Chapter 12
This must be my panicked brain’s final delusion.
How cruel to trick me into seeing Nordin’s eyes in the body of my captor.
I blink hard to dismiss the spell. When my wet lashes reel up, I suck in air because the wolf is snuffling me, his hot breath streaming against my throbbing brow.
Since Nordin knows what I am, it deepens my conviction that this cannot be him.
When the werewolf drags his tongue over my forehead, panic tunnels my vision. I reach up and shove him, but there’s no give to his neck. He keeps lapping at my head as though he wants to make a meal of it.
I begin to pray that my valkyrie blood will poison him, though I already know it won’t. I’ve bled before, been licked before, and the wolf who’d tended to my injury hadn’t expired. At the time, I hadn’t realized what a risk Nordin had taken in healing me with his saliva.
As the creature keeps sampling me, I’m transported back to the fighting arena and the tree I fell out of when I was seven.
I’d climbed into it to watch Nordin train with his brother.
Their match entranced me to the point that I’d scooted farther out than was safe.
Though I was slight, the branch was slighter and gave.
I don’t remember falling. I don’t remember splitting the back of my skull against a rock. All I remember is feeling a little stunned.
The brothers had pounced over the low stone wall. Where Bjorn had morphed into skin, Nordin had stayed in fur. My ears had rung, but not loudly enough to miss Bjorn warn his brother not to lick my wound.
Nordin hadn’t listened. He’d ribboned his healing tongue over my scalp, making it tingle so hard tears had finally pricked my lids. How was I supposed to not fall in love with a man who defied everyone and everything to keep my fragile body in one piece?
If Nordin had been here, would he have saved me today, or would he have let his shifter brothers delimb me?
My mind sorts through the last words I spoke to him. What had they been again? Were they awful? I remember yelling. I remember wishing him gone. But what had I—
The words trundle back through me, as jagged as encrusted opals.
“I’m so sorry,” I murmur into the cold night.
The wolf grunts as though he thinks I’m apologizing to him instead of to a man who will never hear my final words.
“She stabbed me with silver! I’ve every right to seek justice and deliver it as I see fit!”
Who is Razor-face raging at? Have other wolves gathered?
“Not to mention you took something of mine, Stormsson. Only fair I take something of yours.”
Stormsson? My pulse stutters, hushing before blaring. And then my lashes flutter riotously, ousting the heat and blood crusting them.
Nordin’s eyes weren’t a deceitful fantasy!
A trillion questions hurtle against my skull, the most pressing one being: How did he find out I was gone?
It’s not even dawn yet. Mor wouldn’t have come looking for me at Saga’s. My scent must’ve been picked up and disclosed through the pack’s mind link. By the lone shifter from earlier? The one who’d stared hungrily up into a tree?
I’m torn from my deliberations by the sight of Nordin sinking into skin. After giving me a scathing look, he shoves up and off me, then unfurls his huge body and plants his feet wide, casting me in shadow.
“I didn’t take anything of yours.” Nordin’s timbre is so far past livid that it rumbles the ground beneath me. “Now get the fuck out of here before I give your throat the same fate as your little friend’s, Varganson.”
Varganson…
Holy shit, I was right.
Razor-face was…is Havrik Varganson, the Jarl of Clan Ravine.
I sit up so fast it warps the redhead’s features, but not enough that I miss his sneer.
I carved up the Ravine Jarl.
A freaking Jarl!
Out of all the wolves out tonight, why did the Norns have to fling this one in my path?
It’s a miracle I’m still alive.
Not that I’ll be for long.
“Arek!” Havrik barks at the wolf I shot with my arrow. “Carry Karn back to base.”
“I can’t do that unless he shifts. He weighs a bloody ton.” The Ravine wolf rubs at his neck. “Fuck, it burns. Bloody silver. If you don’t punish the twat, I will.”
“Stop calling me by my anatomy,” I snap. “I have a name. Cressida Larson. Use it.”
