by Nora Ash
I reached up to pet Arni, who’d grown quieter the closer we got to our destination.
“Is he in there? Or is this another red herring, hmm?” I asked, nudging his beak.
“He’s in there,” the raven confirmed.
Finally.
I breathed in a sigh of relief and went to approach the cottage, but Arni stopped me.
“Wait.”
I turned my head to arch an eyebrow at him in question.
The raven hesitated for a moment, then shook out its dulled feathers. “Be careful, boy. Ragnarök is here. No one is unmarked, not even the God of Mischief.”
I frowned. “What do you mean? Speak clearly.”
Instead of answering, he gave a squawk and set off from my shoulder, flying toward the roof of the cottage where he dove down the smoking chimney, disappearing from view.
I sighed. Messengers of gods they might be, but they’d all days had a penchant for dramatics over clarity. And marked or not, I had a task to fulfill.
I strode across the snow-covered clearing and paused in front of the door, rapping my gloved knuckles against it. Loki might be my father, but Arni was right—he was the God of Mischief, and only the dumbest of fools walked through his front door uninvited.
“Enter, son.”
That voice. I smiled even as the power of it shivered through my bones. I’d found my father. He would help us through this.
I opened the door and stepped inside a small, low-ceilinged room with rough planks for flooring and wooden beams supporting the ceiling. And there he sat, with Arni and Magga on his shoulders, one leg slung over the arm of a chair, straddling the old piece of furniture in an arrogant mockery of the god-king himself.
My smile widened. “Father, it’s good to see you. You look well.”
“Bjarni,” he greeted me, his voice frosty.
I sighed. “Arni said you were angry.”
“Angry?” Loki’s voice was deceptively calm, and I swallowed a grimace. I knew that tone. When I was a kid, a beating had usually followed.
“Why would I be angry?" he continued. "I task my sons with the survival of our family, set them a simple task—mate a human omega and keep her safe—and the next I hear, only Saga has managed to complete the task and the omega is also bonded to Thor’s bastard. Why would that make me angry?”
He pushed off the chair, coming to his feet as his voice grew rough with his fury. Both ravens on his shoulders squawked and flapped, clearly eager to retreat from the furious god, but they stayed put nonetheless. A binding spell, I suspected.
“Father, let Arni and Magga go,” I said, trying to intervene on their behalves. Arni was right—it took them forever to grow their tail feathers back, and they were a pitiful sight in the meantime. “They’re not to blame for what happened, and if you’d let me explain—”
“If you didn’t want them to shoulder blame, you wouldn’t have sent either with news of your shortcomings!” Loki snarled. “Their task was to watch over you and ensure you fulfilled my plans, and they failed!”
“We didn’t fail, Father, not in the scheme of things. Saga mated the omega, and Grim and I will too on her next heat. She is powerful, and she is determined to stop Ragnarök. Isn’t that what you wanted? Your plans will still come to fruition—we just had a little, ah, hiccup along the way,” I said, hoping to soothe his flaring temper.
I failed.
“Don’t presume to know my plans, boy,” Loki said, his eyes narrow as he stared me down. “You allowed a stranger to search for me! You risked my life! And then, by all the stars in the sky, you brought Modi Thorsson to hunt for me! You were never my brightest child, but I would have hoped you’d be smart enough not to bring the enemy to my doorstep!”
“I wouldn’t have, had the situation not been dire,” I replied. “You know I’d never do anything to put you at risk, but Saga and Grim—they’re in trouble. We need you.”
“You need me?” He spat the words out, so much venom in his voice I took a step back. “After you failed me and brought an enemy to my door? Son, I did not bring you here to help you. I brought you so that you may know my disappointment and see your punishment with your own eyes.”
I blinked. “Father… we don’t have time for petty squabbles. Grim and Saga might die at Odin's hand. He will execute them for treason in your stead. Whatever punishment you wish to award me I will accept, but please—help me save my brothers first.”
