Edge of Control: (Viking Dystopian Romance) (38 page)

She remembered what he’d said to her in the Catskills.
Fix your shit,
he’d growled at her on that bluff above the water while the temple burned behind them
. Or don’t come back.

“Wulf.”

Her voice didn’t sound like hers. She was tired. So beyond tired. She was jacked and a little battered from that run, thinking with every step she’d be too late. She was exhausted by all of the
crap
that swirled around inside of her and was either her destruction or her salvation, she didn’t know which. But this cold-ass beach wasn’t the place to get into it.

And her half-brother wasn’t the man she wanted to get into it with.

But he was the one staring down at her, every inch of him the pissed-off raider king. Terrible and mighty. And about three seconds away from meting out a little discipline to a smart-mouthed brother under his rule.

So she broke every rule the brothers lived under. She reached out and put her hand on his arm.

He tensed into pure granite beneath her hand. Unlike some, she’d never underestimated him. She knew exactly how deadly he was. She saw the mayhem in his gaze, and it was aimed directly at her.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he bit out.

And she already had her hand on him. She was already sinking. Why not drown?

“I need a shower,” she told him, throwing a lifetime of self-control and discipline to the wind. “I need to eat. I probably need to sleep for a week. I can’t feel my feet and I’m not sure I didn’t get a concussion when the boat crashed.” She searched his face, but it was closed down, fire and fury. “Most of all, I need to see Riordan, and I need you to let me do that. We have the entire winter to tell you what happened to us. You don’t need to know it right now.”

Wulf’s mouth shifted into a hard curve. His gaze was worse. He was terrifying, like he was holding all that immense power of his back by sheer force of will and she was pulling on the very last thread—

But she didn’t back down.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “Am I your king or your bitch?”

Something cracked in her then. Maybe it had already cracked, somewhere on that run. Maybe it had never been solid in the first place. But there, on that frigid beach, it shattered.

“You’re my blood brother,” she threw at him, for once not caring if he—or everyone else around them—saw the turmoil inside of her. Let them stare. Let them think she was weak. How could she possibly care about that after everything that had happened? She didn’t. She dropped her hand from Wulf’s arm and let it fall to her side, and she didn’t know if that was defeat. She wasn’t sure she could tell. “Can you please be my blood brother for one fucking night instead of the goddamned king? Would it kill you?”

And then that was out there. Sitting on the wet rocks with them. Shivering in the October damp. There was no taking it back.

Eiryn didn’t shut her eyes, because she wasn’t a little punk. She’d take what was coming to her. She tilted up her chin and left her hands at her side. And realized she fully expected him to backhand her. The way their father would have done—the way he had done, on numerous occasions. She expected that wild, insulted light in Wulf’s eyes to tip over into violence. Contempt. She had every expectation he would take her down for saying such things to him.

She braced herself for the hit.

And she didn’t know what to do when he didn’t throw that punch.

Wulf stood there for a long moment, a look she’d never seen before on his face. It scraped through her. It made her feel hollow and something like shaky.

“You think I’m going to hit you?” His voice was mild. But she could see that odd light in his eyes. Something far darker than fury. “You think—what, exactly? I’m going to slap you down right here?”

Her lips felt numb, and Eiryn couldn’t tell if that was the weather or the way he was looking at her. “It’s more accurate to say I don’t know that you won’t.”

Wulf blinked at that. He looked away for a moment, down the length of the beach to where the brothers were throwing around the bashed-in hulls of shipwrecked boats, looking for parts to salvage. And probably also just to throw them.

When he looked back her, she wanted to cry. But it occurred to her she didn’t know how to do that, either.

“Do you know why I didn’t kill him?” Wulf asked quietly. So quietly the wind almost stole the words away. Eiryn folded her arms over her middle and told herself she didn’t know who he meant. But she did. Their father’s twisted-up, angry face flashed through her head. “Why I ordered him crippled instead?”

“Because you wanted him to marinate in what he’d done,” she replied. Everyone knew this story. “You wanted to make sure he had a lot of time to sit and think about it.”

