Edge of Control: (Viking Dystopian Romance) (20 page)

How had he failed to recognize that when he’d walked away from Eiryn ten years ago it had been the same thing all over again?

He knew why he’d done it, both times. It was always the same reason.

The brotherhood. The blade.

But he’d just spent the first week of his adult life without his blade in his hand, something he’d always imagined would kill him—and here he was. Fine. He’d tasted Eiryn again, which was a mistake so vast it was eating him alive, and the worst part was he had every intention of making it worse. Much, much worse. These caravans were up close and personal affairs, Helena had told them. There would be no avoiding their compliant duties and Riordan couldn’t lie to himself. He didn’t bother trying.

He couldn’t wait.

Riordan had been so focused on what he was giving up, he hadn’t paid enough attention to what he was getting. This was a finite mission, not a life change. He wasn’t a kid hiding under a porch this time around. His king
wanted
him to do exactly what he was doing.

Which was, basically, to act like the mainlander version of the man his father had been. The man Riordan was supposed to become before he’d taken matters into his own hands. The man he’d killed with his own selfish bullshit—

But his ghosts were his problem. He’d carry them inside him, like the crisp scent of grass and those precious summer afternoons and the quiet laughter of people he’d never see again. Like Eiryn ten years ago when her smile hadn’t been so rare, her gaze open and too much emotion in her young face, before he’d crushed her, too. He’d do what he had to do this winter, and when it was over, he’d take himself to task for enjoying it.

He was sure there was more space on his skin to mark his shame and pay his penance. There always was.

“Riordan.”

His gaze snapped to Eiryn’s then. She was still standing there, frowning at him despite the sun in her eyes. The crowd of people around them had thinned, spreading out over the grass. Some had gone to the caravans. Some had headed for the western bridge off the island, the one that actually linked these Kansas City islands to the mainland. Still others were heading into Union Station to soak in all that history.

“Do you want to check that place out?” she asked, looking between him and the building that stood there, serene and something like sweet in the summer afternoon. No trains ran in or out of it now. No one had seen a train in centuries. But still it stood, as if the seas had never threatened it. It looked as if it always would.

“No,” he said, aware that his voice was rough. He ignored it.

He reached over and took her hand, because he could. Because out here in the light of early September and the end of another summer, it didn’t matter. They weren’t brothers here, not where anyone could see. That meant he could do what he wanted, like enjoy that instant bolt of sensation that surged through him when he touched her. That meant he could hold on when she tried to pull away.

Riordan smiled. A real smile, from a place inside him he hadn’t known was there. He’d save regrets for the spring. He’d match them with his ghosts and kick his own ass, the way he always did.

But first he’d make sure there was something worth regretting. A whole lot of somethings, or what was the point?

“I have everything I need,” he told her, this woman who would play his mate for a season. This woman he couldn’t get enough of, then or now, and he figured it was high time he stopped trying. “Let’s go.”

It wasn’t the caravan itself that bothered Eiryn.

Sure, it was a rickety old thing held together as much by chance as the various things Lang, its remarkably hairy and pale owner, and Xela, his thick and weathered mate, used to patch up holes and paper over potential issues inside and out. And it lacked pretty much anything in the way of amenities. There were a series of bunks in the back and a sitting area in the middle, and neither part of the vehicle was remotely luxurious or even particularly comfortable.

Eiryn had always taken her rooms in the Lodge back home for granted, she realized now. All those warm and toasty furs. Hot water and a private shower. Heat in the winter and cool breezes from the sea in summer. Though as the days wore on, while Eiryn didn’t dream about life back home any less, she somehow . . . got used to the endless, jolting ride. She started finding the bunk she shared with Riordan almost comfortable—or at least, more comfortable than the disgusting ferry ride, that cot in Louisville, and sleeping on the ground during raids. She found that after a day or two she even relaxed a little bit while sitting on one of the built-in couches, as long as no one else tried to creep up behind her.

Eiryn wouldn’t want to live in the ratty old caravan any longer than she had to, but she was fine with it. More or less.

The people she was sharing her space with weren’t the problem, either, though having to deal with mainlanders up close and personal had certainly taken a small period of adjustment. This was one of the smaller caravans that had lined the green lawn across from Union Station, with only four built-in bunks. With one reserved for Lang and Xela, that left space for two couples other than Eiryn and Riordan. And they were all . . . fine. Or relatively unobjectionable, anyway.

Eiryn knew how to judge a person by their prowess in battle and the strength of their swing. The honor by which they lived—or didn’t. In the absence of a battlefield where she could read opponents instantly in the ways they attacked or held back, feinted or struck, who could tell how to measure these mainland creatures? She understood that not one of them was a threat, which instantly downgraded them in her eyes from potential opponents to . . . curiosities.

