Back then, she’d found it poetic, in the profoundly dark way everything had been that summer. He’d stabbed her in the back in his way. She’d let him talk her back into his bed and then she’d returned the favor, and more than that, she’d enjoyed his blood on her hands.
It feels like a fair trade, she’d snapped at him. A little bit of blood for your broken promises and my dignity. Seems to me you got off easy.
Eiryn would never forget the way he’d looked at her then. Dark and terrible. Broken.
You better get the fuck out of my sight, he’d growled.
And she’d obeyed, her hands stained with his blood when she’d shot him the finger on her way out the door.
She still didn’t regret it. But she wasn’t that girl any longer, betrayed and ripped up into all those mean and bitter pieces. She couldn’t seem to locate any of that anger in herself today. Her fury had propelled her for years. It had been her only friend for a long, long time, especially these past few months after she’d learned the truth about what Tyr had done to her father. Defiant, relentless fury had been the engine behind everything she’d made of herself, everything she’d done. She’d been so furious for so long she hardly knew how to function without it.
But not here. Not now, with him.
It was like she was remembering a story someone had told her a long time ago about somebody else.
Eiryn let her eyes drift shut. The sun danced all over her face and Riordan sprawled on top of her as if his big body was a shield, and it was almost as if it was . . . more. More than simply necessary compliance. More than a different kind of physical finish to their fight up on that ridge—as if maybe this was the finish they’d been heading for these past ten years.
As if it was more than sex, however hot and brightly lit this afternoon. However soul-wrecking. However deeply, irrevocably dangerous.
Or, more precarious by far, as if they were.
* * *
The caravan made it to the Great Lake Cathedral City—perched on the lip of a vast saltwater lake and protected by the mountains that had kept it high enough above sea level to remain safe and largely unspoiled throughout the Storms—two days before the September equinox.
Riordan was more than a little surprised the rickety-ass thing had made it in one piece. Or at all.
“Cutting it close, don’t you think?” dour Jonathan snapped at Xela in the living area, where they were all sitting and waiting to see the last of each other. Behind the wheel, Lang navigated the clunky old caravan through the crowded streets toward one of the designated parking areas a good five miles away from Cathedral Square.
“You’d be cutting it a whole lot closer to the March equinox if you’d walked it,” Xela replied, her round face like a stone.
Riordan bit back his smile at that, his attention on all the people wandering around out in the streets of this noticeably untouched city. He’d always heard that the western kingdoms were more populated than anywhere else. That the eastern mainland was the province of pioneers and outcasts from these, the more settled parts of what was left of a once-vast country now largely beneath the sea. It had always made sense to him in the abstract. The Rocky Mountains were high and largely impassable during heavy storms. Those who had evacuated from sea level and the flood plains way back when the Storms began had made sure that if the worst happened, they’d have the Rockies to protect them. They’d been ready. And they’d been rich.
That meant they had infrastructure. Roads. Paved roads—and not just one. Streets full of houses that looked as if they’d stood here all these centuries and more were lived in still. The people out wandering in the September afternoon weren’t desperate-looking like some of the hungry, dirty so-called kings and travelers in some of the eastern settlements. Riordan couldn’t see a single obvious bandit or low-life scavenger in any of the groups he saw streaming down the wide sidewalks—sidewalks, for fuck’s sake—dressed in clean, cared-for clothing. Quite the contrary. All these people had a prosperous softness to them, as if they weren’t entirely aware that the world was a shithole. And maybe they weren’t. The world hadn’t ended here, as far as Riordan could tell.
No wonder the church was so popular. Something that had never made any sense to him shifted a bit in his head. If wolves were a story people told to scare you while you lived behind stout walls in places where the old, lost world wasn’t strewn all about you, why would you fear them? You wouldn’t. But you might fear the priest who told you he was the reason those sharp-fanged, bloodthirsty nightmares stayed far away.
