Before she could escape, he pulled her face down and pressed his lips to hers. She opened her mouth to protest, and he deepened the kiss. His tongue delved deep inside her mouth, and she pushed against his shoulders, sputtering in outrage.
He quickly released her, a self-satisfied grin on his face. “Now, we’re done.”
She almost couldn’t hear the words because of the berserker screaming in her head.
No! Wrong! It repeated over and over again. It clawed at the mental barriers Astrid had quickly raised to keep it from completely taking over her body. She had to exude great willpower to control the inner warrior and calm it enough that she could think clearly again.
Once the berserker stopped screaming, Astrid did what any self-respecting Valkyrie would do. She punched Ulf in the nose and exited the training facility.
Chapter 11
Astrid took a deep breath before knocking on the king’s office door. She’d taken a quick shower and changed her clothes after her fight with Ulf, but nerves had sweat beading on her skin again.
“Come,” rumbled from inside the office. She grabbed the door handle, squared her shoulders, and entered. This meeting would be hard. She knew she deserved to get punished. But the unknown had her heart beating faster and made her hands clammy.
Leif sat behind his desk, leaning back in the chair with one boot resting on top of the other knee. His six-foot-four body appeared relaxed, but the intense gaze in his ice-blue eyes and his serious face showed he was anything but.
If this was any other meeting, Astrid would have lowered her head in a short bow before taking one of the chairs in front of the desk. But she was in deep shit here. She’d disrespected her king, her queen, and her fellow warriors. There was much atonement to be done. Much guilt to deal with.
She walked around the desk and kneeled in front of her king, touching her forehead to the knuckles of his hand resting on the armrest closest to her. “Min kung, I am sorry,” she said.
The hand under her forehead jerked as if startled, and she felt Leif’s other hand briefly touching the back of her head. “Stand,” he said. “Go sit.”
She rose but kept her head bowed as she made her way to one of the visitor chairs and sat down. Despair welled in her chest as she anticipated her punishment. Would Leif exile her from the fortress? She’d been a lone soldier in the human realm for a hundred years. Freya and Odin had used her as a scout to look for places where Loki’s creatures popped up. When they did, the god and goddess would send a band of warriors to deal with them. Sometimes Astrid would join the warriors, but most often she’d move on to continue her lone mission. And then Freya had sent her to join these Vikings in the early nineteen hundreds.
She hadn’t realized how much she needed the fellowship of the others until this very moment, when she might lose not only their camaraderie but, worse, their respect. She swallowed the lump in her throat and raised her head. There were other Viking kings with permanent tribes in the human world, two others in North America. Maybe she could join one of them. It wouldn’t be the same though. This tribe had become her family.
She’d expected Leif to look at her with anger or disappointment, maybe even both. Instead, he studied her as if she was a problem he couldn’t figure out. He stroked the stubble on his chin. “Let’s talk about what happened in Denver.”
His simple request stalled Astrid’s brain for a moment. So much had happened in Denver. She didn’t know where to begin. She stared wide-eyed at the king.
Leif dropped his leg on the floor with a thud and rested his elbows on the desk. “Just start from the beginning. You got to the clinic…and then what?”
She cleared her throat. “Scott had checked himself out, and because of patient confidentially, Dr. Rosen wouldn’t tell me how Scott left the clinic or where he went.”
Leif frowned. “Why in the Allfather’s name would Scott not wait for you? He knew someone was coming to get him.”
“He said he saw a wolverine scouting the clinic and thought he was hallucinating. He wanted to spare Naya the pain of watching her brother go crazy.”
“That would have been painful for her, but not knowing why her brother disappeared would have been even more painful.” He scratched his chin again. “Do I need to worry about Scott’s mental state?”
Astrid shrugged. “He seemed fine during our drive back here. He slept a lot, but when we talked, I didn’t notice anything amiss.”
“Good.” Leif nodded. “Now tell me why you didn’t report Scott’s disappearance as soon as you found out.”
