Edge of Control: (Viking Dystopian Romance)

by Megan Crane

  She blocked out the protests from the other two, which sounded a lot like excuses to her, because the guard holding her arm dragged her inside the bishop’s chamber and slammed the door shut behind him. The lights were so bright inside it took her a moment to adjust, but that worked because it made her eyes water. All the better to look weak and emotional.

  Eiryn let herself droop a little bit in the guard’s grip, the way she imagined a soft little weeping thing would.

  He laughed. It was a nasty sound.

  “Oh, you’ll pay for your impertinence, you little gash,” he breathed at her, smelling of a roasted dinner and other things Eiryn preferred not to speculate on. “Throwing yourself at the great man’s door when everyone knows he’s in his holy seclusion before the Equinox Mass. Do you really think he’ll bless you for your presumption?”

  He gave her a hard shake instead of waiting for her to answer, and Eiryn found she didn’t care much for the experience. It made her brain seem to jostle inside her skull, which in turn made her feel deeply, darkly murderous. She sucked a homicidal urge back down and reminded herself she was a weak, soft, breakable thing men like this could do with as they pleased.

  Not a raider brother who could knock his teeth down his throat without expending too much effort.

  “He’ll make you wish you were dead, girl,” the guard told her. With obvious relish. “And when he’s done with you, I’ll take my turn, and I’m not nearly as careful as he is. He likes to make a point.”

  Another unnecessary shake, with predictable results—but Eiryn couldn’t let herself put this asshole’s eyes out. Not yet. Not even when he got a little more in her face in a way she supposed an animal like him would consider sexual.

  “But I like it when they cry,” he sneered at her. “And believe me, bitch. You will.”

  He pulled her down a short hallway. One side was dedicated to stern church teachings, copied out onto lengthy scrolls and hung with lights pointed straight at them. The other was lined with benches, as if there was usually a line for the pleasure of Bishop Seph’s company in a room he called his confessional.

  Finally, the guard hauled her through another door, and she understood in an instant that she was finally in the right place.

  This room was larger than all the cells she’d passed in the hallway, though built in much the same vein. Meaning, as much like a cold jail cell as possible without actually adding any bars. It was a round, stone chamber with pegs in the walls at odd intervals. Eiryn couldn’t understand what they were for until her gaze snagged on the woman almost hanging off of one of the lower pegs from her bound hands, her back arched so that only the very tips of her toes touched the ground. Her short-cropped dark, curly hair marked her as a nun. She wore a strange, zippered dress that was thrust halfway up her thighs and had been left open to show her mottled pink breasts, as if she’d been slapped there. Repeatedly. The nun didn’t look up when the guard entered, dragging Eiryn with him, though she had to have heard the scuffs of feet. She kept her gaze averted, as if the stone floor was mesmerizing.

  Eiryn swallowed as the guard hauled her farther into the room. There were wide, steel-reinforced trunks against the walls. Another one of those benches she’d seen in the last cell, this one wider and longer. A different contraption that looked more utilitarian, with no cushioned bit and something that looked like a place to dry clothes—not, she imagined, what it was used for. And then the guard yanked her around—far harder than necessary—and Eiryn saw the man sitting at the end of the room, hidden from view until anyone seeking him was already all the way inside his grim little chamber. He sat in a very large, dramatic chair that was bolted to the floor, fitted with wide armrests and a tall back.

  Bishop Seph.

  Eiryn knew it was him at a glance. He looked cruel. Cold. Pale like a ghoul with terrible eyes. He was lean and reedy, his silvery hair cut short and a strip of beard on his chin, nowhere else. His hands were elegant and long, and tangled in the long, chestnut-colored hair of the woman crouched between his legs as he drove his cock into the back of her throat.

  Deep. Hard. More than a little brutal. And Eiryn had seen enough deep throating in her time to know that this example of it was all about his gratification, not hers.

  The bishop glanced up at the guard’s arrival without expression and without altering the pace of his furious thrusts at all.