Riordan had always thought the church was a con. But he’d never appreciated the full contours of that con before. He found he was the disgusted version of kind of impressed.
“It is a great blessing to have a winter marriage sanctioned by the bishop himself,” Jonathan was intoning from across the living area, not that anyone had asked for his thoughts on theology. Of course his gaze was heavy on Kamala, who’d taken ignoring him to new heights over the past few days. “It brings forth fertility and boosts humanity. Both necessary to our survival, I should not need to remind you all.”
From her place on the bench seat across from him, Eiryn shifted her gaze from out the window to Jonathan. Then she shot a look at Riordan that was so blandly murderous Jonathan should have felt it like a blade to the neck.
Riordan didn’t try to keep his smile back then. He tuned the blathering fool out the way they’d all been forced to do and kept his eyes on the strangest city he’d ever seen as it slid past his window—not on Eiryn, because that was complicated.
Riordan had been to a lot of equinox celebrations in his time, though clan equinox and solstice gatherings in the eastern islands had nothing to do with compliance or winter marriages. They celebrated the brothers’ raids at the end of each summer, and they shared out the spoils of their endeavors with the whole clan. The festival usually lasted days. Everyone in the territory under Wulf’s rule was entitled to come before the king at the September equinox and claim their share of the clan’s wealth to help them through the darkness. It was the point of the raids all summer. It was why the clan supported the brotherhood and what the brothers themselves fought for. Clan first, clan always. Clan forever.
He understood the clan’s celebration at this time of year. It made sense to gather what bounty you could before the winter roared in to kick your ass for six dark months. But this mainland marriage ritual was something else entirely. Riordan found the whole compliant thing fascinating, if he was honest, even if his experience with compliance so far had been nothing but blistering hot in the exact way it wasn’t supposed to be.
That was some funny shit, he thought. Raider sex was so open that compliance felt like a kink.
He still didn’t glance over at Eiryn, because he had no idea what she’d see on his face if he did. Or worse, what would be on hers after their afternoon on that Colorado ridge and in their sunlit bunk. He’d expected her to freak out. He’d assumed she’d react to all that forced intimacy in her usual violent, bloodthirsty, murderous way. He’d anticipated it.
Instead she’d been . . . quiet. Too quiet. So quiet it was messing with his head.
There was a hollow thing inside his chest that he couldn’t seem to identify or get the hell out of him, no matter how many times he ordered himself to sack up and move on. There were too many things he wanted to say to her, because she was too goddamned quiet but also because she’d rubbed the scar she’d given him like it was some kind of talisman.
Riordan had a lot of things to say about that scar. And that crazy, stupid, bullshit night ten years ago when she’d given it to him and then walked away the way she had, with his blood on her hands.
He’d never seen anything more beautiful or more lethal in his life.
It was when he’d known, without a shadow of a doubt, that he’d been right to scrape her off and make it hurt, so she’d never come back without sacrificing that scrappy pride of hers—which he’d known she’d never, ever do. Not
hing so extraordinarily savage, so perfectly vicious, should ever stay tied down to a man. Too bad Riordan had wanted her with all the parts of himself he’d been denying existed, ever since the spring he’d learned who he really was. The very fact he’d wanted her so badly was reason enough to let her go.
He would only hold her back. Who knew what his selfish bullshit would do to her? He’d known she wasn’t his, that she couldn’t ever be his, even with his own blood staining her brutally delicate hands. Even though the very sight of her naked and stained with him had made his cock hard.
But Riordan had always been a sick fuck—that was the point.
Now, ten years later and far across the planet from his rooms in the Lodge, there were whole arguments he wanted to jump back into with her, and who cared if that was still deeply unwise. That scar, for instance. All the shit that had gone down between them ten years ago. Or in the past week on this endless caravan trip. Or what exactly she’d been thinking to throw his family in his face up there on that Colorado ridge. Eiryn, of all people, with more family drama than one of those dumbass plays the villagers sometimes put on to while away the rainy months.
