Edge of Control: (Viking Dystopian Romance) (27 page)

He grunted at that and lowered his hands. “If you say so.”

In a tone that basically called her a weak-ass punk.

“Oh, okay then,” she threw back at him, nothing if not easily goaded into a fight. She thought it was a character strength, not a flaw. “Let’s do it. I’m sure we’ll keep it civil for the first five minutes or so. But then—”

“Yeah, then.” He turned to the couch to grab his thermal and swiped it over his face like a towel. “
Then
is a bitch.”

He started to tug his shirt back on while he was still facing the couch, not her. And Eiryn couldn’t seem to keep herself from letting her gaze drop to that scar on his back that she’d more or less ignored, pretty much every day since she’d cut him, until that unguarded moment in the caravan. And the truth was, when he was wearing his usual weapon harness, with blades hanging everywhere, it was hard to notice. Some years she’d almost forgotten it was there.

But tonight, it was all she could see.

His back was a marvel, of course. This was Riordan. He was strong and wide and gloriously chiseled into sleek brown marble. The names of his lost family scrolled down the length of his spine and led straight to the jagged little scar she’d put there with her own hand, as if they were all part and parcel of the same thing.

Something was wrong with her. Because she knew that she should feel shame. Or barring that, given that he’d deserved it and she couldn’t quite bring herself to regret it, something a little more complicated than . . . pride.

And a bolt of hunger, pure and deep, that scorched through her so hot and wild she was sure it left marks.

Maybe it wasn’t an accident that she didn’t look away quickly enough, so Riordan caught her staring when he turned around again, tugging his thermal into place.

She dragged her gaze to his. And reminded herself he’d told her she didn’t have to hide. Not from him. No better time to test that theory.

“I don’t regret it,” she said, with her chin at a belligerent angle.

“I never asked you to.”

She shrugged. “I’m sure I should.”

He’d never worn that particular expression before in her presence, she was sure of it. Something harder and darker than
pained,
and it rolled through her like a shot of the hard stuff she drank only very sparingly and alone. A rich, peaty burn straight down the center of her.

“I told you I was auditioning you for a slot as a camp girl,” he said quietly. “That I was bored with amateur hour, tired of playing teacher, and was ready to get back to the real thing with women who knew what they were doing.”

He’d done it after he’d made her come apart beneath him once again. After he’d pumped himself into her and groaned like it was killing him, too. He’d slapped her on the ass and told her to get out, and he’d wrecked something inside her in that moment that if she was brutally honest with herself she knew she’d never quite gotten back. A certain innocence, maybe, funny as it was to imagine she’d ever had any. Or, more to the point, the ability to believe that someone—anyone—could actually care about
her
a little. Instead of about what she could do for them.

He’d hit her as a woman, not as another fighter. And she’d done nothing but fight back ever since.

Eiryn held back the roaring thing inside her that threatened to knock her over. With a whole lot more difficulty than she cared to admit. And she kept her damned voice even, no matter that it made her throat hurt and her mouth taste like copper.

“I remember, thank you.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and kept that gaze of his steady on hers. “I figure I earned a scar or two.”

Eiryn studied him for a moment. She hadn’t asked him why he’d said it. Why he’d turned cruel overnight. Why he’d decided that not only did he need to get rid of her, he needed to take every bit of that gut-wrenching, cringe-inducing vulnerability she’d shown him over the course of her first summer back in the raider city after years in isolation out in the provinces and use it against her. With devastating accuracy.

She hadn’t asked him then. She wouldn’t now.

Still. “It’s a lot funnier now, I have to admit. I’d be an epically shitty camp girl, I think we can all agree.”

Riordan didn’t smile the way he should have. “That’s not where your talents lie,” he agreed. “You’re a little too controlling to really get into the necessary camp girl mindset.”

She wasn’t losing her sense of humor, surely. Not over ancient history.

“Are you talking about anal?” she asked mildly, with maybe a little bit of edge beneath it. “It’s sticking your dick in a different hole, Riordan. It’s not a personality test.”

