Chapter 42
Mate. I'm his mate. Linnea didn't know whether to fear that this was another trial.
No. Mine. Mine. MINE, her wolf insisted. I told you not to believe what you saw. He's MINE.
Fenris stood in front of her with his heart bare between them. He was not reaching for her. He was waiting.
"I pushed you away on purpose," Linnea admitted, the confession scraping its way out. "You want to know why I've been treating you like a stranger since the hall and the serpent's bowl? It wasn't Inga. I knew what I was feeling for you, and it terrified me."
"Little singer..."
"Let me finish, or I'll lose my nerve." She locked her arms down at her sides.
"I can survive a lot. I've had practice.
I survived my father and the cult and my mother's face at that table.
The one thing I can't survive is having you and then standing one day in a world that doesn't have you in it.
You're a god. I'm whatever I am. The math doesn't work, and I did it a hundred times on the way down here.
I decided it was safer to step away now than watch you leave me later. I was trying to let you go."
Fenris took his time to reply, patient and measured, knowing they were in a moment that deserved reverence. "You want to know what I gave the serpent at that bowl."
The turn threw her. "What?"
"You watched me pay Níehoggr a toll for your passage, and you thought I did it to you out of pity.
" Fenris shook his head. "I gave it the good years with Sunniva.
The early ones, before she and our children thought I was a monster.
I carried those memories into the dark, Linnea.
They were the only warm things I had down there.
They kept me company when there was nothing else at all. "
Linnea's chest was too tight, her tongue struggling to form words. "You gave those away? Why?"
"I didn't need them anymore." He took one step closer to her.
"You are always going to be the brightest thing I have in any dark that ever comes for me again.
I don't need old memories to keep me warm when I have you in the world.
So I handed the serpent the old light, because I have a new one, and if you choose me, I swear on Yggdrasil and everything hanging from it that I will never leave you or let you believe for a single breath that you are not worth every scrap of love my broken soul can still make. "
The enormity of it landed in Linnea's chest and stole her voice for a beat. Something that had been torn open in her since Inga, Sunniva, and the tithe closed over.
Linnea crossed the space between them, wrapped her arms around him, and kissed him.
"Of course I choose you," she said against his mouth. "You enormous, tragic, ridiculous god. I told you before that you're the only thing I've ever wanted."
For a heartbeat, Fenris only looked at her like he couldn't believe his ears, before he was kissing her back.
There was no hesitation. It was teeth and tongues and tearing at each other to get closer.
Linnea shoved his shirt off him and dragged her mouth down the silver scars carved into his chest, claiming every mark the world had feared as hers.
Finally, her wolf crowed, wild and delighted. Ours. Bite him!
The rest of their clothes came off in a graceless scramble, until there was nothing left between them but heat and the frantic press of skin on skin.
His hand splayed at the back of her head and tilted it to where he wanted it.
He set his mouth to her throat, right over the pulse, and the scrape of his teeth there made her moan.
"Say it again," he growled. He moved down to her breast, closed his mouth over her nipple, and pulled a sound out of her she didn't know she could make.
"Mate." She dragged his head back up to her mouth. "You impossible, stubborn thing. Mine. You're mine too."
Whatever leash he had kept on himself snapped at that wondrous word in her mouth.
He bore her back into the furs of the bed and came down over her.
His hand pressed between her thighs and found her already slick and wanting.
He stroked her, unhurried and merciless at once, until her hips lifted off the bed to chase it.
"Say you're going to be all mine. My mate. Forever," he begged against her jaw.
"Shut up and don't stop," she replied, hips lifting.
"Say it." He laughed low and pushed two fingers into her.
Linnea groaned, needing to come so badly it hurt. "Fuck, I'm yours. I accept you as my mate. Just…fuck…"
Fenris licked the side of her jaw, thrust his fingers in deeper, and worked her until the coil deep in her belly drew tight and broke. She came around his hand with his name shattering in her mouth, and he rode her through every wave of it and didn't once let up.
"Again," he ordered against her throat, his fingers still working her through the aftershocks. "I have wanted you wrung out and past speech for all the miserable days since that hall. I'm not going to waste it now."
"Fenris." His name came out of her half-laugh. "I want you in me already. Don't you want to fuck your mate?"
"That was naughty of you. How can I say no now?" he grumbled, eyes narrowing.
"You can't," Linnea said against his lips. "My mate."
Fenris made a sound that was all wolf as he hooked her knee up over his arm, notched the head of his cock against her entrance, and drove home in a single long stroke.
