Chapter 48
“I’m coming in!” Saga’s shout tears me from my dreams.
I wake so brutally that my body lifts off the mattress.
“This is your final warning before I barge in.” There were others? “For my eyeballs’ sake, please, please, please don’t be doing the dirty.”
“Your eyeballs are safe, Syster,” Nordin replies from where he stands at the foot of the bed, belting his black tunic.
How deeply was I slumbering not to have heard him get up?
The door clicks open. Saga peers through the crack before widening it. “Oh, thank Gods. I’m still scarred by that time I walked in on you and…”
Nordin cuts her a look that makes her tilt her head.
“Zas knows you aren’t a virgin, Nord.”
“Just because I know it doesn’t mean I want to be reminded of it,” I say, tucking the covers around my chest before fluffing my pillows to prop myself up.
“What brings you here so early?” Nordin asks.
“Nika’s back. With Klovir.” Saga jumps right onto the bed, nesting in the spot that still bears the indent of her brother’s body. “They’re waiting for you at the longhouse. Your longhouse.”
“What did he decide?” I ask, my voice thready with worry.
I realize it won’t change Tyron’s fate, but I’d still prefer he dies at the vampyrs’ hands rather than at Nordin’s.
My best friend curls her arm, then pillows her head on it, evidently meaning to settle in for a while. “Don’t know. The Krossons only asked that I fetch you. So here I am. Fetching you.”
Nordin hooks the buckle into the leather strap, his attention heavy on his sister’s face.
Her nostrils flare. I see her sniffing her arm before taking a whiff of the pillow. “You should crack a door open or burn some incense. A lesser person would faint from the sex stench.”
Nordin walks over to me. “You could not lie in our bed.”
She sighs. “I could, but it’s really comfortable. Varganson might’ve been a scumbag, but he had impeccable taste in home furnishings.”
Nordin leans over. “I’ll bring back breakfast and Klovir’s response.” And then he presses a kiss to my mouth. It’s gentle, quick, familiar.
To me.
Not to Saga, who says, after he’s left, “I still can’t believe you’re together… And doing the dirty.” She flips onto her side and tucks her palms under her cheek. “Did you go further than preliminaries?”
“You honestly want to talk about it?”
“No. Yes. No. I can’t decide. As your best friend, I want to hear all about it and offer advice. If you need any. As your lover’s sister, I think it best…” Her expression teeters as though she were warring with her conscience. “Oh, just tell me. I’m too darn curious.”
I find myself smiling. “We went further than preliminaries.”
“Are you still able to walk?”
“Surprisingly.”
“Respect, girl.” She smirks. “Considering how he’s hung, he best be your last.”
“And why is that?” I ask, even though there isn’t any doubt in my mind that her brother will be my last.
With a shit-eating grin, she says, “Because they’d need extra padding to stay in.”
I gape at her for a solid minute before erupting into laughter.
“Teasing aside, are you all right? I remember how much it hurt the first time, and I’m a shifter. In other words, built to withstand girthiness.”
I huff out another laugh. “Is that a word?”
“Should be.”
“Well, I withstood your brother just fine.”
She cocks a brow. “All the way in?”
“No. He said he’s never seated himself all the way—” I grimace. “Forget it. I don’t want to know if that’s a lie.” I stomp on the image of Nordin with other women before it can spread.
But it spreads…
“Hey, what’s with the glum face?”
I snag my lip.
“Tell me.”
I grimace. “What if I’m not enough, Saga?”
“The mythical Empress, whose beauty is only outdone by mine”—she adds a wink—“worries that she won’t be enough? I’ll have heard it all.”
“I’ve no magic.” I twist my hands in the sheets, refraining from pointing out their unsightliness. “And I’m not his true mate.”
“Zas, babe, my brother is nuts about you. Like, in an alarming way. No, alarming isn’t the correct term…” She sticks her tongue into the corner of her mouth in thought. “It’s like you eclipse everything in his line of sight.”
“Who knew you could wax so poetic, Saga Stormsson?”
She smiles, but soon the curve of her lips loses vigor. “It scares me too, you know.”
“What does?”
“The intensity of his love for you. He looks at you like Bjorn looked at Lenora. Like he’d follow you into the pits of Jotunheimr.”
I lay back on my side and touch her cheek. “Nordin and I aren’t going anywhere.”
She heaves in a ragged breath, releases it, then rolls onto her back and peers out the ceiling window at the sky tufted with rain clouds. “You left me.”
“Not by choice,” I whisper, reaching for her hand and clasping it tight.
Her teeth sink into her thinner lower lip and dent it.
“I know I mostly behave like I don’t give a shit about anything, but I give so many shits about my family.
I hate how torn we’ve all become. I hate that my brother and parents aren’t talking to each other.
I know it has to do with you not being of age and all that, but I wish they’d accept Nordin’s choice like Eira and I have.
Especially since you’re mere moons away from your twenty-first birthday. It’s so ridiculous.”
I contemplate telling her the actual reason Nordin no longer talks with their parents. But Saga stayed behind with them. If she leaves too, then who’ll be left to inherit the Vale throne? Although, would it be so terrible if an Alpha from another family rose, and Saga joined our pack?
I test the waters before spilling the irreparable secret. “Are you eager to become Alpha someday?”
Her lips flex into a grin. “Hel, yeah!”
I decide then and there that if she ever learns that her father tampered with my mortality, she’ll hear it from someone else.
“So about my surprise birthday party… I know you wanted to throw it here and everything, but Mor and Far will never come without a formal invitation from Nordin, and since there’s no chance of that happening—or is there?” Her tone is heartbreakingly hopeful.
“You’d have to ask him.”
She sighs. “Might be easier to do it back home. But only if you swear to come. Otherwise—”
“I’ll be wherever you need me to be, Saga. Always and forever.”
Which is how I end up back in the Vale Valley the following evening, my gut writhing with nerves that, more than once, make me hesitate to turn back. But I forge on.
If only I hadn’t…