Chapter 14
This is no fever dream. It’s real. I am really lying in the buff next to Nordin.
He rolls onto his back, expelling a sound halfway between a sigh and a groan, as though he were in pain. Sure enough, the shadow of a bruise stains the skin between his navel and the sharp V-cut of muscle that plunges beneath the waistband of his linen breeches.
One glance at my body reveals knickers—crumpled and rolled up between my ass cheeks, but still notably present. “Did you strip me?”
“Corpses can’t exactly strip themselves,” he mutters, studying the ceiling as though the rough-hewn beams were transcendent. “Your clothes were frozen solid, and your skin was blue. I thought you were dead.”
“No such luck.”
His eyes slash toward mine. Apparently, my humor isn’t to his taste.
I sling another long look around the windowless log cabin that’s a quarter of the size of my home. “Where are we anyway?”
He returns his gaze to the rafters. “A trapper’s cabin. There are a few of them around the land. They belong to all the packs and are used for shelter or to recover from injuries sustained during a hunt.” His throat dips. “Wrap yourself in the furs.”
“I’m fully thawed.”
“Zas…” he growls.
“Your cloak is itchy. Besides, I have my back to you, and you’re staring at the ceiling. If my nakedness disgusts you so much, keep your eyes averted.”
My request is met with low muttering that drives up a corner of my lips.
“Why do you enjoy riling me up so much?” he asks.
“For the same reason you enjoy yelling at me.”
A frown creases his brow. “I don’t.”
“There you go.”
He glances my way, his eyebrows now rising in skepticism.
I observe him right back. My stare must feel too heavy for his taste, because he returns his attention to our inanimate surroundings.
“How did you know where to find me?”
“Saga caught your scent and told Far through the Alpha link.” The crackling firelight catches on his face, pooling shadows around the whittled framework of bone and glinting off the dark scruff on his jaw. “After Eira and I looked everywhere for you, I asked Saga to check the sledges.”
I slide my lips between my teeth at my misstep. “I should’ve sprinkled more deer urine…”
“What you should’ve done was not leave.” His pitch is so brusque it feels like a wasp sting.
One that reignites my frustration. “And spend my whole life being an outcast? No thanks.”
“An outcast?” he chokes out. “You’re not an outcast, Zas.”
“Says the man who insisted I hide out during my cycles so that our fellow packmates didn’t wonder what the Hel sort of creature he dragged out of the Wilds.” I glide my glower off his face, setting it atop his harshly pumping chest instead.
For some cruel reason, I conjure Nika resting her cheek there, atop the acres of taut flesh sprinkled with coarse hairs as brown as the ones on his chin and above his eyes. Has she yet?
I hate that I’m thinking of her, but I don’t hate it any more than the prospect of having to return to the valley and watch her go home with Nordin night after night.
Fuck, I really don’t want to go back.
I veil my jealousy with selflessness. “By leaving, I was saving your family from having to justify harboring a despised valkyrie.” My neck is so stiff that I roll onto my other side so I don’t have to keep looking over my shoulder at him.
“It would’ve been a win-win for everyone.
” I tuck my hands underneath my cheek because my self-confidence doesn’t extend to my waxy fingers.
“A win-win—” His cheekbones flush bright. “The cloak,” he growls, dragging his palms up and down his face as though to scrub the sight of my bare skin from his corneas.
Which is only my stomach, since I made sure to drape my arm over my breasts when I turned. “You took my clothes off, Nordin. You fished me out of that fjord. You forced me into this cabin. So stop bloody acting so righteous. If anyone has a right to be ticked off right now, it’s me.”
His hands sweep back to his sides and ball there, and then he flips me a glower that doesn’t venture lower than my chin. “You’re right. What was I thinking? I should’ve let you freeze to death.”
I smile. “Not too late. Point me in the direction of my rucksack, and your wish might come true. Either I’ll die from frostbite or I’ll become a dragon’s chew toy. Either way, you’ll never again have to swoop in and play savior.”
The skin around his eyes rucks, and then he’s moving, reaching an arm around me. For a heartbeat, I think he’s about to…to…
I’m not quite sure what.
Embrace me and tell me he’d die right alongside me if I were to leave this realm?
Smother me to be done with my antics once and for all?
I’m wrong on both accounts.
He plucks the side of the cloak and snaps it over me, then surges to his feet.
How I yearn not to be affected by him. How I wish I could look at his body and admire its might instead of its beauty.
Why couldn’t the cremation of my journals have made me immune to him? Unrequited attraction is such a bitch.
The muscles in his back flex and pop as he stalks toward the wall, the one from which our clothes sag.
He unhooks my overdress, stockings, and cloak, then wheels around.
For a moment, he just stands there, strangling my clothes in his fists, but then he jerks back into motion, lumbering toward the fire.
I sit up so abruptly that my covering collapses around my waist. “Don’t you dare burn them!”
I’m primed to pounce when he mutters, “Not my plan. I’m only trying to speed up their drying, since even an ounce of moisture will harden to ice.”
He lays them flat on the floorboards, at a safe distance from the spitting pit, and then he returns for his trousers, which he dons with a grimace. Either they’re not dry, or it’s my nudity that’s twisting his mouth.
Feeling slightly less vindictive, I draw the furs up and tuck them under my armpits. “Are my gloves dry?”
His eyes flick to mine. When he notes that my ghastly torso’s no longer on display, the line of his shoulders relaxes. “They are. They’re also in such a pitiful state, it’s a wonder you have any fingers left.”