Astrid folded her hands in her lap and studied the interlaced fingers. “My pride wouldn’t let me. The queen gave me a chance to redeem myself by bringing her brother back. I couldn’t bear hearing the disappointment in her voice when I told her I screwed up. And I couldn’t face my fellow warriors after messing up another mission. They’d never trust me in battle again.”
“Astrid,” the king barked, and she looked up startled. “How did you use your normally smart—yet stubborn—mind to come to the conclusion that Scott checking himself out was your fault?”
She opened her mouth to answer, but no sound came out, so she closed it again. What Leif asked sounded so reasonable now, but back in Denver, it had made perfect sense to go looking for Scott on her own. She’d been so confused, so tired. And her berserker had been so out of control. “I decided to see if I could find him before I reported in.” She leaned forward slightly. “And I did find him.”
The king waved his hand as if to dismiss her claim. “You found him two days later and decided on some harebrained rescue scheme.” His gaze pierced into her eyes. “Without backup.”
“I did have backup,” Astrid mumbled, lowering her gaze back to her lap.
“Who?”
“Luke Holden.”
“Fucking Holden again.” The king cursed some more under his breath. “Tell me everything that happened,” he demanded, “starting from when you left the clinic, and include all the details about how Holden got involved.”
Astrid recited how she’d ended up at the train station and described her fight with the wolverines.
“Hold up,” the king interrupted. “What do you mean, they have accelerated healing and fight like acrobats?”
Astrid thought for a minute. The wolverines the warriors had encountered on their patrols were worthy adversaries but possible to defeat. In the parking garage in Denver, she’d been genuinely scared. The reason she was still alive was because the wolverines had wanted her that way. “It’s like they’ve been enhanced somehow.”
The king cursed again. “Irja is so close to developing an antidote to their poison, but now they’ve become fucking circus artists.” Leif and Naya had both been poisoned by the wolverines using a chemically altered version of wolfsbane. Although it took a few days, their bodies had purged the poison. “How exactly are they different?” Leif asked.
Astrid had to think again. The fight in the train-station parking garage had become a blur after she was stabbed in the thigh. And she did not plan on telling Leif how close she’d been to not making it back at all. Thanks to Holden—
Mine, the berserker suddenly whispered in her head.
Astrid took in a deep breath and gripped the armrests of her chair to center herself. Damn her horny internal beast.
She thought she’d calmed the bitch down after she’d gone haywire when Ulf kissed them.
And now she was using female pronouns thanks to Ulf. Damn him too.
Astrid closed her eyes and forced a mental block between herself and the berserker. She had to get it together. She couldn’t freak out in front of the king.
“Astrid,” Leif said, concern deepening his tone.
“I’m fine,” she said and opened her eyes.
“I don’t think you are.” The king’s nostrils flared. “The presence of your berserker is so strong it’s almo
st like having another person in the room with us.”
Astrid’s eyes widened. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.” Leif shook his head. “Your inner warrior has always been close to the surface and quick to enter battle fever. But I can’t tell if it’s because you’ve been in the human realm longer than most of us, or just part of your personality.” He smiled. “You’re quick to jump into confrontations, whether your berserker has surfaced or not.”
Astrid swallowed the retort on the tip of her tongue. She knew she had a quick temper, but it wasn’t a product of her berserker or how long she’d wandered with humans. She’d been born with a short fuse and a quick tongue. She’d basically been in constant trouble from the time she learned to talk. An uppity thrall, especially a female thrall, was not tolerated by most owners. “But now it’s different?” Cold trickled down her spine. Should she tell the king her inner warrior sometimes spoke to her? What had changed her berserker’s behavior? Had the wolverines slipped her something without her noticing? Had Holden?
“Yes. Naya’s berserker’s presence is as strong, but this feels different.”
“How?”
“Well, for one, you’re not my själsfrände.” The king smiled again, but then his face became drawn, tired. “Let’s get back to the wolverines. If they’re back and stronger than before, we need to know what we’re up against.”
