Edge of Control: (Viking Dystopian Romance) (33 page)

“Make me ask again,” she told him softly, “and you’ll wish I caned you bloody.”

“Me,” the bishop spat out, because like all cowardly little bullies he could dish it out forever and take absolutely none of it in return. What a shock. She pricked his throat and knew he felt his own blood trickle down the length of it when he paled. “On King Athenian’s orders.”

“And what about that temple in the Catskills?” she asked in the same friendly tone. “Why are you running around burning church property to the ground?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“The mercenaries gave you up, friend,” Riordan told him from his place across the room. “Fun fact about us whores for hire. We have no loyalty. We only have a price.”

“The church doesn’t burn down its own temples,” Bishop Seph gritted out. “That was the king.”

“Through you,” Eiryn prompted him.

He bared his teeth at her. “Yes.”

Riordan let out a bark of laughter. “What a good errand boy you are.”

The bishop shifted beneath Eiryn, as if his fury was eating him alive. She sincerely hoped it was.

“Thank you,” she said sweetly, sinking down so she got even more in his face, to make sure he’d spend a lot of time remembering this moment. “I really appreciate the spiritual guidance. And just think. You didn’t even have to use your magic wand on me like you did with the other girls.”

She bore down a little harder with her foot on the wand in question, and liked it when a push of air burst out of his mouth, sounding suspiciously like the high-pitched whine of a punk-ass bitch. A movement caught her eye and she saw the nun had given up staring at the ground and was watching Eiryn instead, her mouth slightly open and something like wonder in her gaze.

Eiryn nodded at her, then returned her attention to the worm at her feet.

“If you’re going to kill me, do it,” he panted up at her, his teeth bared. “I am a humble servant of god. I know what my future holds.”

“So do I,” Eiryn promised him darkly.

“You still can’t kill him,” Riordan said from behind her. “Are you going to drag this out all night? Let me know if you are and I’ll go sell my services to the highest bidder while I wait. Like us mercenaries love to do.”

Eiryn leaned in closer to the bishop. So close it was almost like a kiss.

Only much, much better.

“Maud says hi,” she whispered, purely to mess with him, and waited for his gaze to go a little wide. A little stunned and a whole lot crazy.

It was worth the fingerprints he’d left on her jaw.

Then she cold cocked him in the face, breaking his nose and knocking him the fuck out.

And that was even better.

* * *

Hauling ass out of Great Lake Cathedral City wasn’t as hard as Riordan expected it to be.

Once Eiryn finished playing her little games with the bishop, she followed Riordan out of the creepy-ass confessional chamber, stepping over the bodies of the guards he’d happily dropped when he’d come in after her. The whole way down the servants’ stairs he stayed tense, waiting for the nun they’d left behind to sound the alarm. Or the compliant woman he’d liberated from a grotesque “prayer session” to come screaming out of a corner, making too much noise and giving them away. Or more guards to appear on their rounds, but it seemed that the church took a lazy approach to its own security on equinox night. Something Riordan imagined would come to a stop once the bishop woke up.

When they walked right back out the door they’d come in, he thought they’d be stopped and questioned. At the very least. He could feel Eiryn’s matching tension right behind him—but the new guard outside the door barely looked in their direction, too busy scowling at a couple of compliants getting a little overly touchy in the street right in front of him.

Five steps later and they were swallowed up in the crowd, gone as if they’d never been there.

The entire city appeared to be out in the streets around the Cathedral. If there was a method to it all, it was lost on Riordan. Happily, that wasn’t his problem. He ignored the people, who were getting more riled up by the second, and cut his way through the crowd with precision. He didn’t look back to make sure Eiryn was following him. He knew she was, and if she wasn’t, she knew the way as well as he did.

It was almost too easy to make it back to their rooms and collect their stuff. Then walk back out into the crowd and get swallowed up in all the shouting and singing all over again. This time, Riordan headed south, out toward the various parking areas to look for a truck that might get them to the ocean, and fast. There was no outcry as they wove their way through all the compliant people, right there in the glare of the brightly lit Cathedral. No guards came running. No one paid them the slightest bit of attention.

