Then it was gone in the next instant when her gaze dropped to his leg, though she didn’t say anything. Her jaw went tight, but she only performed a quick check of her own body. She ran her hands over her soaking-wet limbs, looking for any injuries. Riordan did the same. There was a welt on her forehead and her hands and knees looked torn.
That was kid’s stuff. She was fine.
“I’m good,” she said, even as he thought it. “Banged up a little.” She jutted her stubborn chin at his leg. “You?”
“Fine,” he muttered. “Fucking piece-of-shit boat.”
Eiryn shoved her hands in her hair, moving the sodden mass of it back from her face. Her dark gaze moved over the hull, then over the beach as the sky above them grew marginally less gray.
“I want our packs,” she said, her voice scratchy. “I have a first aid kit we could use to clean you up a little.” She eyed the hull, then his leg. “If we both lift it, can you hold it up a minute while I look?”
He glared at her as if she’d called him a coward, then spat on his mother’s grave.
Eiryn’s mouth curved. “Of course you can.”
It hurt like a bitch. But when they were done and he’d dropped the hull back down to the beach, every single muscle from his calves to his neck screaming at the exertion, she had their packs.
As she squatted down to rifle through hers, Riordan ran his hands over his wet, salty face, and shifted his weight to his good leg. Then he followed the trail of debris that led out into the water, trying to see if anything useful might have washed ashore with them.
Instead, he stiffened. “Bandits.”
“I hope they drowned,” Eiryn retorted, her voice muffled with her face pointed toward her pack. “And I hope it took a while.”
“They didn’t.”
He heard the gruffness in his own voice. Then Eiryn was at his side, her shoulder against his arm, scowling out at the seething waves.
Where the same goddamned boat that had been chasing them across the planet was tacking back and forth, black sails shredded but still holding air.
“They’re looking for a way to land,” Riordan said after a minute or two, watching the boat go round and round.
Beside him, Eiryn sighed. “Which means it’s time for us to go.”
She didn’t wait for his response. She went and grabbed her pack and he followed, watching the way her mouth pressed into a thin line when she saw his limp. But she didn’t comment on it. She only started across the beach, toward the ledges piled high with boulders and the sheer cliff behind them.
It was a lot harder to get his pack on than it should have been, but Riordan did it. Then he followed her across the beach, every step a little bit worse than the one before, and it didn’t seem to matter how many times he told himself to suck it up.
She waited at the foot of the cliff, where a rope ladder hung down, tied off on a stake the clan had pounded into the ground a long time ago. It was a flimsy fucking ladder at the best of times. It was always wet and treacherous. It twisted in on itself and rungs often snapped off when any weight was put on them.
It required full use of two arms and two legs.
He could tell by the furious, mutinous way she glared up the side of the cliff that she knew it.
“Go,” he growled at her.
She didn’t look at him. “I’m not leaving you here as a snack for those metal-faced freaks.”
“Eiryn.”
She continued to ignore him. She untied the ladder from the stake and let it slam and dance against the rocks, making the point for him.
Riordan tossed his pack to the ground and kept his gaze on the water where the black-sailed boat tacked back and forth restlessly, as if the idiots on board thought that, eventually, they’d find a safe way to land. Too bad there wasn’t one.
When Eiryn turned back around to face him her expression was set and hard. Her hands were in fists.
But her eyes. Her eyes were too dark and too bright. Tortured.
That kicked at him. It almost took his breath.
“Go,” he told her again, his voice low. “And take the ladder with you.”
“You can climb it. Just go slowly.”
He shook his head at her. “You know they’ll have guns. I’m not going out with a punk-ass bandit bullet in my back.”
Her eyes were even darker then. Whole storms that made the ones they’d fought look like nothing. It would kill him if he let it. He didn’t let it.
Somehow, he didn’t let it.
“Then we’ll both stay here and fight them off,” she argued. “How hard can it be? They’re bandits. If we had a magnet we could immobilize them all and call it a day.”
“Baby.” Her chin rose, and he didn’t know if it was the word or the way he’d said it, dark and rough. As brutally honest as that storm in her eyes and the matching one inside him. “One of us has to make it. We can’t risk both of us dying here and some army of assholes taking down the clan in March. You know this.”
She went stiff with denial. With fury. But he pushed on.
“You have to go. And you have to go now, before they stop fucking around out there and get close enough to start shooting.”
He saw the grudging, terrible acceptance and the grief on her face, and the way she tried to fight it back. He saw the agony in her dark eyes.
Her mouth worked as if she wanted to speak, but she didn’t.
“Clan first,” he told her quietly. “Clan always.”
This was who they were. This was what they did.
Eiryn dragged in a breath, jagged and wrong. The closest he’d ever heard her come to a sob.
“I figure they’ll dick around out there for at least another fifteen minutes,” she said, her voice dark. “Then maybe it will take them another fifteen minutes to sack up and try to get ashore and, fingers crossed, half of them will get eaten up and spat out by the undertow.”
“I’m personally interested to find out if metal rats can swim,” Riordan said philosophically, because it was better than fighting off the urge to haul her close to him and get his hands on her, maybe for the last time.
