Edge of Control: (Viking Dystopian Romance) (21 page)

And gloriously, giving her the true respect of another raider brother instead of the bullshit faked solicitousness of the compliant douche he’d been playing for what seemed like forever, neither did he.

She didn’t bother trying to land a good hit while he was on top of her. Too risky to stay where he could pin her. She ducked her head and power-rolled out of his tackle, then flipped back up to her feet.

Riordan came after her. She landed a hard palm strike just to the left of his jugular and he grunted, falling back a step. But before she could capitalize on that, he swiped her down again with a hook of his leg. Eiryn knew she couldn’t let him keep her down on the ground—he was too big for that, too powerful. If he got her in a good hold, she was done, by simple virtue of his brute strength. What she had on her side was speed and agility and she used both to break his attempt at a hold.

She rolled hard and kicked out, getting a satisfactory grunt when she hit him in the ribs. They grappled, there on the ground with no one to witness the fight but the wind through the evergreens, crisp and cool. He blocked jabs to his face, his throat. She ducked away from a serious elbow strike that would have knocked her out, rolling up to her feet again, and when he came after her she responded with a knee to his junk.

“You’ll regret that more than me, babe,” Riordan growled, dodging it. Barely. He bared his teeth when her knee connected hard with his big thigh instead, then slapped it down off of him with a hard palm.

Which stung like a bitch.

He aimed a heavy punch directly at her face in retaliation, but she knew his moves. She was expecting it.

“Way to telegraph, dumbass,” she threw back at him as she snapped her head out of the way.

Which she regretted instantly when he caught her with a direct uppercut to the abdomen, because he knew her moves too. She lost her breath for a moment, but took the hit. She let it throw her back so she could fall into a long roll, then stand up again with a little more space between her body and his massive fists. A little breathing room.

They faced each other across the small clearing, with the Rocky Mountains spread out all around them and marching off toward the horizon in all directions. It was cooler up here, and brighter. So much brighter than down on the road.

And this, Eiryn understood with a flash of insight she didn’t want, was far more intimate than sex in the dark. There was no pretending here. There was no hiding or closing her eyes. They knew each other better here than they ever had in bed, no matter what had happened during that long ago summer. Or in the past week.

It was as much a handicap as it was an advantage.

Riordan’s face was perfectly serious. Even severe, as if he was having the same unexpected intimacy overload she was. As if he was as aware as she was that this was whole lot more than a friendly scuffle—or whatever passed for
friendly
between the two of them. Something inside her flipped over at that thought, but she refused to examine it. Not now.

Not when he was sizing her up for weaknesses when he already knew most of them by heart.

“You think you can take me?” It was more of a taunt than a question, even though Riordan said it in that gruff, low way that told her he was in full battle mode. “Without your blade?”

Her curse was that she found his focused aggression hot as hell. She’d always claimed she wanted him to see her as a warrior. The sad truth was that Riordan was the only warrior who always, always made her feel like a woman.

It made her want nothing more than to make him bleed for that insult.

“I think that if you’ve started running your mouth, you’re more worried about it than I am.” She kept her hands in their fighting position near her face and beckoned him closer with a lift of her chin. “You know you want a piece of me. Come get it.”

He laughed, but his dark eyes were hard. “Baby, I get a piece of you every night.”

Eiryn smirked while she considered all the different ways she could immobilize him. Hurt him. Leave marks, like the bruises she could already feel rising on her skin. Or better yet, scars that wouldn’t heal.

“Are you a weak-ass compliant douche?” she asked, almost idly. “My mistake. I thought I was talking to a member of the brotherhood.”

Riordan only circled her, his dark eyes on hers. “There are a lot of things I don’t get, now that we’re talking. Just you and me. Like buddies.”

“And you really think the middle of a fistfight is the time to play a few rounds of
get to know you
?” She shook her head. “That’s just weak. If you need to surrender like a little bitch, man up and admit it.”

“Tell me this,” he replied, as if he hadn’t heard her. Though of course he had. “How the hell did you not realize that Wulf gave that order?”

