by Megan Crane
“On it,” he clipped out at her.
Eiryn didn’t wait another second to see what the war chief she’d hated for years and had long wanted to kill would do. On some level, she understood that meant she trusted him—but that was for another time. Here, now, she wheeled around and started for the doors again.
But she heard Tyr behind her, in his bullhorn of a voice that could be heard down to the bay and back, taking up the cry of the brothers.
Taking up the fight when she couldn’t.
“I call all brothers!” he bellowed. Calling on the honor they all carried right there on their chests, just as she did. Because this was what they did. This was who they were. “All brothers! The clan is under attack!”
Eiryn threw open the doors, pulling on her willpower and her strength, and all that darkness inside of her she’d called hate for much too long.
She knew what it was now. She knew what it meant.
She knew exactly who she was.
All she needed now was the chance to show it.
Behind her, there was a beat, then chaos. She heard the shouts, the cries, of too many warriors responding to their summons.
Then the war chief’s voice across them all. Again.
“Jailhouse Beach!” he thundered. “And get ready to party!”
15
Riordan could have taken the first five bandits who staggered out of the wreckage of the bandit ship, no problem, even with his hurt leg.
It was when another five assholes poured out of the boat that he got pissed off. Ten was a whole different ballgame. Ten was potentially a problem. Particularly when they swarmed up onto the beach and started tossing Uzis around.
Dicks.
He held his boulder.
He used the dumbass handguns. He even got the fascination with them, to some extent. There were definite advantages to picking off enemies from a distance.
The trouble was, these particular enemies shot back.
Riordan watched a rock explode a little too close to his face and ducked down lower. He hated guns. Still, he emptied one handgun, taking down three bandits in rapid succession. It was easy—all he had to do was aim for all that glinting, shiny metal. He emptied the second handgun, bringing down another and winging two more. He reloaded the clip on the third and, when he looked out again, the remaining bandits had retreated behind the hull of their crashed boat.
One of them starting firing, great blaring bullets that slammed into the sand and made it seem to explode, but all of them seemed to fall short. He almost dismissed it as bad aim from a dumbass when he heard the scrape of something against the rocks just below him where nothing should have been.
Great. That had been cover fire.
He grabbed his blade in his free hand and waited.
When the little punk peeked up, chains welded from cheek to cheek and his forehead bristling with studs like he was auditioning to be a robot, Riordan swung at him and took him down. One neat cut and the bitch was in pieces.
But he didn’t see the other one coming until the fucker was on top of him. The bandit clocked him in the neck, but Riordan elbowed him back. The little shit kicked the gun out of his hand but ignored the blade, clearly thinking the handgun was the go-to weapon.
“Hurt your leg?” the bandit, dripping wet with spiked rings implanted all over his nose and eyebrows like a porcupine’s spines, taunted him.
“Yeah, it’s really holding me back,” Riordan growled, and popped him one in the jaw.
The bandit staggered back a step. And Riordan knew he had to neutralize this, fast. The more time he took putting this fool down, the more the remaining bandits would get brave and try to come at him while his hands were full.
He feinted to the left and let the skinny little douche pull a gun out of his waistband and aim it right at Riordan’s face.
“No one steals from the Rizento Clan!” the bandit snarled at him.
“No one gives a rat’s ass about the Rizento Clan,” Riordan retorted, and ran him through.
He took the asshole’s gun and patted him down until he found a jagged hunting knife as well, then he tossed the moron over his little rock barrier so his buddies could see him in all his metallic glory.
He threw himself back behind his boulder, but despite his big talk he’d messed up his leg. He felt the blood coming out of the wound, but ignored it while he checked his position. The bandits behind the hull—four, he thought, if he was counting right—stayed put.
A head snuck out from the far side, so he shot at it. There was a volley of return fire. But he suspected their ammunition was getting low, just like his was.
Riordan sat back, and he didn’t let himself think about anything. Not her face. Not that look in her eyes right before she’d done the right thing and left him here. He couldn’t lose focus. He couldn’t count minutes and estimate when and if she’d return.
That way lay pulled punches and his own cowardly death.
There was more shooting. Riordan ran out of bullets and, soon enough, so did they. While he waited for them to decide how they were going to rush him, he pulled an extra shirt out of his pack and ripped it into long, narrow pieces. Then he took a breath, gripped the shard in his leg, and tore it out.
Everything went a little black around the edges. Maybe all the way through for a second. The pain took him down, but not under. He shook it off, frowning down at the blood. Too much blood. But there was nothing to do but bandage it up, wrapping the strips of shirt around and around his thigh and tying it off tight.
He threw himself back against the rock and tried to make his eyes focus again. It took one breath, then another, to make the black spots go away. Then he got pissed. It wasn’t enough that when the piece-of-shit boat broke, it stabbed him in addition to running him aground. Now its asshole owners were on his beach. Trapping him behind a rock like some hapless deer run to ground.
Fuck that.
He stood, seeing at once that his theory was right and the bandits were out of ammo. Three of them were already coming across the sand. One held a skinny ax that was about as useful in a fight as a toothbrush. The other held a flashy blade that Riordan could tell he didn’t know how to wield. The third, however, had two shorter blades, one in each hand, and he knew exactly how to hold them. The third one was the one to watch.
