Chapter 37
Sigrid arrives just as Nordin finishes tying my belt. I readjust my hand in the sling, then comb out my hair.
As we cleaned up and dressed, Nordin said that our relationship was ours—in other words, no one else’s business. I fear, from the violent pounding on the door and the repeated yelling of Nordin’s name, that Sigrid is here to make it her business.
How I wish I could climb through one of Nordin’s two skylights to escape, but the panes of glass are airtight. The only way out of his home is past my aunt…
As he finally unbolts his door, I steel my spine.
Sigrid barges in, complexion livid with rage. “Out. Get out of my son’s house! Out!” Her tone is so glacial that instead of triggering my legs, it freezes them to the slats.
“No. Zaskja isn’t going anywhere. But you’re more than welcome to step out if you can’t contain your irritation.”
Sigrid rears her head back. “She’s your cousin, Nordin! She’s not of age! It’s disgusting…” She swings her head from side to side and shudders. “Revolting.”
“She isn’t my blood cousin, and you know it,” he replies calmly.
“She’s a child!”
“She is not a child. She is also none of your concern. The same way our relationship is none of your concern. I understand that it took you by surprise and that you may need some time to adjust. All I ask is that you refrain from interfering and—”
“I only have one son left. I won’t lose him to some…some—”
“Careful.” Nordin’s word is barely audible yet snaps like thunder.
“Your father’s dream is for you to take over the pack. How can you just throw it all away on some fling with your cousin?”
Though I can only see Nordin’s profile, I don’t miss how his jaw clips, and his lips barely pull apart as he says, “Again, Mor, Zaskja and I aren’t related.”
“I wasn’t the only one horrified by the news. You should hear the things being said.”
“I’m not interested in anyone’s opinion on who I want to spend my life with.”
Sigrid gapes, the blood draining from her cheeks. “You could have any unmated woman! Any.”
I’m starting to think she’s one second away from shifting and howling for the packs to send contenders for her son’s heart.
“Well, I want her.”
She flinches at the bite in his tone, but then her eyes taper. “I’m your mother. I love you. Therefore, I will never stop protecting you, not only from others but also from yourself.”
“Don’t make me pick between you and her. You won’t like my choice.”
Holy Fenrir. My heart lurches, stunned that he’d choose me over his beloved mother.
Sigrid’s eyes spasm as she backs up. “I wonder if she’d pick you if she knew what you did to get your father and the Council to grant a valkyrie asylum on our land.”
The line of Nordin’s shoulders sharpens as though muscle were transforming into bone.
“Before you completely ruin Nordin’s chances of becoming Alpha, Zaskja, ask him what he did. And if he’s disinclined to tell you, then come find me, and I will.” And with that, Sigrid shifts into fur and tramples off, leaving me feeling more shaken than victorious.
Nordin white-knuckles his front door, which he’s yet to close. His face is tipped low, like his lashes. Through the strands of hair that escaped his topknot, I spy the corners of his eyes and mouth pinching.
I want to believe that Sigrid’s intent was to sow discourse, but his reaction suggests there’s more at play than simple malice.
Noiseless seconds transform into oppressive minutes. “What did she mean? What did you do?”
The skin around his eyes creases further, but then his nostrils flare, his lashes rise, and he snaps his front door shut.
Without looking my way, he walks over to the foot of his bed and drops onto it as though he weighed as much as one of those boulders that broke from the valley wall the day his brother died.
When he plants his elbows on his thighs and hangs his head in the scoop of his fingers, my concern transforms into trepidation.
“Did you steal me from my birth family?”
He looks up, driving his thumbs into the bridge of his nose. “No.”
“Just tell me.”
He gives his head a hard shake, then spears his fingers through his white locks, springing more free. “It was the only way to save you.”
My heart misses a beat. “What was?”
“My father and the Council”—his throat bobs—“they wanted to cast you out of the valley…out of the wards. Just leave you to fucking die in the Wilds. Eira and I…we came up with the solution together, but she couldn’t go through with it, so I did.”
Stare affixed to the firepit, he rakes in a breath. Lets it out. Heaves in another. And then he drags his palms down his face and groans long and hard.
“Did what?” The words leave me in a hush.