Loki’s nostrils flared, and where I’d hoped to see reason bloom in his dark eyes, only renewed anger festered.
“You wish for me to step in the way of Odin’s vengeance? You want me to die, son? If I come within a hundred leagues of Valhalla, he will execute me. Your brothers have gotten themselves into this mess—at least Grim should be smart enough to get them out again.
"In the meantime, you will mate the omega and you will make certain she is kept from Thor’s bastard. Use her powers to ensure our bloodline lives—and keep her in line. We can’t risk her expending her magic trying to save the whole world, let alone Thor. Prophecy or no.”
I stared at my father for the longest moment, words refusing to form in my dazed mind. He still looked exactly like the man who’d come to visit us when we were children—who’d whispered the secrets of Valhalla in our ears and told of us our glorious destinies—tall, dark, mysterious, and beautiful in his divinity.
I’d always thought he loved us, that his cold mannerisms were just who he was, but he still felt… something beneath the surface. Because I’d loved him. He was my father.
It was only now, as I stood before him desperate for his help, that I understood. We were pawns to him, chess pieces he controlled to ensure his own goals.
He would never risk his own life to save my brothers. They were expendable.
I was expendable.
“Father…” I whispered hoarsely.
“Quiet!” he hissed. Dark magic rose around his body. On his shoulders, Arni and Magga’s squawks rose to shrill screams. “This is your punishment, son. Fail me again and it will be your brothers'—or your children's, should you sire any with the omega before our paths cross again.”
The magic flickered, turning into flames as they fully engulfed his body. His eyes shone bright white, making me squint to see.
I wished I hadn’t.
Flames licked up his shoulders and set fire to the birds trapped there. Their agonized cries tore through my chest and I roared, lurching to save them.
Invisible bonds kept me in place, howling with rage and sorrow as the two ravens who’d watched over me all my life died screaming in the dark fire.
When there was nothing left of them but ashes, the fire died as swiftly as it had started, my father’s eyes darkening once more.
“Do not seek me out again until Ragnarök is over,” he said, his voice calmer now, though still laced with anger. “And do not fail me again, Bjarni.”
Power grabbed my body and pushed, and I flew through the air, through the walls of the cabin and deep into the woods, landing on my back in the snow in a small clearing of trees.
I stared up at the darkening sky through the canopy high above, the silence of the forest overwhelming my senses. Grief and fury warred behind the wall of nothingness wrapping around my insides like a comforting blanket, but I was too numb to feel it.
Blessedly numb.
In the span of the past few minutes, so much had died.
My lifelong companions.
My belief that I was ever loved by the man who sired me.
My hope.
I lay in the snow for a long time before I found the strength to get to my feet. Back in Seattle, a woman was waiting for me. She needed me. My brothers needed us.
Even in the depths of nothingness, there was that. There was Annabel and Grim and Saga.
The trek back to Seattle was faster than the journey out, but it felt infinitely longer.
I kept expecting Arni to land on my shoulder and chatter some rudeness at me before
he nipped my earlobe, kept peering to the sky in hopes that this was all just a horrible nightmare that I would wake up from any minute.
All that met me was solitude and snow.
Shortly after dawn, the numbness broke and grief took its place. I wished it’d been anger, but I wasn’t so lucky.
Tears trickled silently down my face and into my beard, making me thankful for my loneliness. If anyone had seen one of Jotunheim’s greatest warriors sobbing like a babe, my days would have been numbered. Weakness was the precursor to death, and right then I felt weaker than I’d ever thought possible.
The only thing that gave me the strength to keep walking was knowing that a few blocks away, Annabel was waiting for me.
Eighteen
Annabel
“Modi!”
I cried out my alpha’s name as he penetrated my weeping sex once more, the agonizing new bond hooked behind my ribs flooding with pleasure, numbing the pain.
I’d lost count of how many times he’d mounted me since he'd put his claim on me, the times in between a hazy fog of hormonal madness and misery. We hadn’t spoken—hadn’t needed to. I felt his regret like an ice pick between my ribs whenever he wasn’t buried inside of me, only the pleasure he found there overriding his anguish.
