Edge of Control: (Viking Dystopian Romance) (6 page)

He was an expert at that particular game.

But Lyla was soft and pliable in his hands, and he liked that Eiryn was tough and strong. Sleek and taut and muscled inside and out. She was the only woman he’d ever met who didn’t bend or yield. At all. Even now, in the midst of messing up her life in her own spectacular way, she walked in her usual lithe and dangerous rolling way as if she was daring the rest of the brotherhood to come at her or call her out. She seemed to float above the ground, her slender form packed hard with sculpted muscle. She was in her customary black, the tight tank top she wore into battle a sleek lick down her toned torso and the trousers she wore a smooth, perfect fit over her high ass, lean and strong thighs, and long, sweet legs in kickass boots. Riordan had tasted so many women they blended together into a hot, delicious blur of tight cunts and hard nipples, soft tits and generous thighs, and all of them were beautiful in their way. But Eiryn was different. She was the one taste he’d never gotten out of his mouth. She had those fascinating muscles in her bared arms and her thighs were like pure steel. He could kick her ass in a fist fight, he imagined, if he managed to land his punches or got her pinned down with his bulk, but she could best him with a blade—and that notion never failed to make his dick hard.

Eiryn was cut from the same metal he was, forged in fire and tested in battle. She was like his favorite kind of blade, as pretty as she was deadly, and he’d spent years trying to forget the moments he’d lost himself against that fine-honed edge.

But he was never going to touch her again.

He’d lived through his first mistake with the king’s baby sister. He didn’t imagine he’d be likely to survive it again. Wulf had been pretty clear about his feelings on that all those years ago, and Riordan had pledged to serve his king, not disobey him when it came to pussy. Even when it was Eiryn.

Put your cock near my little sister again and I’ll cut it off, brother,
Wulf had said in his lazy, blood-curdling way that summer, no sign of the friend from their nursery days in his murderous blue gaze. He’d even clapped Riordan on the shoulder as he’d said it, easy and friendly, right out on the green where the brothers had been sparring.
In the middle of the great hall at dinner. Then I’ll mount that shit on the wall.

Then he’d smiled, making the threat that much worse.

Riordan slammed himself into Lyla hard and deep, and this time when she came, she screamed.

Eiryn’s dark gaze shifted to his, right as she reached the fire. And for a moment they were caught like that. Taut and hot. He couldn’t sink himself into her like this, so deep and too good. He couldn’t hold that lithe and powerful body of hers against his and make her scream and thrash the way he had once. The way some part of him would always want to again.

But he knew, as her dark gaze clashed with his, that she felt it. The way she always did on nights like this, when they were caught together and kept apart and there was too much sex in the air. He knew. That she still wanted him, too, no matter the lies she told or the hatred in her eyes. That she couldn’t help but imagine she was the one straddling him and filled with his cock, coming again and again and again.

He could see it in those dark eyes of hers only he knew were blue. He could feel it in that thing that dragged out like a chain between them, anchoring them and torturing them, spite and lust and greedy heat, the way it had always been.

They’d been playing this game a long time. Having sex
at
each other. It was a special kind of torture to be balls deep in a hot cunt and still twisted up over a woman who was leading a different man off to do him in private.

Or maybe it was their own screwed up kind of thing, he sometimes told himself. It was beautiful too, in its way. It was the closest he’d ever get to tasting her again, and he could see from that arrested, haunted look on her face—there an instant, then gone the next—that she felt as rough and as raw as he did.

He told himself that was something.

Either way, he waited until she tore her gaze from his with that same old blank look on her face as if she hadn’t seen him or cared either way if she had. Her public face, not that he believed it. Only then did he let himself come at last, pumping himself deep into Lyla and managing, somehow, not to say the wrong name.

It was always a kind of miracle.

Lyla slumped against him for a moment or two, her heart pounding so hard he could feel it against his chest. Then she stirred, smiling at him as she sat up and then neatly slid off of his cock.

