The Soul of a Rogue (A Box of Draupnir Novel Book 3)

by K. J. Jackson

  A cowardly entrance, but she didn’t want to actually see Rune and retreat before she’d even entered the room.

  Though ill-advised, the solidly closed door would do her good—setting a barrier against a too-early escape.

  Both Des and Weston were waiting on the main stairwell, ready and anxious to charge into the room should she utter the slightest cry for them.

  But she couldn’t call foul quite yet, even though every bone in her body wanted to thrash Rune, through and through. She at least needed to turn around to him first. Look at him.

  Pulling her shoulders back, she exhaled and spun around.

  Rune stood across the room from her, ramrod straight with his back awkwardly touching the white stone fireplace mantel as though someone had shoved him against it and he had never bounced off of it. Dark circles wrapped his eyes, but his copper-green irises were alive, fire burning in them.

  “Why are you standing so oddly there?”

  He pointed to the floor. “I’m wet. I didn’t want to wreck the carpets.”

  She looked down. The toes of his boots were pointed outward to the sides so the whole of him was on the black marble of the fireplace hearth and not on the carpet. A puddle, growing with each drop from his clothes, spread slowly outward from him.

  Her eyebrows pulled together and she had to shake her head before she stepped forward. Now was not the time to be sidetracked. “What was it that you wanted to see me for? Des said you would not leave until you talked to me alone. This is alone. What is it you need to say?”

  “You are everything.” The three words came from his lips, cracked, the weight of the world in the syllables.

  Words that sliced into her gut, shredding it.

  Her arms lifted, crossing to rest across her ribcage. “You are done? I can excuse myself?”

  The smallest smile quirked the right side of his face. “I will talk at you until you listen to me, Elle. Until you hear me.”

  “Or until I leave.”

  His fingers went to his forehead, wiping away a line of drips. “You can go when you deem it. I cannot stop you, the only thing I can do is to beg you to stay. To listen.”

  Her head tilted to the side and she flipped one hand out from the clasp at her torso, silently urging him onward.

  “I couldn’t let the box hurt you—couldn’t let Gatlong near you, and he would have been after you, ready to kill you if I hadn’t left with Hoppler and the box. I saw your face, Elle. Saw how what I did destroyed you. And that I put that pain onto your face.” He paused, his head shaking as he swallowed hard. “It slayed me through and through.”

  She blinked, not a muscle in her face twitching as she stared at him.

  “Somehow, and I’m not sure how it happened, you became my everything and I didn’t even fully realize it until it was there, right in front of me and I was losing it. Losing you. And the thought that you could be hurt or killed because of the box—it wasn’t even a choice. I had to give you up because keeping you safe was the most important thing.”

  His hand ran along the back of his neck. “My lies were always going to catch up with me, Elle. And I lost sanity during that time with you—I started to want more. Hope for more, when all of what I’d created—set into motion these past thirteen years was going to come for me no matter what. I never should have involved you. Never should have fallen in love with you.”

  “Fallen in love with me?” She scoffed. “I was a pawn—it’s blatantly clear that’s all I was.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “No, you had me fooled.” She shook her head, her face tilting up to the ceiling. “So fooled. I was just a pawn, a tool to get into the baths. You used me.”

  His jaw shifted hard to the side. “I did. There is no excuse. That was all I had planned to do. What I vowed to do. Find out what clues the baths held, then get the box and leave. A plan that burned to ash the second I saw you on the edge of that lake at the isle. Proud and vulnerable and hiding so many of your scars that I was forced to see you. Truly see you. I wanted you in that moment, wanted you forever. Wanted the soul of you.”

  “Oh, I know all about vows, Rune. About promises one makes to oneself.”

  “Elle—“

  “And I know about breaking them. I swore I would never let another man into my heart—into my life—again. And you…” She paused, a shiver running across her shoulders. “You shattered that vow I made to myself. I don’t know how you did it, but you did.”