Astrid nodded, but his words about his själsfrände, his soul mate, stayed with her. She couldn’t help envying the connection that the king and queen shared. “Sure,” she said and took a quick peek at Leif’s left hand. Although he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, the tip of his snake tattoo could be seen under the cuff. Naya had a completed serpent tattoo as well, although hers were more of an intricate Celtic knot-like design than traced out runes, like the king’s and like the snake heads of his warriors. Naya had received her tattoo when Freya claimed her as a Valkyrie.
At least she didn’t have to worry about having to complete a soul-mate bond. If she and Holden were destined to be together, the serpent tail would have showed up the first time they hooked up.
Freya, Mother of Valkyries. Why was she obsessed about Holden now? Astrid shook herself and concentrated on the conversation. “I was injured and couldn’t concentrate as well as I would have liked, but the wolverines’ quick reflexes were mainly what threw me. These creatures reacted and anticipated my moves much quicker than the ones we fought ten months ago. They moved out of the way too quickly for me to do any real damage.”
She and Holden would never be anything more than casual. She didn’t do long-term with regular humans. Henri had cured her of that. The berserker stirred again, but Astrid clamped down on her mental shields and forced it back to sleep. Sweat beaded on her forehead from the effort.
Leif gave her a curious look but didn’t say anything about her odd behavior. “Go on with the report. What happened after the fight?”
Astrid continued her story, describing how Holden had found her and patched her up before offering to help find Scott. She glossed over the night in the gingerbread house, but she had to look away during that part or she’d have blushed redder than the apple clenched between the jaws of a roasted Yule pig.
The king grunted a few times but kept mostly quiet until she’d finished. “Where are the phones you found?” he asked.
“Ulf is investigating them.” She had to look away again. This time because of anger bubbling up inside her. Why had Ulf kissed her? To show that as a woman, she would always be a sexual object first and a warrior second? She’d punch him harder when she saw him next.
The door flew open, and Naya strode into the room. She gave the king a quick kiss and then perched on the arm of his chair so she too faced Astrid.
The king’s face lit up, and he grabbed Naya’s hand. The tiredness disappeared from his face, and his eyes filled with love as his gaze caressed her face. That click and hum Astrid always felt when the royal couple was together reverberated through her chest. It was as if the two completed a network and automatically pulled every warrior in their vicinity into that web through their berserkers.
Naya smiled briefly at Leif, the same powerful love mirrored in her own eyes. Then she turned to Astrid, and her gaze hardened. “Scott tells me Luke Holden helped rescue him,” she said in a brisk, businesslike tone.
“Yes.” Astrid nodded. A stab of irritation shot through her. Why was the queen so interested in Holden? Had there been something between the two of them, even though Holden denied it? “He used his resources to track down Scott and offered to be my backup during the rescue.” Her tone came out snippy, and Naya leaned back. Her eyebrows rose toward her hairline.
“Wow. Touchy much?” A small smile played at the corners of Naya’s mouth.
Freya’s meadow. She’d just insulted her queen. “I’m so sorry, min drottning.” Astrid bowed her head. “I meant no disrespect.” Shit. She was here to grovel, not to make the situation worse.
“None taken.” Naya waved her hand in the air. “But why was Holden in Denver?”
“He had some business deal going on.”
Leif snorted. “Likely story. I never trusted that guy.”
“That’s because you’re both alpha males.” Naya dismissed the king’s words with another hand wave. “You don’t trust anyone with as much testosterone overload as you. Your brain short-circuits and all you can think of is challenging the other man.” Astrid had to look down again, this time to hide a grin. She glanced up through her lowered lashes. The king frowned at his queen, but all Naya did was blow her fiancé a kiss. “Look, Holden helped save my brother. We owe him.”
Leif grumbled some more. “What do you want me to do? Send him flowers?”
“I want to invite him to the wedding.” Naya dropped her verbal bomb while staring intently at Leif.
“Not possible,” the king barked. “Put that idea out of your head right now.”