It was a sucker punch. It took her breath the way his strike to her abdomen had. And worse. She managed to keep herself from physically reeling, but she saw the way Riordan’s mouth curved. She saw that gleam in his eyes. He knew he’d scored a direct hit.

“Of course Tyr was doing what Wulf wanted,” Riordan continued, in case that first punch wasn’t enough. “You must have known that no one in their right mind would cripple the new king’s
father
without his express permission.”

“Fuck you.”

Riordan let out another bark of laughter that made her want to leap across the little clearing and stab him in the throat.

“Yeah,” he drawled. “That’s what I thought. You knew.”

“Oh, maybe you didn’t hear me while you were running your mouth.” Eiryn felt bruised on the inside. And she thought she’d rather die than let him see it, no matter what he might suspect. “Fuck. You.”

Riordan was clearly enjoying himself, the prick. “What I can’t figure out is how you managed to lie to yourself all those years. Talk about dedication. I know what you get out of pretending you hate me.” She didn’t know what was worse, that knowing look on his face or the things that shook inside of her, telling her truths she didn’t want to accept. “But what the hell did you get out of pretending you were on some holy war of vengeance when you had to know it was a load of crap?”

“I didn’t lie to myself, asshole,” Eiryn gritted out. “I believed Wulf.”

Riordan didn’t lower his hands from their upright and ready position. He didn’t relax his stance. And his dark eyes felt like a strike, hard and true.

“Bullshit.”

“I forgot who I was talking to,” Eiryn seethed at him, because he wasn’t the only one who could land a sucker punch. “Happy-go-lucky Riordan, everyone’s best friend. Second in line to everything that matters, but never out in front where he might actually have to do something besides laugh, laugh, laugh and fuck camp girls in the ass. Important enough to be part of the conversation, but in the end? Completely fucking disposable.” She held her hands out to the side to encompass the mountains around them and the whole of the damned mainland. “Look where you are.”

He snorted, then shook his head, though his gaze never left hers. “You couldn’t be more wrong if you dedicated your life to it. Which, wait. You have.”

“You’d certainly know a lot about dedicating your life to lost causes.” Her voice was so cold it almost hurt in her own mouth. But she didn’t let that stop her. Not now that they were finally exchanging real punches. “It must be nice to pretend you have a higher calling. A stain you can never wash clean that keeps you at a distance from everyone else. How fucking convenient.”

“Did you really just say that to me?” Riordan’s voice was incredulous, but his gaze was frigid, promising mayhem and retribution in equal measure. Eiryn really, really hoped he’d try. “You. With zero irony.”

She was tired of talking. More tired of trying not to reel from the things he’d thrown at her, each of them festering, causing as much damage—or more—than the hits he’d landed on her body.

“Are you going to keep running your mouth at me? Or can we maybe get back to the good part? I don’t mind telling you I have a roundhouse kick with your name all over it.” When Riordan only smirked at her, she sighed. “Or you could try to bore me into submission, sure. It’s a strategy.”

“Keep telling yourself you’re bored.” Riordan didn’t sound cold then. Or furious. It was much worse than that. He sounded
certain.
“Do you really think I can’t read you? Your potshots here. Your bullshit in bed. All painful little diversionary tactics. You have nowhere to hide, baby. Don’t you get that yet?”

If she let any of that sink in at all, Eiryn would have to surrender to the earthquake ripping her apart inside, and that was impossible. That way lay nothing but disaster. She couldn’t possibly take the chance.

“Come on,
brother.
If you read me so well.” She danced back and forth instead, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, trying to bring the fight back into an arena she understood. One that, not coincidentally, would allow her to wale on him until the ugliness inside of her dissipated. “Kick my ass, if you’re such a big man who knows so much.” She tilted her head to one side. “Unless you’re afraid I’ll be the one kicking your ass?”

“Nice try,” he replied, circling her, that hard light in his dark gaze. “My balls actually dropped a long time ago. You’re not going to insult me into rushing you like a dumbass.”