And god knew there was a whole lot of sex he wanted to have with this woman—his woman at last, or at least for now—without having to bite his own tongue half off while he did it.
Inhibitions were not his strong suit. And as many secrets as Riordan had collected about the clan in his time, he’d never had to worry this much about keeping his own. He didn’t care for the sensation. It was too much like being choked.
Eiryn had gone unnaturally subdued and quiet over the past four days, which was more than a little alarming. The more compliant I am, the better, she’d told him when he’d found six seconds of relative privacy to ask what was wrong with her. He didn’t like that shit at all. He didn’t like her this close to him and still out of reach—worse than the past ten years, because at least then he’d known that whatever bad blood was between them, she was a brother. She was doing what she’d always wanted to do. More compliance had never been her destiny. She was too lethal. Too tough.
The caravan had rattled into Utah and then made its way up through hot red deserts in the south into more mountains, taking its sweet-ass time to finally arrive here in the church’s stronghold. And every day that passed had made Riordan more antsy. More restless. He couldn’t escape the prickly sense that they were running out of time, which was crazy. They had a whole winter in front of them. It made him that much more determined to dig into whatever the hell was happening with Eiryn—assuming he ever got a moment of privacy with her again.
This hearty compliant forced togetherness, night and day, wasn’t for the faint of heart. Or strained of temper.
Lang finally parked the caravan and Riordan reminded himself that winter hadn’t even officially begun yet. His restlessness was premature. It had taken him and Eiryn all this time to make it to the Great Lake Cathedral, but really, this was where their task began.
And then, finally, it was time to leave this odd group of travelers he’d learned entirely too much about over the past week. Eiryn stood next to him as everyone gathered their belongings out in the parking lot and smiled convincingly while they all made bright, false promises to meet again someday. She pressed her shoulder against his as the group started to break off into their separate little units, and he followed her gaze to where Kamala had already thrown herself headlong into a crowd of pilgrims heading for the Cathedral, as if she couldn’t hear Jonathan calling her name.
Riordan laughed. “Good luck with that, motherfucker,” he muttered, but low enough that there was no chance the dour butcher could hear him. He’d take too much pleasure in breaking the humorless man’s neck, and he didn’t need the kind of attention that would inevitably bring.
He fell into step with Eiryn with his pack strapped to his back once more, following the flow of foot traffic toward Cathedral Square.
It felt ridiculously good to walk, after being cooped up in that caravan for so long. To say nothing of that hideous ferry. He stretched his legs and Eiryn matched his pace, and for a long time that was all they did, moving smoothly through the various knots of people milling here and there down the long stretch of road with the Cathedral looming in the distance. They couldn’t run up a mountain and punch things, but at least they could walk.
“Something about this place bugs me,” he said when they’d been at it some time, a good two or three miles, swept up in the steady tide of people. All of them looked a little too placidly happy for Riordan’s taste. Too satisfied.
It was louder out here in the street than it had been in the caravan, which meant much better cover, but he still had to watch his volume. He was already getting a few too many second glances simply because he was as big as he was, an implicit threat no matter that he wasn’t dressed in raider clothes or showing off his tattoos and blades.
“It’s the central, beating heart of the church two days before the holiest day of the year.” Eiryn’s voice was dry. “And you don’t believe in any of it. Why would you be comfortable here?”
Riordan shook his head. At first he thought he was simply stiff from so many days of so little movement, but it wasn’t that. He tried to figure it out as they moved at an easy pace, dodging a group of confused tourists staring up at a tree and then a pack of overly enthusiastic young men leaping around like overwrought pit-wolf puppies. It was a partly cloudy September day, with a bite to the air that suggested the rains were closer than it seemed in all that brightness. The mountains formed a brooding sort of wall behind the Cathedral as it thrust up against the blue sky. It looked as if it feared no storm or dark winter’s night, proclaiming its might with all three of its tall and forbidding steeples and the crowds flowing all around its base.
