Chapter 31 Rada
RADA
I’d grown up dodging feral Alphas. I’d spent years learning to duck blades and axes, and I’d even managed to temporarily avoid my own biology.
But there was no dodging the sea and the sky on that small island, when two idiot monsters decided to fight over me like giant, ill-mannered dogs with a juicy, small bone between them.
At least one of them took the time to set me out of the way before they killed everyone, though I was knocked around a bit at first by the divinely pissed-off ice god.
I did manage to wrap my cloak around my hands before I fell to the jagged rocks again, and by the time I’d gotten back to my feet, Goran was there.
He grabbed me and pulled me to his chest, wrapping his own soggy cloak around us both.
We stared at the monsters for a moment, frozen in shock.
Lusca had moved down the beach enough that when he took his form again, he didn’t flatten us, though his enormous shell loomed a bit too close for my comfort. If he fell, we would be crushed.
“I have to get you safe,” Goran shouted. “Is there any shelter?”
He wasn’t asking me; Kellin was staggering toward us, and he yelled back, “Nothing for miles. If we could swim out far enough and sail due east, there’s an island with a sand cove a half day’s—”
The wind whipped his next words away. It blew like an icy hurricane around us, though Skadi had now made himself physical enough to snap with his teeth at Lusca’s whiplike tentacles.
An icicle the size of my leg came hurtling toward Kellin’s head from behind, but Lachlan was suddenly there, snatching it out of the air before it could connect.
I gasped. We were all too exposed. There was nowhere to hide.
While I panicked, Alexios was doing something at my waist—putting a belt around me? No, tying the bag of supplies there. “Can you two swim her out far enough?” he shouted to Lachlan and Goran.
“We can try—duck!” Lachlan yelped. Goran immediately pushed me down, crouching over me as something whistled over us. Icicles or tentacles, I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t care.
“Get in the boat!” I ordered everyone. Luckily, the kraken had placed Goran’s boat in shallow enough water that it was still close enough to wade out to.
They all obeyed, though Goran refused to climb in until I was aboard.
There were supplies on board, or crates anyway, and a small cabin.
Goran and Dustin tied ropes to the anchor holds and tossed them into the water.
The selkies shifted into their seal forms and grabbed the ropes in their mouths, preparing to tow us deeper.
I knew the sea was Lusca’s domain, but I needed to explain to him that Skadi might not be a friend, but he wasn’t necessarily an enemy.
However, the water that whipped around the boat made it almost impossible to see the two fighting creatures, and speaking to them was out of the question.
“Go below,” Alexios shouted at me, pointing me toward the cabin. I rolled my eyes and went to stand at the side, peering out into the storm.
“Lusca!” I yelled. “Skadi! Stop fighting, you great hulking idiots!” To my utter shock, one of them listened. But it wasn’t the one I’d expected.
Skadi broke away, or at least one of his legs did, and he plucked me off the ship’s deck, lifting me to his enormous, scaled face.
“You may not leave me, little enemy!” He didn’t wait for an answer, some part of him—the storm, or his tail—striking Lusca and batting him hundreds of yards away.
My heart panged as I watched the enormous kraken sail over the cliffs and onto the island.
Only knowing he was more or less indestructible kept me from crying out.
“I stole you. You belong to me. You are my hoard, and no one may take you from me.”
His hoard? Oh, shit. I knew about dragons and their hoards.
“You said you’re not a dragon!” I yelled. “Even if you were, I can’t be your hoard, Skadi. I’m a person.”
“My person. You gave me your tooth. Now all of you is mine. Mine!”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
For some reason, he rubbed his snout on my head and shoulders.
It didn’t hurt, but the scales were prickly, leaving trails of frost on my skin and freezing my hair.
When he pulled back his head, though, my pendant hung on one of his teeth.
He pressed his snout to his scales at the front of his wing joint and blew cold air over it, freezing the pendant to his body alongside the other small lumps that I knew must hide my poisons.
“Hey, you can’t have my pendant!” I shouted.
“But I can. It is mine, like every other part of y—” His annoying claim was cut short by an enormous tentacle, bigger than any tree I’d ever seen and far longer.
It came from behind the cliffs, wrapped around him, and shook me free.
