by Nora Ash
“I’ll be okay.” Unsteadily she walked to my side and placed her hand on my chest. “Go. Bring him back.”
There wasn’t much we shared, her and I. But the urgency of our task was one such thing. I had to go. I was the only one who could. There was some small measure of comfort in that.
Cupping her cheek in one hand, I bent down and pressed my mouth to hers.
She inhaled softly the moment before our lips connected, but didn’t resist the kiss. It was soft and sweet, and it filled me with the strength I needed to do what I had to.
“I’ll go,” I said, pulling back from her with a deep breath. “And when I come back, I’ll make sure you’ve got all the power you need to continue.”
Fifteen
Modi
Letting the Jotunn go off on his own went against every instinct I had. He might be a bumbling fool, but he was still the spawn of the betrayer. One never knew what the two of them would cook up on their own.
I glared at the omega slouched on the edge of the bed in the dismal apartment I’d been left to babysit her in. She was the reason Loki had seen us coming. A more experienced sorceress…
A more experienced sorceress would still not have been able to out-trick the God of Mischief.
My shoulders slumped and I rubbed at my skull, trying to ease the irritation prickling my skin. I loathed to admit it, but the human had been a surprising asset. From the strength of her magic to how she had handled Heimdall, I doubted even Trud could have done better. Or, if I was honest, half as well.
“Eat,” I growled at her, irrational anger that she had proven me wrong bubbling in my veins.
She flinched at my harsh tone, the uneaten food I had broken into one of the closed shops on the street below to get her falling from her hand to the bed sheet. Her eyes widened with fear for a split-second before she managed to school her expression into an irritated scowl.
“God, why are you such a dick?”
Instant regret had me grimacing at the sinking feeling in my gut when realization finally clicked into place. Despite the front she put up, I scared her. Of course I did. I had been harsh with her after she broke through my inner barriers, and now here she was, alone and vulnerable with me, her powerful magic burned to ashes and no way of defending herself, should she need to.
It was a curious sensation. For the first time, I looked at her and felt pity rather than irritation. She was just a human girl swept up in a world she had no way of understanding, separated from the two alphas who had claimed her.
I crossed the floor and sat on the bed next to her, picking up the food and returning it to her. “You need to eat. It won’t replenish your magic, but it will help your body recuperate from the strain.”
My softer tone made her look up at me, gaze guarded as if she expected me to snap at her again. “I’m not hungry.”
I opened my mouth to tell her tough, she was eating anyway, but the shine in her brown eyes had me frowning. Impulsively I reached out to touch her forehead with the back of my hand.
“You are burning up!”
Shit. Was she sick? I knew little of human ailments and even less about keeping a sick one alive.
“Yeah.” The way she said it, dodging my gaze as if she was hiding something, made me narrow my eyes.
“I take it you have been feverish for some time?”
“A couple of hours,” she muttered.
So she decided to get sick shortly after Bjarni left. Of-fucking-course.
“What do you need? Medicines?” I asked. “A human healer? What do you call them… a doctor?”
“No. I’ll be fine,” she said. “I just need to rest until Bjarni comes back.”
I stared at her, suspicion still hot in my gut. She wasn’t telling me something. Her forehead was locked in a frown, and she was worrying her bottom lip with her front teeth in an oddly vulnerable display I hadn’t seen from her before.
But pressuring her probably wasn’t the wisest course of action right now. Hopefully she would indeed be fine until Bjarni returned. He had spent much more time with humans over the last decades—he would be better at figuring out what to do with a sick omega.
Being trapped in the dingy apartment with nothing to do but wait quickly turned from an annoyance to torture.
I couldn’t sleep. By the time morning rolled around, I was pacing back and forth between the bed and fireplace, my muscles straining as if preparing for battle.
I was Thor’s son! I was born to fight, not wait around patiently for another alpha to return with the enemy we needed to capture!
