They never had a chance, boy, gruff old Amos had told him matter-of-factly when he’d broken the news, not long after the first thaw. Can’t outsmart snow.
No one had ever blamed Riordan directly. Or not to his face, anyway, and maybe that had made it worse. But then, no one needed to blame him outright. He took care of that himself.
He wore his guilt on his skin, where he’d inked the names of his dead down the length of his spine, to keep him centered and marked, forever. He paid his penance every day. He’d so badly wanted the blade over his own blood—so he gave himself over to the blade and to battle and to the kind of blood that sort of life promised and demanded in turn. He was a cursed man, having dishonored his own family with his own bone-deep selfishness, but he couldn’t change that. What he could do was make his guilt the white-hot fire that sharpened the edge of his blade and made him as fierce and as resolute a defender of his clan as he’d failed to be for his blood kin.
So that was what Riordan did. That was all he did, first with an unnerving, fiery intensity and then with a smile to mask it. He’d entered the brotherhood with the same single-minded devotion years later, and he’d pledged himself to Wulf, body and soul, after his friend from their nursery days had taken the throne. Four lives had been sacrificed to his ambition, and he’d never forgotten it. He’d never, ever wavered.
Except for that one summer. That one reckless, impossible summer he still couldn’t seem to get out of his head, when he’d risked everything he’d built as a living monument to those he’d lost. When for once in his life, the only time in his life, he’d ignored all the blood that stained his hands. When he’d let his cock do his thinking for him, the way he’d let his selfishness do the same when he’d been ten.
Just in case you wondered if you’ve changed, he told himself sourly now. You haven’t. You never will, you twisted fuck.
No one had died that summer. But that didn’t mean any of it had ended well, and Riordan wasn’t the only one with the scars to prove it. Not all of them internal. It was one more strike against him, to his mind. One more indication that he was a twisted, terrible, cursed man who destroyed the things that mattered to him, one after the next.
Every last thing he’d ever cared about, he’d killed.
Lyla finished wiping him down and smiled at him, and Riordan didn’t want to think any longer. He didn’t want to spend any more time inside his own head. He had a hard cock and a waiting camp girl. Why make things any more complicated than that? He couldn’t change any of it. Not the past. Not the present.
Certainly not what was or wasn’t happening out in the woods right now.
He leaned back against the smooth rock behind him and pulled Lyla astride his lap, settling her against him with her back to his chest. She was a curvy, silky weight on his thighs, smelling faintly of campfire smoke and fragrant oils. She made a low, greedy sound and used those hips of hers to rub herself against his cock where it strained against his trousers. Then she let out a sigh when he reached down and slid his hand beneath the waistband of the stretchy shorts she wore to test her soft pussy. She was slippery and wet already, as expected, but Riordan was big. It required a little extra work to take him comfortably.
“I want you wetter,” he muttered, his mouth against her neck.
He felt her shudder as she obliged, right on cue, right into his palm. But that wasn’t enough. He stroked his way inside of her and she moaned, then pressed that round ass of hers harder against him. He pumped in and out of her hard, grazing her clit with each stroke while she rocked herself against him. She made another one of those noises of hers, then arched her back as she reached up to toy with her own tits, moving harder against him while she did. It was hot. She was hot. Riordan glanced up to see a couple of brothers standing nearby, watching Lyla do her thing with greedy, hungry looks on their faces.
When she was wet enough, Riordan withdrew his fingers. He patted Lyla on the butt and she leaned forward, giving him a killer view of the wet stain in the crotch of her shorts and the sweet, round globes of her plump ass. She even rubbed her heavy tits against his leg, a nice touch. He pulled his cock out of his trousers, pumped it once or twice, then wrapped an arm around her waist to haul her back against him.
