The night wore on. The brothers broke off to amuse themselves balls deep in the camp girls, in different groups and configurations than the previous night because no one liked a repeat on a raid. Riordan got his head on straight at last and talked to Maud and Helena about the Great Lake Cathedral and the western kingdom where the last power station and server farm stood, and even better, how to travel between the two even after the September equinox. But he kept an eye on Eiryn while he did it.
He told himself it wasn’t deliberate. He happened to know exactly where she was at all times, that was all. You always do, a small voice inside him piped up.
Riordan told the small voice to go fuck itself.
Eiryn talked to Gunnar, then Wulf, and looked deeply unenthused with both of her half-brothers. She traded insults with booming Jurin, then escalated into some battle stories and lies with Bast and Ellis when they’d finished taking Lyla from both ends.
And when she slipped away from the fire as the night started to get really festive, he followed her.
Riordan didn’t know what he wanted. There was comfort pussy around the fire, and he was getting ready to go six months without. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing following Eiryn off into the dark instead of glutting himself.
You know exactly what you’re doing, that asshole voice contradicted him.
He followed her down the beach, away from the fire. He ignored that voice. He was aware with every step that he should turn back around, that nothing good could possibly come of . . . whatever the hell he was doing. He and Eiryn had a whole winter to get in each other’s faces. Why start now when he didn’t have to? She was clearly going off to be by herself, the way he knew she liked to do, especially when the bonfire scene got intense.
The last of the summer light was slowly easing from the sky as she stopped at the water’s edge and stared out at the sea. She looked . . . not fragile, exactly. She was too commanding a presence for that, even stripped of all the markers of the brotherhood. But she stood there with her feet in the wet sand, her arms folded while the breeze tangled in her hair, and he thought she was the loneliest creature he’d ever seen.
It made his chest ache.
But he didn’t turn back.
“I feel naked,” he said as he drew close.
“But aren’t, I fervently hope,” she retorted at once. She didn’t look at him, but then, Riordan knew she’d likely been aware of him since the moment he’d stepped away from the fire. “Let’s keep it that way as long as possible.” Eiryn laughed. “Unless you thought we should do our duty tonight? Maybe get a few pointers from the compliant girls?”
“Yeah, no thanks,” he said, but his voice was rough and his cock was insistent, and how sad was that? He’d take some weak-ass compliant sex just to get his hands on her?
You’d take anything to get your hands on her, said that same snide, asshole voice inside him that sounded a whole lot like Eiryn, now that he was considering it. You’d do anything. You don’t give a shit about this mission. You want her.
He was sick and tired of his own head, especially where Eiryn was concerned. So what if she’d sucker punched him today? So what if he hadn’t expected all those memories to come flooding back? She had. They had. Shit happened. When had he turned into such a little bitch?
The trouble was, tonight he also looked like one.
“It’s only hair,” he said, as much to himself as to her. “And new clothes. We’re playing the part, Eiryn. We’re not taking up compliance. We’re not becoming mainlanders. We’re brothers of the clan.”
He’d pulled on a long-sleeved thermal, covering up his tattoos, which he never liked to do. His tattoos shouted out who he was, where he belonged. He didn’t like muting them. Between that, the loss of his braids, and going without his harness, he was as good as naked. Worse than that, he might as well have been the farmer his parents had meant him to be all those years ago. He finally looked the part.
It made him hate himself all over again.
Eiryn smiled, but it was cold. Remote.
“They all looked at me as if I was any woman a brother might have brought to the campfire of an evening,” she said, and her voice was her blade now. Cool. Deadly. “Assessing me, the way they do every female they see. Just another piece of ass. They can’t even help it.”
Riordan grunted. “They’re dicks.”
“Next summer, when we’re done with this, that’s what they’ll see when they look at me,” Eiryn continued in that same light and lethal tone. “A piece of ass sitting around a mainland fire. Because it’s not off in the distant past anymore, those images of me looking like any other woman. It’s going to be a fresh, new memory.” She drew herself up taller. “They’ll jerk off to it all winter and I’ll have to start all over again, reminding them who the hell I am.”
“Eiryn.” Riordan ran a hand over his short hair, still not anything like used to it, especially now that he looked like his douchebag alter ego. That farmer he’d killed four people to avoid becoming. He shoved that out of his head and focused on the woman standing beside him, as rigid as a blade. “I don’t know how to break this to you, but these are our brothers. They’re a bunch of disgusting sex fiends and perverted deviants. What makes you think they haven’t been jerking off to you this whole time?”
Eiryn blinked. Then turned, very slowly, to look him square in the face, as if she was seeing him for the first time. Riordan supposed that without his braids and his blades strapped across his chest, she was.
“Thank you,” she said quietly, “for making this situation simultaneously worse and better.”
He inclined his head. “My pleasure.”
Eiryn studied him for a moment, her eyes dark and her mouth a solemn line.
“Why are you being nice to me?” she asked. “It’s alarming.”