Riordan murmured his thanks, running his fingers down her cheek as she knelt beside him. Then he stood, stripping off his trousers as he rose. He figured Wulf, like the rest of them, would want to channel the night’s disappointment and near-death experience into a restorative fuck or two before they regrouped to talk about what the hell they were going to do now. That meant he had time to clear his damned head.

Another brother was stepping up to Lyla as he started walking, offering her a hard dick for her bright smile. Riordan headed down to the water, feeling the sea clutch at him as he made it to the hard sand at the waterline. It took him a minute to recognize that the figure he saw out in the swell was Tyr, holding his woman in his arms. Tyr sounded as if he was being a hard-ass, but he couldn’t have been, because Helena was laughing at him.
At him.
As if the war chief was just another man.

“You don’t actually
have to
throw me into the ocean every time,” Helena was saying, her voice perfectly clear for a moment when the breeze changed. “You want to.”

“Same difference, sweetheart,” Tyr replied.

In a voice that sounded nothing like the war chief at all.

Riordan waded out, let a wave break over him, and then dove forward through the next one. It was dark and the weird-ass moon was bright, and he cut through the cold, crisp water easily, concentrating on the reach of his arms and the soft rush of the water over his naked body.

He didn’t want to think. Whether or not the war chief got soft for his mate wasn’t Riordan’s concern and there was certainly no reason it should
clutch
at him, as if there was a message there he should be heeding. Warriors weren’t soft, no matter what things they murmured in the dark when there was pussy involved.

And he was even less soft than that, because he didn’t deserve anything else. He hadn’t been raised in any kind of hardship like Gunnar and Wulf had been under Amos’s iron fist. His parents had been good, solid people and a credit to the clan. That was what made what he’d done to them so hideous. They’d never beaten him or tossed him out into the cold winter to fend for himself. They might not have been the most demonstrative people in the world, but besides the camp girls, who were exactly that by choice and profession, who in the raider clan—or any other clan on what was left of the Earth’s surface, come to that—was? It wasn’t smart to be soft in a world that worked so hard to kill you. Still, Riordan had been in no doubt that they’d loved him in their way, his stoic parents. He’d been their oldest son and their hope for the future.

That, too, made it worse.

He swam out to ships, circled each one of them, then headed back to shore with the same long, hard strokes. It felt good to move through the water, quick and smooth. He liked the silk of the sea against his bare skin. And out here, finally, he could lose himself the way he wanted to do.

No Eiryn. No dark midnight eyes across a fire and the straining body of another fuck. No regret, no ghosts.

He needed to let this shit go before it ate him alive. He needed to stop telling himself that and actually do it.

You need to do
something,
he growled at himself.
Anything.

Riordan had made it back to the beach and was toweling himself off in front of his rock when Wulf walked into the circle of firelight again, wearing nothing but a length of wool wrapped around his hips. He patted the camp girl with him on her naked, jiggling ass, and she melted away from him. Then he nodded at Gunnar’s nun near the fire, where she and a couple of camp girls were dividing up the cooked rabbits into enough portions to go around.

“Eat,” Wulf said, his voice pitched to carry. “And then tell me what the fuck we’re going to do now.”

Riordan took his meat when it came around, settling back to eat it with the nuts and jerky he always carried with him. The debate was already raging, and he listened. He calculated. He tried to hear the agenda behind the proposition instead of just the words, if there was one. He snuck a glance over at Wulf, who had thrown on a pair of trousers and was lounging there in the grass as if he might drift off to sleep at any moment. Eiryn sat next to him, slightly elevated on a tree stump with her long, black-slicked legs thrust out before her. She looked the way she always did—tense and furious. And infinitely dangerous. He could feel it in his gut like lust.

“We can’t storm the western highlands,” Marcus was saying. “For one thing, they have armies.”

“Do we even know where the other temple is?” Ellis asked. “Its exact location?”

“We know where it is,” Gunnar replied shortly. He’d reclaimed his woman and had her kneeling between his outstretched legs as he fed her from his hand, something Riordan had noticed the brother liked to do. A lot. The man did like his toys. Maud, for her part, looked as dreamy and far away as ever, but she took the morsels he offered and murmured something Riordan couldn’t quite hear after each bite. He suspected he knew what it was—and hey, whatever worked for them. “The question isn’t where in the valley it is. The question is, what else is in the valley now? The map is old.”

