Edge of Control: (Viking Dystopian Romance) (19 page)

And Eiryn was lost.

She broke apart, burying her mouth against her own arm as Riordan bit her neck, the ferocious, bone-rattling orgasm ripping through her like a storm, tearing her to pieces while he pounded his way after her.

She felt him come hard, flooding her with his heat and his fury.

Still silent. Still in the dark.

And for a long time they stayed like that, his cock only slightly softer inside of her. Her face buried in her own arm. His heart pounding like a drum behind her while his body crushed her into the mattress, her own so raucous she was surprised no one else could hear it.

Once more, she was grateful for the dark. She wished they could stay like this, lost in it with no repercussions whatsoever, forever.

But that wasn’t how life worked. Not her life, anyway. Not ever.

He pulled out eventually, and her curse was that she wanted to pull him back inside her. How could she want that when she knew what would happen if she let it? Riordan was an exercise in defeat and self-loathing who happened to have the one cock in all the world that fit her perfectly and tore her up with a single stroke. He always had been.

And yet.

She heard him zip himself up. Then he shifted around on the narrow bed, forcing her to move with him again or find herself flung off onto the floor. Eiryn tugged up her jeans, and didn’t try very hard to keep her elbows to herself as she did up her fly, because he wasn’t the only one who was feeling edgy.

But then she had to lie there in the dark, edgy and pissed or not, pressed up against him in some hideous parody of cuddling again. She was happy that it was so black around them that he couldn’t see her face. Because she could feel the heat and emotion flooding it, and that was bad enough.

“You came all over me exactly like someone with a blood grudge, babe,” Riordan said, quiet and sarcastic and devastating, a soft taunt into her hair. “That was the first thing I noticed.”

Eiryn felt a searing heat scorch the back of her eyes, but she blinked it away, because she didn’t cry and she wasn’t going to start tonight. Not over him. Not over this. She reminded herself he couldn’t see her. He couldn’t know, he could only guess. So she made her breath even by sheer force of will. She waited until there was no constriction whatsoever in her throat.

Then she sighed as if she was terribly bored.

“It’s all the same in the dark,
babe.
” She felt his temper spike as he tensed beneath her, and smiled. “But I appreciate the effort. You know I like a little comfort dick as much as the next girl.”

He didn’t reply, and she knew—
she knew—
it was because he wanted to respond in ways that would break their cover and expose them to everyone in this bunkhouse. She could feel him prickle with all his dark and repressed fury right there, wrapped around her, his damned arms too tight.

Compliance, it turned out, cut both ways. And left marks.

They lay there like that, trapped in their own little game of pretend and the scars it left on both of them, for a long, long time.

He eventually dropped off to sleep the way men always did, the douchebags, but Eiryn still had to lie awake and serve out the first watch in this alien place. She’d taken her watch dutifully in any number of unpleasant if not outright dangerous spots over the years, but she thought this might be the worst yet. She was plastered all over this man she’d just let fuck her silly in a crowded bunkhouse filled with compliants, and not, as she planned to claim come the morning, because it was part of their cover.

No one could see them in here. No one would have known if they’d done their duty or not.

She’d given herself away. Completely. No matter what she’d claim tomorrow.

And she had hours and hours to lie awake in the suffocating dark, listening intently for any approaching thieves and wondering how the hell she was going to face Riordan—or herself—come the morning.

Or ever again.

* * *

He should not have had sex with Eiryn.

Not the way he had that night, too furious to really settle in and indulge himself in her perfect body the way he’d wanted to do for a long, long time. The way Riordan had been imagining in vivid detail ever since she’d thrown herself into the ring and decided to take part in this mission they’d both known would mean sex, sooner or later.

Not that he hadn’t enjoyed himself, of course. But it had barely taken the edge off.

The trouble with Eiryn was that she was arrogant and tough, like every other member of the brotherhood. It was what made them who they were. But she was worse than all of them as far as he was concerned, because he’d never fucked any of them and yet a taste of her pussy was never, ever enough.

