Edge of Control: (Viking Dystopian Romance)

  Just as there was no escaping the man she had to sleep with or what she had to do every night when they crawled into their cramped bunk and closed the curtain, because if she could hear all of her bunkmates, they could certainly hear her.

  Sex was just sex. A different kind of training session, that was all, just as she’d told Riordan back in the Catskills. Eiryn had been telling herself that all her life, especially over the last decade. There was no reason to change her feelings on that now, just because it was significantly more intense sex. It was still only sex.

  And even if it wasn’t just sex, not for her, though she would die before she admitted it, she told herself that didn’t matter. It couldn’t. She’d thought being with Riordan would kill her ten years ago, but look at that. She’d lived. She’d survived him. And then she’d survived losing him.

  This compliant nonsense, she was grimly determined, would be fine too.

  Her problem was the intimacy of it all.

  Intimacy, it turned out, pretty much just sucked.

  Sex she could handle. Yes, Riordan took great pleasure in making her come, over and over, so she was constantly in danger of crying out and alerting the whole caravan to the fact that she wasn’t exactly compliant herself. And yes, he made her feel entirely too much and she hated it. That had been more than clear in Louisville and if anything, it got worse every time he touched her instead of better. She kept waiting for familiarity to breed a little helpful contempt, but so far, no luck.

  But when it was dark, when he couldn’t really see her face, when they were no more than two shapes in the night and she could pretend she was anywhere else and with anyone else too, well . . . that was one thing. That could be any night and any two people. It was never as dark as the warehouse in Louisville, but it was dark enough. It was easy enough to wake up every morning and assure herself that it had been nothing more than regular old comfort dick and comfort pussy, just the way raider brothers liked it.

  As long as they stayed in the dark, nothing but shadows she could pretend didn’t exist by day, it was fine. She saw no reason why she couldn’t get through the whole of the winter that way.

  Today they’d run over something a few hours into the day’s long drive and blew out a tire, somewhere in the Colorado Rockies on the long downswing toward Utah. Lang and Xela were out by the side of the road, muttering at each other as they patched the thing up—or possibly muttering at Jonathan, whose pompous offer of assistance had turned into a typically longwinded lecture. Everyone else announced they were taking a little walk, off the side of the battered old road and down toward the sparkling bright river that ran alongside it.

  Eiryn and Riordan exchanged a single swift glance as the group set off on their walk.

  “We’re going to climb that hill,” Riordan said, very casually, nodding in the opposite direction, toward the ridge that towered above them. “Maybe there are settlements somewhere nearby.”

  “Colorado mountain folk are clannish and secretive,” Lang said in his booming voice, straightening to wipe the sweat off his gleaming pale forehead with the hairy back of one hand. “They’ve been barricaded up these hills since the Storms and they don’t care for outsiders.”

  “Then all the better we know exactly where they are and avoid them,” Xela snapped at him, slapping a wrench into his hand from where she squatted on the ground, looking like a great, round boulder draped in one of the flowing black tunics she preferred.

  Riordan inclined his head as if he’d been asking permission instead of announcing his plans. Eiryn could almost feel that telltale muscle in his jaw clench inside her own body as he somehow kept from making that distinction perfectly clear to their caravan leaders. The poor souls were still laboring under the delusion that a man with all of Riordan’s highly developed and deeply muscled brawn was a run-of-the-mill farmer.

  He didn’t wait for more commentary. He headed across the empty road and into the trees. Eiryn had gotten better at scurrying over the past week, and that was what she did as she followed him, using small steps and enough chaotic speed to give the impression that she was smaller, more bumbling, and far less fit than she was.

  But once they were in the trees, out of sight of the others, they broke from their cover stories and ran.

  Hard. Like the raiders they were, not like the characters they’d been playing for the past two weeks. They ran like their lives depended on it. Directly up the side of the hill, delighting in the fact the steep grade made it a challenge.

  It felt like flying.

  Eiryn didn’t care that she could feel her breasts shift beneath her binding. They weren’t bouncing. They didn’t quite hurt and besides, she was moving again. At last. She was using her body the way it was meant to be used. She stretched her legs and she pumped her arms, running straight up the side of the mountain, chasing Riordan through the trees until she passed him and then pushing herself harder still when he passed her in turn.

  It had been so long. Cramped up in tiny quarters and forever being watched. But here, out in the woods with no one to see that she wasn’t who she said she was, she ran.

  She ran until she was panting with the effort. Then she kept going, running until she thought her lungs would burst and her legs would revolt. Then she dropped her head, dug deep, and ran even faster.

  And felt like herself again, for the first time since she’d taken off her tight binding on that beach in the Catskills.

  When they made it to the top of the ridge, they found that it was really just a little bump of a thing next to the far bigger peaks spread out all around them. They stopped there, both leaning over with their hands on their knees. Both sucking wind like prospective brothers on a training run.

  At least Riordan sounded a little bit out of shape, too. Eiryn might have tossed herself off the side of this ridge if it had been only her feeling slow and sluggish after too much constrained traveling these last weeks.

