Page 85 of The Fanged One

"Tor!" she snapped, upside down, hair swinging. "Tor, are you seeing this? Help me!"

"Sorry. He's bigger than me," Tor called back.

"Ciara!"

"Grovel harder," Ciara reminded Fenris.

Layla said to no one in particular, "I feel like we should at least pretend to stop this."

"Von, do you know any decent sound warding?" Arne asked.

Fenris carried Linnea through the nearest low doorway into a bedroom, shot the iron bolt across the door, and dropped her onto the bed.

Linnea glared up at him, chest heaving, a flush up her throat that had nothing to do with wanting him and everything to do with fury.

"You have about three seconds to explain yourself."

"I'm not doing this anymore," Fenris snapped.

"Doing what?"

"This." He gestured between them. "You, talking to me like I'm a stranger. Me, letting you push me away without explanation. I'm done with it. You're going to tell me what your mother said to you in that hall that made you hate me so much, and I'm going to tell you the rest of it, and neither of us walks out of this room until we do."

Linnea flinched. "There's nothing…"

"Linnea, don't lie to me on top of everything else."

Linnea's blank expression finally cracked, and her face came apart. She pressed the back of her hand hard against her mouth like she could push it all back in.

"She said I was the reason she left, okay?" she said, trying to force the words out through a ragged gasp. "My mother sat down across from me like we'd arranged to meet for coffee, and she told me she looked at a daughter who couldn't shift and did the math and chose herself, and never regretted a day of it."

Fenris forced himself to stay where he was, to not crowd in on her when all he wanted was to take her in his arms and kiss all her sadness away.

"The thing is, Fenris, it doesn't even matter if it was really her," Linnea continued, wiping the stray tears off her cheeks. "Tor seems to think it was a trick, a mask, something the place dredged up to gut us because we don't know if she's really dead. It still doesn't matter either way because every word of it was true."

"It wasn't…" he began.

"I'm a völva of Ulfheim who can't shift." She rode straight over him. "That's the whole truth of who I am. Not wolf enough for my father, who beat it into me. Not wolf enough for my mother, who walked out over it. Not wolf enough for the pack, who looked at me like something born wrong and only tolerates me now because my magic has value to them. Not wolf enough for the god of wolves to want for anything more than a warm body to hold in the dark until he gets where he's going." Her voice gave out in the middle of it, but she kept going anyway. "No matter what I do, I'm just never enough, and I'm so fucking tired of it!"

The wolf was up on its feet inside him, hackles raised, furious on her behalf, with nowhere to put it. Fenris crouched down on the floor in front of her and gave her the only thing he had that was bigger than Inga's poison.

"I have been a wolf for longer than your people have existed," he said softly. "I have become the monster in every telling of my story. Men carved me onto standing stones with my mouth open and the world ending in my teeth. Everything that has ever looked at me has been afraid of me. Everything except you. You stood on a forest path in the snow and told a god the size of your car to get in the back and not eat you, please. No one in the Nine Worlds has ever looked at me the way you do, like I'm worth being treated normally and being rude to. Do you understand what that is to me?"

Linnea's mouth opened and shut again. He took that as a sign he should continue.

"Sunniva was afraid of me," he said, because he had started now, and she would never understand unless he laid it bare for her. "I loved my wife with the part of me that is a man, and she loved that part back, right until the day the wolf showed through the skin, and she saw what she had married. After that, she couldn't meet my eyes. That's the sum of the great love you think you're never going to measure up to. A woman who flinched when I came into the room, until I let them put me in the ground because being buried was easier than watching her be frightened of me in my own house."

"You were holding her hand and smiling and… Why do that if she was so cruel to you?" Linnea asked, her brows drawing together.

"She was apologizing to me, Linnea," he said, summoning his courage. "She told me I'd spent an age building a shrine to a marriage that scared her, and that I should pull it down. She told me to stop being afraid and to claim my true mate. To ask her properly, so the yes would be hers to give. That is what you watched across that hall. Not a man going back to the love of his life. A dead woman cutting me loose and pointing me at you because it's where I've always belonged."

"Your true…" Linnea's brows came down further. "What the fuck are you talking about, Fenris?"

"You're my mate, little singer," he whispered. "You have been my mate since the first time I heard your voice. When I woke, your scent reached me in that forest, and my wolf recognized you. I have known every single day since."

She stared at him. The fury came right after, which he should have braced for because she was his in more ways than one.

"The forest," she said, color climbing into her face. "You've known since the first day, and you let me walk into Niflheim thinking I was someone you'd pass the time with, and that you'd be embarrassed about later…"