My heat refused to break, and as horrible as it was, I was grateful, because once it was over, there would be nothing to ease the torment.
Modi grunted behind me, his hands finding their now-familiar place on my hips and yanking me back onto his thick dick.
At least this part didn’t hurt any longer. He’d fucked me so many times my pussy swallowed him without protest. Even the knottings felt sort of good now.
I mewled, digging my fingers into the ripped mattress, closing my eyes as red-hot pleasure crawled through my pelvis and down my thighs. “Harder!”
“What in the ever-loving fuck!”
A roar that didn’t belong to my lover ripped through my brain, seemingly coming from everywhere around me.
I opened my eyes, squeaking in shock when the hands on my hips and the dick inside me were ripped away, leaving me empty and cold as another roar shook the apartment.
Dazedly I looked over my shoulder, naked fear gripping my lungs at the sight.
Bjarni was there, only he looked nothing like the gentle giant I’d come to know.
His face was twisted in fury, red and almost unrecognizable, teeth bared as he stood over Modi where he’d flung him to the floor.
“My omega! You claimed my omega! You, who think she is so beneath you! You, who looked down on me for wanting her!”
He didn’t wait for a reply. In the blink of an eye he’d lifted his foot and brought it down onto Modi’s skull with a sickening crack.
I shrieked as agony flared in my chest, sharp and unbearable.
“Modi! Modi, Modi, no! Please, no!” I scrambled to get off the bed, all thoughts of heat and regret gone in that horrible, too-long moment when my mate lay still on the dirty floor.
“He’s gonna live.” Bjarni’s voice was still a growl. He shoved Modi’s limp body with a foot, and my new mate groaned softly but didn’t stir otherwise.
Relief flooded my mind, anger taking the place of panic.
I bared my teeth at the man who’d hurt my mate, who’d stopped him from sating my desperate need. “You’ll pay for that!”
My own voice was barely recognizable, hoarse from screaming and raw with primal fury. I grasped for the well of my magic, my reserves filled from uncounted mountings, determined to blast this prick into next week for what he’d done to Modi.
Only Bjarni had other ideas.
He narrowed his eyes in response to my bared teeth, and before I’d managed to summon my power, he crossed the space between us, grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, and shook until I lost my grasp on my magic.
“This is what you want, Annabel?” he snarled. “You want to fight me?”
“You hurt him!” I growled back, though whatever receptors he was pressing into had my body lax and compliant no matter how much I wanted to claw at him.
“You hate him!” he shouted, shaking me again hard enough to make my teeth clatter. “He took advantage of you while you were out of your mind with heat! But fine—if that’s how you need it, that’s how you’re getting it!”
Roughly he threw me on the bed. I landed on my stomach, and before I managed to turn back around, he was on me.
The heavy press of his body kept me pinned to the mattress despite how frantically I fought to free myself. That undeniable tingle of excitement I’d come to know too well since Modi first took me crawled up my hamstrings and mixed with my anger.
Panting grunts in my ear had my heart pounding against my ribs and my ass arching up in invitation without my consent. He reached down to open his jeans, followed by the instant press of his hard alpha cock nestling in against my lips.
“No!” My protest was breathy, unconvincing even to my own ears. That aching tug behind my ribs thrashed in protest, but my body was still under the thrall of my heat. Mindlessly I spread my legs wider for the alpha whose mere presence promised to sate me.
“Yes!” Bjarni hissed, followed by a blazing stretch between my thighs that took my breath away. My pussy swallowed his cock with little resistance, my channel slick and eager, and he bottomed out inside of me with a pleasure-roughened groan.
“Gods! Annabel!” Despite the note of elation, of worship in his shout, Bjarni didn’t pause to savor me this time. Where he’d been gentle and generous before, now…
Now he was anything but.