  “The same way you did it to me—a whisper in the night, sinking into my soul, stealing away every plan I’d made.”

  “Yes.” She nodded, her lips twisting to the side. “But then you crushed what you created. What you did, Rune—how you lied to all of us. Used me. Put Jules in danger from that monster of her father—if he had gotten his hands on that box…” She scoffed, her hand flipping up to wipe away a tear that had spilled from her right eye. “Well, there is a reason vows should be kept. And maybe you should work on keeping your vows—you haven’t even asked about the box.”

  “I don’t care about the damn box, Elle.” His hands curled into fists, his voice dropping into a growl—the first anger she’d seen from him since she’d stepped into the room. “I’m here for you, dammit. The box can go to hell, where it belongs. I should have let it go a long time ago.”

  Her head jerked back, the savagery of his words vibrating in her chest. “But, Rune, your father—”

  “Is the past. Is not my future. That has never been clearer. With you I forgot what I was fighting for all these years—revenge, fulfilling my father’s mission. When I was with you I forgot. The storm of it didn’t fester in my mind like it always had. When I was with you all I wanted was you. Not revenge. Not anything but you.”

  He unclenched his fists, shaking his arms before pinning her with his gaze. “Elle, you’re not ready to hear this, but I will do whatever it takes. A week. A month. A year. A hundred years. Whatever time you need. Whatever it takes for you to look at me like you did when we were in the baths the last time.”

  Her look sliced into him. “And just how did I look at you?”

  “With love, Elle. With love you weren’t sure what to do with. With love that had bubbled up out of nowhere, with no footholds, and yet had somehow managed to slip into the cracks of your heart. With love you wanted no part of but couldn’t deny. You looked at me with the rawest sprouts of love that had no business growing, but did.”

  She stared at him for the shortest of seconds before her gaze went back to the ceiling. “Yet, maybe what you saw was a lie, just the same as all of yours.”

  “No.” He charged forward, water droplets flying and he grabbed her face between his palms, dragging her look toward him. “No. There were lies, yes. And then there was what happened in-between those lies. Do not mistake one for the other.”

  “How can I not?”

  “Because I know you can feel it in me. In the blood that pumps through my veins.” He leaned in, his face only a breath away, the ferocity of his words echoing in her ears. “I want you. I want you today and tomorrow and for the thousands of days after that. I want you in my bed and by my side on the street, in a carriage, in a home. I want you waking up to find me watching you. I want you to carry our children in this glorious body of yours. I want whatever you can give me. Whatever you can forgive. Even if it’s only a small slice of your heart. I’ll take it. Happily. Whatever you can give me. Whatever it takes.”

  She drew a trembling breath. “And if I cannot?”

  “Then I will continue to love you. Near, far, wherever. I will be there. Forever.”

  “Don’t promise me forever, Rune.”

  “Then I promise you tomorrow. Take tomorrow from me.”

  Her stare locked in his, his copper-green eyes holding the world out to her, and she lost all sense of resistance. All sense of anger and the burning hurt of betrayal. She lost it all, for better or worse.

  Forgiveness…forgiveness would just have to come.r />
  For she loved this man, loved him to her toes, to the bottom of her soul. And he was only asking for tomorrow.

  She could do that. Love him for the next day.

  And every day that came after that, one at time…that, maybe she could do.

  An exhale whispered past her lips and she nodded, not breaking his stare. “I’ll take tomorrow.”

  His lips crashed into hers.

  Tomorrow, forever.

  He didn’t care. She didn’t either.

  { Chapter 27 }

  “You are ready?”

  Rune looked at the Box of Draupnir cradled in the center of both of Elle’s hands as she held it up to him. A fat drop of muddied water dripped from the ceiling and landed on her right temple.

  Her mouth quirked to the side with a chuckle that echoed in the hollow chamber that stretched far back into the earth. She wiped her temple against the sleeve of her upper arm and then smiled. “As I was saying, you are ready?”