She threw her pack on the ground and dug around in it, pulling out three handguns and a set of ammo clips. She set them on the rocks at his feet. Then she let out a long, slow breath, and pulled out her blade.
He didn’t speak as she laid that at his feet too. He couldn’t. Her perfect, wicked blade. His chest was so tight he was surprised it didn’t rupture. He wasn’t sure he was breathing anymore.
“It’s three miles to the Lodge,” she said quietly, looking up at him. “I’m fast as hell. By my calculations, it will take them a half hour to come at you. All you have to do is live for about twelve minutes more, and I’ll be back. And you can bet I won’t be alone.”
She stood, fluid and lethal, leaving her heavy pack behind. And he understood the resolve on her beautiful face. Just like he understood the bruises on her body and the anguish in her gaze.
He didn’t dare touch her. He knew he wouldn’t let go.
“It was always you,” he told her, rough and real. It came out of him like fire, like blood. Impossible to contain. Bigger than the both of them. He wanted to reach out to her, but he didn’t. He curled his hand into a fist instead. “It’s only you.”
If anything, her face grew colder. Her dark eyes gleamed. He saw her whole, dangerous body tense while that stubborn chin of hers went up like he’d thrown down in battle.
“Then you better fucking live,” she ordered him, his warrior to the end.
And then she took off.
Riordan didn’t watch her go. He heard the ladder clank against the cliff. He heard her made a small sound of exertion. But he couldn’t stand there and witness what he was sacrificing or he didn’t think he could do it.
And he had no choices here. He had to do it.
He turned around and watched the water instead. He gathered up the guns and ammo, and he secured her long, wicked blade in his harness for
easy access. He dug around in his pack, looking for anything else he could use.
And when he’d gathered everything he could, he hauled himself up to the base of the cliffs and the only protected spot on the whole beach, tucked up on a ledge behind a big-ass boulder.
Riordan didn’t look up. He didn’t try to calculate how far she’d gone or where she might be along that six-mile route, there and back, if she’d even made it to the top of the cliff yet. None of that was going to change what was about to happen. None of it changed what he had to do.
Clan first, clan always. Clan forever.
That was the vow he’d made. First as a ten-year-old kid who didn’t know what he was doing. Then as a young man who’d known exactly what it meant. Blood. The blade. There could be no greater honor than to lay down his life in service to his clan.
And it was only a very small voice inside of him that whispered otherwise. That Eiryn was fast as hell and highly motivated to get back quickly.
That maybe, just maybe, he could lay down his life for the clan some other goddamned day.
He shoved that voice aside.
There was no going half-assed into battle, waiting for someone to come save him. There was battle or there was death. He was a member of the brotherhood, a warrior of the clan. He’d chosen his path a long time ago. The names stamped along his spine demanded he stick to it.
Even if the scar he wore beneath those names was far more treacherous, and whispered something else entirely.
The October wind slapped at his face as he watched the black sails tack around again and then apparently grow a few balls at last. Because this time they stopped dancing around and aimed straight ahead. Putting themselves on a collision course for the rocky shore.
Riordan braced himself against the boulder, made sure his weapons were within reach, did not think about the woman he’d carried with him forever but still hadn’t managed to claim, because if he couldn’t have her he’d settle for this.
His duty and his glory in one fell swoop.
* * *
Eiryn ran.
The three-mile approach to the raider city from the high cliffs over Jailhouse Beach snaked along the crowded, narrow bay, stuffed full of too many tiny islands covered in pine trees that provided a little natural camouflage. No one who didn’t already know the heart of the clan was located there, at the end of the bay nestled at the foot of a brooding mountain, would ever take the time to poke their way around all those islands to discover it.
Certainly not without being seen.
But those were summer problems, and this was fall, and Eiryn ran without seeing a single soul.
The cliffs Eiryn ran on now were half in the thick, dark woods, half out. In the summer, sentries patrolled the heights and clan members walked along the cliffs on pleasant afternoons to take in the views.
But this wasn’t summer. It was a blustery late afternoon in October. The cold, wet rain still fell, though far less of it than before, and the clouds grumbled back and forth in the low, muttering sky. Eiryn had stopped paying attention to the weather before she’d even made it to the top of the cliff. She’d wasted precious moments tying the stupid rope ladder to the stake at the top so the wind wouldn’t yank it away, the vicious bitch, and then she’d taken off.
She didn’t look back. She didn’t waste time.
She ran harder than she ever had in her life. Her lungs ached and her thighs screamed. Then she ran a little faster.
Three miles was nothing. Three miles was a laugh. Three miles wasn’t even a training run, especially this one, so flat and easy.
She chanted that out loud. Again and again.
She pushed herself more. Her body had been battered and underfed these last weeks. It wasn’t happy. But Eiryn was a brother. Her body was her tool, her weapon. She’d spent her whole life training for moments like this, when hope was in the power in her form, the strength of her will.
She sucked it up. She dug deep. She hoped and she ran faster.
But she couldn’t outrun her own head.