Riordan forced himself to keep calm, something that was normally second nature to him. And more important, to keep his hands off of her, which shouldn’t have been hard either. Wulf might have accepted that things might happen between them over the course of the winter, but that was theoretical at best and, if it happened, would happen outside his sight. This beach, here and now and in full view of too many of their raider brothers, was nothing short of stupid.
If not straight up suicide, but tell that to his cock. The raging asshole didn’t seem to care.
“It’s you and me now,” he told her matter-of-factly. “Braidless and compliant. If we can’t get along, we might as well challenge the first king we see to a death match and see what happens. Because otherwise, let’s face it, we’re going to rip each other apart.”
Riordan knew Eiryn well enough after all these years that he could see the urge to argue with him as it moved across her face, maybe just for the sake of arguing with him. That would certainly be tradition. Instead, she swallowed it.
And it was a mark of how messed up this whole thing was that he couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or another loss.
“So this is an olive branch?” Eiryn asked quietly. “I didn’t think you had it in you. You’re more a man of unsolicited lectures and dark glares, in my experience. No olives. No branches. Ever.”
He felt his mouth curve, and only he had to know that there wasn’t anything fake about it this time. “Woman, I’m a fucking delight.”
She actually smiled at that and it made that iron band around his chest pull tight.
“Not to me,” she said softly. “To everyone else, sure. But never to me.”
There was only the smallest bit of blue left in the night sky, and it felt like another omen. He didn’t believe in omens. But still, Riordan gave in to an urge he didn’t pretend to understand and reached over to her, taking a strand of her loose, silky hair and wrapping it around his fingers.
Once. Then again.
He shouldn’t have done it. He shouldn’t have touched her, even such a little, throwaway touch like this. It slammed him straight back into the past and that summer, when she’d b
een entirely too much like this, all the time. Tough and vulnerable, though she’d have died before she admitted the latter. Trained to fight, but soft and sweet in his arms.
His downfall, in other words. His irresistible destruction in one slim, lean female form. Riordan knew why he’d made the choices he’d made back then. He’d make them again.
But here in the dark, with only the two of them and her hair falling all around her like all his favorite memories, he wished he’d had another option. Anything but what he’d done. Anything to keep her. He moved closer, tugging on the strand of her hair to make her tilt her chin up.
And then there was nothing in the whole world except that mouth of hers. A little bit sulky, even as it was still so solemn. That full lower lip that he wanted to get his teeth on. The promise of her heat, her taste.
Ten years later and he hadn’t forgotten her taste. He hadn’t forgotten a thing.
Riordan moved closer, so he was almost touching her. Almost. He could feel her breath and liked the fact it sounded rougher than a moment before. He could feel the faintest suggestion of her shirt against his and knew without looking that her nipples would be hard and ready, begging for his mouth.
She smiled, a wicked curve of her lips that he felt like a kick to the gut. His cock was so hard it bordered on painful. And he didn’t give a shit if Wulf was standing two feet away with a blade in his hand and sheer mayhem in his eyes. He wanted her.
He’d always wanted her.
“I made my thigh harness into a hip band,” Eiryn told him, soft and silky. He barely understood the words, too busy imagining that mouth of hers wrapped around his cock and taking him deep. “It fits right under these jeans.”
Riordan slid his hand up into the heavy warmth of her hair, cradling her head in his palm. This close, he could see the faint dusting of freckles that told him she’d been out in the sun too long. This close, he caught her scent, a delicate musk that made his mouth water. He remembered that scent. He remembered spending an afternoon getting drunk on it, with his face buried deep in her sweet, hot pussy while she shook and cried out and came all over him. Over and over again.
He couldn’t think of a single reason not to throw her down on the ground and get her good and hot and slippery all over again.
But she was still gazing up at him as if she wanted to tell him something. Riordan made himself focus. It usually wasn’t this difficult. But he usually wasn’t this hard.
“If you put your mouth on me, I’ll stab you in the stomach and watch you bleed,” Eiryn said sweetly. She proved her point with the dagger in question, holding it gently, very gently, against the flat expanse of his belly and running the sharp tip of it back and forth, back and forth, like a steel kiss. Then she smiled, and his cock got even harder. “Babe.”
7
Five days of hard sailing later, the raiders dropped them off some ways south of the port of Louisville on the eastern coast of the Mississippi Sea. Riordan had spent those five days trying to pull every last piece of information he could from Helena, from Maud. From all his brothers. From the camp girls, not just Lyla, who had spent time on the mainland. Anything to give him an advantage in the coming months.
And anything to keep him away from Eiryn for a last little breather. To give him one last opportunity to get his head clear and even start to imagine that he could keep it that way.
If that was even possible with the memory of her dagger pressed against his belly and his sad realization that he wouldn’t have minded it too much if she really had cut him, as long as he could have gotten a taste of that pussy of hers afterward.
Or during. Or whenever.
His greedy asshole of a cock wasn’t picky. And it wasn’t like she hadn’t cut him before.