For the length of one breath, neither of them moved. He held there, buried to the root, his face tucked against her neck, breathing her in.
"Gods, there you are. I thought I would never get to have you."
Linnea scraped her nails down his back and pulled him flush against her. The magic in the bond flared bright at the joining, hungry for the last thing it had been denied. Her own power simmered to meet it.
"Stop waiting," she said against his jaw. "Take me. Have me."
His pace turned brutal, and down the bond came everything he had never said, every stroke driving it deeper into her than his cock could reach. She locked her legs around him, dug her fingers into the muscle of his shoulders, and hauled him harder into her.
"Say you are mine again," he demanded, his voice in ruins. "Out loud. I want the words… I want..."
"I'm yours." Linnea put a hand around his throat and dragged him down until his ear was at her mouth. "Which makes you mine, wolf, so you had better plan on sticking around a long time to enjoy it."
"Never letting you out of my sight again." Fenris drove into her harder, a growl breaking loose from his chest, and the gold cord of the bond between them wound tighter with every stroke, hot and straining toward their edge.
Her orgasm was rolling in a second time when he set his open mouth to the join of her neck and shoulder, and his breath went hot and ragged against her skin. Every other time his teeth had grazed and retreated. This time she wanted them to stay.
Yes, her wolf snarled, all teeth now. There. Bite. Ours.
"Do it," Linnea begged, the words torn out of her. "Claim me. I'm choosing it. Claim me, and I'll claim you right back."
Fenris's teeth sank into the meat of her shoulder, the sting of it lighting up every nerve, and the bond snapped taut between them like a struck string. No one had ever loved her as he did in her whole life; it was a flood, with nothing at all held back.
Linnea turned her head and bit down hard on his throat, and the bond between them locked shut at both ends.
His whole body shuddered and came apart above her.
He spilled into her on a broken sound that she took straight into her own chest, her own release tearing through her and dragging him over the edge with it, the two of them claiming each other in the same breath.
When Linnea came back to herself, he was there. Not beside her but in her like a second heartbeat. Down the new thread between them came his relief, wonder, and naked terror at how much he wanted this, laid as bare as if he had said every word of it aloud.
Linnea sent her own back the same way, everything she had never once had the courage to say, and it landed in him hard enough that his arms locked around her like he might come apart without them.
Magic and love ran both ways until she was drowning in it.
She could no more be a passing warmth to him than he could be to her. They were equals, down to the root.
Fenris's hand found hers, their fingers twining together, and lifted them to kiss her hand over and over. Linnea remembered the horrible moment on the path when he had offered his hand, and she had refused him. She vowed never to do that to him again, no matter how angry they were with each other.
For a long moment, she lay spent and shaking on his chest, both their hearts going like war drums. Magic danced through her, and for a moment she thought it was the mating bond settling again.
"Linnea, what's wrong?" Fenris asked, already feeling it.
"I…don't know…" Linnea pushed up off Fenris's chest and moved back on the furs onto all fours, her hair falling around her face, a surge of power coming through her like a tide filling a bay.
No one was reaching for a leash. No one was making her do this or forbidding it or deciding it in her place. For the first time in her life, there was only her, the wolf, and a choice that belonged to no one else.
"I accept you," Linnea said to the creature that had lived starved in her dark. She put her hands on her chest, and tears slipped down her cheeks. "I accept you. I love you. I'm so sorry I kept you locked away for so long."
Yours, it breathed, gone soft for the first time in her life.
Yours, she replied and let go.
There was no pain in the shift because nothing was being forced through her against her will.
One breath, she was a woman on her hands and knees in a nest of furs, and the next her spine rolled, her bones slid, and she landed on four paws on the floor. It was like shrugging off a too-tight coat she had been made to wear since birth.
Linnea twisted her head and looked down the length of her own foreleg. The fur on it was a shimmering gray-silver, the same color as Fenris's scarred eye, with every hair tipped in black.
The world came to her sharper through the wolf's eyes, closer and drenched in scent, and nearly all of it was him. Forged steel and silver dust, magic, and the salt of the two of them together.
Fenris sat up slowly on the bed. The god who had been feared by everything that had ever laid eyes on him stared at her in silent wonder, as though the sight of her had stopped his voice.
She stood beside him. His match. His equal. Not his creature and not his to command, a wolf that had walked out of her own cage on her own four feet because she chose to.
Linnea lifted her head, and every ache and every stolen year and every not-enough that had ever been laid across her shoulders poured out of her. She tipped her muzzle to the ceiling of Hel's little hall and howled.