Nordin steeples his fingers beneath his chin. “I don’t think you understand how much I loathe my mother right now…”
“Tell me.”
“Come here.”
My strides are rickety, hesitant. Nevertheless, I walk over to him. Once there, I repeat my entreaty. He bands his arms around my waist and draws me between his spread thighs, then nestles his head against my writhing stomach.
I want to touch him, to reassure him that whatever it is, we will get through it. But my muscles are too tightly wound to lift my hand to his mussed hair, and my chest too full of dread to utter the promise.
So I just stand there, ramrod straight, and wait for him to unload the secret he’s been carrying for over a decade.
A secret my mother is in on…
The two people I love the most. Who love me the most.
I’m more than ever convinced that whatever it is, it can’t be insurmountable. “If you did it to protect me, then—”
He shudders.
“—then it cannot…”
He cranes his neck to look up at me. Even though no tears roll down his cheeks, his eyes are crimson with misery.
“What?” I breathe out. “What did you and Mor do? Just fucking tell me.” My harsh timbre works to snap him out of his muteness.
“Idepletedyourmagic.” He speaks his confession so rapidly that it takes my mind a moment to unpick the syllables and turn them into distinct words.
“My…magic? I had…? I thought…” I lick my trembling lips. “I was Empress-touched?”
His mouth thins. “No.”
I frown. “I don’t…I don’t understand. I thought only Empress-touched…”
My eyes widen.
My blood whooshes.
My ears ring.
My nape prickles.
My skin pebbles.
“I’m…” My breathing is so labored that it takes me two tries to get the words out. “I’m an Empress?”
Nordin says nothing, just keeps watching me with broken eyes.
“How did you—I don’t understand. Did I open the portal I stepped through?”
“We don’t know how you got here.”
“But you know I’m an Empress?” I say sharply, stepping back.
His arms stay tight.
I murmur a raucous, “Let go.”
Though reluctance is painted all over his wrecked face, his arms fall away from me like butchered twine.
“How did you deplete my magic? Am I still an Empress? And why didn’t you tell me the day I learned I wasn’t a shifter? How long were you planning on keeping it a secret?”
Nordin links his fingers together and lets them hang between his legs. They shake…like the whole of me is shaking.
“Your lineage makes you an Empress, not your magic, so yes, you’re still an Empress. I depleted your magic with dragon-fire.” He averts his stare and grimaces. “Valkyrie magic dwells in runes that are inscribed across their fingers.”
My heart pounds hard, then harder. Kjell had asked to see my hands, not because of some weird fetish but to check for markings.
“I held your hands over the longhouse firepit. I burnt your skin. I listened to you wail. Watched tears rain down your cheeks. Held your body when it went limp. I did all of that because Eira couldn’t bring herself to harm you—not even to save you—and my parents… the Council…they only wanted you gone.”
“You did this so Mor could keep me?” My heart feels both fragile and hard, like the opals I so love.
“No.”
“Then why?”
“If I hadn’t burned your magic, the Sons of Odin would have. And then they would have killed you.”
“I understand why they would steal my magic, given their hatred for my kind. What I don’t understand is why you would. Were you scared of it? Were you worried I’d use it against the pack?”
“I was afraid.” His chest broadens with a long, deep inhale. “Not of your magic, but that someone would spot your runes and alert the vampyrs.”
A month ago, I would’ve thought it impossible that the people I grew up with would try to hand me over to the Sons of Odin. I knew better, but evidently, I didn’t know all. I wouldn’t leave Nordin’s home until I did, though.
“This is not how I wanted you to find out,” he gripes.
“No shit. I bet you were hoping I never found out. I bet you were hoping I’d keep thinking I was some dumb little girl who played with fire.”
“No.” He lurches to his feet and takes a step toward me. “And you were never some—”
“Don’t.” I hold up my hand. “I don’t care for platitudes right now.” Even though my fingers are cloaked in leather, I picture my waxen skin, then picture the male standing before me melting it, and I shudder. “What did it matter if someone told the vampyrs?”
“They would’ve murdered you.”
“Again. What. Did. It. Matter? How was my fate your problem?” I cry out.
“You would rather have died?”
