by Nora Ash
“Grim.” I forced my tired muscles to contract so I could sit up, propping myself on one elbow and reaching for him with my free hand. I pressed my palm against his chest right where our quiet bond attached below his ribs, his coldness leaching into my skin. “I won’t ever make you do that. I promise.”
My other mates liked it with an edge of reluctance. I suspected they enjoyed the opportunity to show me their strength and dominance, that my submission was all the sweeter if it came hard won. And, truth be told, I liked that too. But Grim?
He might have all the alpha instincts, and he’d certainly shown me his dominant side while he rutted me through my heat, but his scars… Those awful memories still haunted him, no matter how much he pretended they didn’t.
No, the idea of a reluctant partner did not delight him. That he was telling me he would do it anyway was only proof how fundamentally our mating had rocked him. He would rather break himself apart than leave me defenseless.
I pushed up fully and embraced him, pressing my face into the crook of his neck.
He sat frozen for several long breaths, a statue carved from ice—unsure of how to respond, I realized.
“Hug me,” I mumbled, rubbing my nose against his shoulder.
Hesitantly, he obeyed. I hummed a pleased note and skimmed my lips over the muscle that connected his shoulder to his neck.
Grim trembled under me, a soft gasp blowing against the top of my head. I smirked and let my tongue flick out to tease that same spot.
My mate responded with a groan, strong arms tightening around my body to the point of pain.
“You feel… so much,” he rasped against my scalp. “Every touch of you is… amplified.”
I let my hands find his back and trailed one finger down the length of his spine in response. He shuddered again, cool breath huffing out against my ear. His hands found my feathered top, and with a few yanks on straps, he pulled it off me, throwing it to the ground with little care for the invaluable leather. When he closed his arms tight around me again, I was the one to shiver as his icy skin enveloped me from all sides.
Grim released me as if he’d been burned. “I’m… sorry.”
I arched my eyebrow at the unexpected apology. “For what?”
In his usual style, he didn’t respond—only closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, it took me a second to realize I no longer felt the chill of him radiating out.
Frowning, I put a hand on his chest. No sensation of temperature met me. He’d… magically nullified his natural chill? To not cause me discomfort?
“Don’t do that,” I said softly, spreading my fingers out over one hard pec. “I want to feel you.”
“You’re no longer in heat,” he countered. “It will be… unpleasant. To mate.”
“I like it—your coldness. Nothing feels right here. Even the water is just… nothing. You’re the only thing that doesn’t feel wrong. It reminds me that I’m not dead. Not fully,” I said. I stroked my hand over his chest for emphasis. When my thumb brushed over his nipple in the process, his entire body trembled underneath me, his eyes squeezing shut. A soft moan echoed in the space between us.
With another breath, he opened those mismatched eyes again. They seemed to bore into mine, into my soul, as if he was searching for something. Slowly, coldness radiated against my palm and up through my thighs.
I smiled and rubbed his nipple again, but he was apparently prepared this time, because he only narrowed his eyes in response.
“Is that how you blended into the human world? You would… dim yourself when taking a girl to bed?” I asked. I don’t know why the question popped into my head—and I certainly don’t know why I asked it right then. The thought of Grim between some nameless, faceless girl’s thighs had acid churn in my gut, some of my own desire waning.
“I never did,” he said. Something in his tone made me think he’d sensed my idiotic jealousy even through the wall he’d put up between our connection.
I grimaced. “I shouldn’t have asked. Sorry. It’s none of my business.”
Grim’s eyes flickered from mine down to my breasts. When he reached for one, I gasped at the coldness of his touch, my nipple puckering into a tight tip.
“I sometimes felt you. When you climaxed. On your own, or with someone,” he said, rubbing one thumb over my peaked nipple and drawing another shudder from me. “This… trickle of pleasure. It was the only times I felt the call to copulate. But I never yielded.”
I frowned, some of my attention scattering for every cool touch against my achingly tight nipple. I probably should have been embarrassed that he’d felt me in such intimate, private moments, but I wasn’t. “Why not? Bjarni and Saga… I’m sure they… enjoyed themselves while they waited for me.”