Put simply, they’re not the new ones I claimed Mor had gifted me for Júl. “Can you toss them to me?”
He nods to a spot behind me—one that I have to lie back to reach.
I snatch them and jam my hands into them. “I don’t suppose you can shift yet?”
He sidles against the wall at his back and crosses his arms. “If I could, do you think we’d have spent the better part of the day in a cabin in the Wilds?”
I fling him a bladed smile. “A girl can dream.”
His pupils dilate, swallowing down the midnight-blue.
“Before you get your breeches in a twist, understand I was being sarcastic.” Deciding that I too would rather be clothed—even in damp fabric—than linger in the nude, I herd my snarled hair over my breasts, then let the fur drop and stand.
I don’t miss how Nordin’s breathing changes, or how his nostrils flare. I can’t tell if it’s pure disgust or if some interest is laced in there. Perhaps lust? He is a hot-blooded male after all, and despite how he views me, I am not a child.
As I circle the fire, every line on his body sharpens. “Do you think Nika will be jealous when she finds out we slept together?”
The hollows beneath his cheekbones become gulfs. “We did not sleep together.”
“Sorry. Against one another. In the nude?”
His lids twitch.
“I mean, I don’t plan on telling anyone about this, since I’m not one to share details of my private life with others.” My cruel smile props up my cheeks. “I’ve learned my lesson thanks to you.”
His color heightens.
“But your scent is all over my skin.” I twist my head to the side, close my lids, and sniff.
“What game are you playing?”
“Hmm.” I draw my lids up, but only at half-mast, and then I advance toward him and crane my neck. “It’s called: Fuck you too, Nordin. It’s called: You trampled my dreams, only fair yours get a tad bent out of shape.”
Because of our tremendous height difference, he has to stoop. “Except if you allude to anything improper, my dreams don’t just get a bit bent out of shape, they get obliterated.”
I roll my eyes. “Nika rejected her mate. Even if she’s the Jarl’s daughter, her pickings are pretty slim. She won’t actually leave you.”
“I’m not talking about Nika. I’m talking about succeeding my father as Alpha of the Vales someday.”
I frown.
“If I’m suspected of breaking a founding commandment, I’ll no longer be eligible to become Alpha.” He rolls his neck, eliciting little cracks that resonate like the popping blaze. “Though I’ll admit, my sister would make a great leader.”
My gaze skips from his pupil-dark stare to his stiff jaw to his corded throat. “Then let me leave, Nordin. You get your precious pack and your pretty shifter mate, and I get all the answers you were never able to give me.”
“You’d die in a heartbeat in the Wilds.”
“Wow. Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“It has nothing to do with what I think of your prowess and everything to do with your origin. Dragons and vampyrs have a taste for valkyrie blood.”
“I won’t get injured.”
A short, scoffing sound escapes him. “Oh, Zas…”
I hate this version of Nordin. The one that treats me like a rambunctious brat who understands nothing of the world.
“You don’t need to bleed for them to smell you.”
“Shifters have a keen sense of smell, and none has guessed where I come from.”
“Because you live among us, and the enchantment that keeps predators out of our valley dulls your scent. Did you already forget Havrik’s comment?”
My lips pinch. “If you force me to return, I’ll just plot my next escape. And make your life Hel.”
He snorts. “More than you already do?”
I narrow my gaze. Bastard.
Since my threat fell on deaf ears, I return to my initial tactic.
I snare one of his many battle braids, which knocks his lips flat.
His skin pebbles as I unhurriedly push the lock over his bulging shoulder, making sure to rake every inch of skin along the way.
Then, eyes planted on his, I moisten my lips with the tip of my tongue.
“What was the commandment again?” My question is rhetorical since I’ve learned the entire codex by heart—a requirement for all Isam?ris. “Oh, yes… Thou shalt not taint or tempt an unripe body with wanton desire.”
I move my mouth nearer to his pec that thunders with his pulse, and then I look up into his murderous gaze, my lower lip already grazing the hard muscle cloaked in firm skin.
“I feel very tempted right now, Nordin.” I dart my tongue out and lick a path toward his pebbled nipple, pausing at the areola’s edge. “You should reconsider letting me—”
Before I can utter the word “go,” he cuffs my neck and pins me to the wall, imprinting the leather strand of my choker into my palpitating skin. His grip isn’t firm enough to cause pain, but it is firm enough to annoy.
“Stop,” he pants, sounding as though he’s just completed a dozen laps around our sprawling valley.
“Although I don’t want to hurt your prospects,” I snarl, “I won’t go back.”
“When did you plan your escape?”
I narrow my eyes, because he knows the answer.
“When?” he thunders.
I glower at a corner filled with as many shadows as there are in my mind. “You know exactly when.”
“Say it.”
“Why?” Although he doesn’t squeeze hard—barely squeezes at all—my lungs feel depleted of oxygen. “Are you in need of an ego boost?”
“What I need is to hear you say it.”
“Why?” I grit out.
“Indulge me.”
I grind my jaw. “Júl. Happy for the confirmation that you drove me away?” I shake with rage. “Now fucking take your hands off me.”
He doesn’t.
I whip my seething glare back to his face and grip his forearm, regretting wearing gloves, regretting being unable to sink my nails into his skin and cause him even a modicum of pain. I squeeze, but he still doesn’t let go.
“Nordin, please…” I hate how my voice breaks almost as much as I hate how feeble I feel when I’m around him, physically and emotionally. “Don’t make me hate you further.”
His thumb draws slow arcs against the underside of my jaw. “I’ve rejected Nika.”