Or that chain that had always, always wound between her and Riordan, binding them to each other across all these years. That awareness she’d called hatred that had lived in her gut and in her heart for ten years. And what had exploded between them on their trip through the compliant mainland, one detonation after the next. Their first night in Louisville. That long afternoon in all that revealing sunshine in Colorado. All those compliant nights in the caravan. Pretending her emotions weren’t involved. Pretending she didn’t lose control, time and again, under Riordan’s talented hands.
All leading to those blistering, reckless, stolen moments in the front seat of a compliant pilgrim’s truck, all need and hunger and stripped down, pared back to truth.
Just you and me, Eiryn, he’d said. No bullshit compliance to hide in. No pretending it’s a duty. Nothing but us.
She burst out of the woods at the far, eastern edge of the city, her chin low as she fixed her gaze on the Lodge, lit up against the October moodiness. There were lights here and there, all over the village from the shops to the docks, but it was nothing like Great Lake Cathedral City. There were as many lanterns in windows as lights, quietly marking homes against the autumn, not making proclamations about god. She could smell wood smoke in the damp air and pine in the wind, the clear, cool scent of the sea in the distance, and here and there the start of the evening meal on any number of different stoves.
Home, she thought, automatically.
But home didn’t make a lot of sense to her without Riordan. Love him or hate him, or both at the same time as was more her style, she didn’t understand what clan was without him.
“And you’re not going to,” she muttered at herself. “Not today.”
Eiryn felt the burn in her legs, her hips, her chest. She pushed harder, stretching her legs as she started up the incline toward the practice green that spread out on either side of the sprawling Lodge, home to the king and all the raider brothers, like a wide skirt. The great Lodge itself sat halfway up the mountain, a tall central portion paneled with bold windows and two long wings stretching out on each side, commanding the whole of the city. The island. The world.
I told you one lie, Riordan had said.
And she’d told herself a thousand.
That she didn’t deserve what others had. That because her father was an embittered old man who had treated her cruelly—but kept her close—everyone else would, too. And because he hated her half-brothers so much, she’d spent her life looking for reasons to hate them, too. She’d jumped right on it when something came along.
The truth was, as Riordan had pointed out, she must have known about the order Wulf had given. But she hadn’t faced it. She’d hidden it away until she could trot it out when it was sure to cause the most damage. To her.
Because she’d forged herself in hate, not love. She didn’t know how to exist if she wasn’t hating someone. All those lonely, painful years of her childhood, it had been her father. His cruelty. His mockery. Maybe some part of her had believed she’d needed it. When she’d come to the raider city to attempt to make it into the brotherhood, she’d fallen for Riordan so fast and so hard it had derailed everything. Her plans. Her life. Everything she’d trained for.
Including her vow of vengeance against the war chief, because there was no way Riordan was going to let his woman take down a man he respected and considered a friend.
Then he’d lied to her and she’d let him. She’d believed it when, like the truth about Wulf’s order, deep down she must have known better. He wasn’t the first man she’d had sex with. What they had between them was so much hotter, so much deeper, so much more intense than mere sex. Yet he’d told her she was nothing to him and she’d believed him, because it gave her someone new to hate and, hell, she was good at that. Between Riordan and Tyr, she’d been covered for years.
Her hatred had fueled her. It had made her what she was. She’d honed herself into a lethal blade, and eve
ry sharp edge was sharpened with hate.
But she didn’t want it anymore.
She’d knelt in that awful confessional in the Cathedral, and she’d seen what hate looked like. What it could do. How it could twist and pervert a person. What it made a man like the bishop become—a walking dead thing, feasting on the living like some kind of zombie shark.
Fuck that shit. Eiryn wanted to live.
And if she wanted even the faintest shot of making that happen, she needed Riordan to survive so he could live, too.
She heard herself as she dug deep and pulled it out for the last little incline, making a noise like a battle cry. Or maybe that was pain, and who cared which. She came over the ridge and then she was on the green, her feet flying, her heart pounding, faster than she’d ever run before in her life.
When she hit the great glass doors of the Lodge she threw them open and catapulted herself inside, making the two men there in the lobby drop instantly into fighting crouches.
She ignored the first man as she rocked to a stop, her breath hard and wild. Because the second man was Tyr.
On some level she was aware of the look on his face, the switch from his battle-ready expression to something like shock that she was here and in god only knew what state—but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the man she’d left behind at the bottom of a cliff with a chunk of boat in his thigh.
“Jailhouse Beach,” she threw at him, her voice as shredded as her legs, but she couldn’t help that either. “Riordan is hurt. Fighting off a boatload of bandits.”
There was noise from somewhere else. Nearby, maybe. A commotion—but Eiryn was all tunnel vision and panic and the last expression she’d seen on Riordan’s face. Agony and truth.
It was always you. It’s only you.
Tyr nodded, hard and certain, nothing but clan and command in his dark eyes.
“I call all brothers,” Eiryn whispered, using the ancient words. Breathing too hard to shout it out the way she should. Her stomach already in a twist. And here, in this, she had no pride. There was no weakness. There was only Riordan. “Please—he can’t hold them off long.”
Tyr nodded again, more decisively.