He didn’t look up from my breasts, but I still saw the dark flicker passing over his features. And then it clicked. Like it should have before I’d even opened my mouth in the first place.
“Oh, Grim,” I whispered, the ache in my heart withering the tendrils of desire his thumb had awakened. I’d had some hazy idea that maybe he’d been like Modi, unwilling to risk offspring, but no. “Of course. I’m so sorry. That was… thoughtless.”
“I’m not broken, Annabel.” Grim looked up then, and to my surprise his eyes weren’t coolly distant like I’d expected, but mildly annoyed. “I don’t think of her when I’m inside of you.”
“How can you not?” Shame made me look away. I’d done what I did because it was the only way, but… “I blackmailed you, just like her.”
He snorted and grabbed my other breast with his free hand, pushing both up and out in lewd invitation. “No,” he said, and then closed his lips around my unattended nipple.
I drew in a sharp breath, my hands flying to his hair without conscious thought. He flicked his tongue over the tight bud before he sucked, deeply.
My pussy tightened and my clit sang, scattering my focus and driving away the clenching guilt from my chest.
“There was no pleasure,” he murmured against my breasts. “Only submission.”
I slid my fingers down to cradle the back of his head as he suckled, skimming my lips over his scalp.
“I’ll kill her,” I whispered into his hair. “For what she did to you.”
“If I wanted her dead, I would have killed her myself,” he said, lifting his head to meet my gaze. “She is my brothers’ mother.”
“And you don’t want to cause them pain,” I said, placing a kiss on his forehead. “My noble, kindhearted mate.”
He chuffed a laugh, bitterness drawing his mouth into a line. “No one’s ever called me that before. Calculated, yes. Weak. Miserable. Grim. And here you are, little mortal, with your soft human heart, lost in the depths of Hel because I killed you… and you’re calling me noble?”
I flushed. “Yeah, well, I’m not saying I’m pleased about that, but you did it for your brothers. I get it. What matters is that you’ve realized you were wrong and are helping to rectify it.”
The wry smirk slid off his face, his features turning stony. But in his eyes, hunger flared. My pussy clenched on instinct, slickness gathering deep in my core.
Without another word, Grim slid his hands to my hips and shoved me to the ground hard enough to force a huff from my lungs. A yank around my waist ripped my trousers down my thighs past my knees. I tried to sit up to push them all the way off and kick off my boots, but Grim fell on top of me before I could so much as get up on my elbows, settling his hips against mine.
I gasped softly at the chill of his skin pressed against everywhere I was bared, and again—sharper—when he pressed the thick head of his cock against my lower lips.
I stared up at him, up at the simmering darkness in his eyes as he took me in. Then he forced himself inside of me in one hard push, penetrating me all the way to my womb.
I shrieked, my body entirely unprepared for the suddenness of his entry, even though I was wet enough to take him. My pussy shuddered around his
girth, stretching to fully accommodate him inside of me. Where his coldness had felt like a blessing during my heat, my body was decidedly more susceptible to it now, muscles contracting hard as my nipples and clit tightened.
It was still delicious, but also… different. More raw. Bordering on painful.
“You yield so prettily,” Grim rasped. He was panting even as he held perfectly still inside of me, shudders traveling through his body every time my pussy fluttered on his cool length. “So perfectly. You feel it, don’t you? How entirely, excruciatingly defenseless you are underneath me. How fully you let me in.
“You may have blackmailed me, Annabel, but you are the one who surrenders when we fuck.”
He gave me a slow, full roll of his hips that made me hiss and cling to his biceps, nails digging in to keep me anchored to reality.
“I could harm you so, so easily. I could make this hurt. Make you plead for me to stop. And yet you lay with me so entirely willingly. Eagerly.” He bent his head to the side of my neck, drawing in a deep lungful before he brushed his lips against my ear and whispered, “Perhaps it will ease your guilt if I tell you that nothing in the nine worlds feels like your sheath clutching me like your life depends on how deeply I penetrate you.”
