Chapter 20
Jared
The message had arrived at seven forty-three.
One line. The burner number, her burner, the one I’d left on her nightstand in what felt like a different chapter of my life.
Asgard. Tonight. Come alone.
I had read it four times.
Not because it was ambiguous, it wasn’t, but because the fact of it arriving at all required a moment to absorb.
She had reached out.
She had chosen the location, chosen the terms, chosen the register of the thing.
Not a text asking to talk. Not a call.
Asgard.
The place where the important things happened in our world, the sacred space, the room where Erik had collared Raia. The location where Noah married Shelby, and Gabriel had proposed to Rose. It was the place where our people came when they were ready to choose something that mattered.
She knew what Asgard meant.
Raia had almost certainly explained it.
Mari had probably reinforced the point with all the subtlety of a battering ram.
She had chosen it anyway.
I had spent the drive over constructing what I was walking into.
Anger… she had every right to anger and I had given her more than enough material for it.
Questions I didn’t have clean answers to.
The reckoning of a woman who had been told the truth after it mattered and was deciding what to do with that.
I had prepared for all of it. I had prepared to sit with whatever she needed to hand me and accept it without defense, because that was what the situation called for and because she deserved someone who would stay in the room for it.
What I had not prepared for was her.
Asgard was quiet when I arrived.
Raia had arranged it, which meant Erik had approved it.
Mari had almost certainly involved herself somewhere along the way.
The room was private, the building otherwise dark, and the familiar atmosphere of the space carried the same feeling it always had when it was empty of everyone except the people who needed it.
I found her in the main ceremonial room.
She was standing near the center of the space with her back to the door, looking at the far wall where a single tapestry hung, a Valkyrie, fierce and unhurried, exactly the kind of image I had come to understand she returned to when she was thinking about what she was made of.
She was dressed in something dark and simple, her hair down, her posture the kind of still that I had learned to read as the outward signal of a woman who had arrived at a decision.
She heard me come in. Didn’t turn immediately. Let a moment pass, not drama, just her own timing, which had always been her own and had never required my permission.
Then she turned.
Her face was composed. Not the social composure.
Not the armor. The real kind. The kind that lived underneath everything else and was made of something I had been cataloguing since the night she’d walked barefoot onto the shibari rig and I had understood, without being prepared to understand it, that this woman was not what the file said she was.
I crossed the room until there was a reasonable amount of space between us and stopped. Let her have the distance. Let her set the terms of the next thirty seconds.
She looked at me for a moment. Those clear eyes doing what they always did, reading accurately, arriving at conclusions I hadn’t finished giving her.
“I should be furious with you,” she said.
“You have every right to be.”
“I am.” A pause. Something moved through her expression, not quite a smile, the warm complicated thing that lived underneath the composed surface and arrived when she was being entirely honest. “I’m also in love with you, which is inconvenient.”
She said it the way she said everything important. Without performance. Without negotiation. As though the truth was reason enough to say it aloud.
The room was very quiet.
I had been braced for anger, for demands, for the careful measured reckoning I deserved.
The words she had actually said arrived like something I had no prepared response for, which was accurate, because I had spent eleven years specifically avoiding the circumstances in which those words would be said to me and I had done an outstanding job of it right up until I hadn’t.
“Polina—“
“Let me finish.” Not sharp. Just the tone of a woman who knew what she needed to say and intended to say it.
“I know what you did. I know how we started, the operation, walking into Midgard knowing who I was and why you were there.” She held my gaze.
“I know about the computer. I know you sat in front of it and chose not to follow through with the plan.” A pause.
“I know it wasn’t fine. The beginning wasn’t fine.
Me being here is not telling you it was. ”
I said nothing. She was right about it all, and she knew I knew it.
“What I’m also not willing to do,” she continued, “is throw away the realest thing I’ve ever had because the beginning was compromised.
