Edge of Control: (Viking Dystopian Romance)

by Megan Crane

  And a bolt of hunger, pure and deep, that scorched through her so hot and wild she was sure it left marks.

  Maybe it wasn’t an accident that she didn’t look away quickly enough, so Riordan caught her staring when he turned around again, tugging his thermal into place.

  She dragged her gaze to his. And reminded herself he’d told her she didn’t have to hide. Not from him. No better time to test that theory.

  “I don’t regret it,” she said, with her chin at a belligerent angle.

  “I never asked you to.”

  She shrugged. “I’m sure I should.”

  He’d never worn that particular expression before in her presence, she was sure of it. Something harder and darker than pained, and it rolled through her like a shot of the hard stuff she drank only very sparingly and alone. A rich, peaty burn straight down the center of her.

  “I told you I was auditioning you for a slot as a camp girl,” he said quietly. “That I was bored with amateur hour, tired of playing teacher, and was ready to get back to the real thing with women who knew what they were doing.”

  He’d done it after he’d made her come apart beneath him once again. After he’d pumped himself into her and groaned like it was killing him, too. He’d slapped her on the ass and told her to get out, and he’d wrecked something inside her in that moment that if she was brutally honest with herself she knew she’d never quite gotten back. A certain innocence, maybe, funny as it was to imagine she’d ever had any. Or, more to the point, the ability to believe that someone—anyone—could actually care about her a little. Instead of about what she could do for them.

  He’d hit her as a woman, not as another fighter. And she’d done nothing but fight back ever since.

  Eiryn held back the roaring thing inside her that threatened to knock her over. With a whole lot more difficulty than she cared to admit. And she kept her damned voice even, no matter that it made her throat hurt and her mouth taste like copper.

  “I remember, thank you.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest and kept that gaze of his steady on hers. “I figure I earned a scar or two.”

  Eiryn studied him for a moment. She hadn’t asked him why he’d said it. Why he’d turned cruel overnight. Why he’d decided that not only did he need to get rid of her, he needed to take every bit of that gut-wrenching, cringe-inducing vulnerability she’d shown him over the course of her first summer back in the raider city after years in isolation out in the provinces and use it against her. With devastating accuracy.

  She hadn’t asked him then. She wouldn’t now.

  Still. “It’s a lot funnier now, I have to admit. I’d be an epically shitty camp girl, I think we can all agree.”

  Riordan didn’t smile the way he should have. “That’s not where your talents lie,” he agreed. “You’re a little too controlling to really get into the necessary camp girl mindset.”

  She wasn’t losing her sense of humor, surely. Not over ancient history.

  “Are you talking about anal?” she asked mildly, with maybe a little bit of edge beneath it. “It’s sticking your dick in a different hole, Riordan. It’s not a personality test.”

  He let out a belt of laughter at that, and in so doing, broke the tight little knot of tension that had gripped them both. Or maybe that was just her and that thing deep in her belly that was going to be the death of her one of these days. She knew it.

  “You’d be surprised,” Riordan muttered. Then he jutted his chin toward the door. “I’m going to hit the showers. How compliant are you feeling, babe? Ready to fuck on command as part of your fun vacation? I’m not wrong in thinking that’s the part you like best, am I?”

  It took every bit of self-control Eiryn had to simply stand there, stone-faced. Until—a thousand years later, when her pulse was a problem in her veins and her gut was a knot and her muscles were tensed in anticipation of the coming battle—he dropped his hard, hot gaze and smirked.

  “Don’t wait up,” he gritted out. “I might have to jack myself off a few times, thinking about the personality tests I could try on you. It’s going to take a while. And if you’re awake when I get back, who knows? Maybe I’ll consider it an invitation from my happily compliant wife after all.”

  And then he stalked to the door, threw it open, and disappeared into the hallway, taking all the air in the room—and in her lungs—with him.