Riordan had spent every minute since he’d pulled out of her tight, hot cunt in Louisville trying to find a way back in.

It took a solid week to get to Kansas City and the ferry ride over had been a miserable experience, as promised. The Louisville bunkhouse had been spacious and luxurious in comparison. They’d been packed in belowdeck, wave after wave of people, crammed into every bit of available space with only a few passed-around buckets to use as toilets and a total disregard for safety or hygiene or anything even resembling comfort. It might have been the only week of his life Riordan hadn’t wanted to get his dick wet at all. In practice. But still, the whole time they’d huddled together to keep their packs to themselves and everyone else in that filthy cargo hold off of them, he’d indulged himself. With one fantasy after the next of Eiryn on a nice, wide bed—or hell, an open field or a forest clearing or a big ass rock—where they could stretch out. Take their time. Get a little creative.

It was no different from the past ten years, really, because he’d always had this same craving for her he’d never managed to wipe out completely. But now that he’d gotten a taste of her again? Forget it. He was addicted all over again.

But an overpacked ferry dripping with compliants and traveling priests was hardly the place to get into any of that.

Kansas City was one of two major Mississippi Sea port cities on the western mainland’s eastern coastline and was the only one considered safe, relatively speaking, for regular people who didn’t sail where they liked and anchor where they pleased. To the north, the port of Lincoln, Nebraska, had been held by an ever-shifting horde of bandits since about two decades after the Storms. There were no bandits in Kansas City. It was a curious swamp of a place that should have been submerged by the rising tides of the hungry Mississippi Sea, but had, through the ingenuity of long-lost ancients, managed to survive in its own unique way. Now it was a collection of walled and heavily fortified islands, each ruled by a separate western kingdom.

Or more accurately, each kingdom’s militia.

After a necessary trip to the public bathhouses that had sprung up near the docks for travelers to wash away the aftermath of the ferry rides from the eastern mainland, Riordan and Eiryn strapped themselves into their packs again and started walking. They made their way from the ferry terminal down on the public docks to the first of the many drawbridges that connected the little collection of islands that all called themselves a part of Kansas City proper. The bridges were heavily guarded on both sides as if every kingdom was strutting around trying to outgun the next. One big game of chicken, as far as Riordan could tell.

But he and Eiryn were raiders. They were good at playing games.

Today it was a matter of keeping their heads down and navigating their way past the hard-eyed military men who stood watch on each island’s border, loaded up with assault rifles and handguns and more than happy to stop pedestrians to ask them a series of pointless, invasive questions, simply because they could. Riordan knew the power games weak men played when he saw them. Accordingly, he didn’t hunch his back or try to look any smaller. He didn’t get in anyone’s face, but he didn’t cringe away, either, and one gun-toting bitch after the next maddogged him, then let him through anyway.

Cowards, all of them. Riordan had yet to encounter a preening douche with a gun who wasn’t.

Riordan paid attention to the scenery instead. Because Kansas City’s network of bridges and islands was fascinating, spanning what had once been a landlocked area of a much different continent and the confluence of at least two major rivers. Every time they crossed a bridge it was as if they’d entered a different world, some small and compact and some much larger and more expansive. There were private, heavily guarded dockyards on islands with restricted access, a bridge over from islands like Country Club Plaza, packed with intricately styled buildings full of people and carefully maintained streets wide enough for the kinds of vehicles that no longer ran on them with any regularity. One island was unnaturally clean and sterile, all the buildings painted the same color and all the people the same sort of wan. The next was bursting with more character in its architecture and citizens, if not with quite enough unbridled passion to draw the notice of the priests.

They found what they were looking for on the fifth and biggest island. They crossed the most heavily guarded drawbridge yet and had to stop twice to answer different intrusive trick questions to make it through. Only when both sets of grim-faced guards in riot gear were satisfied did they make it over the wall and then down the long stairs into what Riordan thought had to be the most perfectly preserved slice of an old city he’d ever seen above water.

