Edge of Control: (Viking Dystopian Romance) Read online

  “Waterlogged guns for watered-down little bitches,” Jurin boomed, so loud it should have made the captives flinch—had they been capable of doing anything so active while Gunnar dealt with them in his particularly creative way. “I’d sooner take on an enemy with my own dick than with some ancient fucking artifact.”

  “Neither one shoots straight, brother,” Riordan replied, smirking. “I’m not sure your dick would be an improvement.”

  Jurin clapped him on the shoulder. Almost tenderly, for him, and it was still a wallop. “That’s not what your mother says when I make her scream my name.”

  “Asshole.” Riordan shook his head at his brother. “My mother’s dead.”

  Jurin let out a laugh that bounced off the pale white birch trees with their scar marks and careened around the small, smoky clearing. “She’s that loud, brother. And I’m that good.”

  Riordan laughed and waved the big man off with an appropriately rude gesture. Then went back to worrying about shit that had absolutely nothing to do with him. His role in the clan meant he trafficked in secrets and the things people wanted desperately to keep hidden, which meant he often knew all kinds of things that weren’t his business, but he couldn’t pretend Eiryn was part of his job. If she was, this would all be a hell of a lot easier.

  But nothing about Eiryn was ever easy.

  He’d warned her, not that it had done any good. Eiryn was nothing if not a pain in the ass, a trait she shared with every other member of the brotherhood, in fairness. They were all too lethal. Too full of themselves. Too conscious of the fact they were the most powerful raiders—and therefore the most powerful people, period—in the entire world. But unlike all the other, brawnier and hairier assholes he called brother, Eiryn always had been a pain in the ass. From the time she was just a little kid with her dark brown hair unbrushed and streaming in an inky shadow behind her, getting underfoot while she followed him and her older half-brothers around the Lodge. Straight on through to that summer when he’d lost his mind and taken a forbidden and deeply fucked-up taste of her that he still wasn’t sure how he’d lived through, given who shared her blood. And then all the years since, when if she could have chopped him into pieces with her dark gaze alone, he’d have been eviscerated a thousand times over.

  Nothing had changed tonight. Nothing ever changed. But he was in a shittier mood than he should have been because of it. Raw and restless and more than a little brooding, the way he was every time he broke the silent, seething agreement between them and tried to talk to her about anything that wasn’t strictly clan business.

  Maybe stop trying, asshole, he told himself darkly. The way you should have ten years ago.

  It didn’t help his mood any.

  The entire night had been pretty much bullshit from start to finish. It had been an easy enough objective—maybe too easy, Riordan thought, now that fire and pieces of temple had rained down on his head. It had seemed straightforward enough in the planning stage, back in the raider city in Gunnar’s junkyard basement lair. Go to the temple on the map. See if all that crap Tyr’s mainlander mate spouted about electric lights and ancient power grids was true. And then, if possible, flip a switch, find a satellite or two, and change the world.

  No problem.

  Riordan was a tracker, not a tech head. He didn’t get the fascination with old hunks of machines that rarely worked the way they were supposed to in this waterlogged, piece of shit new world. He understood the wet, cold earth he’d grown up in, knee deep in mud out in the fields and barefoot in the woods. He could read it, predict it, get it. He could find anyone, anywhere, and no matter if they didn’t want to be found. He tracked information as well as he did people, and he gathered it whether the people in question wanted him to or not. Usually they really didn’t. He could find paths and trails where everyone else saw nothing but a sheer mountain face and their own certain death. He could put together two random conversations and a stray sighting of the right person in the wrong place and foil a half-cocked assassination plot. And he could kick major ass while he did it.

  He didn’t entirely understand what the fuck the war chief’s woman wanted to do with the ancient power station and server farm that had stood on this hill earlier today—dubbed a temple by the church in their never-ending quest to claim anything that smacked of tech and make it a holy remnant instead—or why Gunnar, the clan’s preeminent tech head, was as into it as he was. Or why his king wanted to go along with it, for that matter. Sure, lights were great. He enjoyed them himself and the fact some asshole bishops wanted to keep what few people were left in the dark was reason enough for Riordan to want to set the world ablaze himself.