  Eiryn told herself she was protecting herself as she stood there for entirely too long, gasping for breath in much the same way she had when she’d charged up the side of that ridge in Colorado. But eventually her heartbeat calmed. Her breathing slowed. And she proved herself a coward, as ever, when she hurriedly climbed up the ladder into the loft and crawled into the bed when there was a large part of her that wanted to take his challenge and throw it back in his face. Go join him in that shower. Wait right there in the center of the living area—naked, maybe, to really mess with him.

  “Any excuse to touch him,” she muttered at herself, her voice sounding too loud in the empty room, bouncing back at her from the ceiling a mere foot or two above her head and reminding her a little too much of that younger version of herself, naked and destroyed in Riordan’s bedroom in the Lodge. “You’re pathetic.”

  She didn’t hear him come in.

  But when she woke up in the middle of the night, he was stretched out with her in that loft bed, his big, hard body wrapped around her. His rough thigh was thrust between her legs, his heavy arm kept her flush against him, and one arm was curled over her ribs, claiming her completely.

  And Eiryn would have to live with the fact that she did nothing at all but lie there and enjoy it until she drifted back to sleep.

  * * *

  The following night there was no need for ass kicking of any kind when they attempted the servants’ entrance a few hours after dark. The grand pre-equinox party on the Cathedral grounds was in full swing, visible through the gates but deliberately kept separate from the mass of humanity on the streets.

  If that didn’t showcase the church’s philosophy eloquently, Eiryn didn’t know what would.

  Having gotten a little lost in all her unpleasant feelings last night, she was amped up and ready to fight her way into the Cathedral. All by herself, if necessary. She could express her thoughts about all those old memories and this far-too-intense new and intimate thing by cracking a few skulls, breaking some bones, and letting good, old-fashioned bloodlust sweep it all away.

  It was more than a little bit of a letdown when she walked right up to the door. She’d been expecting Riordan to have to incapacitate the guard and then hopefully leave her to handle a few of his friends. But they were both waved right in while the idiot gazed broodingly out at the street at a pack of giggling compliant girls.

  The door slammed behind them, delivering them into the Cathedral. Or rather, an empty hallway painted an unnecessarily bright shade of white that ran underneath the public areas of the huge church building.

  Eiryn raised her brows. Riordan only shrugged.

  There was no time to complain about how much of a buzzkill it was to expect a fight and get nothing but an empty hallway. And she didn’t really want to get any chattier with him anyway, since that led nowhere good. She started walking instead, keeping her boots light and soundless against the concrete floor, following the sound of the aristocratic crowd above them. The glimpse of the party she’d gotten through the slats in the gates had been eye-opening. Literally. There’d been a sea of remarkably silly hats, for one thing, each one more architecturally unsound and profoundly ridiculous than the next. And men and women alike had been dressed in astonishingly bright colors and impractical shapes, all silken and shimmery. Yet there’d been the slimy undertone of a threat Eiryn didn’t entirely understand, given every last one of them was soft, and worse, thought they were safe and protected.

  She skirted a set of doors that led to the kitchens, judging by the vague smell of roasting meats. Then Riordan grabbed her arm and tugged
her into an empty custodial sort of room, while what looked like a battalion of older nuns thundered past. When the coast was clear again, she eased back out and kept going, while Riordan took point at her back.

  Slowly, carefully, they made their way up out of the bowels of the Cathedral. Maud had given them as much in the way of a building layout as she could, and once they made it to the ground floor—exploding with white and gold and stained glass that was probably very impressive by day—Eiryn took a moment in the shadows behind a pillar and tried to orient herself against the map Gunnar’s former nun had drawn for them in the sand.

  Riordan took the lead. Instead of heading toward the very fancy celebration taking place out through the wide open doors on the landscaped, fountained lawn in the square, he worked his way farther into the Cathedral itself. He found a set of stairs that were clearly set aside for servants, far away from all the ostentatious luxury that bloomed everywhere else in all the overwhelmingly buttery interior lights. Eiryn eased the stairwell door shut behind her, keeping it quiet, and then ran up the stairs after him. They were both light on their feet, making no noise. One floor, then another.