Wulf shook his head, his gaze never leaving hers. “Because you begged me to let him live.”

That jolted through her, a cold shock kicking through her, low in her belly. She couldn’t breathe.

“What are you talking about? I was ten years old when you took the throne. I had nothing to do with it.”

“You were ten years old, yes,” he agreed. “I had just won. Amos was a prisoner. You came to me then and there and you begged me not to kill him. You reminded me that he wasn’t only the war chief to you, or Amos the giant asshole, he was your father.”

She had the vaguest, strangest memory of that night. The whole clan had been out in the streets, it seemed, watching the young upstart Wulf battle old, canny, and deeply hated King Donovan all over the village. It had ended down at the docks, when eighteen-year-old Wulf had landed the killing blow and won his throne, leaving the old king lying there in the water like so much trash.

She remembered the torches against the night, the wild celebrating with the leftover edge of terror at what had happened. She remembered a leaner, younger, and much more feral Wulf standing there in the center of everything, the old king’s blood on his face and a very different look in his blue eyes than the one she’d known before.

To her he’d been
her
Wulf. Always so kind and patient with her.

How had she forgotten that?

But she knew how. One crippled, embittered man. And a lifetime of hate she’d nurtured like it was love.

“I can’t believe you listened to me,” she said, trying to pretend he hadn’t rocked her completely.

“You are my little sister, Eiryn,” Wulf told her. His voice was gruff. Resolute. “I thought you needed him. If I’d had any idea what he would do to you, I would have broken his neck and left him to rot on the green.” His gaze slammed into her, brilliant and blue against the gathering dark. “That night was the last time I can remember you calling me your blood brother without any edge to it. Until now.”

She had no idea how long they stood there like that. The brothers moved around them. She heard Tyr’s great bellow. She heard Jurin’s booming laughter. But she and this king who was also her older brother, her blood, stood there with too much history and the same shitty father between them.

Eiryn cleared her throat. “Well,” she said, because she didn’t know what to say. She only knew that things had shifted. That everything had shifted. “You’ll be happy to know that I fixed my shit. I think. I won’t . . .” And it amazed her what it cost her to meet his gaze then. “I won’t abandon my post again.”

He studied her for long moment, his gaze uncomfortably shrewd.

“No,” he murmured. “I don’t think you will.” Then he nodded toward the ladder behind them. “Go. Do what you need to do. Don’t ever grab my arm like that again unless you want it cut off—” but his mouth curved as he said that, and his ferocious eyes gleamed—“and under no circumstances are you to come back into my sight until you’ve eaten something and washed off the mildew smell. I don’t care if it takes days.”

She smiled at him. A real smile, bright and wide, and then wider still when he looked taken aback by it.

“You have my promise,” she assured him. “I won’t offend the royal nose.”

And this time when she climbed that obnoxious ladder and ran back to the Lodge, it really was easy. Her legs felt like separate weights, dragging her down, but her heart was lighter than it had been in years.

In her shower, she rinsed out her hair a final time and squeezed out the excess water. She stepped out of the shower and wrapped herself in a wide, soft towel, then combed her fingers through her wet hair and left it otherwise alone.

She padded out of her bathroom, letting the radiant heat from the floors soak into her bare feet. Her rooms were in the east wing of the Lodge, set up on a higher floor with views out over the village and the bay. At night sometimes, when the wind was good, she could hear the crash of the ocean while she slept. Her rooms were private. Very few people ever came in here, by invitation or at all. Her living room looked like any other brother’s. Weapons on the wall. Perhaps a nicer seating area than some, arranged to let her watch the screen Gunnar had set up or stare off through her windows at the sea. A wide, stone-topped table where she mended her things as needed and sometimes ate. All very standard. All very common to anyone in the brotherhood.

But her bedroom was entirely different.

Possibly it was completely feminine, she thought as she made her way down the hall toward it. Though she never would have used that word before the past month. Still, what else to call the high bed in the ancient four-poster style that she’d piled high with mattresses and pillows, furs and blankets? The thick, deep rugs in bright colors to take the sting of the dark winters away? It was the only place in her whole life that she’d ever let herself be soft, and only while she slept.