“This is creeping me out,” Eiryn said when they finally made it through the worst of the crush. “How did we walk right out of there?”

She frowned over her shoulder at the mess of light. The big drums sounded eerie and mysterious this far away. The songs and chants lost all definition and sounded less like hundreds of voices and more like the wind. A compliant storm. Riordan didn’t like it.

“We need to get the hell out of here,” he agreed. “That bitch knows our faces.”

Riordan found a truck he liked in the third lot they visited, about a half hour’s walk south of the commotion in Cathedral Square. The vehicle was big and old, but with the kind of modifications he thought he wanted for this balls-out trip they were about to take to the coast of the Mississippi Sea, like a powerful grill on the front that could handle frontal assaults and an extra external fuel tank. Almost full up, as if its owner had a long, treacherous drive planned.

“First or second watch?” he asked Eiryn as he checked all the connections and tires, waiting while she picked the lock on the passenger door.

“Second,” she replied. She tossed the door open and climbed up into the passenger side of the vehicle. Then she slid down the bench seat and unlocked the driver’s side door for him. “The steering wheel’s still here. What an idiot.”

Riordan privately thanked the idiot who’d had enough misplaced faith in the holy city to leave his steering wheel attached to the truck’s steering column instead of taking it with him, the way people expecting a rougher crowd tended to do. It saved him having to break into a second vehicle to find one he could use. He swung up behind the wheel and messed around with the wires beneath it, trying to remember the lessons he’d been taught about how to do this before he’d started going on active raids every summer. Because a raider never knew what he was walking into or when he might decide a ride was a better plan.

“Easy,” he said with a grin when the engine turned over. “Like everything tonight. Which means there’s probably an army at the entrance to the Eighty.”

Eiryn shot him a glance from her side of the bench seat. “It should be just a little bit farther south. Unless you want to find that northern approach and hit it that way.”

“South is fine.”

Besides, if there was an army waiting on one end of the city they’d likely be everywhere else, too. Might as well get into it here, where it would be easier to retreat into the crowd. He put the truck in gear, eased out of the tight parking space, and headed for the main street.

This far south of the action, the streets were clear of people, and in no time he found his way down to the Eighty, the only remaining maintained roadway in the western highlands. There was no army. There was no one around at all, for that matter. It only made him more uneasy. Riordan drove off the surface streets and straight onto the ancient highway. Then he pointed them east and slammed his foot on the gas, rocketing them up into the mountains.

“I don’t see anyone behind us,” Eiryn said a tense stretch of time later, her attention in her side mirror, the way it had been since they’d gotten moving.

The overlit city melted into a pool of gold in his rearview mirror, then disappeared, leaving nothing but a low orange hangover in the night sky.
Good riddance
, Riordan thought. He kept expecting a chase. Or some assholes hanging around, waiting to jump them on their way out. But there was nothing. Only the mountains, the falling temperature the higher they climbed, and the September night.

“Let’s give it a little longer,” he muttered, keeping the accelerator low, scanning the empty road all around them for signs of life. Any life at all.

About forty-five minutes out of the city, with nothing in his rearview mirror, he pulled off the highway. He didn’t want to set them up as a target, so he took the first dusty old local road he could find, pitted and reduced to dirt. He followed it through an abandoned collection of buildings too rundown and few to be any kind of settlement, and then up a hill. He parked there, pointing the truck back toward the highway so they could see anyone coming. Then he killed the headlights.

And there it was. The dark. The thick black of night, not the false brightness of that terrible city.

Riordan took a minute. He saw all the stars he’d missed down in the valley with the Cathedral lights polluting the sky in all directions. The quiet stretch of mountains ranging along the other side of the freeway, looking gentle against the dark. The soft, eroded headstones of the ancient cemetery he’d parked in. A breath he hadn’t known he was holding left him then. And it almost hurt him to switch on the interior lights.

Eiryn climbed into the backseat and Riordan took the front, checking all the door pockets and built-in compartments now that they didn’t have to worry about the truck’s owner coming upon them.

