Edge of Control: (Viking Dystopian Romance) (5 page)

It amazed Riordan, having been lucky enough to be born into a raider clan and raised without all those mainland hang ups, was how many mainlanders bought into it.

But then there were girls like Lyla, who had been thrown out of her settlement for experimenting with noncompliant forms of sex, like sucking cock. She’d walked straight into a raiding party two summers ago and she’d never looked back. Now she was doing what she liked, taking her time with Bast as if she could keep it up all night. If Riordan’s memory served, she could. She moved her head up and down and didn’t use her hands at all, creating a slick, hot rhythm that Riordan could feel in his own dick.

Bast came with a sudden grunt, thrusting wildly into Lyla’s mouth, and she took it all, then licked him a few times for good measure. When she sat up a few moments later and knelt there before him, the brother smiled, reaching over to smooth a hand over her thick, brown hair as it poured down around her.

Riordan was already hard and ready when she turned her smile on him.

“Are you hurt?” she asked in her soft, slightly roughened voice.

“It’s not my blood, sweetheart,” Riordan assured her as she moved closer to him, pulling a bucket of clean water with her.

“I’ll get it off you anyway,” she murmured. “Just to be sure.”

Lyla knelt beside him, running a cool cloth over his face and his chest while he sat there and told himself to decompress already. Before he became the next thing that exploded here tonight. He looked past Lyla as she worked him over with her soft hands, past her round, naked tits high and sweet and that invitingly round ass of hers. Over by the fire, Gunnar was sitting near his woman as she knelt before him and tended to the food, what looked like amusement all over his usually grim face. Gunnar hadn’t wanted to bring his nun on this mission and had argued against it when Wulf had requested Maud accompany them. He’d finally relented, even though he’d had to basically knock her out and keep her drugged to get her across the Atlantic. Riordan thought it was hilarious that the only man he knew who could operate a one-man ship across the bitch of a spring sea had found himself a mate who was too seasick to stay conscious on a mild, late August crossing. Farther back from the fire, Tyr was lounging, back against the trunk of an oak tree, his dark-haired mate in his lap, and if the way she was rubbing herself against him was any indication the war chief was deep inside of her. Everything was as it should have been in the wake of a mission that hadn’t gone well, but could have been a whole lot worse.

Riordan should have been relaxing, or trying. He saw his brother Marcus stride up from the water fully naked, his dirty-blond hair slicked back and his tanned white skin gleaming wet in the firelight, and then watched him tug pretty Janhavi up and onto her feet with an easy grip on her arm. Her dark-brown face was all dimples and laughter as she looked up at him, her black hair in soft little bunches, and it looked almost like some kind of dance when Marcus kept right on lifting her up against him. She wrapped her legs around his waist and held herself high as he reached between them, then she slid her way down on his cock. Marcus widened his stance, sliding his hands into her tiny shorts and grabbing hold of her ass cheeks. Then Janhavi was the one to move, lifting and lowering herself against him to ride his cock where he stood, her thighs clamped tight around Marcus’s waist.

These were the sights and sounds of the usual post-battle haze. Riordan generally liked to lose himself in nights like this. The camp girls were hot and wet and eager, and they could go as many rounds as he needed to get the aggression out of him. Even mated females like Gunnar’s Maud and Tyr’s Helena were a pleasure to watch as they took their men down from battle ready to what passed for peaceful in the brotherhood. Raiders liked to make sex a celebration. There was no shame in a long, hot screw in the middle of a gathering. Life was short and winters were long. Joy was fleeting and death was certain and, more to the point, probably not far off.

Raiders took their pleasures where they found them.

But Riordan couldn’t seem to get there the way he normally did. That creepy-ass moon was too big in the sky above him and still that ominous color, there was no sign of Eiryn or Wulf, and even sweet Lyla with her soothing hands and cool water against his skin couldn’t calm him down.