  Finally, Riordan stopped on a landing and opened the stairwell door there. Slowly, very slowly. He melted out into the hall, paused to listen for a moment, then motioned for Eiryn to join him with a jerk of his head. It was like stepping back into an old fairy tale of all those bygone eras. A carpeted hallway with marble and theatric sconces everywhere she looked.

  “How is this holy?” she muttered, almost soundlessly, though she knew Riordan heard her by the way his back tensed slightly. “It’s so . . . shiny.”

  He let out a judgmental sound. A breath. “Overcompensation.”

  Of course, Eiryn reasoned as they continued down the hall, they were used to a king who fought with his men and let anyone who felt lucky come at him barehanded during festivals. He didn’t hide behind gates and high walls and guards. And Wulf remained undefeated in combat because he was that much of a badass, not because he sequestered himself on a throne somewhere and refused to let anyone test him.

  She’d taken at least three more steps down the hall before she realized that she’d had a whole train of thought about her royal half-brother without a single shred of her usual fury and sense of betrayal.

  That made her blink.

  Ahead of her, Riordan tilted his head toward the sound of female voices that wafted toward them from somewhere farther along and out of sight.

  “Pretty sure that’s the princess waiting room Maud told us about,” he said in an undertone.

  “It should be,” she agreed, picturing that sandy map again.

  If Maud’s directions—as a novice who wasn’t exactly given free rein to wander where she liked in the Cathedral—were correct in the first place. If Eiryn and Riordan remembered them right, weeks later. If everything was the same as it had been when Maud left here. If, if, if.

  But then, if was what made even the best-planned raid or mission so entertaining, no matter what happened. There was no planning for the unexpected, there was only rolling with it. That was what adrenaline and skill were for.

  Eiryn moved in front of Riordan again, feeling the way he slid into place at her back, seamless and easy. She headed toward the voices, making sure she made no noise at all as she moved down the hushed, thickly carpeted hallway. It was a strange out-of-body experience to be dressed like a compliant, yet move like a brother. She liked the way her hair flowed behind her. She wondered, briefly, when that had happened. She’d never have believed she could get used to her hair falling all over the place, braidless, but she liked it. It made her feel like she was a woman as well as a brother.

  It wasn’t lost on her that she’d always believed she had to choose between the two.

  She followed the sound of female voices around a corner, only nodding when Riordan indicated he’d hang behind a few paces to make sure no one was approaching from behind them. She paused outside an ornate entryway with odd symbols carved on the lintel above it, taking a moment to listen to the women inside speak. Princesses, if they were in the right place. If not, they could be nuns. More novices like Maud. Or whatever other classes of women the church locked away in here—which could be anything at all, she supposed. What the hell did she know about the church?

  Eiryn went very still. She listened, hoping to pick up a few clues before she walked inside. But it might as well have been a different language.

  “Then she stepped in front of me,” one nasally voiced woman said, with great drama—“and pressed herself against him.”

  “She touched him?” asked a breathy voice in return. As if she’d never heard anything so appalling in all her days.

  “And not with her hands,” Nasally said, significantly.

  “No,” gasped Breathy.

  Eiryn wanted to murder them both in cold blood. Her palms itched to close around the handle of a blade or the nearest blunt object—anything to make them stop talking.

  Instead, she simply stepped over the threshold and walked swiftly inside as if she belonged there. She took a quick visual sweep of the room as she went. It was large and astonishingly lush, like every other part of this overfed place. There was a huge window on the far end that looked out over the party in the courtyard below and the crowded streets beyond the gates. Sumptuous fabrics and deluxe stonework with a level of detail Eiryn had never seen before adorned every surface, from the intricate trio of chandeliers that dominated the ceiling to the deep, burgundy carpeting beneath her feet that seemed to clutch at her as she walked over it. The room was set up into individual seating areas, collections of couches and tables here and there, enough to cater to a whole pack of royal compliants. But there were only two on offer.