“There’s a storage compartment in the back, but there’s a padlock on it,” he told her as they looked around to see what the owner might have left behind. “I don’t think it’s coming off.”

“I think we’re good.” She crawled into the front seat again, lifting her chin toward the back as she slid into place. “A handgun for every seat and some ammo clips. A rusted blade that could be fun if we wanted to make a little noise. And a couple of bags of dried fruit, should you want a snack while you consider these options.”

She tossed the small dried fruit pouches into the center console as unappealing punctuation. Riordan continued his search of the pockets up front, but came up with nothing useful. Just the sad detritus of a dusty little life that had somehow led to the equinox celebrations at the Cathedral. He shook his head. He didn’t get the lives these mainlanders led. He’d rather take his chances in battle. On the grumpy-ass open sea at the wrong time of year. Life was short and shitty. If he was going down anyway, likely sooner rather than later, better he should do it hard. With honor and a blade. Not a couple of waterlogged handguns and a woman who couldn’t say no.

Beside him, Eiryn dug through her pack. She pulled out a tight little roll of black and put it on the seat beside her. It took Riordan a minute. Then he realized it was her battle gear. The stuff he’d thought she’d left behind in the Catskills. He didn’t meet her gaze when she slid a look at him, daring him to comment, but he didn’t do anything to hide his smirk, either.

She leaned down to pull off her boots, her hair falling forward to conceal her face as she bent over.

“So that total immersion into compliance thing was just for show?” he asked, watching her, and maybe a little bit lost in the way she moved. Lithe and smooth. Lethal elegance and raw power. He shifted in his seat. “All that vacation stuff was part of the act?”

“Not at all,” she replied, a hint of laughter in her voice. “I was all in. But the show’s over.”

She wasn’t wrong about that. He pulled his own pack from the backseat, digging out his harness and strapping himself in. It was cold enough up here in the mountains that he left his thermal on. But he couldn’t seem to keep track of what he needed to be doing, because Eiryn was stripping off her T-shirt and jeans. Then she was sitting there on the same damned bench seat in nothing but her binding wrap, pulling it tighter around her.

Heat walloped him. Need clutched at him, hard and fierce, like a massive fist. Riordan told that roaring thing inside him to calm down. Instead, his cock tried to climb out of his trousers.

Eiryn tugged that skintight black tank top of hers back into place with a practiced roll, smoothing it down over her taut stomach. Then she ran her hand through her long dark hair, fanning it out over her shoulders. He was obsessed with her hair. The heat it carried. The scent, fresh and wholly her. It teased him, moving over him like a touch. Making his mouth water and his cock ache.

She flicked another look at him—likely to see why he’d frozen solid next to her—and went still.

But he could see her eyes, then. Dark and blue and blazing hot. And her pulse was a wild thing in her neck, thumping out the same wild rhythm he felt inside him.

The air in the truck was thick. Hot. Reckless and greedy.

For a moment that was all there was, pulled out taut and gleaming between them.

“I’ll call it bloodlust if you will,” he told her, his voice rough. Harsh.

“We don’t have time to call it anything,” she said. Almost primly. “We have to drive across the mainland and commit suicide by boat.”

That thing that always wrapped tight between them was stronger now. Hardier. It filled the cab of the truck. It filled
him.

If he was going out, he wanted one last taste of her to take with him. To make it worth it.

He reached for her, and he could read the intent that had to be stamped on his face in the way her lips parted at the sight and her eyes went dark. Hungry. Wild.

Riordan wrapped his hands around her face, tangling his fingers in that silky hair of hers, and he hauled her to him. Or maybe she catapulted herself against him. It didn’t matter. His mouth was on hers or hers was on his. They fought to get close. Closer. They fought because they fought. Teeth, tongue, her taste exploding through him, making that Catskills fire seem like a pale-ass candle in comparison.

They ate at each other’s mouths, feasting as if they’d never get another chance to taste each other again. Wet, hot, and desperate. Something like savage.