  Rune looked at the tree to the left of them in this cold dome of grey rock. That the tree—gnarled with age and grey-green leaves that crinkled at the touch—grew here, cracking up through the rock below into the sunless cave was unfathomable.

  That they had found the tree was a miracle.

  But there it was, nestled in a cove of the Icelandic coast. The thirty-third cave that they had searched in on these shores during the last three months.

  His father had been right to have his dream. He’d been right to pass it down to his son.

  This was where the box belonged, there was no question.

  At the center of the tree at the height of his waist, a rectangular gash sat in the wood, a hole that had never healed over, never forgot.

  It wanted its heart back.

  Rune’s gaze shifted to the glow about his wife’s eyes. She’d come to want this just as much as him—more so even. Since that day in Weston’s drawing room, she’d never wavered. Never wavered in her faith in him. In her faith in this goal.

  Never. Not once since she’d surrendered, heart and soul to them, to the future. A future that was no longer just a whimsical possibility, but now a reality they could grab a hold of and craft into whatever they wanted it to be.

  He looked to the box in her hands. It hadn’t been easy, getting here. The cold, unforgiving winds. The icy waters. Day after day of waking up and forging forth with nothing but faith to guide them. Elle had endeared herself to every one of his mates on the Firefox, keeping spirits high as they’d trudged from one spot to another in the bitter winds of the coast. Her enthusiasm had pushed them to find this spot more than any of the coins he’d promised his mates on the ship.

  Still, he owed all of them a debt of gratitude.

  “Rune?”

  He blinked, his gaze lifting from the box to her dark blue eyes. “Sorry, I was thinking.”

  “Of?”

  “Of what this box brought me.”

  “What?”

  “You. It brought me you and you are worth more than the largest hoard of riches.” His shoulders lifted. “Where we were when we met. What became of us. I do not deserve it—you.”

  “Except you do. You love me?”

  “Always.”

  She smiled. “Then you deserve it. All of it. You chose love over all of it—the past, the riches this box could bring you.” She lifted the box in her hands. “This box is a test of men and you passed. You’ve earned it, Rune. Your father would be proud of you.”

  His hand moved past the box to brush his fingers along her cheek, wiping away the last of the muddy splotch. A breath into his lungs and he nodded. “I’m more than ready.”

  “Do we look at it one last time?”

  He nodded, the side of his mouth twitching. “I think we do.”

  He set the lantern in his right hand down and slid open the top of the box. Elle tilted the open box to the light, the deep flash of the ruby twinkling, alive, almost as though its heart was throbbing, knowing it was so close to home. To rest.

  He looked to Elle. Her lips pulled inward and then she nodded, her voice a whisper. “It knows.”

  A tingle ran up his spine, making the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. For as much as he believed in the box and the power of it, the whole of this was beyond him—beyond them.

  They just needed to fulfill their part of the story.

  He swung the lid closed and they walked over to the tree.

  His forefinger slid into the hole in the middle of the tree and he cleared out flecks of dirt and then looked to Elle.

  She aligned the edges of the box to the hole and slid it slightly forward. His hand went over the back of hers and together they pushed.

  Inward until the box sat fully in place, near to seamless from where it had been broken away.

  His fingers collapsed around Elle’s hand and they took a step back, both looking at the tree.

  Minutes passed. Silent. Still.

  No explosion. No magic.

  Just peace. Peace he could feel seeping through his bones.

  “One last thing to do,” Elle said, her fingers squeezing his.

  He took one last look at the tree, at the edge of the box he could barely make out, and he turned, walking out of the cave with Elle at his side.

  Outside under the grey skies they trekked up the narrow line of a path they had forged that led up the side of the cliffs from the shoreline, and then moved south a reasonable distance from the cave.

  Stopping, Elle pointed to the end of the train of gunpowder that snaked along the ground to the rocks above the entrance of the cave. “This is it. Murray said this would work.”