They anchored in a stretch of coast too open and barren for anyone to be lurking or watching. There were final instructions about where and when they would all meet again the following March, barring the usual spring squalls and various other fits the bitch of a sea liked to throw that time of year. There was the usual clapping of shoulders, a smattering of appropriately vile insults, and the typical gruffness because these were the clan’s most elite warriors, not a pack of weepy little bitches.
And then Riordan and Eiryn jumped into the shallow water with their packs on their heads and waded into shore. The raiders wasted no time casting off and heading straight into the early morning mist, getting the hell out of sight of any potential Louisville perimeter guards.
And that was that.
Riordan and Eiryn were on their own until spring.
“Let’s get moving,” Eiryn bit out the moment the sleek ships tacked back toward Atlanta. She’d wriggled her way into her jeans once she’d hit dry land, then had sat down to brush sand off her feet and lace up her boots. Now she swung her heavy pack over her shoulders and tightened the straps.
Then glared at him as if he was dragging ass.
“I don’t think that’s a particularly compliant expression, babe,” he told her, taking his own damn time getting his boots on. And maybe taking a little longer than that, if he was honest, just to annoy her. “You want to give us away that fast?”
“Compliant women are still women,” Eiryn retorted, her dark eyes glittering in the gray morning light. “Meaning they certainly know an irritating man when they see him.”
Riordan laughed at that, then slowed down even more, until Eiryn muttered something dark beneath her breath. She walked away from him—instead of throwing something at him, which he figured was her first impulse—and headed up the slope of beach. Then she stood and aimed her scowl toward the port city waiting for them just out of sight in the north, spread out over the hills above the muddy Louisville Bay.
Riordan finished messing around with his boots and then tried to take stock of their surroundings, not the woman in front of him. But he couldn’t seem to focus on the knobby green hills around them, not when Eiryn was standing right there, hiding herself in plain sight. He’d come to terms with the fact that he was just going to find it weird—and by weird, he was all too aware he meant fascinating—to see her dressed like a regular woman not in the brotherhood. Five days at sea hadn’t lessened the impact of that hit at all. But accepting that he apparently wasn’t going to get used to the new, compliant version of Eiryn anytime soon meant . . . he still wasn’t used to it at all.
Her glossy dark hair was thrown over one shoulder in a thick braid today and she’d actually wrapped a piece of bright pink fabric around her hairline. Pink. Eiryn in pink. It was so astonishingly feminine and shocking that Riordan had to order himself not to go over there and get his hands on it. Or anywhere else he could touch her. Just to make a firm and comprehensive study of all the places she might be pink.
Calm yourself, you horny motherfucker, he ordered himself darkly.
But instead, he found himself studying her shoulders beneath her heavy pack, which looked so narrow and delicate from a distance. She’d bound her breasts again, but not as tightly as before, something he could tell because he might have spent a little too much time analyzing the state of Eiryn’s breasts over the years. Not creepy at all. And she’d even borrowed a length or two of beaded leather from the camp girls and wrapped them around her wrists and forearms, decorating them in the way a brother never would.
Riordan found he kind of liked the fact that anyone looking at her would see nothing but a compliant woman. Pretty and lean, and she was wearing a different shirt today that fluttered around her upper arms and concealed the power in her toned biceps. The female brothers marked their kills in vine-like tattoos the same way the male brothers did, but they didn’t do it on their arms. They inked them to wrap around their torsos instead, which meant Eiryn’s were hidden beneath her clothes today, like a wicked blade resting innocuously in its sheath. She looked small and slender, and he could see she was still working on her stance, trying to simply stand the way regular people did rather than keeping herself ready to fight at any moment.
Bu
t he doubted anyone would see all the clues in her body that he did, because he was trained to look and because he was an expert on Eiryn’s body, particularly. He was the only one around who knew that she was a loaded weapon. He was the only one who could see the whole of her, no matter her compliant disguise.
It was a measure of how screwed he was, maybe, that he felt that like her mouth closing over his cock, sweet heat and delirious suction.
He ignored that, too. Or more precisely, his cock was out of control and little too focused on Eiryn and he pretended he didn’t notice.
Riordan climbed up the steep slope of the beach and stood next to her at the top. There was nothing around but the knobby hills that Helena and her maps had told them led to the Louisville port on the cliffs, perched above the ancient, long-drowned city that was sometimes visible on the floodplain beneath the muddy waters where the Ohio River met the encroaching Mississippi Sea. Riordan had spilled a lot of blood in Kentucky, far to the east where the Appalachian Mountains flirted with the Atlantic Coast. He’d never been on Kentucky’s western coast before. So far his impression was that it was hot, hazy, and so damned humid it was like standing in an armpit.
“Ready, princess?” Eiryn asked without looking at him. “Or do you want to play with your outfit a little longer? Maybe fix your hair? Make sure you look pretty?”
“By all means, asshole.” But he was grinning. “Lead the way. Let’s haul ass to this shithole port so we can start playing compliant douchebags as soon as possible.”
Eiryn jabbed her middle finger in the air, still without so much as a glance at him, and kept it like that as she stalked off into the woods with her back straight and her head high. He had to admire her commitment.