  The woman on her knees before him wasn’t dressed like a nun. Her warm gold arms were bent at the elbows and tied behind her back. She wore a long skirt that was rucked up over her hips to show a bright red ass, crisscrossed with angry-looking welts. Eiryn could hear her choking on the bishop’s cock, a sound which he appeared not to hear.

  More likely, he enjoyed it.

  “Another one, Bishop,” the guard said, sounding only slightly less nasty than when he’d been speaking to Eiryn alone. “She got all the way to the door.”

  The bishop kept ramming his cock into the woman’s throat, but his gaze moved to Eiryn then.

  He was frigid. Cold all the way through, like something far worse than mere ice. His merciless gaze bored through her and that thin line of his mouth shouted out his disapproval. Cruelty came off him in waves, and even though Eiryn had no doubt at all that she could kick his ass up one side of this little torture chamber and down the other, she felt a little cold shiver skate down the length of her spine. A warning. Her body’s way of alerting her to the darkness in this man that he made no attempt to hide.

  It pleased her deeply to know, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was almost certainly not getting the same warning at the sight of her.

  “Have you come to pay a little penance?” the bishop asked. His voice was smooth. Almost friendly on the surface, but she could hear the dark rot beneath it. She could see it in his cold eyes and in the harsh way he slammed himself into that woman’s face.

  A little pit yawned open deep in Eiryn’s gut.

  She welcomed it. He might be a scary motherfucker, but she was scarier. Much, much scarier. Especially because she wasn’t cloaking herself in holy words. Or showing her hand in the first five seconds.

  “I met a man who told me only you could save me, your holiness,” she said. She made herself sound silly with nerves. Almost overcome.

  The bishop abruptly stopped fucking the woman’s face. He pulled out and hauled her up by her throat, his cold eyes assessing her as she hung there before him, still choking. The poor woman was a mess. Her face was wet, tears and snot, and gasping sobs took the place of her breaths.

  “How dirty and ruined are you?” the bishop asked the woman, almost casually. “How destroyed by your own sinful nature have you become? Shall we see?”

  The woman moaned something unintelligible. The bishop smiled faintly, which was the creepiest thing Eiryn had seen yet. He reached down, shoving the woman’s skirt out of his way as he reached between her legs. Eiryn knew exactly when he hit her pussy because she jolted—then winced with a yelp, as if he’d pinched her for her temerity. Eiryn guessed he had. And hard as hell.

  “I believe you are damp after all,” Bishop Seph pronounced, sounding disappointed. But Eiryn could see his eyes and knew better. “I’m afraid I can do nothing else for you. I cannot help those who prefer to remain lost.”

  “No, no, no,” the woman sobbed. “I’m not! I can’t be! I want to be compliant!”

  “Women like you are a scourge upon this benighted Earth,” the bishop continued, in that same heavy, disappointed tone, as if he’d had great hopes that were now dashed, which Eiryn felt was unlikely. “You drink those sinful, wicked herbs to keep yourselves barren, spitting in god’s face. You taunt good men with your wiles and trick them into passion and pleasure, stealing their seed when it could fertilize the wombs of good, compliant women instead. You take pride in the fact you are an empty vessel.”

  “No, sir,” the woman bawled. “I want a child more than life.”

  The bishop pushed her backward, his eyes gleaming as she stumble
d, the way he’d clearly meant her to do.

  “My man will hear your prayers, woman,” he told her. “But I warn you. He will report back to me in full. Do not risk displeasing him, lest you insult me further. Remember who watches you, every breath you take.”

  The guard pushed Eiryn forward, viciously. She let herself stagger with the force of it instead of rolling, then skidded painfully to her knees as the guard took the sobbing woman by her bound arms and hauled her out. She could already see the douchebag’s cock hardening in his trousers, and it occurred to her that the benches in the hall weren’t for a line of the faithful. They were for this. Further prayers.

  She hoped Riordan taught him a better and more useful meaning of the word gash. And then skewered him.

  The interior door shut with a click. Then there was only her and this cockroach and a silent nun on the wall.

  The bishop sat in his little torture throne, his dick still out and in his hand, stroking it like it was a scepter.

