Chapter 41
Nordin claps the long white strand of hair I’ve ignited, snuffing out the fire. As his eyes trace me from head to toe, his expression teeters between intense focus and murderous lethality. “You all right, love?”
I gape at him before finally nodding. “Are you all right?”
“Fucking fabulous.” He shifts his stare to Havrik, who’s gone the same shade as the stars visible through the round skylight.
“I shot a silver thorn into his scrotum,” I explain, imagining that Nordin must be wondering about Havrik’s state of undress.
The Ravine Jarl finally shakes off his stupor, rips his hand off his nether regions, and plants his boot back on the floor, making his gold chains jangle. He mustn’t have gotten the needle out because he perspires as his fingers scrabble through his jacket pocket for a weapon.
Nordin nods. “May I get some context as to how your thorn ended up there?”
“Havrik rolled his trousers down in the hopes that I would suck him off.” May the memory fade fast. “Which I didn’t,” I add, pleating my nose.
Nordin bobs his head once more, his tranquility a thin veneer behind which foams something feral.
Before my next breath, the polish cracks, and he swings his arm out at such speed that his limb blurs.
It takes me a second and much blood splatter to understand what he’s just done—slashed Havrik’s face with a blade that gleams white.
I press my knuckles to my lips to keep from vomiting.
“Zas, love, please step out.”
I don’t have to be asked twice; I sprint.
“I’ll be just a minute. Eira should be done with Arek soon, but stay indoors until she comes for you, all right?” Hinges groan as Nordin shuts the bathing chamber door.
As the adrenaline flushes from my veins, my lips begin to wobble. I truly won’t die tonight. Mor and Nordin are here. They came for me.
A tear trips off my lashes and rolls down my cheek just as a shriek that seems to rise from the deepest parts of Jotunheimr pierces through the closed door and stabs my ears. The next one is weaker. And then…silence.
The door squeaks open, and then Nordin is striding out, painted in so much blood that it drips from the tip of his nose and stains his beard.
He homes in on me, closing the distance between us in three long strides.
And then he’s cradling my cheeks between his sticky palms. Not even an ounce of disgust eddies through my veins.
“Is Havrik dead?” I croak.
“Yes.”
I blink back the moisture that keeps forming. “Do you realize what this means?”
“Did he hurt you?” Nordin asks.
“The Ravine pack is—”
“Did he hurt you, Zas?”
I shake my head, then blurt out, “Nordin, the Ravine pack… It’s yours!”
“I don’t bloody care about that at the moment.” He glares at the corners of my mouth.
I probe them with the tip of my tongue to check for bleeding. When I taste copper flakes, I surmise I no longer bleed, but the sight must be ghastly. Then again, given how much gore Nordin wears, I doubt it repulses him.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks.
“Tell you what?”
His pupils are so constricted, they look about ready to wink out of existence. “That my father was the one to”—his molars grind—“poison you.”
My body temperature plummets so swiftly that I start to tremble. I consider lying, but Nordin knows me too well. He knows that even though I can keep myself from speaking secrets, I can’t keep myself from writing them.
“I didn’t want you to hate him,” I admit.
He says nothing. Just keeps gazing at me…into me with perplexing intensity.
“Does Mor know?”
“She does now.”
Shit. “Your father and I found an understanding, so—”
“Don’t ask me to forgive him.”
My eyes mist over. “He’s your father, Nordin.”
“He hurt the most precious person in my life.” His confession vibrates the air between us, agitating my heartbeats. “Blood will never excuse what he did. What he tried to take from me.”
I avert my gaze from his. “I’m not yours anymore.”
“You might hate me.” His shoulders curl inward. “You might never forgive me or choose me again”—his face hovers over mine—“but I will always choose you.”
My lips part around breaths that grow more ragged with every inch of space he erases.
“Over everyone and everything.” His words graze my mouth. “Not only beyond Midgard but beyond Ragnarok.”
I swallow, not daring to look higher than his nose, worried that if I do, I’ll glimpse a future I shouldn’t want. When more moisture pricks my lids, I lower them completely.
His lips tremble over mine. A tentative sweep. A fragile supplication. How do I forgive someone who destroyed a vital part of me? Especially when the reminder haunts my flesh?