Naya turned to Astrid as if she hadn’t heard her fiancé’s command. “And I want Astrid to invite him for me.”
“Not going to happen,” Astrid and Leif said in unison.
Naya just smiled serenely. “He helped save my brother. I want him at the wedding. Plus, Scott wants Holden there. It will make him feel better if there’s another familiar face.”
Astrid shook her head. “This is not a good idea.” She was one of the bridesmaids and on display throughout the ceremony and reception. It would be impossible to avoid Holden.
“Listen to her, älskling,” Leif said. “Having humans at the wedding is not a good idea.”
Naya whirled around to look at her fiancé. “I’m human.”
“You know what I mean.” Leif reach out a hand, but she ignored it. “Regular humans, not enhanced.”
“Like my brother?” The queen’s words were laced with ice.
Astrid frantically searched her mind for an excuse to leave the room. This was definitely leading up to a fight, and as much as the royal couple loved each other, that passion also spilled into their disagreements. It was not a good idea to be in the fallout zone during one of their nuclear meltdowns.
Leif pulled Naya into his lap, putting his arm around her. “You love your brother. I love you, and so I love your brother.”
The queen’s shoulders relaxed, and she curled into her fiancé’s embrace. “Okay, but I still want Holden at the wedding.” Astrid took a breath to protest again, but the queen pinned her down with her gaze. “And you owe me for not telling me that Scott was lost.” She stood. “For two days, you were sending me texts as if everything was okay. When you didn’t even know where he was. You lied to me.” Naya’s voice rose and broke a little on those last words.
Astrid felt lower than the slimiest slug. She looked down at her lap. “I’m so sorry, my queen. Pride and stubbornness got in the way. I wasn’t thinking clearly.” She raised her head and f
elt moisture in her eyes. “I didn’t outright lie, but I lied by omission, and for that I apologize most deeply.”
“Don’t you trust me?” Naya’s brow furrowed. “Is our friendship so unworthy you can’t ask for help when you need it?”
Oh shit. Those words caused a stab of guilt to pierce Astrid’s heart. “Our friendship means everything. I was weak from blood loss and confused. All I could think was that I would disappoint you and the king again.”
The king had kept very quiet, but now he cleared his voice. “I should gather the others so we can discuss a new strategy for these enhanced wolverines. If they are in Denver, it won’t be long before they show up here in Pine Rapids. Especially if they’re tracking Scott.” He stood and briefly kissed Naya on her forehead before walking toward the door.
“Holden’s coming to the wedding,” the queen shouted after him.
“Never,” the king shot back before the door closed behind him.
Naya turned back to Astrid. “You will invite him for me, since Leif won’t let me leave the fortress.” It wasn’t a question.
“Why can’t you leave the fortress?”
“Leif thinks I might be in danger. There is a lot of chatter on the Darknet. These new wolverines are superintelligent. They are organized and communicating in ways we haven’t seen before. Their efforts to get to me and Scott have ramped up.” The wolverines were created on order from Loki by the covert organization behind the lab the siblings grew up in. As an extra bonus of having the creatures, the lab handlers used them to hunt Naya and Scott. They wanted to use the siblings in a breeding program of super soldiers.
The Darknet information was disturbing, but that wasn’t what Astrid had meant to ask. She shook her head. “No, I mean why do you want me to deliver the invitation?”
Naya frowned. “Because you know him already,” she said as if that was an obvious reason.
“Don’t you think he will find it odd that Daisy is marrying under the name Naya in a pagan Norse ritual?”
The queen paused for a moment, but then dismissed the words with a wave. “Nah, he’ll understand why I used an assumed name. I bet a lot of his customers and business associates do the same.” Astrid wanted to ask Naya more questions, but she didn’t want to give away her interest. Especially when she didn’t know herself why she was so hung up on Holden. “Besides,” Naya continued, “when someone rescues your brother, you thank them in person and you invite them to your wedding. And since I can’t go, you’ll have to be my proxy.”
Viking Warrior Rebel Page 12