  Eiryn figured he thought it was one.

  “I have convents filled with nuns who have spent years training, their only goal to serve the needs of holy men and accept their consecrated seed,” Bishop Seph intoned, as if that was all something other than gross. “What pride you must have to walk in off the street, wander through restricted parts of the Cathedral with such blatant disregard for the rules, and then imagine yourself worthy enough to enter my presence. What abominable, disgraceful pride.”

  Eiryn imagined that speech was terrifying to good little compliant girls. But she’d been around horny bastards her entire life. She knew exactly what that shining, wet look in his gaze was. And she noticed the cock in his hand wasn’t any softer.

  He snapped his fingers then. The nun on the wall pulled herself off the peg with a little hiss of effort, then hurried across the floor to him.

  “I prefer a proper receptacle,” the bishop told Eiryn.

  He kept his cold gaze on her as he made a circling motion with two fingers. The nun obediently turned so her back was facing him and moved closer, pulling up her dress as she did it. A little too competently for a woman with bound hands, Eiryn noted, which suggested she’d had a lot of practice. She parted her legs as he dragged her up into his lap, letting them fall wide open over his spread thighs, and she sighed slightly when he slammed her down on his cock.

  But it wasn’t a pained sigh. Quite the contrary. Eiryn blinked.

  The bishop gripped the nun with one hand at her hip and the other wrapped around her throat, and then he pounded into her. Hard and fast and brutal, which was clearly his thing. But there had been none of that oil the compliants liked to ease their way. Which meant, as hard as it was for Eiryn to get her head around, the nun had to be very wet to take him that fast and that hard with such ease. Sure enough, she could see it with her own eyes. The nun was enjoying herself, if that heavy-lidded expression on her face was any guide, or the way her lips parted as the thrusts came faster. Harder. Not that Bishop Seph seemed to care much either way. He held her still as he hammered into her, taking what he wanted as if it was no more than his due. Then he came in a rush, letting out only a single deep breath.

  Almost in the same moment, he shifted the nun off of him. And this was the church, Eiryn reminded herself. Of course he didn’t bother himself with any gesture toward getting the nun off. He didn’t even look at her as she instantly turned around and knelt before him, then bent to lick his cock clean.

  But he probably had her do this at least seventeen times a day.

  And the entire time he did it—all of it—Bishop Seph kept his cold glare squarely on Eiryn.

  She knelt there on her slightly bruised knees, glad for the pain and the chill of the stone floor. It kept her focused. Eiryn stopped trying to match her memory of Maud’s graceful position, because what mattered was that she got to the point. And then hurried right along to the part where she got to hurt this piece of shit.

  “My friend said I needed you, sir,” she said, so softly. She bowed her head slightly. “He said only you could save me. He was sure you would view it as a gift.”

  The bishop let out a sound that wasn’t anything like a laugh. “I have no friends who would imagine an impertinent lowborn creature a gift I would value in any way.”

  Eiryn doubted he had friends at all. Which was the flaw in her plan. But she pushed on because in addition to all the other reasons she needed to do this, she was now personally invested in making this asshole bleed.

  “He was so certain you would understand,” she murmured. She lifted her head and met the holy bastard’s frigid gaze. “And it sounded as if he knew you well. His name is Krajic.”

  13

  The bishop bared his teeth. It was nothing like a smile.

  He shoved the nun off him, appearing not to notice when she sprawled across the floor. But then, neither did the nun. She simply picked herself up and shifted into the exact sort of easy, graceful kneeling position Eiryn had given up trying to mimic. Eiryn understood, then. These easy, flowing positions were like bladecraft. They looked simple and natural because they were actually the result of years of hard work.

  But she filed that revelation away, because the bishop’s glare was harsher than before, his narrow face flushed with temper. If she had to guess, she’d say he really didn’t enjoy hearing that piece of shit mercenary’s name from some random lowborn creature who’d wandered in off the street.

