Ashwin (Gideon's Riders #1)

by Kit Rocha

  Avery shook her head, and Kora tried not to wince as she read the unspoken words in her dark eyes.

  No one could give Malena what she needed, not anymore.

  Before Gideon could say anything else, Ivan pushed through the door on the far side of the courtyard. He was dressed in his habitual black, a wraith-like shadow with frozen blue eyes, and his words were coolly efficient. “We have a position on the raiders’ new camp. Deacon’s mobilizing the Riders.”

  “And our guest?”

  Ivan hesitated for only a heartbeat, but it was long enough to make his distaste apparent. “Ashwin’s gearing up, too.”

  Gideon studied the man. “Does that bother you?”

  “No, sir.”

  It was a lie, and it was the truth. A lie, because Ivan’s disgust was strong enough to show, even through his usual chilly, locked-down demeanor. And the truth, because his personal feelings were nothing in the face of Gideon’s wishes, much less his orders. If Gideon wanted Ashwin back in one piece, every single Rider would fall to make it happen.

  Kora didn’t know whether to be relieved or scared to death.

  Gideon was neither. He accepted Ivan’s conflict and his obedience without question. “Tell Deacon I’ll be there in a moment to discuss our final plans.”

  “Yes, sir.” Ivan’s nod was almost a bow. He repeated the courtesy to Avery and Kora before spinning on his heel.

  When he was gone, Gideon turned back to them. “I hate to impose on you both, but could you stay with him until I get back?”

  Avery unfastened her cloak, slid it off her shoulders, and laid it over a bench near the table. “We won’t leave him alone.”

  Kora’s fingers had wound so tightly in the cloth she held that she was cutting off her circulation. “Gideon—”

  He slid a hand over hers and stroked her knuckles until her grip eased. “He’ll come back, Kora. Have faith.”

  Faith. Maybe it really was that simple for him. Whether his prayers were answered or not, he trusted that the outcome was part of a greater plan, his god’s will.

  Kora didn’t have his faith, and she didn’t have his assurance. All she had was a glimmer of hope that Ashwin might have feelings for her, after all—a glimmer that would rage into an anguished fire if something happened to him.

  Gideon walked away, and Avery touched Kora’s shoulder. “Let’s get back to work.”

  It took her a moment to realize what Avery meant—for them to finish the task. “We can’t. I don’t know what to do.”

  “I do.” Avery picked up the cloth Gideon had set aside. She glanced up at Kora, then shrugged. “I asked one of the senior priestesses at the temple. Not because of Jaden—this was months ago.”

  Slowly, Kora unwound the cloth from her hands and dipped it into the basin. The water soothed away the pins and needles from the sudden blood flow to her fingers, and she found herself asking, “Why?”

  Avery shrugged again. “I was curious about the rituals. Birth, marriage, and death—it says a lot about a society, the way they approach all three, don’t you think?”

  An emotion suspiciously like shame scraped at Kora. Gideon had taken her in and provided her with a home—no, with more than a home. With a family. He and his sisters and their whole sector had welcomed her as one of their own, as royalty.

  And a refugee fleeing from the destruction of Sector Two had taken more time to get to know their culture than she had.

  “Don’t,” Avery murmured.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Look at me like that. Like I’m such a better person than you.” She paused, then resumed bathing Jaden’s corpse. “Especially since I just lied right to your face.”

  Kora stared at her.

  “That’s right,” Avery responded, as if the stare was a question, a comment. A condemnation. “What do you know about Sector Two? Before the war?”

  Almost nothing that didn’t revolve around its infamous brothel district, but Kora would be damned before she’d open with such a delicate subject. “They focused on trade, mainly. Importing and exporting goods for the city.”

  “Don’t shrink away from it. I don’t.” Avery flashed her a knowing look. “Mostly, they traded in whores.”

  Kora’s cheeks heated. “Right.”

  “They don’t call it the world’s oldest profession for nothing.”

  “I guess not.”