I groaned out something that could have been an agreement. Holy hell, where did he learn to talk dirty? My body lit up like a torch, everywhere he touched me inside and out so very alive, as if life itself welled from our entwined bodies.
Grim rolled his hips again, a lazy movement that drew a groan from my throat. “Do you know how many nights I have stroked myself to release, remembering how your scent bloomed around me when you came into my stables that first day? How often I’ve imagined what it would have felt like if I fucked you up against the kitchen counter that first night?
“I’ve cursed your name for how you make me want, mate. So no, taking you is nothing like fucking her.” He punctuated his statement with a hard thrust that made me arch and dig my nails deeper into his shoulders. And another.
“Grim!”
“You sing my name so beautifully,” he growled into my ear, his cool breath sending shivers down my neck even as I writhed at the violence of his penetration. “It was given to me to warn of my gruesome nature, yet you make it sound like the gentlest caress. Do you know how badly I ache for you every time it spills from your lips?”
“I ache for you too,” I gasped, breaking on a moan when he took another rough stroke in my pussy. “I need you. Oh. God, yes! I need you!”
His lips danced over mine, featherlight at first, then deeper. Hungrier. I moaned into Grim’s mouth, my breath hitching with every roll of his hips. Every cell in my body was alight with him, every nerve tense and frayed. He was so cold inside of me, but that couldn’t extinguish the heat in my core.
Grim let out a strangled groan, and then darkness spilled through our bond and into me.
Heat. Bliss. Mate. Images and words that didn’t belong to me tumbled through my mind as Grim released the block on our bond, his thoughts like soothing caresses.
“Yes,” I groaned. “Yes, yes. More, baby. Yes.” I wrapped myself around his presence inside of me, hugged him to my chest and tried to bracket his hips with my legs to pull him tighter still, but my knees were trapped in my trousers.
Grim obeyed me nonetheless. His thrusts came harder, the darkness inside of me swelling as it wrapped around my light, while one hand traveled down my stomach to the apex of my thighs. I keened when he reached my clit, ripping my mouth from his as I threw my head back against the dirt beneath us.
He circled my pulsing nub with rapid, tight movements, as if he knew exactly what I needed, and in response the fire in my core rose through me like a tidal wave.
An image of my face screwed up in pained bliss flickered through our bond. Can’t hold back. Can’t. Can’t.
“Do it! Grim, do it!” I shrieked and arched my pelvis up high as every muscle in my body locked up. Release tore through my spine, blinding me to anything but the ecstasy of coming on his pounding cock.
Grim snarled, a savage sound, and slammed his cock all the way to my cervix through clenching muscles protesting the forced stretch. A stretch that quickly became so much more intense when the bottom of his shaft swelled.
“Shit!” I’d asked for it, and even as I clawed at his shoulders and writhed to escape the inevitable, some dark, primal part of my mind thrilled as my pussy lost the battle against his knot and yielded to the stretch.
Grim’s groan of pleasure mixed with my pained howl, the thick bulge forcing its way in behind my pelvic bone and locking us together.
My muscles contracted again, forcing a mewl from my throat when the pressure of it pushed hard against my G-spot. I was already coming again when Grim pressed his thumb against my clit, taking my orgasm into the skies.
I cried out his name and heard mine echo through my mind in return. Cool semen bathed my cervix, making my pussy spasm around his knot again. My G-spot shuddered at the renewed pressure, and I seized up in another bone-shattering release spurred by Grim’s constant circles on my swollen clit.
Tenderness swarmed my mind, a mixture of my own endorphin-fueled emotions and his, soothing the physical roughness of the knotting. I clung to him, moaning his name as I rode the waves of pained pleasure, my ecstasy-addled thoughts blending into his.
I was halfway to oblivion when another image flickered through my mind. It was of me in my feathered leathers, sitting on a throne of bones, a skull in one hand and a still-beating heart in the other. Behind me, a sentinel half-hidden in shadows stood guard.