“And the church is all up in it,” Tyr said after a moment. “I want to know why.”

“Why is the church up in anything?” Jurin boomed. “Because that’s what they do, the spineless fucks.”

It went around and around. They couldn’t blindly send a raiding party to the only other temple that was both above water and combined the things Helena’s family had said were needed to access the Internet, a power station plus a server farm. Like the temple they’d lost tonight.

“My parents claim they saw it, but not up close,” she said at one point. She drew out the tablet she carried everywhere. “They made notes. They saw it from a high hill to the south and determined it would be too difficult to access. That’s why they were trying to get to the Catskills.”

“Tell me about the bishop,” Wulf said when the discussion hit a lull.

Gunnar looked as if he would take that on, but it was Maud who spoke, after glancing at her mate. Riordan sometimes thought she asked Gunnar for his permission, not that it would make sense if she did. Maud was neither as spacey nor as soft as she acted. He knew that firsthand.

“Bishop Seph is the acting head of the church,” she said in her musical, dreamy way, elegant and quiet enough to make Riordan feel every inch the barbarian he was. “The Grand High Priest disappeared into the mountains years ago and no one’s seen him since. Bishop Seph makes a pilgrimage to see him once a year with a great caravan of the faithful, but only he ever walks over the sacred stones and actually enters the refuge.”

“So the motherfucker could have died years ago,” Jurin belted out.

Maud inclined her head. “Some whisper that he did. And I can’t be the only one who wondered if perhaps Bishop Seph helped him along, but it would be suicide to say such a thing out loud.” She looked as if she could sit in that position of hers, on her knees with her hands folded neatly in her lap and her head both high and gently angled, forever. Riordan figured she already had, after all her years in the convent. “For all intents and purposes, Bishop Seph
is
the Grand High Priest.”

“I’m betting we can’t roll up on the head of the church and ask him a few questions without some blowback,” Tyr said. “Like why he has such a hard on for mercenaries or why he blew up his own temple.”

“One does not
roll up
to Bishop Seph,” Maud said, and Riordan was sure he heard laughter there beneath the quietly disapproving tone she used. “One awaits his condescension and notice, and abases oneself accordingly before his glory.”

There was a small silence after that. Gunnar’s mouth kicked up in one corner.

“Translation,” he murmured. “The douchebag is a smug prick.”

Wulf popped a bit of meat into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. All the brothers quieted down as he did, waiting for him to speak.

“I need someone to track down this bishop and abase themselves,” the king said after a moment. “Or whatever else is needed to get the answers I want. And I need to know where that last temple is, exactly, and why Helena’s parents didn’t want to approach it. And you’re all right. I can’t send a raiding party unless I want a war. I don’t.” His pale blue eyes gleamed bright and hard in the firelight. “Yet.”

And Riordan knew how this was going to go before his king even slid a look his way. He was the clan’s best tracker. And he was unmated. Unattached. Nothing to hold him back from a possible suicide mission like the one Wulf had just described. He knew it in his bones as if it had been stamped there with a red-hot brand.

This was his destiny. He’d made himself into this finely honed blade of war and given it over in service to his king. There was no call not to swing it when asked.

“How do I infiltrate a church without raising an alarm?” he asked, and he noticed no one else around the fire seemed particularly surprised that he was volunteering.

Wulf only smiled.

Across the fire, Maud frowned. It occurred to Riordan that he didn’t think he’d ever seen her do that before.

“Uh,
you
can’t,” Helena said, from her seat on the grass next to Tyr. She sat forward. “You certainly can’t walk in as a raider. They’ll know exactly what you are at a glance.”

“It would be better if you could . . .
blend,”
Maud agreed, shooting a look at Helena, then back at Riordan.

The two mainland women frowned at Riordan as if he was an unpleasant specimen that had washed up before them and needed a great deal of work—not a reaction he’d ever received before. Especially not from two women. It made him very nearly bristle.