“You broke me, Nordin.”
“You broke me too, Zas.”
My lids reel up, and I glare. “How dare you equate our pains!”
“I’m not. I’m just telling you that I’ve been so fucking miserable without you that I’ve decided I prefer to spend my days in your presence being glowered at and snubbed than away from you.
I was on my way to tell you when—” His eyes taper so harshly that I’ve no doubt he’s thinking of the male whose life he’s just ended.
His fingers slide to the back of my skull and link there. And then he’s tilting my face farther.
“I won’t make you false promises, but trust that I will do everything in my power to restore what I took from you.” His gaze reaches so deep into me, it pokes my trodden heart. Awakens it. “Whether you give me another chance or not.”
The longer I stare, the more my heart swells, each beat stretching it wider. When he dips close, when his nose bumps into mine, I don’t pull back. I don’t think I could, even if he let go. I’m like a moth, drifting toward the firepits, so entranced by its light I forget how it destroys.
As our breaths fuse, his glowing eyes plow into mine, hunting for permission.
For mercy.
“I hate how much I still love you,” I confess, shivers ribboning down my neck, skipping along my teeth, my gums, my palate. “I hate that I can’t stop. I hate—”
His mouth comes to rest over mine. It doesn’t part, only holds, absorbing each slight tremor, each vast uncertainty.
My fingers perch on his beating chest. My toes roll. My face slants. And then my lips move, drawing his into motion. Drawing all of him into motion.
His spine bends. His hands rove. He tucks me so close that my breasts mold to his chest and my ribs lock around his.
I lean back to murmur, “This isn’t me forgiving you, Nordin.”
A shadow blunts his stare, dimming its luster.
After a deep inhale, I add, “I still love you, but I haven’t forgiven you. I don’t know that I ever could.”
His lashes flutter, and then his forehead falls to mine as if the weight of his thoughts were too heavy for him to bear alone. “I’ll take anything you’re willing to give me.”
So I offer him what I’m able to surrender at that moment—my gratitude and this kiss. Our lips meet once more, with a hunger so deep it threatens to consume my self-preservation and make me amend my earlier decree.
“Don’t hurt me again. And don’t ever lie,” I say when his lips venture across my jaw before dipping down my throat.
“Never,” he rumbles, clutching me tighter, chafing me with his beard and with his unequivocal promise.
A throat clearing stills his mouth. He sighs, curls one arm around my waist, and turns toward the source of the noise.
“Oh, Fenrir, what did he do to you?” Mor presses her trembling fingers to her mouth.
I think she means to Nordin, until I catch her gaze skating down my chest and over my stained nightgown.
“It’s not my blood,” I reassure her. “It’s Havrik’s.”
The breath she expels is so profound it drives her palm away. Two more deep inhales cycle through her chest before she speaks again. “Saga is on her way. She says there’s chaos in the Wilds.”
A gasp sneaks down my raw throat. “The vampyrs?”
“No.” Mor shakes her head. “The Ravines. They’ve all morphed back to skin and are waiting.”
I frown. “For…?”
“For their new Alpha to howl so that they may sink back into fur.” She studies her nephew. “Are you ready, Nordin?”
His fingers splay around my hip, driving me toward my mother. He relinquishes me to her, then steps past us, out the door, under a sky that seems impossibly bright even though the moon is all shadow tonight.
He lifts his face, and the obscurity shrouding the dark moon recedes like a gently pulled veil. His skin takes on a preternatural glow. Even his hair sparkles. The moonlight must restore the lock I charred, for his body suddenly broadens, bends, and then he slams down onto all fours.
The purple fur along his spine rises and shimmers, the hue brightening before turning as crimson as the blood dappling my nightgown. Once the color of the Ravine pack stains his coat, the moon extinguishes its enchanted light.
Nordin tips his head toward the heavens and pours a sound that tightens even my non-shifter chest. For a heartbeat, all is still, and then from the other side of the mountains, a chorus of howls echoes against the fabric of the night.
Alpha… My wolf’s dream has just come true.
Did the Norns lead Havrik to my door? Is Nordin’s rise tonight their work, or accidentally mine?