  Avery went on. “There were different establishments in the Garden, and each House had its own specialty. If you desired a wide-eyed ingénue, you’d get a Dahlia. If pairs were your preference, there was always Ivy House. And if you wanted a truly dangerous woman, as beautiful as she was deadly, then you wanted an Orchid.” She swirled her cloth in the basin, then let it drop slowly into the water. “My sister Alexa was an Orchid. You know Lex.”

  “I do.” Kora had first met the queen of Sector Four during the war. “Meeting her was…interesting.”

  “Yes?”

  “Okay, more like awkward. She threatened to shoot me in the face.”

  Avery huffed out a wry laugh. “Like I said—beautiful and deadly.” Her fingers clenched around the edge of the stone table until her knuckles turned white, giving lie to her humor. “I was trained at Rose House. They taught us how to be everything. Hostess, lover, house manager. Pet. That’s why I asked about the rites. I had to learn everything I could about Sector One.”

  As a logical leap, Kora couldn’t follow it. “I don’t understand.”

  “My patron died in the bombing.” Avery swallowed hard, then looked at Kora, her eyes wide and pleading. “I was taught that I had to be all those things for him. The perfect woman. And I’m still doing it, even though there’s no one left for me to be perfect for.”

  The words punched into Kora, spreading through her chest in a hot ache that traveled up to knot in her throat. For all the questions that had plagued her about her origins, she’d never once wondered who Kora Bellamy was. In her heart, her soul, she knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life, who she wanted to be. It had kept her anchored, even kept her sane at times, and she couldn’t imagine feeling lost in her own skin.

  Avery was still watching her, silently beseeching, and Kora took her hand. “So do it for yourself. Be perfect for you, or imperfect. Be an absolute mess, if you want. As long as it’s what you want.”

  “What I want.” Avery considered that, then squeezed Kora’s fingers. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She pulled away and retrieved her washcloth. She murmured something under her breath, then squeezed a rivulet of the scented water over Jaden’s forehead. She paused, then repeated the gesture twice more. For a moment, it was like watching Gideon when she had first come into the courtyard—a sacred ritual, with a meaning she hadn’t taken the time to learn.

  Finally, Avery spoke. “There’s a reason they call it making a home, you know.” Her voice was casual, almost purposefully so. “It takes work to build something. It doesn’t just happen.”

  Kora looked down at her hands. She’d twisted the cloth around her fingers again, so she pried them free. “You’re right.” She couldn’t expect to be a part of their community if she still considered herself an outsider.

  Avery’s next words mirrored the thought. “You don’t live in Eden anymore, Kora. And I don’t think Gideon—” She faltered, a flush staining her cheeks. “I don’t think anyone here would find your questions tiresome. So ask. Find out if you want to make this your home.”

  Before Ashwin’s arrival, it was a question she considered often. Now, he’d completely taken over her thoughts. Until she figured out what was going on between them, everything else had been shuffled aside. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Please do.” Avery returned to her task, satisfied. “This is a good place, Kora. We’re both lucky to have found it.”

  Kora couldn’t disagree.

  Ana

  Deacon was watching her again.

  Ana’s skin prickled with a
wareness under his gaze. She ignored it as best she could as she laced her boots, focusing on making them snug, but not too tight. Tying the knot just so, because if she tripped over her laces in her first fight as a Rider—

  He moved on, and she exhaled quietly and reached for the knives she kept in her boots. The temptation to look over her shoulder was intense, but she didn’t want to draw his attention again for fear he’d find a reason to make her stay behind.

  Because Deacon didn’t approve of her.

  Ana doubted anyone else could tell—maybe not even Gideon. But Ana had always been hyperaware of Deacon. She’d watched him in her teens, idolizing him more than a little. He was the quintessential Rider, everything Ana’s father was training her to be. Strong, serious. Quick to help when help was needed. Quick to protect when danger threatened.

  Her father had never bothered to warn her that Deacon was also a cranky, autocratic asshole who handed down orders without explanation and expected the Riders to jump if he so much as blinked.