He thought they all looked more than a little drunk.
It wasn’t until they made it to the outskirts of Cathedral Square that Riordan understood what was biting at him. It was what he’d noticed on the drive in. It was too clean here. Too quiet. There were no ruins anywhere in sight. No sea-scarred leftovers of the world they’d lost. There were only trees full of perky fall color and orderly church-held buildings everywhere he looked. Manicured yards and public squares and tidy little houses, marching off toward the uncluttered horizon. And all the soft, unworried, devoted disciples of this bullshit fake life, wandering around without a care.
As if there were no wolves or marauders stalking the settlements to the east. As if there were no bandits, no highwaymen—hell, no raiders. He didn’t know which was worse—that no one here seemed to realize the world had ended hundreds of years ago or that they didn’t care because they lived in one of the few places where it didn’t matter.
“The whole world is a piece of shit.” Riordan didn’t say that as loud as he could have, because he wasn’t in the mood to slaughter a bunch of idiots if they heard him and came at him. Or to be more accurate, he wanted to slaughter every last compliant douchebag within his view, but that would be counterproductive. Enjoyable, but definitely counterproductive. And he’d probably have to explain the resulting carnage to his unimpressed king, which did not appeal. “But not here. Look how happy all these fools are.”
Next to him, Eiryn let out one of her silvery little laughs—wicked, dark, and rare—that poured all over him like her hands against his skin and made his cock stand up in his trousers besides. “It’s creepy as fuck.”
The woman was going to be the death of him, and the worst part was, he didn’t think she was trying to mess with him at the moment. If anything, she seemed to have taken her role a little too much to heart these last few days. She’d been acting as if she really was soft and breakable and pointless like all the other women.
Riordan hated it.
Because he liked her ferocious. Blood on her hands and battle in her dark blue eyes. That made the times she was helpless beneath him, spread open to receive him, that much better.
God knew Riordan was tired of quiet,
compliant sex. He liked what happened after, the falling off into oblivion with her spread over him and his cock still deep inside her, getting her sweet, sticky cream all over the both of them, but he wanted more. He wanted to get his hands on her without any barriers. He wanted her naked again, and for a much longer time. Completely naked, inside and out. He wanted uninterrupted private time to work out a few things with the ghost who’d been haunting him all these long years. He’d gotten a glimpse of what was going on beneath her surface four days ago and now he was . . . whatever desperate was when a man was a goddamned raider, not a cringing little bitch.
But the Cathedral rose up before them, their job on the mainland was only beginning, and there was no privacy in sight, whether he liked it or not.
He tried to pull his shit together, like he was the clan’s best tracker sent out on a critical mission instead of some weepy-ass pansy with nothing but complicated pussy on his brain. Now that he and Eiryn had made it here, he had to put that same old crap between them aside. He needed to focus on how the hell he was going to get inside the Cathedral and even better, get a little face time with the Bishop.
Novices do an extra-long penance for the September equinox, Maud had told them back in the Catskills, during their long afternoon’s discussion on the beach. Usually they’d cane us, so we could turn our thoughts to god as we contemplated our virginity, that glorious gift we would bestow upon the church when it was time. But every other year or so, if the watch nun was feeling benevolent, we got to contemplate these things on the roof of the convent. That meant we could see how those not as blessed as we were readied themselves for winter.
Nothing you say ever makes me think you were at all blessed, Helena had replied.
That’s blasphemous, obviously. Maud had tugged on the ring in her collar as she’d sat there, cross legged and smiling, as if she didn’t even realize she was doing it. People come from all over the mainland to pick someone for the winter and have their winter marriage blessed at the Cathedral. Everyone agrees that a blessed winter marriage leads to increased fertility, which is of course the only goal. She’d waved a hand. Everyone knows someone who knows someone else who got pregnant with twins two winters running.