Riordan didn’t believe in omens. He was a raider brother, and no omen or prophecy had helped him get where he was. He’d been born to a farmer and his long-term mate out in the fertile fields of the clan’s farthest territories, and he’d been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps the way males in his bloodline had done since the first of them walked away from what was left of civilization and threw in with the raiders after the Storms ended. But Riordan had wanted more than greedy fields and brutally short seasons, fickle crops and wandering calves. The summer he’d turned ten, he’d run away from his parents during the September equinox festival in the raider city where the whole clan gathered to stock up on winter supplies and gulp down the last little bit of summer and celebration before the winter rains came. Riordan had holed up in the dirt beneath one of the shops in the village with a pouch of dried meat and a skin of water, and he’d stayed hidden until the rains hit in earnest ten days later. There was no more possibility of crossing the mountains that cut the city off from the rest of clan territory at that point, which meant there was no possibility of anyone taking him back home to the farm.

It had been the best winter of his life.

He’d spent the dark, stormy months in the clan nursery just down the hillside from the fabled Lodge where King Donovan and the mighty warrior brothers lived. The nursery was where all the clan’s children whose parents were either dead or otherwise occupied with clan business were raised, and to a farm boy from way the hell out in the lonely countryside with no neighbors within three days’ walk, it was paradise. Riordan had learned how to fight. Not the way his father and uncles fought, out of necessity so far out in the middle of nowhere, more brute strength than skill. He’d learned real bladecraft at last. He’d picked up a good blade that winter, curved because it was different from everybody else’s and he’d been arrogant enough at ten years old to like that distinction. Riordan had never put it down again.

Not even when he’d learned, come the spring, that his family had died on one of those mountain passes. All of them. His strong, stern father and his quietly tough mother. His two younger brothers. They’d waited too long to head back to the farm, likely because they’d been searching for Riordan in the city while he’d deliberately stayed hidden away to avoid them, and they’d been caught in one of the early snowstorms in the higher elevations.

They never had a chance, boy,
gruff old Amos had told him matter-of-factly when he’d broken the news, not long after the first thaw.
Can’t outsmart snow.

No one had ever blamed Riordan directly. Or not to his face, anyway, and maybe that had made it worse. But then, no one needed to blame him outright. He took care of that himself.

He wore his guilt on his skin, where he’d inked the names of his dead down the length of his spine, to keep him centered and marked, forever. He paid his penance every day. He’d so badly wanted the blade over his own blood—so he gave himself over to the blade and to battle and to the kind of blood that sort of life promised and demanded in turn. He was a cursed man, having dishonored his own family with his own bone-deep selfishness, but he couldn’t change that. What he could do was make his guilt the white-hot fire that sharpened the edge of his blade and made him as fierce and as resolute a defender of his clan as he’d failed to be for his blood kin.

So that was what Riordan did. That was all he did, first with an unnerving, fiery intensity and then with a smile to mask it. He’d entered the brotherhood with the same single-minded devotion years later, and he’d pledged himself to Wulf, body and soul, after his friend from their nursery days had taken the throne. Four lives had been sacrificed to his ambition, and he’d never forgotten it. He’d never, ever wavered.

Except for that one summer. That one reckless, impossible summer he still couldn’t seem to get out of his head, when he’d risked everything he’d built as a living monument to those he’d lost. When for once in his life, the only time in his life, he’d ignored all the blood that stained his hands. When he’d let his cock do his thinking for him, the way he’d let his selfishness do the same when he’d been ten.

Just in case you wondered if you’ve changed,
he told himself sourly now.
You
haven’t. You never will, you twisted fuck.

No one had died that summer. But that didn’t mean any of it had ended well, and Riordan wasn’t the only one with the scars to prove it. Not all of them internal. It was one more strike against him, to his mind. One more indication that he was a twisted, terrible, cursed man who destroyed the things that mattered to him, one after the next.

Every last thing he’d ever cared about, he’d killed.

Lyla finished wiping him down and smiled at him, and Riordan didn’t want to think any longer. He didn’t want to spend any more time inside his own head. He had a hard cock and a waiting camp girl. Why make things any more complicated than that? He couldn’t change any of it. Not the past. Not the present.

Certainly not what was or wasn’t happening out in the woods right now.

He leaned back against the smooth rock behind him and pulled Lyla astride his lap, settling her against him with her back to his chest. She was a curvy, silky weight on his thighs, smelling faintly of campfire smoke and fragrant oils. She made a low, greedy sound and used those hips of hers to rub herself against his cock where it strained against his trousers. Then she let out a sigh when he reached down and slid his hand beneath the waistband of the stretchy shorts she wore to test her soft pussy. She was slippery and wet already, as expected, but Riordan was big. It required a little extra work to take him comfortably.