I glanced at the dark-haired girl still curled up on the bed. She was looking worse, sweat pearling on her forehead and her cheeks flushed a deep pink.
Bjarni needed to get his ass back, stat.
Though as soon as I had the thought, reluctance rose in my throat, acrid on my tongue. If he walked in the door right now, I was pretty sure I would punch him in the face just to relieve some of my pent-up frustration.
I looked at Annabel again, wetting my dry lips. There had to be something I could do for her, some way I could alleviate her discomfort—
My thoughts came to an abrupt halt when her face screwed up in a tight grimace and she keeled over, clutching her midriff.
“Ooooh!” Her low, anguished whimper rang through the apartment like a bell, seizing every muscle in my body and rendering me rigid. A rush of emotions rampaged through my blood, heating it to the point of boiling: concern, battle lust, victory… excitement.
The throb from my fully hard cock finally clicked the pieces into place.
“You are in heat!” It was an accusation, but it came out as a throaty growl.
She turned her head to look at me, eyes still glazed, pink lips parted with her soft panting. She didn’t respond, but she didn’t need to.
I could have slapped myself. How had I not recognized the signs earlier? How hadn’t she?
Anger flared, doing little to dampen my riled-up hormones. “You’re in heat! Why the fuck didn’t you say anything?”
“I… didn’t know how fast it would come,” she croaked. “Last time it was much slower. I’d hoped… I'd hoped Bjarni…”
She’d hoped Bjarni would be back in time to take care of her.
I stared at her, my fists clenching without my consent. Instincts I’d done my best to suppress since I presented as alpha roared at the idea of another man seeing her through her heat, but I gritted my teeth against them.
This was exactly why I had never wanted anything to do with omegas. She was my brother’s mate, and here I was, hard and ready to screw her into oblivion as if I had any right to her sweetly-scented snatch.
I growled when I didn’t stop myself from inhaling deeply at that thought, and the most delicate smell of omega heat touched my nostrils.
Stars above, she smelled like thyme and honey and woman.
“I… I don’t think I’ll be able to make it until he’s back,” she said. “You’ll have to…”
She trailed off once again, but what she'd left unsaid hung thick between us. She wanted me to rut her through her heat.
“No.” Despite the ache in my dick at the thought of bending her over and shoving myself inside of her, I knew I’d never be able to do that. If I did, if I surrendered to the instincts fighting to take control, I would be lost.
She was my brother’s mate. I was not going to split our family apart, not for a piece of ass.
Her eyes widened at my denial. Not that I could blame her—I was pretty sure no alpha in history had turned down an offer to fuck an omega in heat.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” she croaked, outrage subsuming her shock. “I can’t do this on my own!”
“You will have to,” I growled, finally finding the will to look away from her pink lips. With strength I didn’t know I possessed, I turned and walked to the wingback by the dead hearth, letting myself collapse into it. I had to grip the armrests to stay seated when she let out another whine.
I gritted my teeth, my temper even more volatile than usual. But I knew she was just baiting me, wanting me to engage so she could lure me into abandoning the principles that had kept me going for all these years.
“I need you, and you’re just going to sit there? What a horrible excuse for an alpha you are! No wonder Magni thinks you need his help to secure a mate!”
Hot, red anger sparked in my brain, and I snapped my head around to stare at her. She was crouched on the bed like a tigress ready to strike, eyes glazed with need and fury and blunt teeth bared in challenge.
“I do not need a mate, nor do I want one,” I snapped at her. “You think if I fuck you, I will claim you like the other idiots vying for their spot in some power-hungry Norn’s web? What you are begging for is a rough rutting—to be forced into submission and taken like the whore you are. You want sex—dirty, filthy, brutal sex—not love. And you don’t give a shit if you tear apart my family in the process. Isn’t that right, omega? So long as you get your cunt stuffed, to hell with my brother waiting for you back home!”