  And she saw no reason not to indulge her competitive spirit and bloodthirstiness out here in the middle of nowhere with no one around to see. Eiryn spied a decent branch on the ground and grabbed it up, pulling off a few extraneous twigs. She tossed it in the air, testing its weight, then passed it from hand to hand. Then she shifted her gaze to Riordan and waited.

  His smile wasn’t long in coming. It was a hard and very male curve of that mouth of his, deadly promise and a hint of sheer, bloody mayhem. Eiryn’s favorite. He walked around the little clearing until he found his own branch, going through the same motions she had. But she could tell he was ready when he switched his grip and settled into a fighting stance.

  Bring it on.

  Eiryn didn’t wait for the banter. The bullshit. Talk before the first strike was for little bitches, and she was so tired of playing one she could scream.

  She attacked. He blocked.

  Their branches slammed together with a satisfying crack that she could feel all the way up her arms, and then it was on.

  Eiryn gave no quarter. Riordan didn’t yield at all. They fought as if the branches were blades, and would have cut each other up if they had been. Eiryn fought her way back from the enforced sluggishness of the past few weeks. She fought until she felt something like her nimble self again. She flowed back into the footwork she’d dedicated her life to perfecting and the bladecraft she’d bled for and sacrificed for in every way that counted.

  And it didn’t let her down.

  It was Riordan’s branch that cracked under one of Eiryn’s particularly hard downstrokes, and he scowled as he tossed the useless piece aside.

  “Oh dear,” Eiryn taunted him, because gloating was entirely different from banter, especially when she’d struck a decent blow. “Things do not look good for the clan’s former star.”

  “‘Former star,’ my ass,” Riordan growled at her, and then he rushed her. He hit her with a merciless shoulder to the midsection and took her down to the ground.

  And then, finally, they fought.

  It was vicious
and brutal and beautiful.

  It was what she couldn’t do in all these semi-public beds they’d been in. It was what she hadn’t done ten years ago, because she’d been a little in awe of the brother who’d shared her bed that summer when he could have been knee deep in camp girls instead. It was a long ass time in coming, and Eiryn didn’t hold back.

  And gloriously, giving her the true respect of another raider brother instead of the bullshit faked solicitousness of the compliant douche he’d been playing for what seemed like forever, neither did he.

  She didn’t bother trying to land a good hit while he was on top of her. Too risky to stay where he could pin her. She ducked her head and power-rolled out of his tackle, then flipped back up to her feet.

  Riordan came after her. She landed a hard palm strike just to the left of his jugular and he grunted, falling back a step. But before she could capitalize on that, he swiped her down again with a hook of his leg. Eiryn knew she couldn’t let him keep her down on the ground—he was too big for that, too powerful. If he got her in a good hold, she was done, by simple virtue of his brute strength. What she had on her side was speed and agility and she used both to break his attempt at a hold.

  She rolled hard and kicked out, getting a satisfactory grunt when she hit him in the ribs. They grappled, there on the ground with no one to witness the fight but the wind through the evergreens, crisp and cool. He blocked jabs to his face, his throat. She ducked away from a serious elbow strike that would have knocked her out, rolling up to her feet again, and when he came after her she responded with a knee to his junk.

  “You’ll regret that more than me, babe,” Riordan growled, dodging it. Barely. He bared his teeth when her knee connected hard with his big thigh instead, then slapped it down off of him with a hard palm.

  Which stung like a bitch.

  He aimed a heavy punch directly at her face in retaliation, but she knew his moves. She was expecting it.

  “Way to telegraph, dumbass,” she threw back at him as she snapped her head out of the way.

  Which she regretted instantly when he caught her with a direct uppercut to the abdomen, because he knew her moves too. She lost her breath for a moment, but took the hit. She let it throw her back so she could fall into a long roll, then stand up again with a little more space between her body and his massive fists. A little breathing room.

  They faced each other across the small clearing, with the Rocky Mountains spread out all around them and marching off toward the horizon in all directions. It was cooler up here, and brighter. So much brighter than down on the road.

  And this, Eiryn understood with a flash of insight she didn’t want, was far more intimate than sex in the dark. There was no pretending here. There was no hiding or closing her eyes. They knew each other better here than they ever had in bed, no matter what had happened during that long ago summer. Or in the past week.

  It was as much a handicap as it was an advantage.

  Riordan’s face was perfectly serious. Even severe, as if he was having the same unexpected intimacy overload she was. As if he was as aware as she was that this was whole lot more than a friendly scuffle—or whatever passed for friendly between the two of them. Something inside her flipped over at that thought, but she refused to examine it. Not now.

  Not when he was sizing her up for weaknesses when he already knew most of them by heart.

  “You think you can take me?” It was more of a taunt than a question, even though Riordan said it in that gruff, low way that told her he was in full battle mode. “Without your blade?”

  Her curse was that she found his focused aggression hot as hell. She’d always claimed she wanted him to see her as a warrior. The sad truth was that Riordan was the only warrior who always, always made her feel like a woman.