  Nasally and Breathy stood before a couch so delicate and overwrought that Eiryn doubted it could hold the weight of a single brother without snapping in half. Including herself. Each woman wore a great, gleaming, strapless dress in a different metallic shade that cascaded down to her feet like metal waterfalls. The dresses made them both glitter maniacally, reflecting dizzying light from the chandeliers above every time they took a breath.

  The one in the copper dress was tall and very skinny, with her dark hair slicked up off her forehead, then left to tumble down, oddly unslicked, to brush against her exposed shoulder blades. She wore thick black junk around her eyes that made her dark eyelashes look long and thick, and there were hints of powder on her dark-hued cheekbones. Next to her, the one in the silver dress was built round and soft, with a peachy glow to her pale skin that again, Eiryn thought was as much powder as anything else. Her light brown hair was slicked back into a severe ponytail that made her look like some kind of balloon on a string.

  They looked like idiots playing bizarre dress-up games.

  “You look like princesses,” Eiryn said softly as she walked straight to them. She sensed movement behind her and tossed a glance over her shoulder in unnecessary confirmation that it was Riordan in the arched entry. Because of course it was. No one could possibly get past him.

  “What?” asked Breathy, her silver dress blinding as she shook for no reason. Or then again, maybe she was looking at the huge and ferocious man suddenly looming there in the doorway. “Wait, is that—?”

  “Of course we’re princesses—” Nasally exclaimed, her face already crumpling into a frown that looked a little too comfortable, as if, given time, she’d live forever with that expression on her face.

  But it was clear neither one of them recognized the threat coming directly at them, because Eiryn was on them, then, and neither over-shiny female did a single thing to offer a defense. Another bummer. Because it was obvious to Eiryn that attacking two fluttery princesses outright would be nothing short of cruelty, no matter the bloodlust pumping inside her, urging her to create a little carnage. It was beneath her, really, to engage with two women she could snap into pieces without so much as breaking a sweat.

  She approached it like a surgical s
trike. She tried to be kind. She lashed out with her left fist and hit silvery Breathy in the solar plexus, hard enough to make the soft woman crumple over and gasp for breath, but not hard enough to do any lasting damage. While she was trying to breathe, Eiryn hauled skinny, coppery Nasally to her and choked her out. It took about three seconds and was almost silent. That meant that just as Breathy looked as if she might try to breathe normally again, Eiryn took her out with a little love tap to the temple. Using her palm, because these women weren’t her enemies. They weren’t any kind of opponents. They were hapless weaklings in overly colorful dresses who happened to be standing in the wrong place right when Eiryn needed to pretend she was one of them. She didn’t need to break any bones or kill them.

  Honor forbade it. But that meant it was so easy it was no pleasure at all. Two pulled punches and a laughably easy choke. And just like that there was a pile of gleaming princesses on the pretty little couch.

  Eiryn scowled down at them.

  “I’m not doing that weird shit to my hair,” she muttered grumpily, then looked back over her shoulder.

  Riordan crossed his arms and propped himself up against the arched entryway. He shook his head, his gaze on the unconscious women in their metallic heap. “I don’t know how you could possibly make your hair do that even if you felt like it.”

  Eiryn sighed, because there was no time to stand here and debate the mystery of princess hair, a conversation she thought might go on for some time.

  “I’m hoping the dress alone will be so blinding that I can bluff my way into wherever the bishop is.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Riordan shifted his attention back to the hallway. “And if it doesn’t work, we’ll get to him another way. He’s a priest. What’s he going to do? Pray at us?”

  “Says the man who won’t be wearing a shiny, blinding carburetor masquerading as a dress.”

  Riordan let out that low laugh. The one she liked best. The one she kept imagining was only for her. Because she was an idiot. Again.

  “The carburetor will be too big for you. Try the weird copper one.”