by Megan Crane
“I’m sure it was a mistake.” He growled that at her. Maybe it was a warning, but if so, she didn’t heed it. Of course she didn’t.
“It wasn’t.” Her hands tightened in his. “I ran. I thought I might just keep on running. You’d all think I was dead and I’d be free.”
For a moment he only studied her. She was maddening and fascinating. She was Eiryn. And this sounded a little too much like defeat for his peace of mind.
He could feel the intensity pouring off of him. He was sure he looked like he was wading into battle.
But when he spoke his voice was soft.
“I don’t think you’ve thought it through, baby.” He flipped her hands over in his and let his thumbs move over her skin. Her deceptively slender fingers and those seemingly small palms with her calluses worn deep. “These are hands crafted for battle. So are you. This is a little break, that’s all. I don’t think you’d like years of it.”
“It’s been years and years since I’ve let my guard down at all,” she told him, her head tipped back and her gaze still much too liquid, much too bright. It should have sent him into a panic. Instead, he moved closer. “Much less for days at a time. I can’t do it back home, not ever.”
He smoothed his hands down her arms, toned from years of bladecraft and those vicious punches she could throw with such devastating accuracy. He looked down into her beautiful, lethal, tough and vulnerable face that had haunted him across the years. He felt the scar she’d given him all over again. He was as hard as he was intent on her. She’d been in his head for a long, long time and it was worse, now.
She was under his skin. She was in there deep. He didn’t think she was going anywhere.
“You can let down your guard with me.” Riordan didn’t care if what he said then sounded like the gruff sort of promise that was usually sealed with blood. He also didn’t care to explore how deeply and fervently he meant it. “I wear your mark on my skin, Eiryn. We’ve spent two weeks acting compliant in this crazy place. You don’t have a single thing you need to hide from me, now or ever.”
She pulled in a shaky breath that wrecked him. He thought the emotion in her gaze might tip over into tears, but it didn’t. Of course it didn’t. Still, she reached up and fit her hard, delicate hand to his cheek, holding it there against his beard and his jaw.
It made a man want to believe in prayer.
“I believe you,” she whispered.
As if that, too, was a vow.
11
The first night out and about in Great Lake Cathedral City, hometown of the asshole bishop and his entire fucked-up church, was necessarily more about mission reconnaissance than action.
Eiryn preferred action. The bloodier, the better. Having to hide in plain sight, swept up in crowds of pervy mainland men out to get their dicks wet while calling it a pious act of compliance was not really on her list of favorite ways to pass an evening. The more time she spent with compliant men, the more she preferred raiders. Raiders were direct. They were honest and to the point. They didn’t fumble around pretending a hard cock had some greater, more holy purpose than a good fuck.
She might have found her role as a compliant woman significantly less hideous than she’d anticipated. Nothing she’d said to Riordan earlier was a lie. There was a freedom in all the strange compliant rules—or maybe it was simply that she’d never spent a lot of time thinking about how many boundaries she’d been living with as a supposedly free raider brother. But out on the crowded streets around Cathedral Square, in and out of the very old, scrupulously well-maintained buildings that loomed officiously and broadcast their relationship with the church with every clean line, the sea of compliant men on the prowl was officially a lot less amusing.
If she was totally honest, it was a whole lot better than sitting in that tiny room with Riordan, neck deep in even more of that intimacy bullshit that was ripping her up from the inside out. Trying to figure out what it meant to let down her guard or if she even wanted such a thing or what the hell was even happening with the two of them ranked right up there as more stuff she absolutely did not want to deal with at all.
Because what happened with that crap was this: It snuck its way into her and knotted itself deep in her gut, so she spent half her time tracking the patterns of the guards working the perimeter of the Cathedral on both sides of the high iron gates the way she was supposed to and needed to—and the rest analyzing why she felt things. Like why, when Riordan had taken her hands in his, she’d wanted to lie down somewhere and possibly die as she fought her way through all the great, unwieldy things that had swamped her.
And worse, why she wasn’t as furious or embarrassed as she should have been that she’d showed him all those things in the first place. That she’d confessed things she’d never have imagined she would ever tell a soul. That whatever else was happening on this insane trip, the armor she’d built up between them over all these years was eroding. Stripping away, piece by piece, until it felt the way it had earlier tonight.
As if they were skin to skin. Again. At last.
But there she went again. Thinking about her fucking feelings while there was work to be done, like the kind of sniveling little bitch she hadn’t been ever, not even when she was a twelve-year-old girl stranded in the hinterland with a cruel old man and a whole lot more to cry about. She gritted her teeth as she and Riordan rounded the Cathedral for the third time during their preliminary recon and tried to get her head on straight.
The night wore on. They tried to figure out which entrances were for the higher ranking people, how those higher ranking people dressed and carried themselves and sought entry in the first place, and beyond that, marveling at how much light these bastards used. It was everywhere. It was shocking. There were lights on the outside of the Cathedral, making the Cathedral itself glow like a beacon to light up the night, with no generator noise polluting the cool September dark. There were even streetlamps, casting warm light up and down all the streets surrounding Cathedral Square and making the people who crowded there practically giddy as they wandered about in all that brightness.