Lyla reached back and pulled the crotch of her shorts to the side, sighing as Riordan fit his thick cockhead against the soft entrance to her cunt, then slid it into her, nice and easy. He always took the first thrust slow, no matter how wild he was. Even the camp girls who rode any number of cocks in a day sometimes needed an extra moment or two to accommodate him. Lyla was no different. She always thought she could take him. Like now, she always tried to make that initial entry faster and deeper, but when she winced slightly, he stopped. She braced herself against him and rocked those liquid hips of hers, raising herself high as if she was climbing off him, then lowering herself again, taking a little more of his cock each time.
She did that once. Twice. One more time. Then she took a breath and sank down, taking all of him at last.
“Good?” he asked in a low, strained voice, still holding himself back.
“Perfect,” she breathed, and he felt her pussy clench down on him.
Riordan wrapped his arms around her waist and hips to hold her where he wanted her, nice and still and open to him, and then he started to fuck her. Hard. To get the battle out. To get this mood of his out.
To cleanse his goddamned palate after that bullshit in the woods with Eiryn.
He fucked Lyla for a good long while.
He only changed his relentless, driving pace when Wulf appeared on the beach, striding out of the woods and into the firelight as if he were propelled by his own intense ruthlessness. Riordan saw his king and slowed his thrusts, but he didn’t stop. Lyla was moaning with her head thrown back on his shoulder and her sweet cunt soft and hot around him, but Riordan wasn’t sure he really felt her again until he saw Eiryn slide out of the darkness too, in her usual place behind the king.
It wasn’t relief. It wasn’t anything. He felt nothing.
Riordan told himself that again and again.
He picked up his pace. He moved Lyla against him, hammering her on his own cock over and over, but over her gleaming shoulder he studied Eiryn as she glided across the sand as if her feet didn’t quite touch the earth beneath her. His impossibly gorgeous ghost, always in black, always as lethal as she was beautiful, and always out of his reach.
She wasn’t dead. She didn’t appear to be bleeding and she wasn’t walking as if she’d been hurt. She wasn’t even sporting a black eye the way Gunnar had been when he’d finished his last tense “discussion” with Wulf during his renegade period a month ago.
Lyla came as he plowed into her, crying out into the night, and Riordan muttered something approving into her ear as she did. Then he kept going, pounding into her through her climax until she started to pant and moan again.
But it was Eiryn he was concentrating on. Eiryn who he couldn’t stop seeing, no matter if he tried not to look.
She was beautiful, of course, but that was the least interesting thing about her. Her hair was a glossy, very dark brown and her eyes looked black from a distance, but Riordan knew that they were really a very dark, midnight blue. She had the same impossible bone structure her royal brother did, high cheekbones and that deliciously arrogant tilt to her head, but Riordan had never wanted to taste every inch of his king’s face. Eiryn, on the other hand, he could make into a meal. He had. Sometimes he imagined her in the tiny little stretchy shorts and tit-cupping shirts the camp girls wore, exposing her ripped belly and maybe even dancing—but that was between him and his imaginative asshole of a cock. It let him pretend she was the one he was fucking as he drove into Lyla again and again.
He was an expert at that particular game.
But Lyla was soft and pliable in his hands, and he liked that Eiryn was tough and strong. Sleek and taut and muscled inside and out. She was the only woman he’d ever met who didn’t bend or yie
ld. At all. Even now, in the midst of messing up her life in her own spectacular way, she walked in her usual lithe and dangerous rolling way as if she was daring the rest of the brotherhood to come at her or call her out. She seemed to float above the ground, her slender form packed hard with sculpted muscle. She was in her customary black, the tight tank top she wore into battle a sleek lick down her toned torso and the trousers she wore a smooth, perfect fit over her high ass, lean and strong thighs, and long, sweet legs in kickass boots. Riordan had tasted so many women they blended together into a hot, delicious blur of tight cunts and hard nipples, soft tits and generous thighs, and all of them were beautiful in their way. But Eiryn was different. She was the one taste he’d never gotten out of his mouth. She had those fascinating muscles in her bared arms and her thighs were like pure steel. He could kick her ass in a fist fight, he imagined, if he managed to land his punches or got her pinned down with his bulk, but she could best him with a blade—and that notion never failed to make his dick hard.