He let out a belt of laughter at that, and in so doing, broke the tight little knot of tension that had gripped them both. Or maybe that was just her and that
thing
deep in her belly that was going to be the death of her one of these days. She knew it.

“You’d be surprised,” Riordan muttered. Then he jutted his chin toward the door. “I’m going to hit the showers. How compliant are you feeling, babe? Ready to fuck on command as part of your fun vacation? I’m not wrong in thinking that’s the part you like best, am I?”

It took every bit of self-control Eiryn had to simply stand there, stone-faced. Until—a thousand years later, when her pulse was a problem in her veins and her gut was a knot and her muscles were tensed in anticipation of the coming battle—he dropped his hard, hot gaze and smirked.

“Don’t wait up,” he gritted out. “I might have to jack myself off a few times, thinking about the
personality tests
I could try on you. It’s going to take a while. And if you’re awake when I get back, who knows? Maybe I’ll consider it an invitation from my happily compliant wife after all.”

And then he stalked to the door, threw it open, and disappeared into the hallway, taking all the air in the room—and in her lungs—with him.

Eiryn told herself she was protecting herself as she stood there for entirely too long, gasping for breath in much the same way she had when she’d charged up the side of that ridge in Colorado. But eventually her heartbeat calmed. Her breathing slowed. And she proved herself a coward, as ever, when she hurriedly climbed up the ladder into the loft and crawled into the bed when there was a large part of her that wanted to take his challenge and throw it back in his face. Go join him in that shower. Wait right there in the center of the living area—naked, maybe, to really mess with him.

“Any excuse to touch him,” she muttered at herself, her voice sounding too loud in the empty room, bouncing back at her from the ceiling a mere foot or two above her head and reminding her a little too much of that younger version of herself, naked and destroyed in Riordan’s bedroom in the Lodge. “You’re pathetic.”

She didn’t hear him come in.

But when she woke up in the middle of the night, he was stretched out with her in that loft bed, his big, hard body wrapped around her. His rough thigh was thrust between her legs, his heavy arm kept her flush against him, and one arm was curled over her ribs, claiming her completely.

And Eiryn would have to live with the fact that she did nothing at all but lie there and enjoy it until she drifted back to sleep.

* * *

The following night there was no need for ass kicking of any kind when they attempted the servants’ entrance a few hours after dark. The grand pre-equinox party on the Cathedral grounds was in full swing, visible through the gates but deliberately kept separate from the mass of humanity on the streets.

If that didn’t showcase the church’s philosophy eloquently, Eiryn didn’t know what would.

Having gotten a little lost in all her unpleasant
feelings
last night, she was amped up and ready to fight her way into the Cathedral. All by herself, if necessary. She could express her thoughts about all those old memories and this far-too-intense new and intimate
thing
by cracking a few skulls, breaking some bones, and letting good, old-fashioned bloodlust sweep it all away.

It was more than a little bit of a letdown when she walked right up to the door. She’d been expecting Riordan to have to incapacitate the guard and then hopefully leave her to handle a few of his friends. But they were both waved right in while the idiot gazed broodingly out at the street at a pack of giggling compliant girls.

The door slammed behind them, delivering them into the Cathedral. Or rather, an empty hallway painted an unnecessarily bright shade of white that ran underneath the public areas of the huge church building.

Eiryn raised her brows. Riordan only shrugged.

There was no time to complain about how much of a buzzkill it was to expect a fight and get nothing but an empty hallway. And she didn’t really want to get any chattier with him anyway, since that led nowhere good. She started walking instead, keeping her boots light and soundless against the concrete floor, following the sound of the aristocratic crowd above them. The glimpse of the party she’d gotten through the slats in the gates had been eye-opening. Literally. There’d been a sea of remarkably silly hats, for one thing, each one more architecturally unsound and profoundly ridiculous than the next. And men and women alike had been dressed in astonishingly bright colors and impractical shapes, all silken and shimmery. Yet there’d been the slimy undertone of a threat Eiryn didn’t entirely understand, given every last one of them was soft, and worse, thought they were safe and protected.