  No, that wasn’t fair. Her dad had never lied to her about the chain of command, and Ana didn’t have a problem with following orders. She just hated the way Deacon snapped them at her, like he was waiting for her to balk or break down. Or change her mind and admit this life wasn’t for her, after all.

  Being a Rider was the only thing she’d ever wanted. It was in her bones, in her blood. Her legacy from her father, the thing that had brought them back together after her mother’s death. He’d wanted this for her as much as she had, and her biggest regret was that he hadn’t lived long enough to see her achieve it.

  Her biggest relief was that he wasn’t here to watch her stew under their commander’s quiet, relentless disapproval.

  Deacon appeared in front of her, as if she’d drawn him close with only her thoughts. He handed her a bandolier, then waited for her to drape it over her shoulder before stepping around to buckle it. “Make sure you use your stripper clip to load your magazines,” he muttered tersely. “They’ll be less likely to jam on you, and you won’t tear up your thumbs.”

  Her first instinct was to bristle and snap that she knew, but then she realized what the advice meant.

  He wasn’t going to order her to stay behind. He wasn’t keeping her out of the fight. “Okay,” she replied, hyperaware of him in a different way now. His fingers brushed her shirt. His breath tickled the back of her neck, which was left bare by the braids winding around the crown of her head—a deliberate choice to deny an enemy a convenient handhold—and she bit back the defensive need to point that out.

  She didn’t idolize Deacon anymore. Prolonged exposure to his grumpy-as-fuck personality had cured her of that. But he was still...Deacon. The only original Rider left. Not just a legend, but a man with one foot already planted in the realm of sainthood. Wanting to impress him was a hard habit to break.

  And she couldn’t stop being aware of him.

  He made sure the bandolier was situated before stepping away to murmur something to Zeke, probably more calm, sage wisdom. By the time Ana finished checking her weapons, he’d moved on to Reyes, and it had become obvious that he intended to make a full circle of the room.

  She should have expected it. Deacon was a control freak on a level that made other control freaks take a step back and reexamine their life choices. She wanted to scoff at him for it, but she couldn’t. Deacon’s methodical obsession to detail kept Riders alive, and she couldn’t afford to die. Not this fast, not flaming out in her first battle in brilliant, vivid proof that the first female Rider should be the last one.

  The fate of every little girl who wanted to fight for her people rested on Ana’s ability to stay alive—or, barring that, to go down in a blaze of glory so fantastic, they sainted her while her body was still warm.

  No pressure.

  Of the two options, Ana preferred living. She wasn’t Ivan, who probably daydreamed about the day he could lunge in front of a bullet meant for Maricela, like his father had for Maricela’s aunt. Some Riders joined with fantasies of a different kind of eternal life, one where people got tattoos of you and prayed to you and made your deaths a part of their faith.

  It wasn’t a bad dream, but it wasn’t her dream. She wanted to do some damn good before she went down. She wanted the power to fix the broken shit in the world, because God knew there was still plenty of it to go around. Even in Sector One, where life was supposed to be about love and generosity. About taking care of everyone, not just the people born already having everything.

  High ideals, and Ana believed in them. The problem was, people were messy. They tended to fuck shit up.

  Her T-shirt mostly hid the tattoo on her arm, but she slid her fingers under the sleeve to trace the outline of the skull by memory. The ink might be visible proof that she belonged, but that wasn’t what made a Rider.

  She would kill today. She would end lives, committing the gravest sin that existed in Sector One. And instead of putting aside her life to toil for years until she’d worked away the stain of her transgression, she’d take a little black raven on her arm and accept that her sin might never be forgiven.

  Right now, she could still walk away. Her soul was more or less clean. Even earning her first few ravens wouldn’t change that. She was young enough to work them off and still have time to enjoy what was left of her mortal life before joining her family in the next world.

  She had tried to count the ravens on Deacon’s arm once. Impossible. They twined underneath it, down past his elbow and up onto his shoulder. Dozens upon dozens of deaths. Deacon could live to two hundred and not have time to atone for so much killing. When he finally ran into something ornery enough to kill him, he’d be trapped in the stark loneliness of purgatory.