Kansas City’s ancient Union Station, once a railway hub, stood in a protected swath of green grass that stretched out to the far side of the island. It looked much as Riordan imagined it must have hundreds upon hundreds of years ago, when it was new. There was a wide pool in front of it where fountains shot water into the hot summer air, an ancient fantasy come to life. He’d never seen anything like it.

This was a ruined world. It had drowned a long time ago, and they all did the best they could in the shit that was left. But this didn’t look like any kind of compromise. This didn’t look like settling for scraps and ruins and leftovers. It looked like a memory made real.

Eiryn was close at his side, but he didn’t dare look at her. Riordan felt . . . outside himself, somehow. As if the particular, deliberate beauty of this place was a personal attack. As if it was
doing
something to him.

He wanted to walk inside Union Station the way some were already lining up to do. He wanted to know what something so terribly old and exquisitely cared-for looked like, or what it felt like to breathe the air inside such ancient walls. The people walking beside him talked excitedly of glorious paneled ceilings and old-time shops maintained in their original form, like a museum. He wanted to see how any of that could possibly exist in this strange place, below sea level on these sunken islands with their fortified walls, when everything else had been lost or destroyed or abandoned so long ago.

“Stop whatever you’re doing,” Eiryn murmured from beside him, her voice pleasant despite her words. In case anyone was listening, he knew. She was as good at her job as he was, which was only one of the reasons her attitude this summer had bothered him so much. “You look like you’re chewing steel.”

Riordan took a breath and ordered himself to relax. Or at least look relaxed, if he couldn’t quite get there. But Eiryn led him down onto the vast, manicured lawn and the deep green smell got into his head. It smelled the way the long yard that wrapped around his father’s house had, like lazy afternoons in a high summer like this one, and the few, magical times his hardworking parents had sat out there to catch the breeze and few sweet moments of sunshine. It catapulted him back to his early childhood, when he’d run around barefoot in grass that smelled exactly like this. He’d rolled in it until he itched. He’d pulled up clumps and had tried to make whistles from the blades. He’d understood who he was and what his life would look like in same visceral way he’d understood the earth beneath his feet and the sky arched high over his head. There had been no mystery, no darkness, no shame or guilt in all that green, all those years ago when he’d still been innocent.

It messed with him, here in this foreign place with an old stone railway station in place of the log cabin his parents had called home. It made him feel a little less steady than he should have.

It made him feel a little too reckless for someone who was supposed to be playing a very specific role.

There was a line of caravans parked on the far side of the vast lawn. According to Helena, they were all privately owned vehicles headed into the western highlands, waiting to round up a decent set of passengers to make the demanding trip. All they had to do was walk over there and start their bidding and negotiations, but Riordan couldn’t bring himself to move.

It was the goddamned grass. The grass and the sun above him and the clear blue summer sky, like a flashback he couldn’t scrub out of his head and no matter that he was half a world and two oceans away from the farm where he’d grown up. It was that astonishingly pretty building with its great arched windows, a throwback to a long-lost world that made him question all the other things he’d always accepted were simply . . . gone. Drowned. Out of reach forever. Maybe it was even the woman who stopped to look up at him, too much summer light in her face while her sleek hair flowed all around her, one more lost thing he’d been so certain he could never have again—until he had.

Or maybe it was the fact he looked like the farmer he’d been bred to become, but still wasn’t one. And no matter how many times he told suspicious border guards that he was all about seeds and crops and his made up land somewhere in the western highlands, he wasn’t his father. He wasn’t even the son his father had wanted, the heir to all his old man had built and tended and maintained.

When Riordan had been given the choice—or what he’d imagined, at ten, was a crucial decision he was called to make or die from the agony of not trying—he hadn’t recognized it for what it was. He’d known what he wanted, oh yes, but he’d had no earthly idea what he’d have to give up to get it.