Eiryn was cut from the same metal he was, forged in fire and tested in battle. She was like his favorite kind of blade, as pretty as she was deadly, and he’d spent years trying to forget the moments he’d lost himself against that fine-honed edge.
But he was never going to touch her again.
He’d lived through his first mistake with the king’s baby sister. He didn’t imagine he’d be likely to survive it again. Wulf had been pretty clear about his feelings on that all those years ago, and Riordan had pledged to serve his king, not disobey him when it came to pussy. Even when it was Eiryn.
Put your cock near my little sister again and I’ll cut it off, brother, Wulf had said in his lazy, blood-curdling way that summer, no sign of the friend from their nursery days in his murderous blue gaze. He’d even clapped Riordan on the shoulder as he’d said it, easy and friendly, right out on the green where the brothers had been sparring. In the middle of the great hall at dinner. Then I’ll mount that shit on the wall.
Then he’d smiled, making the threat that much worse.
Riordan slammed himself into Lyla hard and deep, and this time when she came, she screamed.
Eiryn’s dark gaze shifted to his, right as she reached the fire. And for a moment they were caught like that. Taut and hot. He couldn’t sink himself into her like this, so deep and too good. He couldn’t hold that lithe and powerful body of hers against his and make her scream and thrash the way he had once. The way some part of him would always want to again.
But he knew, as her dark gaze clashed with his, that she felt it. The way she always did on nights like this, when they were caught together and kept apart and there was too much sex in the air. He knew. That she still wanted him, too, no matter the lies she told or the hatred in her eyes. That she couldn’t help but imagine she was the one straddling him and filled with his cock, coming again and again and again.
He could see it in those dark eyes of hers only he knew were blue. He could feel it in that thing that dragged out like a chain between them, anchoring them and torturing them, spite and lust and greedy heat, the way it had always been.
They’d been playing this game a long time. Having sex at each other. It was a special kind of torture to be balls deep in a hot cunt and still twisted up over a woman who was leading a different man off to do him in private.
Or maybe it was their own screwed up kind of thing, he sometimes told himself. It was beautiful too, in its way. It was the closest he’d ever get to tasting her again, and he could see from that arrested, haunted look on her face—there an instant, then gone the next—that she felt as rough and as raw as he did.
He told himself that was something.
Either way, he waited until she tore her gaze from his with that same old blank look on her face as if she hadn’t seen him or cared either way if she had. Her public face, not that he believed it. Only then did he let himself come at last, pumping himself deep into Lyla and managing, somehow, not to say the wrong name.
It was always a kind of miracle.
Lyla slumped against him for a moment or two, her heart pounding so hard he could feel it against his chest. Then she stirred, smiling at him as she sat up and then neatly slid off of his cock.
Riordan murmured his thanks, running his fingers down her cheek as she knelt beside him. Then he stood, stripping off his trousers as he rose. He figured Wulf, like the rest of them, would want to channel the night’s disappointment and near-death experience into a restorative fuck or two before they regrouped to talk about what the hell they were going to do now. That meant he had time to clear his damned head.
Another brother was stepping up to Lyla as he started walking, offering her a hard dick for her bright smile. Riordan headed down to the water, feeling the sea clutch at him as he made it to the hard sand at the waterline. It took him a minute to recognize that the figure he saw out in the swell was Tyr, holding his woman in his arms. Tyr sounded as if he was being a hard-ass, but he couldn’t have been, because Helena was laughing at him. At him. As if the war chief was just another man.
“You don’t actually have to throw me into the ocean every time,” Helena was saying, her voice perfectly clear for a moment when the breeze changed. “You want to.”
“Same difference, sweetheart,” Tyr replied.
In a voice that sounded nothing like the war chief at all.