She was breathing hard as if my words only fueled her desire. “He wants you to,” she said, voice rough and so filled with need my dick throbbed at the sound of it. “Magni wants you to mate me. But even if you didn’t—do you really think he’d want you to let me suffer like this? Do you have any idea how much it hurts? How much I ache? You promised to care for me in his place!”
Annabel slid off the bed, approaching my chair. She moved stiffly, her agonized pleas ringing true, but even so…
My eyes followed the sway of her hips, then wandered up her sweat-covered blouse that clung to her breasts tightly enough to allow her peaked nipples to show. Hazy thoughts of closing my mouth around one of those little buds made me grip the chair’s arms tighter.
Fucking hormones!
When she sank to her knees in front of me, a picture-perfect image of submission, I nearly lost myself. Oh, how easy it would be… She was so willing—she needed me. And Magni…
She was right—he had asked me to care for her, to make sure she was well-tended. Wouldn’t he rather I rutted her than Bjarni?
“Modi… Modi, please.” She looked up at me, and instead of fury, desperation danced in her eyes. “I don’t want this either. It’s so… so humiliating to beg an alpha I barely know for sex. But it hurts. Please, it hurts.”
The flash of pity I had felt for her last night returned. There was nothing but honesty in her gaze. Honesty and agony.
Shit.
She was further into her heat than I had thought. Most omegas in her situation would have stripped bare and attempted to pleasure themselves to alleviate the discomfort until an alpha could tend to them, and she hadn’t yet. I had mistakenly assumed she was still in the early stages, that the process was dragging out.
She was not.
Her pupils were blown wide, her hands trembling as she placed them on my knees. “Please. I’ll do anything. Anything, Alpha.”
Alpha.
Though I knew little of Annabel, I did know that she was a proud woman, independent, and strong. The way she handled herself around alphas, even her own mates, it was obvious she would never fall into the submissive omega role.
Except now she was kneeling prettily in front of me, calling me Alpha as she pleaded for my help.
How humbling, how humiliating it must be for a woman like her to be rendered so helpless by her own biology.
“Annabel,” I said, softer than I had ever addressed her before. “I cannot.”
“Why?” It was a pitiful moan.
I took a deep breath, hesitating as I stared at the trembling omega. My own instincts were roaring for me to fucking do something, my cock aching for her. It would be so easy.
But…
“I don’t want to father a child out of wedlock.”
I had never told a soul. I had never shared this fear with anyone, and yet as Annabel stared silently up at me, her breathing still too fast but her gaze free of judgement, it all came spilling out like a boil that had finally burst.
“Magni… he was given a shitty lot. His mother was an omega. She was in heat when my father came across her. He rutted her through her heat, and then he left her. He was only forced to confess his infidelity when the omega showed up at Valhalla demanding restitution.
“My mother…. She forgave my father. But she never forgave Magni. When my father allowed him to move in with us to get him out of Jotunheim, my mother could not get past the daily reminder of her husband’s betrayal. She treated him terribly. Still does. He will never admit it out loud, but he struggles with not feeling wanted to this day.
“I have seen his pain. I feel it in my gut every day since I learned of his existence. I cannot… I cannot do that to a child. I will not risk bringing a life into this world, especially not with Ragnarök at our doorstep.”
Annabel stared at me in silence for a long breath, but I saw understanding break behind her glazed eyes. And… empathy.
Even in the depths of her own agony, she was capable of empathy.
“I can’t believe the one time I actually think you’re a half-decent person, it’s because you leave me to suffer.” Her attempt at joking cut off with a pained groan. She keeled over, her hands slipping from my knees to her abdomen as she panted hard. “Oh, god!”
Rich, sultry slick perfumed the air as she writhed on the floor in front of me, pulling a growl from my chest at the heady blow to my already barely contained instincts.
Gods, this was fucking torture! For both of us.
“Y-You need to leave,” she whispered from her curled-up position on the floor, resigned to her fate. “We don’t both have to suffer.”