  “Krajic is dead,” Bishop Seph murmured, and Eiryn wondered if it cost him to sound so offhanded and casual, as if it was nothing to him. Then, in the next breath, she realized he did it deliberately because it made his next question hit that much harder. “How could he possibly have sent me a dirty little street whore to save?”

  Eiryn had to take a moment to remind herself that she needed confirmation from this slimy worm to bring back to Wulf. That she couldn’t rip that pale white dick of his off at the root and shove it down his nasty throat, no matter how she itched to do exactly that. She had to remind herself two, maybe three times. And breathe through the red haze that descended and urged her to just end him anyway.

  “I met him in Louisville,” Eiryn told him when she could speak without all that bloodlust and hate in her voice. “Late last month.”

  The bishop stroked his cock thoughtfully, then tucked it back in his trousers. He pulled his fly closed and then he rose, tall and imposing, every part of his sinewy frame stamped with the muscle of the church’s power and the solid thickness of his own brand of cruelty. Eiryn could feel him everywhere, as if he’d infected the very air in the room with the dark shit he carried with him. As it emanated from the stones themselves.

  “And how exactly did Krajic do that,” asked Bishop Seph, a sort of curious fury on his long, pale face and that fake friendly tone making his smooth voice sound discordantly plummy, “when he was cut down in a raider hall in July?”

  There it was. The dots were connecting, right there in front of her. She felt that flare through her. It felt a whole lot like victory.

  But she didn’t want to get ahead of herself. And she needed more.

  “I don’t understand.” Eiryn tried to look confused. Befuddled and lost, or whatever he’d expect to see if she was legitimately some faithful, compliant woman off the street in search of his perverted brand of saving. “I thought he said he worked for you directly?”

  She trailed off as Bishop Seph stepped away from his chair, moving past the quietly kneeling nun to tower directly over her. It was clear he felt very powerful like that, big and scary with soft women flailing around at his feet. What a douche. But she let her mouth go slack with some approximation of fear and tried to make herself shake a little bit the way she imagined a regular compliant woman would in the presence of all his repulsive theatrics.

  It was then, behind the bishop’s looming form, that the nun broke her serene poker face for the first time since Eiryn had entered the room. The other woman lifted her gaze, met Eiryn’s briefly, then dropped he
r eyes to her endless contemplation of the floor once again. If that was a message—of support or condemnation—Eiryn couldn’t read it.

  “Krajic was a dog.” The bishop sneered down at her. “A crude animal easily sent out to cull the herd. What kind of sins do you traffic in, I wonder, that you meet mercenary scum in slums like Louisville and stop for a chat?”

  He moved closer, reaching down to take Eiryn’s chin in his hand. It wasn’t a gentle grip but, more to the point, she really, really disliked being touched without permission. She was a brother. She should cut off his hand for the insult. But she was in this asshole’s church and she still wanted something from him, so she suffered through it. She forced herself to stay quiet, the way a woman without options would.

  It was funny that she’d actually claimed she enjoyed compliance. Right about now she couldn’t think of a single reason why anyone would tolerate it.

  “I watched Krajic glut himself on a pair of my nuns. He was vicious. Disgusting.” Bishop Seph’s eyes glowed with more of that wet, horny fire. Eiryn had no doubt he’d watched and enjoyed the show, the way creepy-ass men like him always did, hands down his trousers the whole time. “Is that what he did to you? Did he tear you up? Did you come all the way here to register a complaint—or did you imagine you would find mercy at my feet?”

  “I thought he was your friend,” she whispered, past that hard hand on her face that was making it difficult to keep her temper in check and her hands to herself.

  “Krajic had a single duty and he failed me.” The bishop’s cruel lips curled. “Perhaps my instructions were unclear or too complicated for such a limited creature to comprehend. Your duty, by contrast, could not be more clear.”

  “My duty?” Eiryn echoed, though she had a feeling she knew where he was going. It was the same place these asshole priests were always going. “I know what my duty is. I think.”

  “Your duty on this Earth is not open to interpretation, for it is a direct commandment from god,” Bishop Seph thundered. She got the distinct impression he’d said crap like this before. A lot. Probably from his pulpit.