” She looked at me steadily. “I’ve spent twenty-four years in a world where everything was a transaction and I had stopped believing that something could be…
actually true. And then you came through a balcony door in the dark and asked me what I wanted and listened to the answer and wrote it under my phone, and I am not”—her voice remained level and its levelness was the most moving thing I had ever heard—“I am not going to let my father be the reason I walk away from this.” She held my gaze. “Not when I finally know what’s true.”
The tapestry moved slightly in the air from the heating system. The room held its ceremonial quiet.
“You said you’d make me fly,” she said. Her chin lifted slightly. The Valkyrie under the composure. “I’m going to hold you to that.”
Something cracked open in my chest. Not dramatically, just the feeling of knowing something that had been held under pressure for a very long time was finally released, quietly, into the available space.
“Shouldn’t the punishment be mine?” I said. “For the beginning. For all of it.”
She looked at me for a moment and the almost-smile became something more present. “Yes,” she said. “The punishment is that you have to earn me. Properly. All of it. No shortcuts, no operational efficiency, no”—a small breath of something that was almost a laugh—“professional distance.”
“I have no professional distance left,” I said. “It appears to have been comprehensively dismantled.”
“Good.” Her eyes were very steady on mine. “Then earn me.”
I looked at her for a long moment, this woman who had grieved her mother and faced her father and walked into a crash with her hands braced and come out the other side still standing, who had said I am not going to let my father be the reason I walk away from the first true thing with the fierce certainty of a woman who had decided who she was going to be and was being it.
I had spent eleven years making sure nothing stuck.
Had built an entire operating system around the clean exit, the controlled distance, the professional remove.
Had watched my friends find something true one by one and had told myself, with considerable conviction, that I was the exception to whatever rule they were all obeying.
I was not the exception.
I had known that since the night I’d stayed in the aftercare room and felt her leave. Since the jacket I’d forgotten. Since the computer I hadn’t used.
“I can do that,” I said. “I want to.”
She held my gaze for one more moment, the full focused attention of a woman who had heard an answer and was deciding whether she believed it, and then something settled in her face.
Not relief exactly. Something more like a woman arriving somewhere she’d been walking toward for a long time and finding it exactly where she’d hoped it would be.
“There’s a room prepared,” she said. “Raia arranged it.”
I wasn’t surprised.
Raia had always possessed a talent for putting people exactly where they needed to be.
I understood what Polina was telling me.
Not just that she had chosen this room, but that she understood exactly what it was for and had walked into it with her eyes open.
No Hecate. No performance. No audience. Just Polina, standing in front of me exactly as she was and choosing to be there.
The distinction meant everything. She knew it did. That was why she had said it.
I crossed the distance between us. Stopped close enough that the warmth of her reached me and lifted one hand and tucked a strand of hair back from her face, the same gesture, the same deliberate gentleness, the same giving of time to say no if she wanted to.
She turned her face into my hand, the same way she had the first night in her room, and I felt it in every place the weeks since had left me open.
“Polina.” Her name. The real one. The only one, in this room, tonight. “I am going to spend a considerable amount of time making it worth your while.”
“I know,” she said. Her voice had dropped to something quieter, the composure beginning its willing dissolution. “That’s why I’m here.”
I looked at her for one more moment, under the composed surface, the fierce clear eyes, the woman who had chosen this with full knowledge and no illusions, and felt, with a certainty and with none of the professional distance I usually kept between myself and the things that mattered, that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Then I took her hand and allowed her to lead me to the prepared room, closing the door behind us.
Asgard had been built as a kingdom. There were spaces meant for large gatherings, private chambers reserved for its core members, luxury woven into every corner, and select rooms where people came to explore the things they trusted few others to understand.
The shibari suspension frame stood in the center of the room.
Along one wall hung neatly organized coils of hemp rope in varying lengths and diameters.
So this was how my little bird wanted to fly.
On a nearby bureau sat a carefully chosen selection of implements.