I stared at her for a long moment, instincts warring with reason. If I left, if I waited in the hallway, I could still ensure her safety without this constant onslaught of omega heat. Leaving her to suffer alone.
Magni’s mate, abandoned and in pain, because I was too much of a coward to risk losing control of myself.
“No," I growled, rough but restrained. With a push, I got to my feet, looming over her. “I will tend to you, Annabel.”
Sixteen
Annabel
I stared up at Modi, not fully grasping what he’d said through the haze of pain pulsing through my abdomen in dull waves.
“W-What? You’ll…?”
“There are… ways that do not require me to knot you,” he said, and if I’d been capable of laughing, I would have at the determined set of his jaw. He looked like he was heading into battle.
“Anything,” I whispered. “Anything to make it stop.”
“Strip.” It was a command, his alpha nature rolling off his tongue with that deep rumble.
I obeyed, my hands responding without needing input from my brain. It took longer than it normally would have as I trembled and fumbled with the fabric of my clothes.
He hovered over me, watching me as I slowly removed layer after layer, his face still stern, features carved from granite. He was every inch the stoic, controlled god, even if heat flamed in his blue eyes.
Goosebumps sprawled across every inch of my exposed flesh as I bared myself for him, humiliation mixing with relief at finally feeling the cool air against my skin.
This was nothing like it had been with Magni and Saga. They’d been all-in, wild and untamed in their need to fuck me. It had scared me at the time, but right then, I’d have given anything to have that same feral desire forced on me so I could fight and surrender and know it wasn’t my choice.
Under Modi’s silent gaze, there was no escaping the reality that this was all me. I was the one who’d begged him for relief—I was the kind of woman who’d spread her legs for an alpha who despised me, as long as it quenched this hellish heat.
I was an omega, and no amount of make-believe would change that.
&
nbsp; Sweat trickled from my neck, chest, stomach, thighs, and back as I knelt naked in front of the man who’d promised to help me. My breath came in soft pants, the smoldering heat in my abdomen threatening another cramp as I stared at his raw masculinity.
He was exceedingly handsome with clean, angular features and long, red hair, but that wasn’t what had my heat-addled attention. No, it was his body—his big, musclebound torso and his wide thighs promising so much strength it made my pussy weep to think about what it’d be like if he thrust himself inside of me. How good he could make me hurt.
I whimpered, reaching for his jeans, my heat once more sweeping away reason.
Finally he moved. Spurred by my attempts at freeing his cock, he shrugged out of his sweater, tossing it to the floor by my side. It brought with it a delicious scent of alpha, and I was momentarily distracted from my task as I stared up at his bared chest.
God, he was gorgeous. And so very alpha.
Agony seared my abdomen, forcing another rivulet of slick from my throbbing channel. I cried out, bracing myself against Modi’s thighs, blind to anything but the pain.
Modi growled, a rich, delicious sound that somehow eased the pain, yet made my pussy shudder with another pulsing cramp.
Wild, raw need gripped my mind, erasing anything but my desperation for that thick cock pressing against his zipper. It was a mind-numbing relief—I no longer gave a shit that I’d humiliated myself in front of a man who didn’t like me. All that mattered was that he fucked me. Now.
I tore at his jeans, somehow managing to pop the button and jerk the zipper down despite having lost all finer motor skills. A rough tug on the stiff, blue fabric, and finally his cock was free.
I gasped at the sight of it. I still wasn't used to the size of alphas, but that breath only gave me a lungful of his heady scent.
“God,” I whimpered, sliding my hands up his powerful thighs as I leaned in to rub my face against his dick, lured by the tangy scent of his pre-cum.
“Yes,” he growled, his hand landing in my hair as I rubbed my nose and cheeks against his weeping cockhead like a cat greeting her master. “I am your god. Worship me, omega, and I’ll ease your suffering.”