  But he was not a fan of mercenary dickwads creeping around blowing shit up—especially not when he was standing a little too close to the exploding thing in question. And then, adding insult to injury, the cockroach who’d run straight into him on that dark hillside had been about as much of a challenge to take down as jacking his own dick.

  All that before Eiryn showed up, hot eyed and alone the way she never was these days, and a hard, swift kick into same knotted pit of regret and fury inside him where she’d always hit him hardest—

  He needed to stop. This was what happened when he dropped the dumbass game they always played and actually talked to her. He drove himself crazy.

  And the night had already been crazy enough.

  “Are you keeping a vigil for these assholes?” Gunnar asked gruffly, jolting Riordan out of his own bullshit. He should have been relieved—and he was lucky it hadn’t been some more douches swinging blades and peppering the trees with more wild gunshots that never seemed to hit their targets. He eyed Gunnar and what was left of the mercenaries at his feet.

  “Just wondering how long you were going to sit around gossiping with cockroaches, old man,” he replied easily enough, with his usual grin.

  Gunnar didn’t quite smile in return—the brother had always been far too committed to storming around looking tortured, even these days when he should have taken that shit down a notch or two with his own, personal nun to ease his pain—but the corner of his hard mouth turned up. Slightly. Very slightly.

  “About as long as you plan to stand there with your dick in your hand,” he retorted in his usual growly, unfriendly way. “You get hit on the head or something?”

  Riordan grunted a wordless reply to that, because what could he say? That every time he saw Eiryn it was like seeing a ghost and it still pissed him off about as much as it had ten years ago? Gunnar might act like he didn’t give a shit about anything but the machines he treated like pets and the mate he treated like his favorite machine, but Riordan had yet to meet a man who wanted any male of his acquaintance anywhere near his sister. Much less another brother.

  He headed out of the clearing instead of bleating out his feelings like a punk ass bitch, and Gunnar fell into place beside him. They left the bodies where they were, with no funeral pyres to show the men the respect they hadn’t earned. Mercenaries were creatures without honor. Whores, plain and simple. They killed for wealth and power and their own selfish gain. They took no vows and were a part of no clan. They deserved to end up as food for scavengers in the dark woods near the temple they’d destroyed. Their names would never be remembered. Their comrades would not record their loss in ink upon their skin. It would be as if they’d never existed on this torn up, leftover world.

  Riordan forgot them the moment he left the clearing.

  It was a short hike back to the beach where they’d moored their ships earlier today, an easy half-hour over the rocky, forested ground, and the moon obliged them by coming up as they strode through the night. This part of the Catskills bordered the sea directly, with a variety of cliffs etched out from the water that had risen in the Storms and then swallowed down whatever land had been there before. There were whole cities beneath the water in this part of the world, and on clear days with a soft wind it was possible to look down into the past as if memories lived there, a
short dive from the surface. But this was a dark summer’s night. There was nothing but too much fire in the wind and the August moon coming up a blood orange in the sky.

  It felt ominous. Like the rest of the night’s epic shit show, now that he thought about it.

  Down on the stretch of sandy grass a few yards back from the high-water mark, there was already a fire going and something cooking. Gunnar headed toward the fire and the two blond-haired, pale-skinned women who tended it. One was Joelle, a busty, happy camp girl with a particular affection for the rougher stuff, bless her. The other was Maud, Gunnar’s nun, short-haired and graceful in the collar she always wore around her neck. Riordan stripped off his battle harness as he rounded the fire, pleased to see what looked like a healthy set of rabbits on sticks in the flames as he passed. He navigated around black-haired Ellis, with the bones of his enemies in his beard, who’d thrown a camp girl under him to fuck, hard and fast, on the grass a few feet away from the fire.