“I want you wetter,” he muttered, his mouth against her neck.

He felt her shudder as she obliged, right on cue, right into his palm. But that wasn’t enough. He stroked his way inside of her and she moaned, then pressed that round ass of hers harder against him. He pumped in and out of her hard, grazing her clit with each stroke while she rocked herself against him. She made another one of those noises of hers, then arched her back as she reached up to toy with her own tits, moving harder against him while she did. It was hot. She was hot. Riordan glanced up to see a couple of brothers standing nearby, watching Lyla do her thing with greedy, hungry looks on their faces.

When she was wet enough, Riordan withdrew his fingers. He patted Lyla on the butt and she leaned forward, giving him a killer view of the wet stain in the crotch of her shorts and the sweet, round globes of her plump ass. She even rubbed her heavy tits against his leg, a nice touch. He pulled his cock out of his trousers, pumped it once or twice, then wrapped an arm around her waist to haul her back against him.

Lyla reached back and pulled the crotch of her shorts to the side, sighing as Riordan fit his thick cockhead against the soft entrance to her cunt, then slid it into her, nice and easy. He always took the first thrust slow, no matter how wild he was. Even the camp girls who rode any number of cocks in a day sometimes needed an extra moment or two to accommodate him. Lyla was no different. She always thought she could take him. Like now, she always tried to make that initial entry faster and deeper, but when she winced slightly, he stopped. She braced herself against him and rocked those liquid hips of hers, raising herself high as if she was climbing off him, then lowering herself again, taking a little more of his cock each time.

She did that once. Twice. One more time. Then she took a breath and sank down, taking all of him at last.

“Good?” he asked in a low, strained voice, still holding himself back.

“Perfect,” she breathed, and he felt her pussy clench down on him.

Riordan wrapped his arms around her waist and hips to hold her where he wanted her, nice and still and open to him, and then he started to fuck her. Hard. To get the battle out. To get this mood of his out.

To cleanse his goddamned palate after that bullshit in the woods with Eiryn.

He fucked Lyla for a good long while.

He only changed his relentless, driving pace when Wulf appeared on the beach, striding out of the woods and into the firelight as if he were propelled by his own intense ruthlessness. Riordan saw his king and slowed his thrusts, but he didn’t stop. Lyla was moaning with her head thrown back on his shoulder and her sweet cunt soft and hot around him, but Riordan wasn’t sure he really felt her again until he saw Eiryn slide out of the darkness too, in her usual place behind the king.

It wasn’t relief. It wasn’t anything. He felt nothing.

Riordan told himself that again and again.

He picked up his pace. He moved Lyla against him, hammering her on his own cock over and over, but over her gleaming shoulder he studied Eiryn as she glided across the sand as if her feet didn’t quite touch the earth beneath her. His impossibly gorgeous ghost, always in black, always as lethal as she was beautiful, and always out of his reach.

She wasn’t dead. She didn’t appear to be bleeding and she wasn’t walking as if she’d been hurt. She wasn’t even sporting a black eye the way Gunnar had been when he’d finished his last tense “discussion” with Wulf during his renegade period a month ago.

Lyla came as he plowed into her, crying out into the night, and Riordan muttered something approving into her ear as she did. Then he kept going, pounding into her through her climax until she started to pant and moan again.

But it was Eiryn he was concentrating on. Eiryn who he couldn’t stop seeing, no matter if he tried not to look.

She was beautiful, of course, but that was the least interesting thing about her. Her hair was a glossy, very dark brown and her eyes looked black from a distance, but Riordan knew that they were really a very dark, midnight blue. She had the same impossible bone structure her royal brother did, high cheekbones and that deliciously arrogant tilt to her head, but Riordan had never wanted to taste every inch of his king’s face. Eiryn, on the other hand, he could make into a meal. He had. Sometimes he imagined her in the tiny little stretchy shorts and tit-cupping shirts the camp girls wore, exposing her ripped belly and maybe even dancing—but that was between him and his imaginative asshole of a cock. It let him pretend she was the one he was fucking as he drove into Lyla again and again.