  It made her want nothing more than to make him bleed for that insult.

  “I think that if you’ve started running your mouth, you’re more worried about it than I am.” She kept her hands in their fighting position near her face and beckoned him closer with a lift of her chin. “You know you want a piece of me. Come get it.”

  He laughed, but his dark eyes were hard. “Baby, I get a piece of you every night.”

  Eiryn smirked while she considered all the different ways she could immobilize him. Hurt him. Leave marks, like the bruises she could already feel rising on her skin. Or better yet, scars that wouldn’t heal.

  “Are you a weak-ass compliant douche?” she asked, almost idly. “My mistake. I thought I was talking to a member of the brotherhood.”

  Riordan only circled her, his dark eyes on hers. “There are a lot of things I don’t get, now that we’re talking. Just you and me. Like buddies.”

  “And you really think the middle of a fistfight is the time to play a few rounds of get to know you?” She shook her head. “That’s just weak. If you need to surrender like a little bitch, man up and admit it.”

  “Tell me this,” he replied, as if he hadn’t heard her. Though of course he had. “How the hell did you not realize that Wulf gave that order?”

  It was a sucker punch. It took her breath the way his strike to her abdomen had. And worse. She managed to keep herself from physically reeling, but she saw the way Riordan’s mouth curved. She saw that gleam in his eyes. He knew he’d scored a direct hit.

  “Of course Tyr was doing what Wulf wanted,” Riordan continued, in case that first punch wasn’t enough. “You must have known that no one in their right mind would cripple the new king’s father without his express permission.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Riordan let out another bark of laughter that made her want to leap across the little clearing and stab him in the throat.

  “Yeah,” he drawled. “That’s what I thought. You knew.”

  “Oh, maybe you didn’t hear me while you were running your mouth.” Eiryn felt bruised on the inside. And she thought she’d rather die than let him see it, no matter what he might suspect. “Fuck. You.”

  Riordan was clearly enjoying himself, the prick. “What I can’t figure out is how you managed to lie to yourself all those years. Talk about dedication. I know what you get out of pretending you hate me.” She didn’t know what was worse, that knowing look on his face or the things that shook inside of her, telling her truths she didn’t want to accept. “But what the hell did you get out of pretending you were on some holy war of vengeance when you had to know it was a load of crap?”

  “I didn’t lie to myself, asshole,” Eiryn gritted out. “I believed Wulf.”

  Riordan didn’t lower his hands from their upright and ready position. He didn’t relax his stance. And his dark eyes felt like a strike, hard and true.

  “Bullshit.”

  “I forgot who I was talking to,” Eiryn seethed at him, because he wasn’t the only one who could land a sucker punch. “Happy-go-lucky Riordan, everyone’s best friend. Second in line to everything that matters, but never out in front where he might actually have to do something besides laugh, laugh, laugh and fuck camp girls in the ass. Important enough to be part of the conversation, but in the end? Completely fucking disposable.” She held her hands out to the side to encompass the mountains around them and the whole of the damned mainland. “Look where you are.”

  He snorted, then shook his head, though his gaze never left hers. “You couldn’t be more wrong if you dedicated your life to it. Which, wait. You have.”

  “You’d certainly know a lot about dedicating your life to lost causes.” Her voice was so cold it almost hurt in her own mouth. But she didn’t let that stop her. Not now that they were finally exchanging real punches. “It must be nice to pretend you have a higher calling. A stain you can never wash clean that keeps you at a distance from everyone else. How fucking convenient.”

  “Did you really just say that to me?” Riordan’s voice was incredulous, but his gaze was frigid, promising mayhem and retribution in equal measure. Eiryn really, really hoped he’d try. “You. With zero irony.”


  She was tired of talking. More tired of trying not to reel from the things he’d thrown at her, each of them festering, causing as much damage—or more—than the hits he’d landed on her body.

  “Are you going to keep running your mouth at me? Or can we maybe get back to the good part? I don’t mind telling you I have a roundhouse kick with your name all over it.” When Riordan only smirked at her, she sighed. “Or you could try to bore me into submission, sure. It’s a strategy.”

  “Keep telling yourself you’re bored.” Riordan didn’t sound cold then. Or furious. It was much worse than that. He sounded certain. “Do you really think I can’t read you? Your potshots here. Your bullshit in bed. All painful little diversionary tactics. You have nowhere to hide, baby. Don’t you get that yet?”

  If she let any of that sink in at all, Eiryn would have to surrender to the earthquake ripping her apart inside, and that was impossible. That way lay nothing but disaster. She couldn’t possibly take the chance.

  “Come on, brother. If you read me so well.” She danced back and forth instead, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, trying to bring the fight back into an arena she understood. One that, not coincidentally, would allow her to wale on him until the ugliness inside of her dissipated. “Kick my ass, if you’re such a big man who knows so much.” She tilted her head to one side. “Unless you’re afraid I’ll be the one kicking your ass?”