Riordan shoved the pain in his leg aside. He came out from behind the rock and walked out onto the rocky beach, doing his best not to limp. Too much.
“No more hiding?” the man with two blades taunted. “You done being a little crybaby bitch?”
“A man with more metal in his face than inches on his cock should use a more respectful tone when speaking to a raider,” Riordan said. Almost conversationally, a big-ass grin on his face. “Though I’m sure you’re not overcompensating, friend. I’m sure it’s a coincidence.”
“Don’t know if you’ve noticed, asshole, but you’re outnumbered,” the one with the ax toothbrush sneered.
“I was more outnumbered before,” Riordan pointed out, managing to sound as if he was fighting off a yawn. “Now I’m bored.”
They fanned out, trying to trap him, and he let them do it. He kept his gaze on the jackhole with two blades and let the other two telegraph their shit noisily every time they breathed or shuffled in the sand.
“Where’s your bitch?” one of the ones he wasn’t looking at asked. “She doesn’t get a pass on this. The Rizento Clan demands respect!”
“Then you should have landed faster, instead of sailing back and forth like you’ve never made a beach landing in your life.” Riordan turned in a circle, taking in all three bandits’ positions, then returned his attention to the only one who looked like a real threat. “This is a raider island, son. We don’t wait around to hand out respect to every water rat that rolls in on the tide. You want it? You earn it.”
The one with the flashy blade came at him, waving it around like he expected the gleam of the steel to do the trick. Riordan just laughed. He did
n’t even have to try hard to slap the blade out of the bitch’s hand with a powerful blow of his own, sending the man sprawling.
“Also,” he said mildly, as if they were all out having a nice chat on this beach as friends, “maybe learn how to sail a goddamned boat.”
The two-bladed man snorted. “Because your boat is in great shape. All over the beach.”
“I think you mean your piece-of-shit boat broke into pieces all over my beach,” Riordan corrected him. “A lot like you’re about to.”
He kept his eyes on the two-bladed man. The other one rushed him. Riordan compensated for his hurt leg and pivoted, dodging an ax strike across his chest to punch the bastard in the face, laying him out.
When he swung back around, it was only the two-bladed man and him.
“You can’t keep it up,” the man said quietly. He was taller than the others and packed with muscle. He had a ring through his nose, and matching ones on his lip, his brow, and through each of his nipples on his bare chest. When he spoke, Riordan could see a steel ball through his tongue. “You must know it. All we have to do is wait.”
Riordan made a show of looking around. “We? Who’s we? Your boys are down.”
The man with the flashy blade, he noticed, stayed down. The man in front of him looked grim. But he shifted his attention back to Riordan.
“You’re losing blood,” he said, still in that calm, quiet way. “You’re all alone out here. All I have to do is wait for you to drop.”
“And then what?” Riordan asked. “Dog paddle back across the Atlantic? You’re fucked. I get to die here defending my clan from a bandit insurgence. You’re just going to die.”
The man with two blades smirked. “As long as you go first.”
Riordan didn’t know how long they stood there, facing off in the sand. He felt the blood welling up from his wound and knew the asshole was right. It was only a matter of time.
But he would die on his feet, not his knees.
Eiryn had told him to live. He had every intention of trying.
At first he thought it was thunder. The bandit sprawled on the ground winced and peered up at the sky. But the roar kept coming, sounding less and less like thunder and more . . .
Riordan grinned.
His back was to the cliff. He waited. And had the distinct pleasure of watching both the remaining bandits’ mouths drop open.
Riordan didn’t have to look. He knew what was happening. He could hear the sound of the ladder dropping down. The rhythmic thud of boots against stone as the raiders who didn’t feel like waiting dropped their own lines and started speeding down as fast as they could manage.
But most of all, he heard them. His brothers.
And he knew without question that his woman was among them. If he knew her at all, she’d be the first one down.
“I hate bandit motherfuckers!” Jurin boomed from somewhere on the cliff, loud enough to ricochet around the cove. There was a roar of approval. “Tin-faced freaks!”
“Welcome the eastern islands,” Riordan said calmly, keeping his gaze—with only a few black spots around the edges—trained on the bandits before him as they watched their own death descend to the beach. It was a glorious sight. “Raiders are never alone.”
* * *
Eiryn stood in her favorite shower at long last, the one located in her extremely comfortable rooms in the Lodge that she’d daydreamed about while she’d been compliant.
She tipped back her head and let the good, hot water wash all over her. She washed away the mainland. She scrubbed off the sea and the blood and the panic. Her bruises felt stiffer, the raw places on her palms and knees stung, and her thighs simply ached, so she let the heat pound into her, soothing it all away. There was a blister on one heel from running in soaking-wet boots and she wasn’t sure her hair would ever be quite the same. She rinsed it out once, twice, then again with the girly shit the camp girls used.
She would smell like flowers and sweet oils, like comfort pussy instead of a warrior, but she didn’t care about any of that anymore.
Riordan was alive. Nothing else mattered.