  Battle lust was a bitch. Riordan grabbed his pack from the pile nearby and looked around, trying to decide what he needed to tend to first. Some of his brothers were down by the water, letting the sea wash away their sweat and blood. Others, like Ellis, were working out their adrenaline overload in other ways.

  Riordan threw himself down on a patch of grass near the fire, using a smooth-faced rock to lean against. He pulled out his supplies from his pack and cleaned off his blade as he sat there, waiting while a camp girl with long, golden-brown limbs shown to perfection by the tiny, stretchy shorts she was wearing, tended the brother next to him. Bast had his head tipped back as he propped himself up on his elbows, sweat gleaming all over his pale gold skin, his cuts and scrapes cleaned and one even bandaged by the woman who was now crouched over him on her hands and knees, taking his cock deep into her mouth. She moved her hips while she worked, rolling them from side to side in a restless rhythm that Riordan recognized instantly even though he couldn’t see her face beneath the curtain of her hair. The motion in those hips meant she was Lyla, and on another, rowdier night, Riordan might have slid up behind her and taken that juicy cunt of hers up on its wordless, needy invitation.

  Instead, he watched. Like all the camp girls, Lyla had a deep affection for sucking cock. In her case, it was probably because she’d grown up on the mainland and had spent the first part of her life trying and failing to be compliant, as the priests and the petty kings demanded of their subjects. Compliant citizens were called upon to repopulate the drowned and meager Earth, but not to enjoy themselves while they did it. Sex was a chore, a duty, a sacred responsibility. Bullshit.

  Instead of finding their pleasure where they could, idiotic compliants subjected themselves to church-sanctioned winter marriages, finding a fuck buddy at the September equinox and spending the dark, stormy winter months trying to make babies for the good of mankind. Come the spring, if the woman was pregnant, they’d take another year together to bring the child into the world. If she wasn’t, she’d pick a different winter husband. And she’d repeat the cycle until she stopped bleeding.

  It amazed Riordan, having been lucky enough to be born into a raider clan and raised without all those mainland hang ups, was how many mainlanders bought into it.

  But then there were girls like Lyla, who had been thrown out of her settlement for experimenting with noncompliant forms of sex, like sucking cock. She’d walked straight into a raiding party two summers ago and she’d never looked back. Now she was doing what she liked, taking her time with Bast as if she could keep it up all night. If Riordan’s memory served, she could. She moved her head up and down and didn’t use her hands at all, creating a slick, hot rhythm that Riordan could feel in his own dick.

  Bast came with a sudden grunt, thrusting wildly into Lyla’s mouth, and she took it all, then licked him a few times for good measure. When she sat up a few moments later and knelt there before him, the brother smiled, reaching over to smooth a hand over her thick, brown hair as it poured down around her.

  Riordan was already hard and ready when she turned her smile on him.

  “Are you hurt?” she asked in her soft, slightly roughened voice.

  “It’s not my blood, sweetheart,” Riordan assured her as she moved closer to him, pulling a bucket of clean water with her.

  “I’ll get it off you anyway,” she murmured. “Just to be sure.”

  Lyla knelt beside him, running a cool cloth over his face and his chest while he sat there and told himself to decompress already. Before he became the next thing that exploded here tonight. He looked past Lyla as she worked him over with her soft hands, past her round, naked tits high and sweet and that invitingly round ass of hers. Over by the fire, Gunnar was sitting near his woman as she knelt before him and tended to the food, what looked like amusement all over his usually grim face. Gunnar hadn’t wanted to bring his nun on this mission and had argued against it when Wulf had requested Maud accompany them. He’d finally relented, even though he’d had to basically knock her out and keep her drugged to get her across the Atlantic. Riordan thought it was hilarious that the only man he knew who could operate a one-man ship across the bitch of a spring sea had found himself a mate who was too seasick to stay conscious on a mild, late August crossing. Farther back from the fire, Tyr was lounging, back against the trunk of an oak tree, his dark-haired mate in his lap, and if the way she was rubbing herself against him was any indication the war chief was deep inside of her. Everything was as it should have been in the wake of a mission that hadn’t gone well, but could have been a whole lot worse.