Nordin hikes up one eyebrow.
“I’ve no need for your name, Flower.” Havrik taps the side of his nose while I grimace at his newest nickname. “I know your smell now—spring sap with a hint of petal.”
He gives his lips a slow lick, which elicits a predatory rumble from Nordin.
“You lay a finger on her, Varganson, and I will scalp you.” Nordin’s casually delivered threat sears through my veins, turning what runs within them molten.
Why? Why must I become goo around this male? Why can’t I stick to hating him?
A crooked smile props up Havrik’s narrow cheeks. “Don’t plan on using my fingers on something that smells so…delectable.”
That dispels the heat in my body.
What disperses the rest of it is when Nordin snarls, “She’s a child, you sick bastard!”
Havrik’s gaze slicks over me like dripping wax before hardening over my breasts that my backstrap has propped up. I tug on the lapels of my cloak to hinder his line of sight.
“Doesn’t look like a child to me,” he says. “Looks of acceptable mating age.”
“She’s not twenty-one!”
“I’m a patient man. Not only that, but I’m an unmated one now, thanks to you,” Havrik says, as the pile of white fur beside his boots finally stirs. He spits out, “Shift.”
I think he’s talking to me, which is odd, but also reassuring because that would mean he hasn’t gleaned my origin. But then the fallen wolf, Karn, shrinks into a heap of lacerated skin and blood-soaked yellow hair.
Without looking away from me, Havrik says, “Arek, take Karn and find a Vale! Tell them I request an immediate audience with Ulf Stormsson to discuss a peaceful resolution to this conflict.”
Arek hefts up an eyebrow. “You got a Stormsson right—”
The Ravine Jarl cuffs his shifter, driving the latter’s head low.
“Immediately, Havrik,” the cowed male replies, hunching to grip his unconscious friend and sling him over his shoulders like a scarf.
My stomach rolls at the sight of Karn’s face, because flaps of skin dangle. He’ll heal since Nordin used his claws, but the pain he’ll be in once he awakens will be tremendous. I can’t say I’ll feel particularly bad.
“See you very soon, Flower.” Havrik’s saucy wink curdles my writhing gut some more. As he traipses down the mountainside favoring his uninjured leg, he calls out, “Send Nika my regards, Stormsson.”
Only once he’s long gone does Nordin pivot toward me, the bones in his face digging into his flushed skin. “What the bloody Hel, Zas!”
This is when I should probably feel alarmed. Strangely, I don’t. “Why are you even in the Wilds? Did you decide you wanted one last hurrah before getting tied down?”
“Why am I in the Wilds?” His lips coil into a manic smile. “You just picked a fight with the most savage wolf in all of Isrike, and my reason for being out here is what’s preoccupying you?”
“I didn’t pick a fight. Havrik did. I asked him nicely to depart. But then he cornered me with his lapdogs. I was only defending my—”
“If you’d stayed on pack land, he wouldn’t have attacked you! If you hadn’t stowed away on a sledge, you wouldn’t have had to defend yourself!” Nordin is done smiling but evidently not yelling. “This is why humans aren’t allowed to attend Myrknótt! Because it’s fucking dangerous!”
He thinks I came out here to have fun? Clearly, my farewell letter has yet to be found.
“I didn’t break out of the valley to have sex and eat raw bear meat,” I grumble, getting to my feet and hunting the ground for my dagger. “You may think me a desperate idiot, but I’m neither desperate nor an idiot.”
Nordin is silent for so long that I take it he disagrees with me.
“Thanks for intervening. I’ll get on my way.”
His lips kink once more, mocking in a way that feels foreign to me. “And which way would that be, love?”
“It’s none of your business which way I’m going,” I mutter. “And are nicknames for me a contagious thing now? I’m not your love.”
“That’s right. You’re my ward.”
I scowl. “I’m not your ward. I’m not your anything. Just leave me be.” I try to fasten my coat, but the button must’ve popped off during my scuffle, because my fingers meet a loose thread. Good thing I brought my sewing kit.