“I haven’t trained in weeks,” she reminded him, never shifting her gaze from his. They were both deadly as hell. They were brothers. The question was, which one of them was
more
lethal? She’d wanted to answer that question definitively for a decade. She particularly wanted to answer it right now, with all this temper and hurt pounding through her veins, hand in hand with the adrenaline surge she loved and had missed during her forced inactivity. “I’m soft and weak. Maybe this is the one time a rush would work.”

He laughed and struck in the same moment, lashing out with a lightning fast side kick. She dodged the kick and turned while she did it, using his body weight and momentum to throw his ass across the clearing.

It was satisfying. Maybe a little more than satisfying.

Riordan landed hard, rolled to his feet, then laughed again.

“You just proved my point,” he said, all that laughter making his voice as bright as the clearing around him, which hit her like another punch. And this time it was a little more dizzying. “And you’re welcome.”

“Oh, right,” she murmured, pityingly. Mocking him. “You meant to do that.”

She was still in her crouch, waiting for him to stop talking and come at her for real this time, when she heard his name. Then hers. Called from some way down the hillside, in a baritone that could only be Dimitri’s.

Riordan’s stance shifted instantly, and she followed suit, standing up straight and dropping her hands despite the simmering fury and the need to draw blood still swimming through her veins. Their eyes met, then they each did a quick sweep of the other.

“Do something about your hair,” he told her, his voice sounding particularly distant after the last few minutes.

“Your shirt,” she replied, through lips that felt stiff because they wanted nothing more than to form insults and force a confrontation. She ran her hands over her hair, pulling out twigs and a few leaves. “Pull it down in back.”

And when he turned to start down the hillside toward Dimitri with his costume back in place, she had no choice but to shuffle her feet, keep her hands to herself, and follow. Like the good compliant woman she wasn’t.

But it wasn’t as if they left the tension between them behind on the mountain.

They walked back down the steep hill to the caravan with Dimitri, who had come to find Riordan—and Eiryn too, he said with a smile because he was actually a decent man, but they’d all known that was only him being polite—to help push the caravan a bit farther off the road to a flatter part of the shoulder.

“Lang thinks he can fix it,” Dimitri shared. “But it will take the better part of the afternoon, so we’re making camp here tonight.”

They hiked back down to the road, the descent taking a much, much longer time than it had taken Eiryn and Riordan to climb up. Eiryn made herself slip. Once, then again. The third time she pretended to be so incapable of maintaining her balance that she threw herself at Riordan’s back, slammed a pointed elbow into his kidneys, then giggled—yes,
giggled,
like a simpering mainland idiot
—
when he was forced to turn and pretend to help her stand rather than clocking her one as she deserved.

She shouldn’t have done that, she reflected when they rejoined the rest of the group. The laughing part, not the overdue fighting at the top of the ridge. Because it made it all seem as if it was okay when it wasn’t.

You have nowhere to hide, baby,
he’d said.

It was like ice water down her back.

Riordan helped all the men do their manly things that Eiryn could have helped with, given that she was stronger than most males, but this was the compliant mainland. She stood around with the other women and pretended she was interested in Gretchen’s baby as more than a curiosity. She even forced herself to make the cooing noise the other females seemed to make naturally. But once the caravan had been moved onto the flatter area and set up so Lang could work on it again, she saw no particular reason to hang around with everyone when inside she was still a heaving mess of bloodlust and fury, deep bruises and that hollow feeling that told her Riordan had landed more punches with his mouth than his fists. More than she wanted to admit to herself.

She kicked off her boots and stowed them. Then she crawled into their bunk—a hand-over-hand crawl when she could have simply swung herself up, but that would have been betraying her true level of agility. Once on the mattress she sprawled out, reveling in all the room she had without Riordan’s enormous body taking up every available inch of the space. Theirs was a top bunk, which meant she could look out their little sliding window and see nothing but the green tops of the evergreen trees and the blue sky around them. She pulled the curtain shut and tried to make her mind quiet. She tried to block out all the things he’d said. She tried to keep herself from turning it over and over in her head.