Edge of Control: (Viking Dystopian Romance)

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who had thrown on a pair of trousers and was lounging there in the grass as if he might drift off to sleep at any moment. Eiryn sat next to him, slightly elevated on a tree stump with her long, black-slicked legs thrust out before her. She looked the way she always did—tense and furious. And infinitely dangerous. He could feel it in his gut like lust.
    “We can’t storm the western highlands,” Marcus was saying. “For one thing, they have armies.”
    “Do we even know where the other temple is?” Ellis asked. “Its exact location?”
    “We know where it is,” Gunnar replied shortly. He’d reclaimed his woman and had her kneeling between his outstretched legs as he fed her from his hand, something Riordan had noticed the brother liked to do. A lot. The man did like his toys. Maud, for her part, looked as dreamy and far away as ever, but she took the morsels he offered and murmured something Riordan couldn’t quite hear after each bite. He suspected he knew what it was—and hey, whatever worked for them. “The question isn’t where in the valley it is. The question is, what else is in the valley now? The map is old.”
    “And the church is all up in it,” Tyr said after a moment. “I want to know why.”
    “Why is the church up in anything?” Jurin boomed. “Because that’s what they do, the spineless fucks.”
    It went around and around. They couldn’t blindly send a raiding party to the only other temple that was both above water and combined the things Helena’s family had said were needed to access the Internet, a power station plus a server farm. Like the temple they’d lost tonight.
    “My parents claim they saw it, but not up close,” she said at one point. She drew out the tablet she carried everywhere. “They made notes. They saw it from a high hill to the south and determined it would be too difficult to access. That’s why they were trying to get to the Catskills.”
    “Tell me about the bishop,” Wulf said when the discussion hit a lull.
    Gunnar looked as if he would take that on, but it was Maud who spoke, after glancing at her mate. Riordan sometimes thought she asked Gunnar for his permission, not that it would make sense if she did. Maud was neither as spacey nor as soft as she acted. He knew that firsthand.
    “Bishop Seph is the acting head of the church,” she said in her musical, dreamy way, elegant and quiet enough to make Riordan feel every inch the barbarian he was. “The Grand High Priest disappeared into the mountains years ago and no one’s seen him since. Bishop Seph makes a pilgrimage to see him once a year with a great caravan of the faithful, but only he ever walks over the sacred stones and actually enters the refuge.”
    “So the motherfucker could have died years ago,” Jurin belted out.
    Maud inclined her head. “Some whisper that he did. And I can’t be the only one who wondered if perhaps Bishop Seph helped him along, but it would be suicide to say such a thing out loud.” She looked as if she could sit in that position of hers, on her knees with her hands folded neatly in her lap and her head both high and gently angled, forever. Riordan figured she already had, after all her years in the convent. “For all intents and purposes, Bishop Seph
is
the Grand High Priest.”
    “I’m betting we can’t roll up on the head of the church and ask him a few questions without some blowback,” Tyr said. “Like why he has such a hard on for mercenaries or why he blew up his own temple.”
    “One does not
roll up
to Bishop Seph,” Maud said, and Riordan was sure he heard laughter there beneath the quietly disapproving tone she used. “One awaits his condescension and notice, and abases oneself accordingly before his glory.”
    There was a small silence after that. Gunnar’s mouth kicked up in one corner.
    “Translation,” he murmured. “The douchebag is a smug prick.”
    Wulf popped a bit of meat into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. All the brothers

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