After threading my bow over my head, I scan the ground for my dagger once more, but still I cannot spot it. Bloody obscurity.
“Until you’re twenty-one, you remain my responsibility.”
My gaze flicks off the shadowy snow and clocks Nordin’s. “Perhaps if you’d raised me, but you’re not my father, Nord. Therefore, I’m neither your problem nor your responsibility; only Mor’s.”
He laughs. Not a good-natured laugh. “After everything this pack has done for you. Everything my family—”
“I am incredibly grateful for this pack. So grateful to have had the privilege of being raised by a woman like Eira. But I can’t just stay and become nothing.
What prospects do I have back home?” As snowflakes begin to swirl, I cut my gaze toward the slope Havrik and his shifter descended earlier.
“Besides my recent offer to mate a Jarl, that is?”
“Never!” Nordin’s voice slaps me with as much violence as the sudden bluster that kicks up the ends of his white locks. “Over my dead body will you mate that brute!”
“Settle down. I wasn’t truly considering it.”
The flakes clump together like down. I need to get moving before it worsens, because trudging through a snowstorm will add days to my journey.
“Since you’re here, can you inform the other shifters not to hinder my travels? And tell Mor to look inside Saga’s trunk. I left her a—”
“You can tell her yourself when we get back.”
“I’m not going back.”
“Planning on camping out in the Wilds alone this winter, are you?”
“No. What mortal in their right mind could survive being a sitting duck in the Wilds?”
“Because trekking through them is you being in your right mind?”
I take a deep breath to keep calm, since one of us should be. “I assume you think I’m leaving because I’m heartbroken that you chose Nika over me.”
His cheeks hollow as though he were sucking at his teeth.
“Though I’ll admit, I was hurt—more so by the destruction of my journals than anything—I’ve concluded that you were right.” I lie so that he deems me levelheaded and doesn’t try to impede my journey. “It was all hero worship and na?ve fluff.”
He must grind his molars, for his cheekbones sharpen.
I hunt the trampled white for my dagger one last time. Did one of the Ravines pocket it?
“Thank you for opening my eyes and giving me the shove I needed to leave the den. As soon as I reach Ljosam?r, I’ll send word.”
Sensing that if I don’t get going, I’ll miss my escape window, I forfeit my search. I still have my arrows. They can’t trim hair, but they can prick skin and thwart future assailants, supernatural or not.
“Wish me luck.” As I turn to leave, I add, “And please don’t forget to tell the others to lay off me.”
Nordin neither nods nor replies in the affirmative. He merely stands there as though part of the land. I suppose he is, since Isam?r wouldn’t be Isam?r without Fenrir’s Children.
I’ve treaded past several trees by the time I hear him say, “Do not force me to snatch you, because I will snatch you.”
My spine draws straight. “Snatch me, and I hurt you, Nord.”
“With a silver-tipped arrow? With your delicate fists?”
His disparaging tone makes me grind my teeth and slip the bow off my head. I don’t want to hurt him, but I will if he tries to stop me.
When footfalls crunch, I reach for an arrow, nock it, and spin. Sure enough, Nordin has caught up to me. I tug the arrow back. He’s so close that if I let it fly, it will penetrate the thick fur and the leather beneath.
“Last chance to leave before I shoot you with silver and you’re stuck in skin for the better part of Myrknótt.”
He takes another step closer, not heeding my warning.
I shift my aim slightly south, preferring to hit his abdomen rather than his heart. It won’t kill him. Nothing can kill a wolf as long as all their precious locks fleece their skull.
One of his dark eyebrows wings up. “Planning on castrating me?”
“Didn’t know you tucked your cock under your trousers’ waistband, but to each their own.”
His eyes take on a lethal gleam as I keep my arms steady.
He advances again.
“Last chance,” I say, hoping I sound more convincing than I feel.
With a brazen smile, he closes the distance.
I let my arrow fly.