifted against the log he was using as a backrest and ordered himself to stop looking at her. It only led to trouble.

“There are caravans,” Helena said. “You can catch rides on them, but they’re only as safe as the people riding them. In my experience, that wasn’t very safe at all.”

Eiryn smiled. “I like our chances.”

Everyone laughed at that—or at the idea of two brothers pretending to be regular caravan riders—but once Riordan forced himself to look away from Eiryn he noticed no one else was looking too hard at her either. It was such a dramatic change, the hair and the clothes. It was messing with them, because the brotherhood was a collection of elemental bastards who spent the bulk of their downtime thinking with their dicks. He saw the way Eiryn held herself, overly casual and pointedly relaxed, and knew she was as aware of it as he was.

But there was no helping the situation. She’d stormed around the brotherhood like death on light feet for so long, everyone had gotten comfortable thinking of her that way. Only that way. Tonight, she looked less like her lethal self and more like a raider’s wet dream, and Riordan wasn’t the only one having difficulty processing the change.

Though he suspected he might be the only one feeling murderous about it.

He sucked it up. Of course he did. But he was happy when the communal conversation ran its course and he could brood as he liked. In silence and without looking at Eiryn every five seconds.

When the camp girls started handing out another night’s ration of fresh meat, Wulf came and threw himself down on the sand next to Riordan. He smiled as Janhavi handed him his share, and then appeared to focus all his formidable attention on his meal.

Ordinarily, Riordan might have cracked a joke to break the tension, but he’d chopped off his braids and had been forced to figure out a different way to carry his blade so that he didn’t look like he was any good with it. His dick was acting like he was fifteen, Eiryn was under his skin like a damned rash, and this one time, he let his king sit there beside him in silence.

“Will it get complicated, do you think?”

Riordan followed Wulf’s gaze across the fire to where Eiryn sat, a camp girl on one side and Helena on the other, and tried to ignore that thudding thing inside him. The way he’d been ignoring it for years—but everything was different now. The two of them were about to become different people for a winter. Maybe it made sense that what worked inside of him wasn’t apprehension.

It was anticipation.

But only a dumbass would say so.

“I think,” he said after a moment, very carefully, “that it’s always been complicated.”

“So it has.” Wulf seemed to concentrate entirely on his dinner, lounging there so casually, but Riordan didn’t buy it for a second. “You have a nice long winter to uncomplicate it.”

That would be the smart thing to do. Too bad Riordan didn’t have the slightest idea how to go about doing it. If he did, he would have done it already. He would have ended this tension between them years ago.

He laughed. “I have to tell you, I don’t think that’s possible.”

Wulf kept his eyes on his sister, so Riordan did the same. She was frowning at something Helena was saying while she licked her fingers, and he could feel the hot, wet touch of her mouth . . . everywhere. Particularly in his overly enthusiastic cock. Not exactly how he wanted to react within an inch of her ruthless, bloodthirsty brother, who could order him torn to pieces on a whim, if he chose. The same one who had warned him off Eiryn once.

And who also happened to be his king.

Riordan needed to find a way to get himself under control. He’d managed it before—for years on end. Control was his goddamned life. Why did it seem so out of reach tonight? As if everything had already changed beyond comprehension and no one had noticed it yet.

He felt different. That was the trouble. He felt different and she
looked
different and the whole thing was a shit show and it hadn’t even started yet.