  Riordan should have been relaxing, or trying. He saw his brother Marcus stride up from the water fully naked, his dirty-blond hair slicked back and his tanned white skin gleaming wet in the firelight, and then watched him tug pretty Janhavi up and onto her feet with an easy grip on her arm. Her dark-brown face was all dimples and laughter as she looked up at him, her black hair in soft little bunches, and it looked almost like some kind of dance when Marcus kept right on lifting her up against him. She wrapped her legs around his waist and held herself high as he reached between them, then she slid her way down on his cock. Marcus widened his stance, sliding his hands into her tiny shorts and grabbing hold of her ass cheeks. Then Janhavi was the one to move, lifting and lowering herself against him to ride his cock where he stood, her thighs clamped tight around Marcus’s waist.

  These were the sights and sounds of the usual post-battle haze. Riordan generally liked to lose himself in nights like this. The camp girls were hot and wet and eager, and they could go as many rounds as he needed to get the aggression out of him. Even mated females like Gunnar’s Maud and Tyr’s Helena were a pleasure to watch as they took their men down from battle ready to what passed for peaceful in the brotherhood. Raiders liked to make sex a celebration. There was no shame in a long, hot screw in the middle of a gathering. Life was short and winters were long. Joy was fleeting and death was certain and, more to the point, probably not far off.

  Raiders took their pleasures where they found them.

  But Riordan couldn’t seem to get there the way he normally did. That creepy-ass moon was too big in the sky above him and still that ominous color, there was no sign of Eiryn or Wulf, and even sweet Lyla with her soothing hands and cool water against his skin couldn’t calm him down.

  Riordan didn’t believe in omens. He was a raider brother, and no omen or prophecy had helped him get where he was. He’d been born to a farmer and his long-term mate out in the fertile fields of the clan’s farthest territories, and he’d been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps the way males in his bloodline had done since the first of them walked away from what was left of civilization and threw in with the raiders after the Storms ended. But Riordan had wanted more than greedy fields and brutally short seasons, fickle crops and wandering calves. The summer he’d turned ten, he’d run away from his parents during the September equinox festival in the raider city where the whole clan gathered to stock up on winter supplies and gu
lp down the last little bit of summer and celebration before the winter rains came. Riordan had holed up in the dirt beneath one of the shops in the village with a pouch of dried meat and a skin of water, and he’d stayed hidden until the rains hit in earnest ten days later. There was no more possibility of crossing the mountains that cut the city off from the rest of clan territory at that point, which meant there was no possibility of anyone taking him back home to the farm.

  It had been the best winter of his life.

  He’d spent the dark, stormy months in the clan nursery just down the hillside from the fabled Lodge where King Donovan and the mighty warrior brothers lived. The nursery was where all the clan’s children whose parents were either dead or otherwise occupied with clan business were raised, and to a farm boy from way the hell out in the lonely countryside with no neighbors within three days’ walk, it was paradise. Riordan had learned how to fight. Not the way his father and uncles fought, out of necessity so far out in the middle of nowhere, more brute strength than skill. He’d learned real bladecraft at last. He’d picked up a good blade that winter, curved because it was different from everybody else’s and he’d been arrogant enough at ten years old to like that distinction. Riordan had never put it down again.

  Not even when he’d learned, come the spring, that his family had died on one of those mountain passes. All of them. His strong, stern father and his quietly tough mother. His two younger brothers. They’d waited too long to head back to the farm, likely because they’d been searching for Riordan in the city while he’d deliberately stayed hidden away to avoid them, and they’d been caught in one of the early snowstorms in the higher elevations.