It had taken a pack of brothers to lift him up that cliff. They’d run him back to the Lodge’s healers while everyone else had turned their attention to the mess on Jailhouse Beach. They’d all raced to handle the situation before the tide came in and night fell. Tyr had rounded up the surviving bandits and had them sent off to be handled as prisoners, which meant Ellis and Bast got to amuse themselves with blindfolds and a long trek out into the woods and then back to confuse the captives about where they were headed. Gunnar had taken charge of the wreckage, deciding what he wanted to keep and what he’d leave behind as scrap. They’d piled the dead on otherwise unusable chunks of hull and pushed them out into the water, letting the sea take the bandits back where they belonged.
But Eiryn hadn’t been involved in any of that. She’d watched them lift Riordan up that cliff and then she’d had to stand there on the rocks where she’d left him to die and explain the last month or so of her life to her king.
She hadn’t had the slightest idea where to begin. Or how.
Wulf stood before her, his blue eyes blazing like hellfire. His powerful arms were crossed over his chest while something darker than fury seemed to roll off of him like storm clouds.
“Eiryn.” She’d jerked a bit at her name, and his eyes had narrowed. “Why are you here? With bandits? In fucking October on a laughably unsound boat that obviously tried to kill you?”
And she was a brother. She knew her duty. She’d done it today, hadn’t she? She’d left Riordan here to die and if the ashy tint to his complexion when they’d hauled him out of here with too much blood dripping down that leg was any clue, he nearly had.
In her head, she’d kept playing and replaying her first sight of him when she’d skidded to a stop at the top of those cliffs, Tyr on one side of her and Wulf on the other. Riordan standing there on a beach littered with dead and wounded bandits, tall and unbroken as if he could stand there forever when she knew—she knew—he was hurt. It made her heart hurt as it beat. And it seemed to beat that much harder every time she thought of it. Of him.
He’d been prepared to fight as long as he had to. Or as long as he could. She’d tried to pull herself together and do the same.
“It’s not the bishop,” she’d told Wulf, her voice flatter than it should have been. It was as if she had no control over any part of herself anymore, something that once would have scared and upset her. Today she didn’t care. “He’s disgusting, but there’s a king who’s worse. He’s gathering an army to hit us in March. Here.”
Wulf didn’t appear to move, but his blue eyes went electric, rivaling the storms that had chased her all the way across the Atlantic.
“A whole royal army.” He lifted one hand and smoothed it down his blond beard. “In March. Did you find—”
“I can’t do this,” Eiryn had told him abruptly, and she didn’t know which one of them was more surprised that she’d interrupted him like that, flat and rude.
He gazed back at her with arrogant astonishment that should have made her stomach fall to her feet. Or her knees go a little wobbly. But it didn’t. She . . . just didn’t care.
Or to be more precise, she couldn’t. Not on top of everything else.
“Which this, in particular, can’t you do?” he’d asked quietly. Too quietly. “Because I thought we covered the subject before you left.”
She remembered what he’d said to her in the Catskills. Fix your shit, he’d growled at her on that bluff above the water while the temple burned behind them. Or don’t come back.
“Wulf.”
Her voice didn’t sound like hers. She was tired. So beyond tired. She was jacked and a little battered from that run, thinking with every step she’d be too late. She was exhausted by all of the crap that swirled around inside of her and was either her destruction or her salvation, she didn’t know which. But this cold-ass beach wasn’t the place to g
et into it.
And her half-brother wasn’t the man she wanted to get into it with.
But he was the one staring down at her, every inch of him the pissed-off raider king. Terrible and mighty. And about three seconds away from meting out a little discipline to a smart-mouthed brother under his rule.
So she broke every rule the brothers lived under. She reached out and put her hand on his arm.
He tensed into pure granite beneath her hand. Unlike some, she’d never underestimated him. She knew exactly how deadly he was. She saw the mayhem in his gaze, and it was aimed directly at her.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he bit out.
And she already had her hand on him. She was already sinking. Why not drown?
“I need a shower,” she told him, throwing a lifetime of self-control and discipline to the wind. “I need to eat. I probably need to sleep for a week. I can’t feel my feet and I’m not sure I didn’t get a concussion when the boat crashed.” She searched his face, but it was closed down, fire and fury. “Most of all, I need to see Riordan, and I need you to let me do that. We have the entire winter to tell you what happened to us. You don’t need to know it right now.”
Wulf’s mouth shifted into a hard curve. His gaze was worse. He was terrifying, like he was holding all that immense power of his back by sheer force of will and she was pulling on the very last thread—
But she didn’t back down.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “Am I your king or your bitch?”
Something cracked in her then. Maybe it had already cracked, somewhere on that run. Maybe it had never been solid in the first place. But there, on that frigid beach, it shattered.
“You’re my blood brother,” she threw at him, for once not caring if he—or everyone else around them—saw the turmoil inside of her. Let them stare. Let them think she was weak. How could she possibly care about that after everything that had happened? She didn’t. She dropped her hand from Wulf’s arm and let it fall to her side, and she didn’t know if that was defeat. She wasn’t sure she could tell. “Can you please be my blood brother for one fucking night instead of the goddamned king? Would it kill you?”