Eiryn had lived in the Lodge for a long time. She was used to electricity and she was even used to the quiet that came with it ever since Gunnar had moved the generators into the caves. But this seemed almost . . . too much. Too over the top. As if the church was showing off. Blasting its might and power with every single streetlamp and every lightbulb up on one of its towering steeples.
It was one thing to light a building that people lived in. It was another, Eiryn thought, to light it up purely to awe anyone who looked at it.
She and Riordan would normally have split up to cover more ground, but it only took one interaction with an overly handsy craftsman from the New Mexico peninsula—during which Eiryn had to bite her tongue and somehow refrain from breaking his groping fingers off—for them to rethink that approach.
“Still want to be compliant?” Riordan asked, sounding a little too smug, as he ushered her away from the man they’d both managed not to maim. Somehow. “That still appealing now that some jackass had his chubby hands all over your ass?”
“I want to be selectively compliant.”
He had that heavy arm of his slung over her shoulders, a state of affairs that Eiryn knew was necessary here, especially this close to the equinox. But with another flash of uncomfortable honesty, she knew that the fact that it was necessary was the least of the reasons she liked it. Riordan let out a low laugh that was different enough from his trademark laughter that she was tempted to believe it was all hers, rich and inviting and yes, intimate.
“You want a vacation,” he corrected her. “And let me just point out that only a raider who’s spent her entire life in battle would think this shit is a vacation, babe.”
She rolled her eyes at him, but the truth was, joking about this was better than what had happened in their room earlier. Much better. That had been . . . unwise and uncontrolled. What had happened between them that day in
Colorado had been intimate enough. Eiryn still couldn’t seem to catch her breath from it. She couldn’t seem to get past it. She certainly didn’t need to add to it.
But she told herself they had the whole, long winter to hash these things out and figure out how, if they were going to keep breaking each other apart, they’d put each other back together again at the end of it before they had to go back to who they were in the clan. Because she couldn’t do her job effectively when she felt like this, fragile and oversized, as if her skin no longer fit her.
Not like you were doing it all that effectively before, she reminded herself sourly.
She blinked that away. This wasn’t the time to think of her relationship with Wulf or what would become of her once this mainland season was over. She didn’t particularly want to think about what was happening with Riordan, either. Not really. The ugly, squishy feelings were bad enough. The truth was, he’d been right when he’d said she’d fought. She’d fought and fought. All she knew how to do was fight. She’d fought with Wulf. Gunnar. Tyr. She was still fighting with Riordan.
It was the rest of it that she had trouble with. She could dropkick anything. She greatly enjoyed it, in fact. But she was fucking useless when it came to all these heavy and twisted feelings.
Far better to concentrate on the one thing she’d ever been any good at. Assessing a seemingly impregnable building like the Cathedral, for example, and finding that—like everywhere that wasn’t clan-held, because the clan was about and for all its members instead of only a select few of them—the sort of folks who drew distinctions between classes of people always, always had a separate entrance for those they thought were less important.
The Cathedral’s servant entrance was tucked away behind a thick set of trees and a half-assed sort of wall. It was guarded by one very bored looking douchebag who spent more time hovering off to the side of one tree trunk, the better to check out the compliant talent out on the prowl in the street, than he did paying attention to the door.
“I don’t think we’re going to need a princess,” Riordan said after their fourth or fifth pass, when they’d stopped at a good angle to watch the guard and the door behind him.
“What a shame,” Eiryn muttered sarcastically. She shook her head. “What’s the point of being a princess in the first place if you have to rent out your pussy like one of those prostitutes in Louisville?”
“If we trip over one I hope you ask her.” Riordan laughed as if he was picturing that interaction, and Eiryn shoved back the dark thing in her that twisted a little bit at the idea he found the idea of her versus a princess quite so hilarious. “In fact, let’s make sure we do.”
Maud had been clear about the sequence of events here. The private Cathedral parties leading up to the equinox celebration were opportunities for the self-styled kings and nobles of the western kingdoms to show off their wares. Their daughters were paraded around so everyone could see what was on offer and make the appropriate bids on the merchandise. It was treated like a grand party, no different from the celebrations outside that were the closest compliants came to raider bonfires, but the aristocratic version of the September equinox was serious in the extreme and not the least bit spontaneous. The nobles of the western kingdoms availed themselves of the chapel privileges on offer to them only on this particular night, because what man could resist the fervent prayers of the well-trained nuns? And the novices were sometimes let out of seclusion during these parties to wander about—under the watchful eye of nuns far past their bleeding years, of course—and, wherever possible, excite the passions of the nobility. In the same way, the daughters of the western kings and aristocrats who would actually have to sate those excited passions were led about like cattle at market.
Back in their small room, Eiryn and Riordan ate the food they’d snuck out of the communal dining area and talked strategy while outside their windows, the night grew darker around the ever-glowing beacon of the Cathedral. Rather than find a princess on the way to the equinox gatherings, which they’d originally thought made the most sense because they could control more variables, they would sneak in through the servants’ entrance, assess the situation from inside, and see if the opportunity to assume the identity of a princess presented itself.