He grabbed my hips covered in finger-shaped bruises, the ache of being filled blending with the soreness in my exhausted body as he used his full strength to yank me down on his cock over and over again.
“This is how you like it, omega? Forced?” he gritted between harsh pants, thrusting his hips so hard and fast I couldn’t even breathe to scream.
“You’ve been mine since you were born—mine. I’ve been patient, Annabel. So. Fucking. Patient. No more. I’m done. Done! From now on, you take my cock whenever I shove it into your pretty little cunt. You take it, and if you don’t like it, I don’t give a shit! You hear me? This is how you want your alpha to treat you? Then by the fucking gods, this is how I’ll treat you!”
He was everywhere, filling me up and caging me in, his aggression painful and exactly what I craved on the most primal of levels. I cried for my injured mate, shrieked like I had for Modi before he'd claimed me and eased the thrashing bonds protesting the mounting from an alpha who wasn’t mine.
Before, both with Bjarni and Modi, I’d been able to suffer through the wrongness of submitting to a man who wasn’t my mate, knowing deep down it was the only way. But now, with Modi injured on the floor?
Surrendering my weeping core was still bliss—and it was torture.
Bjarni didn’t give me a chance to fight my heat and come to Modi’s aid. He kept me in place on my hands and knees, fucking me ever rougher no matter how much I screamed and cursed him.
In a way, I was grateful. My bonds may have protested at my submission, but this time it wasn’t my choice—and in the end, all there was left for me to do was surrender my body and let Bjarni rut me through my heat.
His knot came with little warning.
One minute I was coming for the umpteenth time, my channel so oversexed it was more agony than bliss, and the next he roared like a wounded beast, the bottom of his already thick member swelling hard.
I whimpered but stayed put, tightening my fingers in the already shredded bedding, lost on endorphins and my traitorous body’s need for that unyielding tie.
“Mine!” Bjarni clamped his teeth around my nape, tearing into my skin and ripping the sore flesh still scabbed from Modi’s claim.
I shrieked, instincts making me fight it until his strong jaw dug into the pressure points meant to keep an omega compliant.
I collapsed onto the bed, my body boneless and my breathing haggard. It h
urt worse than any of my previous claims, his bite half-covering the still-fresh wound from Modi’s.
“Bjarni.” My throat was too tight to produce more than a hoarse croak. “Bjarni.”
Ancient biology, older than humans—older than gods—penetrated my cells with every frantic pulse of my blood, forever altering my essence, my very DNA. His name turned sweet on my tongue as emotions that weren’t my own flooded my system, bathing me in bone-deep satisfaction and raw ecstasy.
The giant alpha kept my neck locked in the grip of his jaw until his thick cock had deposited every drop of his seed deep in my body, thumbing my clit to wring another orgasm from my exhausted pussy.
Only when he had no more left to give did he release my neck and slide his hand from my clit to my hip. He peppered my shoulders with kisses, his beard tickling my skin as he murmured my name over and over.
Pleasure sang in my mind and in my chest, a sharp contrast to the unpleasant throb where Modi’s bond was anchored. Behind that was the constant anguish from the mate bonds tying me to the men I'd left in Valhalla.
“Annabel.” It was a soft rumble—so intimate it clutched at my quivering heart.
Love, raw and pure, welled up from that fresh bond dug deep into my chest.
Love.
Bjarni loved me, and as I lay tied to him by his knot and this new bond, there was nothing either of us could do to hide that fact.
This was how a mating bond was supposed to work, only instead of elation, instead of comfort, his love only brought into sharp, agonizing distinction how my three other claimings had been nothing like this. How even in the arms of a man who loved me, I’d never be whole again.
I sobbed before I could stop myself, sorrow and hurt drowning out the pleasure of Bjarni’s embrace.
“Annabel? Annabel!” Shock colored my alpha’s voice and throbbed in our bond. He wound his arms underneath me, pulling me in tight against his chest. “Shh, please, don’t cry. Please, please, don’t cry.”