“I’m the one asking the questions at the moment,” I snap. “Bloody answer them!”
“Fenrir put you in my path, Zas! You appeared right in front of me!”
I snort. “Did you think I was some gift sent from your Wolf God?”
“Yes!”
I tilt my head. “I suppose that isn’t so far-fetched considering your compulsion to burn gifts.”
His face turns to granite, and then he pivots, walks to the armchair in the corner, and shoves it aside. He crouches and snaps the hide covering his floorboards, then grows out his talons and pries one of the slats up.
He reaches inside his floor and exhumes something that further tosses my pulse. “I never burnt your journals. I contemplated doing it, but I couldn’t bring myself to.”
Instead of softening my anger, it only galvanizes it. “And you were keeping that a secret from me for what reason? Were you afraid I’d hand them out for others to read?”
“No.”
“Then why the fuck—”
“I was waiting for the right moment!” He drops the journals back into the hole and jams all ten of his fingers into his hair.
“What would’ve constituted the right moment?”
“I don’t know, Zas! I don’t fucking know, all right!”
“You give yourself too little credit. You seem to know a whole bunch of things.”
He glares at me.
I glower right back. “Did it never cross your mind that by ridding me of magic, you rid me of my immortality? Which makes me all the more murderable…”
“The wards would’ve kept you safe until Skarnir died and the vampyrs were driven away from Isrike once and for all. Which we assumed was a matter of months. After which Eira and I would’ve brought you back to Ljosam?r and begged the others for your runes back.”
“Because runes can be returned?”
He scrutinizes his feet. “You’re one of the Twelve. The last of your line. We imagine that—”
“The last?” The ringing in my ears swells to a raucous crescendo.
He swings his bloodshot gaze back to me.
“That’s why you know when I was born! Not because of the growth curve of my ears, but because I’m the last Thorn.”
The silence that ensues is so loud it sounds like the harshest, coldest squall—the sort that sinks ships, shreds stone, and uproots everything in its path.
“You only kept me alive to keep Taeric’s curse alive,” I murmur.
His eyes glitter now, and not with his wolf magic. “No.”
“Liar.” Bang, bang, bang goes my gullible heart. It’s a wonder my ribs haven’t fissured yet.
“It’s not a lie. I didn’t know you were a Thorn when I carried you back to the Council. I didn’t,” he snaps.
“No wonder Vaelen asked Tyron to retrieve me…” I muse, backing away. “Can you imagine if he’d succeeded?” The air in the pit house feels like it’s condensing, congealing, about to smother more of me. “I imagine the vampyrs know I’m a Thorn?”
“They don’t know for certain.”
I recall my first and only meeting with the Vampyr King. The male had known I wasn’t related to Nordin.
“That’s why he’s laid siege to the Wilds. Not to retrieve his vampyr, but to get your father to hand me over?” Even though fury electrifies me, I still don’t tell Nordin about Ulf’s iron-laced beverage or my bargain with him. The one I will no longer be upholding.
“I’ll never let that happen, Zas.” Fury burns away the slew of other emotions glossing his eyes.
I snort. “I’m no longer yours to protect, Nordin, nor yours to harm.”
Though I grasp that he didn’t commit the crime out of cruelty, the result is the same: He destroyed me.
More than the fire from fifteen years ago.
More than any vampyr ever could.
Nordin Stormsson fed me lies and used them to keep me weak.
He calls Havrik a monster, but did Havrik ever hold a child’s hand over an open flame until that child lost consciousness from pain and woke up with no memories?
I shudder. “What’s my name?”
He frowns.
“My birthname. What is it? You must know.”
His lips flex as though loath to give it to me.
“My name, Nordin! What is my real name?!”
“Aheeva. Aheeva of House Thorn.”
The skin along my neck prickles as the fibers of my being repossess the syllables and string them across my mind. Aheeva. It was never a valkyrie battle cry; it was my name.
I start toward the door but then wheel around, stride to my scattered journals, and crouch. Under Nordin’s panicked stare, I stack them up, heft them to my chest, then turn and pitch them into his hearth.
“Zas…” he hisses.
“That’s not my name.” With tears on my lashes and fury in my chest, I finally leave behind the monster who made me believe we were soulmates.