“Maybe it won’t.” Riordan was kicked back on the couch with his hands laced behind his head and his boots propped up on the small table, looking not the least bit like the compliant man he’d been playing for the past two weeks. He’d stripped off his thermal and was sitting there with acres of his hard-packed brown chest on display, with his tattoos shouting out the truth about him in unmistakable ink, and those marvelous diagonal slashes in his steel-ridged abdomen disappearing beneath the low waist of his trousers. He looked like himself again. And it turned out that there were parts of Eiryn after all that were entirely too female to mind it. “Maybe we can find the bishop without resorting to another round of playing dress up. Gunnar’s nun only thinks she saw the fucker interacting with the guests. I have to say, he sounds more like the type to lounge around waiting to be worshipped.”
“All these mainland kinglets are the same kind of coward,” Eiryn agreed. “Bishop or little pompous douche in a compound, it’s all the same.”
They didn’t quite smile at each other then. Their earlier conversation seemed to hang in the air between them, growing larger and heavier by the second. Or maybe it was that loft bed above them that was doing that—sucking all the air from the room. Making Eiryn wonder what she would do if Riordan put his hands on her tonight.
Or what she’d do if he didn’t.
And more, wonder when she’d become a little fainting virgin about sex.
When they’d exhausted every potential avenue of possible approach into the Cathedral and contingency plans for what they’d do in any imagined eventuality, the silence stretched out between them, and that was worse. Eiryn got up from her place on the cozy little rug on the other side of the table the moment she realized she was holding her breath, waiting for him to say something or do something or—
It was pathetic. Whatever her odd, gnarled feelings over the past few days, she was a brother, not a bitch. She did not mope around after men. Especially not men she’d already had.
She stretched. Then she decided she might as well get a little training session in, here in this safe little room with no eyes on her but Riordan’s. She set about that the moment she thought of it, and if the idea of burning off the worrying, brooding sort of restlessness inside her also appealed, all the better. She kicked off her boots so she could get her bare feet against the cool concrete floor and the rugs and so there was no chance anyone below would hear her.
She started with some old-school battle art, moving fluidly from one position to the next as warm up, practicing her stance and a number of arm positions that weren’t quite strikes. She wasn’t surprised when Riordan grunted and then rolled up to his feet too. He got rid of his boots as well, then joined her. There wasn’t much space in their little room, but they made the most of it. They dropped and did alternating sets of planks and pushups until they were both shaking and sweating. Then they alternated sets of pull-ups on the loft overhang with squats, lunges, and other movements that utilized their own body weight and harnessed explosive movement—exactly what they had to be ready for.
It had to be about an hour later when Riordan wiped his face with his arm and then focused his dark eyes on her. Hot. Commanding.
Lethal in more than one way.
He lifted his hands to his face and shifted his stance, as if he was getting ready to strike.
“Want to go a few rounds?” he asked, dark and low.
The way other men asked for sex. And Eiryn didn’t bother pretending that she was unaware that for all intents and purposes, where the two of them were concerned, it was the same thing.
And she did want to go a few rounds, in fact. Oh, how she did. They’d been interrupted in Colorado and that still hummed inside of her no matter what had com
e afterward. No matter what might come afterward here.
“I don’t think so,” she made herself say.
His dark brows rose while his eyes gleamed. “Scared?”
She laughed, and too bad that it came out a little rusty. “You wish. You make a lot of noise when you fight, babe.” Eiryn smirked at him and then threw his own words back at him. “No raider sparring pleasure for my compliant winter husband. You’ll bring the rest of the building down on top of us.”
He grunted at that and lowered his hands. “If you say so.”
In a tone that basically called her a weak-ass punk.
“Oh, okay then,” she threw back at him, nothing if not easily goaded into a fight. She thought it was a character strength, not a flaw. “Let’s do it. I’m sure we’ll keep it civil for the first five minutes or so. But then—”
“Yeah, then.” He turned to the couch to grab his thermal and swiped it over his face like a towel. “Then is a bitch.”
He started to tug his shirt back on while he was still facing the couch, not her. And Eiryn couldn’t seem to keep herself from letting her gaze drop to that scar on his back that she’d more or less ignored, pretty much every day since she’d cut him, until that unguarded moment in the caravan. And the truth was, when he was wearing his usual weapon harness, with blades hanging everywhere, it was hard to notice. Some years she’d almost forgotten it was there.
But tonight, it was all she could see.
His back was a marvel, of course. This was Riordan. He was strong and wide and gloriously chiseled into sleek brown marble. The names of his lost family scrolled down the length of his spine and led straight to the jagged little scar she’d put there with her own hand, as if they were all part and parcel of the same thing.
Something was wrong with her. Because she knew that she should feel shame. Or barring that, given that he’d deserved it and she couldn’t quite bring herself to regret it, something a little more complicated than . . . pride.