  “If Murray said it, I imagine it will.”

  “Light it,” Elle said.

  Rune pulled free a tinder-box and struck the flint, sending sparks onto the gunpowder. It lit, sparking as it travelled along the ground away from them.

  He stood as Elle set her palms over her ears. Rune followed suit.

  Crackling, the flame ran along the line adjacent to the edge of the cliffs until it jutted outward toward the sea and disappeared over the edge of the precipice. Seconds later, the first explosion shook the air. Then the next. Then four more.

  Rocks exploded, tumbling, falling, dislodged from where they had lived for eons. All of it crashing down in front of the opening of the cave.

  A cave that was no more. Just a cavity, forever sealed from the outside world.

  Nothing but a pile of rubble where their footprints had just been.

  They both stood in awe, looking at the dust rising from the debris, the boom of the explosion echoing in his ears.

  Elle slipped her arm along his waist, leaning into his side as her eyes stayed riveted on the pile of rocks, still croaking and moaning as boulders found new spots to settle their weight. “Murray was right.”

  Rune nodded. “The man does not underestimate.”

  She looked up at him. “What now?”

  He took one last look at the jumble of rocks, at the final resting place of the Box of Draupnir, and then he looked to Elle. “We move on. I heard Pad talking about an expedition getting underway in Honduras to the remains of a supposed ancient Mayan civilization. There will be a fair amount of excavating necessary if the site is found.”

  A hesitant smile curved her full lips. “Truly?”

  His brow crinkled. “I lead the expedition, you lead the excavation?”

  She laughed, wrapping her left arm around him as well. “A hawk circling its next prey?”

  “You’re the only finch I can handle. I honestly don’t care what we find, as long as you’re there with me.” His arms wrapped solidly about her and he couldn’t think of another place on earth he wanted to be. His lips landed on her brow. “On to tomorrow, my wife?”

  That would never get old, calling Elle his wife. She’d finally promised him all of her days, yet every morning, he still asked for that day and that day alone.

  She chuckled, her head leaning into his chest as they both look
ed out onto the wide open sea. “Tomorrow.”

  { Epilogue }

  Elle picked up her skirts, holding them solid as Susannah grabbed them tight, holding on for balance as she giggled, bouncing in a circle around Elle as she hid from her big brother, Tarrence. The sweetest music ever, the unrestrained laughter of a wee one. Elle sank her fingers onto the mop of Susannah’s red curls, amazed at the silkiness.

  Spying her dark-haired brother behind the other side of Elle’s skirts, Susannah squealed and darted away from Elle, rounding Rune’s boots, and then as fast as her chubby one-year-old legs could carry her, she sped straight past her mother and into the hallway trying to escape her brother. The giggles never left her lips, even as her brother caught her, wrapping his three-year-old arms about her, his own laughter mixing with hers.

  Elle’s heart expanded in her chest, watching the wonderment of the two. How had she missed this?

  She looked at Jules, laughter splitting a smile across her face even as she shook her head. “I am sorry we weren’t here for her birth—she is already walking—running—how is that possible?”

  “She never crawled—she’s a determined one and she used to watch Tar so seriously, so determined, studying everything he did, how his legs worked and how he was magically moving about.” With a grin, Jules’s gaze followed her children running back into and around the drawing room. “You could see the constant frown on her face, wondering why her own legs didn’t work like that. So once she was strong enough to pull herself up, that was it, she was walking—running in days.”

  “No falls?” Rune asked.

  “Oh, there were plenty of bloody knees along the way. But that never stopped her. And Tar slows down for her.” Jules’s eyes lifted to the ceiling as Tarrence scooted just out of Susannah’s reach. “That is, he slows down for her when he’s feeling particularly magnanimous.”

  The echo of boots clomped down the center hallway of Seahorn Castle and both of the children ran out into the corridor. Des appeared a moment later, spying his children.