Grim.
“W-What was that?” I groaned, the imagery different enough from all the sex-addled thoughts we’d shared it sobered me.
Grim’s only response was to press his thumb hard against my clit and rock his hips into mine, and my thoughts scattered to the wind as my body seized with another climax.
By the time sleep finally stole me away, I’d forgotten all about that unsettling image.
Fourteen
Grim
I loved her.
Norn-forced or not, I loved her, and it was a dark, hideous, possessive urge so deeply rooted in the most primal parts of my soul it would be impossible to weed out.
I rubbed absentmindedly at my ribs as I watched Annabel climb over a fallen tree while holding Mimir safely under her left arm. Her backside swayed, drawing my focus from our surroundings. I gritted my teeth, ignoring the stab of desire low in my gut.
Lust. I was starting to understand why the desert religions thought of it as sinful. What my body ached for every time I so much as glanced at my mate was distracting, easily overpowering, and all-consuming. There was nothing good or pure about it, that much was certain. But it wasn’t what had the darkness inside of me swelling.
Love.
I almost laughed amidst the bleak horror of it all. There were those among the gods who saw Freya as weak, mild—easily ignored. If they’d ever felt what I did after my soul wove itself with Annabel’s, they would cower in fear of the Goddess of Love.
Tendrils snaked through my thoughts, plucking out the memory of my mate holding me tight while she swore she’d kill the one who’d harmed me. Fierce. She was so ruthlessly fierce, even if she submitted eagerly underneath me. Iron and flesh.
My magic swelled, pushing at the wall I’d erected between my end of our bond and hers. Keeping it in place was a constant battle—my very soul ached to blend with hers again, but if I yielded, it would truly be the end. Those brief, euphoric moments during my climax where I’d lost control of myself so completely my mind had spilled into hers nearly undid everything I’d ever cared about.
I sent my brothers a thought, steeling my mind against the seething anger flaring from somewhere deep in my primordial makeup.
I’d been prepared for this—for the jealousy, the urge to rip apart the men who meant everything to me, and for the sudden shift to make the omega my primary priority.
I ha
dn’t been prepared to love her.
As if sensing my distress despite my ironclad grip on our connection, Annabel shot a look at me over her shoulder. Her plump lips curved up in a soft smile that made me wonder if Verdandi’s web had cursed her with the same feelings as I. No one had ever smiled at me like that before.
I doubted anyone ever would.
“It’s not much longer now,” Mimir said, drawing our attention. “We will have to ask them for guidance. Respectfully, please. I don’t much desire having my eyeballs pecked from my skull.”
“Them?” Annabel asked as I instinctively laid a hand on the handle of a dagger at the implied threat of what was ahead. “Who?”
“The ravens,” Mimir said. “Come to think of it, best let me do the talking. They are tricky beasts.”
“Ravens?” Annabel asked. “Like Arni and Magga?”
“Arni and Magga?”
“My father stole two ravens from Odin’s rookery, once upon a time, and gifted them to Saga and Bjarni,” I explained.
“Who names a raven Eagle?” Mimir muttered. “Yes, plum, like Odin’s birds, and not. Every raven flies across the skies, plucking gossip and secrets from the winds. And when they die, they come here, to this place, where they exchange their secrets and find many more.”
“So you think they’ll know of another way to escape Hel?” Annabel asked, urgency coloring her voice.
“If anyone knows of a way, it will be the ravens,” Mimir said.
We heard them long before we saw them.
A low, continuous rumble in the distance grew in volume with every step we took, until gray light filtered through the trees up ahead and the noise was an unbearable, squawky crescendo.
“Such chatter,” Mimir shouted over the cacophony. “Something must have excited them.”
We broke through the tree line and into a large, barren field. In the center of it a large, dead oak stretching up toward the sky, Hel’s inferno of souls swirling in the distance behind it. And on every branch, hundreds upon hundreds of ravens perched, leaving not a single space. On the ground surrounding the ancient trunk, many more thousand black birds sat, chattering and squawking.