She skirted a set of doors that led to the kitchens, judging by the vague smell of roasting meats. Then Riordan grabbed her arm and tugged her into an empty custodial sort of room, while what looked like a battalion of older nuns thundered past. When the coast was clear again, she eased back out and kept going, while Riordan took point at her back.

Slowly, carefully, they made their way up out of the bowels of the Cathedral. Maud had given them as much in the way of a building layout as she could, and once they made it to the ground floor—exploding with white and gold and stained glass that was probably very impressive by day—Eiryn took a moment in the shadows behind a pillar and tried to orient herself against the map Gunnar’s former nun had drawn for them in the sand.

Riordan took the lead. Instead of heading toward the very fancy celebration taking place out through the wide open doors on the landscaped, fountained lawn in the square, he worked his way farther into the Cathedral itself. He found a set of stairs that were clearly set aside for servants, far away from all the ostentatious luxury that bloomed everywhere else in all the overwhelmingly buttery interior lights. Eiryn eased the stairwell door shut behind her, keeping it quiet, and then ran up the stairs after him. They were both light on their feet, making no noise. One floor, then another.

Finally, Riordan stopped on a landing and opened the stairwell door there. Slowly, very slowly. He melted out into the hall, paused to listen for a moment, then motioned for Eiryn to join him with a jerk of his head. It was like stepping back into an old fairy tale of all those bygone eras. A carpeted hallway with marble and theatric sconces everywhere she looked.

“How is this holy?” she muttered, almost soundlessly, though she knew Riordan heard her by the way his back tensed slightly. “It’s so . . .
shiny.
”

He let out a judgmental sound. A breath. “Overcompensation.”

Of course, Eiryn reasoned as they continued down the hall, they were used to a king who fought with his men and let anyone who felt lucky come at him barehanded during festivals. He didn’t hide behind gates and high walls and guards. And Wulf remained undefeated in combat because he was that much of a badass, not because he sequestered himself on a throne somewhere and refused to let anyone test him.

She’d taken at least three more steps down the hall before she realized that she’d had a whole train of thought about her royal half-brother without a single shred of her usual fury and sense of betrayal.

That made her blink.

Ahead of her, Riordan tilted his head toward the sound of female voices that wafted toward them from somewhere farther along and out of sight.

“Pretty sure that’s the princess waiting room Maud told us about,” he said in an undertone.

“It should be,” she agreed, picturing that sandy map again.

If Maud’s directions—as a novice who wasn’t exactly given free rein to wander where she liked in the Cathedral—were correct in the first place. If Eiryn and Riordan remembered them right, weeks later. If everything was the same as it had been when Maud left here. If, if, if.

But then,
if
was what made even the best-planned raid or mission so entertaining, no matter what happened. There was no planning for the unexpected, there was only rolling with it. That was what adrenaline and skill were for.

Eiryn moved in front of Riordan again, feeling the way he slid into place at her back, seamless and easy. She headed toward the voices, making sure she made no noise at all as she moved down the hushed, thickly carpeted hallway. It was a strange out-of-body experience to be dressed like a compliant, yet move like a brother. She liked the way her hair flowed behind her. She wondered, briefly, when that had happened. She’d never have believed she could get used to her hair falling all over the place, braidless, but she liked it. It made her feel like she was a woman as well as a brother.

It wasn’t lost on her that she’d always believed she had to choose between the two.

She followed the sound of female voices around a corner, only nodding when Riordan indicated he’d hang behind a few paces to make sure no one was approaching from behind them. She paused outside an ornate entryway with odd symbols carved on the lintel above it, taking a moment to listen to the women inside speak. Princesses, if they were in the right place. If not, they could be nuns. More novices like Maud. Or whatever other classes of women the church locked away in here—which could be anything at all, she supposed. What the hell did she know about the church?

Eiryn went very still. She listened, hoping to pick up a few clues before she walked inside. But it might as well have been a different language.