  Or so the legend went.

  Again, she brushed the empty skin where her first ravens would sit, then dropped her hand and returned to her preparations. Perhaps the possibility of damnation should have bothered her more, but Ana had too much faith.

  If an afterlife of punishment was the fate God handed her for trying to protect his people, she’d accept it. But the God she believed in, the one whose compassion filled the temple when the priestesses gathered everyone close, the one who urged them to love each other—

  He wasn’t vengeful. He wasn’t cruel. And He was wise enough to know what was in her heart when she was pulling the trigger. If her God turned out to be petty enough to punish those who had given up everything to protect His people?

  Well, then Ana would gladly spend eternity in purgatory. Even if she had to spend it with Deacon.

  Chapter Ten

  The deserters had gone to ground at the extreme edge of Sector One. To get there, the Riders had to go north through Hunter’s family’s lands, then across the river and through the edge of Gideon’s sister Isabela’s property.

  The vineyards stretched to the east in rolling hills, but the road Deacon led them down curled toward foothills that grew into mountains. A smudge of green to the west marked the edge of the closest farming commune. During the long decades leading up to the war, men unlucky enough to end up there had spent their lives in brutal toil, growing the food that people consumed so blithely in Eden. Women in the communes had been given an even more thankless task—producing the next generation of labor.

  The communes and illegal farms were undergoing uncomfortable but necessary reforms under the new Council. Normally, Ashwin would find the specifics interesting—assessing the new head councilman’s commitment to his vision of a better world was an important task. But it wasn’t the mission he’d been given.

  His mission—the real one, as well as the one he’d claimed publicly—was at the end of this road. Deacon pulled his vehicle off the road a mile out, and the collection of trucks and motorcycles behind them followed, forming a loose circle around a clear patch of dirt.

  Deacon stood in the center, a pair of binoculars raised to his face. After several long minutes, he lowered them. “Bishop, Ivan? Recon.”

  “
Yes, sir,” Bishop said. Ivan simply nodded, and they both took off at a jog toward the line of trees.

  Reyes drummed his fingers on the side of the truck, then pulled a butterfly knife from his back pocket and began flicking it open and shut, over and over. The handles clicked, and he spun the knife faster, finally rolling it entirely over the top of his thumb only to catch it again.

  Hunter ignored him—and the wickedly sharp blade flashing only inches from his arm—choosing instead to squint against the slanting sunlight. “What do you think?”

  “Hard to say.” Deacon rubbed his chin. “We have to be careful. For Gideon’s sake.”

  He said it regretfully, as if every one of them would eagerly sacrifice their lives—except for the inconvenience it would cause the man who’d sent them to bleed and die. The generals at the Base would give anything for that sort of loyalty.

  Zeke hopped into the bed of a truck and pulled out his own binoculars. “Maybe I should scout in the opposite direction—”

  “No,” Deacon barked. “You’ll stay your ass right here.”

  “Deacon—”

  “For now,” he elaborated.

  Gabe leaned back against the truck and elbowed Zeke in the leg. Zeke swallowed whatever he was about to say and resumed staring moodily through the binoculars, as if he could see through the cover of the trees if he just tried hard enough.

  Survivor’s guilt. He had been with Jaden during the last attack, and no doubt harbored a range of incapacitating emotions. Ashwin had seen men go into battle with the need for vengeance overriding their survival instincts—and he’d seen those men die bloody deaths. Frequently, they took down the men with them.

  Silence reigned, until Deacon broke it with a grunt. “Two teams, if we can manage it. No one pairs off, not this time.”

  The radio at Deacon’s belt crackled. “Got eyes on the camp, boss,” came Ivan’s voice. “Looks like only part of it’s above ground. There’s some kind of cave—maybe a tunnel.”

  Reyes swung his knife shut with a loud click. “Lots of old silver mines in this area.”