She used to think that with pride, as if it made her strong to hide parts of herself. Tonight, it only made her wonder how she’d gone so long and so far when she was so divided.

She was halfway across her bedroom floor, her gaze on one of the soft, bright rugs in question, when the fact she wasn’t alone in her bedroom penetrated.

Her head jerked up. She froze.

Riordan leaned there against the end of her high bed, one hand looped around the nearest bedpost. His dark eyes were glittering fiercely. He looked pissed, in fact, something she ignored as she looked down to his legs. He was wearing very low, cut off exercise trousers, the bottom edge of a white bandage visible beneath one ragged hem. And that was all he was wearing.

So many things warred inside of her, then. What to say. How to say it. Where to start—and all of it was swept away by something much bigger and much more raw because he was
here.
He was
alive.

She’d ordered him to live and he had.

He straightened. Slowly. He pulled himself to his full height, reminding her that he was Riordan, one of the most powerful brothers in the clan. His beautiful body, smooth brown marble etched with the brands and tattoos that marked them as who they were, was a little battered. A cut here. That bandage. But he was here.

They were both here.

Eiryn finally admitted to herself that she hadn’t believed for one second that they would survive that crossing. Not at this time of year. Not in that boat.

“This is bullshit.”

She blinked at his gruff tone. “What?”

He was gripping the bedpost so hard she thought it might snap off. That hard-ass, serious look was stamped all over his face. Like they were facing off as usual and he was here to slap her down. Also as usual.

But nothing was
as usual.

“It was supposed to be a whole winter,” he said, like that was some kind of accusation. “I want my winter.”

“Riordan.” She found her hands on her hips and a scowl on her face. “You’re hurt. You should be resting. What are you raving about?”

He scowled right back at her. “I cut myself off from shit like this a long time ago. Deliberately. My whole life, I sacrificed everything for the clan. For the brotherhood. For the
glory
of dying the way I deserved to die for what I did to my family.”

She eyed him. “Did you make it snow that year?”

He actually growled at her. “You told me I used that to keep everything else at a distance, and you’re right. I always have. Except you.” He shook his head then. “Ten years ago you came out of nowhere and knocked me off balance. And I knew I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t deserve to be happy. But what the hell did scraping you off do but make it worse?”

“Is that what this is?” she asked, forcing her words out though her throat felt too tight. “Worse?”

“You’re under my skin,” he told her, his voice that dark sugar that rolled all over her. “You have been for years. I always know where you are. I always know what you’re doing. I find you first. It doesn’t matter how badly you want to kill me, or how much you blame me, or what you pretend when you look at me. I told you on the beach. It’s you and it’s always been you.”

“Why are you yelling at me?”

“Because you fucking know it!” he threw at her. “You knew I lied ten years ago and you knew exactly what I was saying on that beach today and what is it going to—”

“Hey. Dumbass.”

He stopped, looking even more furious than before. “What did you call me?”

“I called you a dumbass, because you are one.” She shook her head, raking her hair back with her hands because she’d never wanted to hit him more, and that was saying something. But for once in her life, hitting wasn’t the right answer. So she opened her mouth and she made herself say something far more demanding. And terrifying. “I love you.”

She thought that shimmered there between them, but maybe she was hyperventilating.

Riordan’s dark eyes bored straight through her. His gorgeous mouth was something like grim.

“Yeah, babe,” he said, his voice too dark. “I know. You have for a long, long time. Let’s call it ten years, for the sake of argument.”

She scowled at him again, even while her heart tripped in her chest and much lower, her pussy blazed with need.

“I’m glad you know so much, asshole. Here’s what I don’t know. How does this work? How can two brothers possibly . . .” She shook her head, because this was all a little dizzying and she didn’t know how to stop it. Or if she wanted to stop it. “You can’t claim me. Or if you do, I should claim you too. Because to be clear, I have a lot of thoughts about anyone touching you without permission—”