Riordan waded out, let a wave break over him, and then dove forward through the next one. It was dark and the weird-ass moon was bright, and he cut through the cold, crisp water easily, concentrating on the reach of his arms and the soft rush of the water over his naked body.
He didn’t want to think. Whether or not the war chief got soft for his mate wasn’t Riordan’s concern and there was certainly no reason it should clutch at him, as if there was a message there he should be heeding. Warriors weren’t soft, no matter what things they murmured in the dark when there was pussy involved.
And he was even less soft than that, because he didn’t deserve anything else. He hadn’t been raised in any kind of hardship like Gunnar and Wulf had been under Amos’s iron fist. His parents had been good, solid people and a credit to the clan. That was what made what he’d done to them so hideous. They’d never beaten him or tossed him out into the cold winter to fend for himself. They might not have been the most demonstrative people in the world, but besides the camp girls, who were exactly that by choice and profession, who in the raider clan—or any other clan on what was left of the Earth’s surface, come to that—was? It wasn’t smart to be soft in a world that worked so hard to kill you. Still, Riordan had been in no doubt that they’d loved him in their way, his stoic parents. He’d been their oldest son and their hope for the future.
That, too, made it worse.
He swam out to ships, circled each one of them, then headed back to shore with the same long, hard strokes. It felt good to move through the water, quick and smooth. He liked the silk of the sea against his bare skin. And out here, finally, he could lose himself the way he wanted to do.
No Eiryn. No dark midnight eyes across a fire and the straining body of another fuck. No regret, no ghosts.
He needed to let this shit go before it ate him alive. He needed to stop telling himself that and actually do it.
You need to do something, he growled at himself. Anything.
Riordan had made it back to the beach and was toweling himself off in front of his rock when Wulf walked into the circle of firelight again, wearing nothing but a length of wool wrapped around his hips. He patted the camp girl with him on her naked, jiggling ass, and she melted away from him. Then he nodded at Gunnar’s nun near the fire, where she and a couple of camp girls were dividing up the cooked rabbits into enough portions to go around.
“Eat,” Wulf said, his voice pitched to carry. “And then tell me what the fuck we’re going to do now.”
Riordan took his meat when it came around, settling back to eat it with the nuts and jerky he always carried with him. The deb
ate was already raging, and he listened. He calculated. He tried to hear the agenda behind the proposition instead of just the words, if there was one. He snuck a glance over at Wulf, who had thrown on a pair of trousers and was lounging there in the grass as if he might drift off to sleep at any moment. Eiryn sat next to him, slightly elevated on a tree stump with her long, black-slicked legs thrust out before her. She looked the way she always did—tense and furious. And infinitely dangerous. He could feel it in his gut like lust.
“We can’t storm the western highlands,” Marcus was saying. “For one thing, they have armies.”
“Do we even know where the other temple is?” Ellis asked. “Its exact location?”
“We know where it is,” Gunnar replied shortly. He’d reclaimed his woman and had her kneeling between his outstretched legs as he fed her from his hand, something Riordan had noticed the brother liked to do. A lot. The man did like his toys. Maud, for her part, looked as dreamy and far away as ever, but she took the morsels he offered and murmured something Riordan couldn’t quite hear after each bite. He suspected he knew what it was—and hey, whatever worked for them. “The question isn’t where in the valley it is. The question is, what else is in the valley now? The map is old.”
“And the church is all up in it,” Tyr said after a moment. “I want to know why.”
“Why is the church up in anything?” Jurin boomed. “Because that’s what they do, the spineless fucks.”
It went around and around. They couldn’t blindly send a raiding party to the only other temple that was both above water and combined the things Helena’s family had said were needed to access the Internet, a power station plus a server farm. Like the temple they’d lost tonight.
“My parents claim they saw it, but not up close,” she said at one point. She drew out the tablet she carried everywhere. “They made notes. They saw it from a high hill to the south and determined it would be too difficult to access. That’s why they were trying to get to the Catskills.”
“Tell me about the bishop,” Wulf said when the discussion hit a lull.