The valley air stirs. Of course… Not everyone went running tonight. Where most two-legged Ravines plod gingerly, others approach boldly. Oddly enough, it’s those with the round ears whose footfalls exude the most assurance.
Mor must sense my shoulders pinching, because she strokes my arm. “Our enemies are gone.” As we watch more Ravines gather around Nordin, she adds, “You swore not to lie to me.”
I rest my cheek against her shoulder, knowing what she’s referring to—her brother’s hand in my poisoning. “And you swore not to lie to me.”
She offers no protest, for she knows that withholding the truth is just as dishonest as lying.
After a beat, I murmur, “I was trying to protect what was left of your relationship.”
I feel her jaw tic against the top of my head, and then her lips press there. “The day I became your mother, you and I became an entity, Zaskja. It was us against the world. And that will never change.”
I sigh. “What do we do now? Where do we go from here?”
“We build a new home for ourselves on this land.”
I look around us, take in this valley with its insurmountable walls. Where will I run to if the world becomes too much again? Where will I hide?
“It isn’t as though Nordin will let you go back,” my mother adds as an afterthought. One surely spurred by the sight of what she walked in on.
“Does that mean you’ll be switching packs?” I ask, because once a shifter reneges on their Alpha, they can’t return until their old pack is under new leadership.
“Yes.” There’s no hesitation.
Shouldn’t she hesitate? She might despise Ulf at the moment, but I’m well-placed to know that hatred fades.
“Are you certain, Mor?”
“As certain as I was about wanting to be your mother.”
New heat billows behind my lids.
She presses a kiss to the crown of my head, then releases me. As she goes toward Nordin, I blurt out to her, “Tyron helped Havrik! Before you switch packs, tell Ulf. If he doesn’t do anything about it, then at least we’ll know where he stands.”
Her features sharpen, whittling every ounce of warmth from her expression. And then she shifts into fur. Her incandescent stare is the only sign that she’s communicating with her Alpha.
I wonder if she also tells Ulf of all that happened tonight. He’ll have felt the tether to his son break, but he might not have realized the cause. Unless he heard about the Ravines shifting out of fur in the middle of the Wilds, and he put two and two together?
What emotion rides the Vale Jarl? Shock? Pride? Uncertainty about the future? Has Nordin already confronted him about the poisoning?
I shake the thoughts out of my head and sink into the moment, not wanting to miss a beat of what’s about to transpire.
The only time I witnessed the phenomenon was so long ago, it’s a wonder I can still remember. It was the day of Lenora and Bjorn’s nuptials. They’d been true mates for years by this point, yet belonging to him hadn’t made her ready to belong to Ulf and the Vales.
But the day they exchanged their vows, she’d asked her father-in-law to turn her Glacier-blue stripe to Vale-purple. I remember how wide Saga’s eyes had become, the same way I recall how Nordin had to restrain his brother with brute force so their father could complete the ritual.
By the time I blink out of the memory, Mor is dropping low to the ground, curling her shoulders inward.
Nordin chuffs, a sound I take to mean, Are you sure, Eira?
Mor yips, then tucks her head between her front legs and her tail between her back ones in complete submission.
For a heartbeat, Nordin only observes her. When she doesn’t scuttle back in indecision, he opens his jaw wide and bites her scruff. Even though Mor doesn’t wince, I do, because being bitten is painful, no matter the reason for it.
For what feels like endless minutes, her stripe stays unchanged, but then I see red creeping into the purple, see it flow down and down until it’s chewed the Vales’ color away and replaced it with the Ravines’.
As Nordin unfastens his teeth from my mother’s nape, his eyes lock on mine. And then he’s advancing toward me. My spine pulls straight and begins to tingle as though color were magically sweeping down its length, striping it Ravine-red.
But my spine will never color. Not magically, in any case.
Like some humans that feel a strong connection to their clan, I could tattoo the color, but it’d reveal that Fenrir wasn’t the one to chisel my ears into points, because no true shifter stripes their spine, not even one with defective magic.
Two questions race through my mind, neck and neck: Am I ready for the world to know what I am, and am I prepared to belong to Nordin Stormsson?