I flew toward the boat, wondering if I’d break into pieces when I landed.
But Goran grabbed me somehow, though my breath was knocked out of me when I hit his chest and he fell to his knees. His face was nearly purple with anger as he shouted toward the sky, “What manner of males are you? Fighting where she might be hurt or killed. Shame on both of your lines!”
“They can’t even hear you,” I told him, but I must have been wrong, because the wind picked up and began pushing the boat out to sea. It was a cold wind, but by now all of the air around us was frigid, so I wasn’t sure which of the colossal idiots was doing it.
Dustin put up the sail, and Goran carried me over to the main mast just before the ship began to scud like a skipping stone across the top of the choppy sea.
The selkies were left far behind, but I knew they’d be fine.
The noise was incredible as the ship rocketed across the sea so fast, the wood creaked like it might fly apart.
Loose ropes slapped against the sides of the boat like Goran’s braids slapped my face as he crouched over me, sheltering me from as much of the wind and icy rain as he could. Ouch. Goran’s braids hurt. I grabbed one with a bone bead that kept whacking my cheek.
Except it wasn’t a bone bead. My fingers closed on a faceted gem, and I knew immediately what it was.
It could only be the diamond I’d placed there a decade before, the first gem I’d wired into an extravagant bead for him after I’d agreed to marry him. He was still wearing my beads, hidden underneath the shell and bone ones.
Did that mean…? Suddenly, it clicked. Of course he was. And what was worse, everyone else already knew.
All the times the others had referred to me as his wife, the raised eyebrows when I corrected them, flashed through my mind, as fast as the boat was riding along the waves to the east.
I grabbed the bottom of Goran’s beard and pulled him down so I could shout in his ear. To make sure he stayed there, I pinched the nerve at the juncture of his neck and shoulder, hard. “We’re still married? We’re still fucking married?”
His throat flexed as he swallowed, and I pushed down the sudden urge to lick the bared skin there.
“Do you really want an answer?” he shouted back, ducking his head.
His face was only inches in front of mine.
So close, I couldn’t even focus on his eyes.
So I stared at his lips instead and breathed in that scent that had meant home so long ago.
“Yes,” I rasped. I didn’t need an answer. I already knew the truth. But I wanted an explanation. “Why didn’t you cut your braids off?”
“How could I?” His lips barely moved as he replied, “If I wanted to cut you out of my life, I would need to remove more than a braid.
More than your beads. I would need to shave my head to forget the feeling of your hands pulling at my hair as you cried out my name.
I would have to cut out my tongue to forget the taste of you, cut off my hands to block out the memory of your skin beneath my fingers.
Gouge out my eyes that looked for you every morning for the past nine years, before I remembered you were gone.
I would need to let every drop of my blood spill and cut out my foolish heart.
“You may have my liebehald on your arm, ma bohinya, but your mark is carved into my heart. Your blood is braided with mine. You may leave me, you may forget me, you may never look upon me again and be glad of it. But I will die knowing that the only moments in my life that mattered were the ones spent in your arms. That the only goal that gives me a reason to breathe is one that may bring me back to you and cause you to look upon me with love again.”
His hand rested on the side of my face, and I leaned into it unconsciously as he kept on breaking my heart, or maybe repairing it.
“I never forgot what you said about my country. How we had lost honor, by trapping our women and stealing their dignity. Ever since you left me, I’ve fought to create a Starlak where, if you ever decided to cross into its borders again, you could be safe.
A country you would want to call your own, even if you never claimed me again. ”
The wind that howled around us, blocked by his body on one side and the mast on the other, was almost as loud as my pounding heart. The vow his warriors had chanted echoed in my thoughts. He’d done that for me?
“I was not a good husband. I didn’t listen to you; I underestimated you.
” I pressed my fingers to his cheek, and he pulled back just enough that I could see his blue eyes.
They shone with intensity, and the raw pain I’d seen before, the night I left him.
“I thought we were meant to do it together. To rebuild a safe country for Omegas, ma bohinya. But you were made for greater things, weren’t you?
You were put in this world to make all of it safer, not just Starlak.
And you were made for greater mates than me.
” He pressed a kiss to my brow, then pulled away, standing.