Dimitri, long-limbed with freckles on his light-brown face, was a carpenter on his way back from a job in Atlanta to spend the winter with his people in Wyoming. His woman, Gretchen, with her deep-set eyes, olive skin, and strong nose, was nursing their ten-month-old baby. Jonathan, meanwhile, was a stern and burly butcher by trade with sallow white skin, thick black brows, and a fierce, downturned mouth who spent a lot of his time quoting dire church teachings, particularly to his much younger previous winter’s wife. Kamala, for her part, bared a bit too much of her ruddy brown skin for Jonathan’s taste and smiled a little too intently at the other men on the caravan, clearly planning to switch things up at the equinox celebration she was headed to somewhere in the settlements outside the Great Lake Cathedral. If not before.

Eiryn didn’t feel the urge to kill any of them outright. They were almost entertaining, in their way. She could admit that a part of her enjoyed listening to them talk about their strange lives, all of them so far removed from what she knew that it was like listening to the old fairy tales her mother had told her when she was very small. Carpenters. Babies. A ranting butcher. It was like a winter play put on for her personal amusement.

Then again, sometimes there were moments that had nothing at all to do with fairy tales. Eiryn had been shocked on that first morning, when she’d been able to tell by the scent wafting up from each mug that all three of the other women were drinking the same herbal tea that she’d brought with her. In bulk. They’d all met each other’s gazes with the same bland expression. None of them had said a word. And no one had ever mentioned out loud that the herbs they were drinking and calling their morning tea were what ensured they wouldn’t get pregnant no matter how low the chances were anyway these days. Church teachings and the rantings of winter husbands like Jonathan were one thing, it seemed. Reality was something else.

Eiryn’s problem wasn’t even Riordan, necessarily. She didn’t know what had happened to him back in Kansas City. She hadn’t been able to read him at all. They’d hardly had a second alone to discuss it, and when they had, he’d only shaken his head and told her—a bit gruffly, to her mind—to stay in character. So that was what they’d done.

For going on a week now.

And that right there was the problem. Not the close quarters, though that, too, was an adjustment. Because she could hear everything, of course. Like Dimitri and Gretchen whispering and laughing like people who genuinely enjoyed each other’s company, something none of the formerly compliant women Eiryn had spoken to had indicated was a possibility in such relationships. Or their cute little baby with all that black hair and those big brown eyes making her little and sometimes not so little noises. Or Jonathan’s long and inescapable nightly sex sessions with a Kamala, who never sounded like she was nearly as compliant as he was, followed by much longer and louder prayers, as if he felt he needed to cleanse them both of any lingering, contaminating lust. Eiryn heard round-faced Xela and bear-like Lang snap at each other as they tended to the business of running the caravan and offering the precious few services the rest of them had paid for, like the anemic breakfasts of a few waterlogged seeds and a cup of dried oats they put out each morning. Just as Helena had warned back in the Catskills, there was no escaping the noise and the knowledge it brought of other people’s business.

Just as there was no escaping the man she had to sleep with or what she had to do every night when they crawled into their cramped bunk and closed the curtain, because if she could hear all of her bunkmates, they could certainly hear her.

Sex was just sex. A different kind of training session, that was all, just as she’d told Riordan back in the Catskills. Eiryn had been telling herself that all her life, especially over the last decade. There was no reason to change her feelings on that now, just because it was significantly more intense sex. It was still only sex.

And even if it wasn’t just sex, not for her, though she would die before she admitted it, she told herself that didn’t matter. It couldn’t. She’d thought being with Riordan would kill her ten years ago, but look at that. She’d lived. She’d survived him. And then she’d survived losing him.

This compliant nonsense, she was grimly determined, would be fine too.

Her problem was the intimacy of it all.

Intimacy, it turned out, pretty much just sucked.

Sex she could handle. Yes, Riordan took great pleasure in making her come, over and over, so she was constantly in danger of crying out and alerting the whole caravan to the fact that she wasn’t exactly compliant herself. And yes, he made her feel entirely too much and she hated it. That had been more than clear in Louisville and if anything, it got worse every time he touched her instead of better. She kept waiting for familiarity to breed a little helpful contempt, but so far, no luck.

But when it was dark, when he couldn’t really see her face, when they were no more than two shapes in the night and she could pretend she was anywhere else and
with
anyone else too, well . . . that was one thing. That could be any night and any two people. It was never as dark as the warehouse in Louisville, but it was dark enough. It was easy enough to wake up every morning and assure herself that it had been nothing more than regular old comfort dick and comfort pussy, just the way raider brothers liked it.

As long as they stayed in the dark, nothing but shadows she could pretend didn’t exist by day, it was fine. She saw no reason why she couldn’t get through the whole of the winter that way.

Today they’d run over something a few hours into the day’s long drive and blew out a tire, somewhere in the Colorado Rockies on the long downswing toward Utah. Lang and Xela were out by the side of the road, muttering at each other as they patched the thing up—or possibly muttering at Jonathan, whose pompous offer of assistance had turned into a typically longwinded lecture. Everyone else announced they were taking a little walk, off the side of the battered old road and down toward the sparkling bright river that ran alongside it.

Eiryn and Riordan exchanged a single swift glance as the group set off on their walk.

“We’re going to climb that hill,” Riordan said, very casually, nodding in the opposite direction, toward the ridge that towered above them. “Maybe there are settlements somewhere nearby.”

“Colorado mountain folk are clannish and secretive,” Lang said in his booming voice, straightening to wipe the sweat off his gleaming pale forehead with the hairy back of one hand. “They’ve been barricaded up these hills since the Storms and they don’t care for outsiders.”

“Then all the better we know exactly where they are and avoid them,” Xela snapped at him, slapping a wrench into his hand from where she squatted on the ground, looking like a great, round boulder draped in one of the flowing black tunics she preferred.

Riordan inclined his head as if he’d been asking permission instead of announcing his plans. Eiryn could almost feel that telltale muscle in his jaw clench inside her own body as he somehow kept from making that distinction perfectly clear to their caravan leaders. The poor souls were still laboring under the delusion that a man with all of Riordan’s highly developed and deeply muscled brawn was a run-of-the-mill farmer.

He didn’t wait for more commentary. He headed across the empty road and into the trees. Eiryn had gotten better at scurrying over the past week, and that was what she did as she followed him, using small steps and enough chaotic speed to give the impression that she was smaller, more bumbling, and far less fit than she was.

But once they were in the trees, out of sight of the others, they broke from their cover stories and ran.

Hard. Like the raiders they were, not like the characters they’d been playing for the past two weeks. They ran like their lives depended on it. Directly up the side of the hill, delighting in the fact the steep grade made it a challenge.

It felt like flying.

Eiryn didn’t care that she could feel her breasts shift beneath her binding. They weren’t bouncing. They didn’t
quite
hurt and besides, she was moving again. At last. She was using her body the way it was meant to be used. She stretched her legs and she pumped her arms, running straight up the side of the mountain, chasing Riordan through the trees until she passed him and then pushing herself harder still when he passed her in turn.

It had been so long. Cramped up in tiny quarters and forever being watched. But here, out in the woods with no one to see that she wasn’t who she said she was, she ran.

She ran until she was panting with the effort. Then she kept going, running until she thought her lungs would burst and her legs would revolt. Then she dropped her head, dug deep, and ran even faster.

And felt like herself again, for the first time since she’d taken off her tight binding on that beach in the Catskills.

When they made it to the top of the ridge, they found that it was really just a little bump of a thing next to the far bigger peaks spread out all around them. They stopped there, both leaning over with their hands on their knees. Both sucking wind like prospective brothers on a training run.

At least Riordan sounded a little bit out of shape, too. Eiryn might have tossed herself off the side of this ridge if it had been only her feeling slow and sluggish after too much constrained traveling these last weeks.

And she saw no reason not to indulge her competitive spirit and bloodthirstiness out here in the middle of nowhere with no one around to see. Eiryn spied a decent branch on the ground and grabbed it up, pulling off a few extraneous twigs. She tossed it in the air, testing its weight, then passed it from hand to hand. Then she shifted her gaze to Riordan and waited.

His smile wasn’t long in coming. It was a hard and very male curve of that mouth of his, deadly promise and a hint of sheer, bloody mayhem. Eiryn’s favorite. He walked around the little clearing until he found his own branch, going through the same motions she had. But she could tell he was ready when he switched his grip and settled into a fighting stance.

Bring it on.

Eiryn didn’t wait for the banter. The bullshit. Talk before the first strike was for little bitches, and she was so tired of playing one she could scream.

She attacked. He blocked.

Their branches slammed together with a satisfying
crack
that she could feel all the way up her arms, and then it was on.

Eiryn gave no quarter. Riordan didn’t yield at all. They fought as if the branches were blades, and would have cut each other up if they had been. Eiryn fought her way back from the enforced sluggishness of the past few weeks. She fought until she felt something like her nimble self again. She flowed back into the footwork she’d dedicated her life to perfecting and the bladecraft she’d bled for and sacrificed for in every way that counted.

And it didn’t let her down.

It was Riordan’s branch that cracked under one of Eiryn’s particularly hard downstrokes, and he scowled as he tossed the useless piece aside.

“Oh dear,” Eiryn taunted him, because gloating was entirely different from banter, especially when she’d struck a decent blow. “Things do not look good for the clan’s former star.”

“‘Former star,’ my ass,” Riordan growled at her, and then he rushed her. He hit her with a merciless shoulder to the midsection and took her down to the ground.

And then, finally, they fought.

It was vicious and brutal and beautiful.

It was what she couldn’t do in all these semi-public beds they’d been in. It was what she hadn’t done ten years ago, because she’d been a little in awe of the brother who’d shared her bed that summer when he could have been knee deep in camp girls instead. It was a long ass time in coming, and Eiryn didn’t hold back.