Page 86 of The Fanged One

"I have never thought that about you," he began, but she cut him off.

"But I still believed it because you never said otherwise! Oh, my gods, Tor knew, didn't he? Ciara told you to grovel. Every single person in that hall out there knows what I am to you except me. Why?" she demanded, all the hurt in her face turning to embarrassment and anger.

"For a whole lot of reasons, Linnea! I have enemies older than your world, and the fastest way to get a thing taken from me is to let the worlds see I want it!" he said, standing back up. "I didn't think I'd earned another chance to feel this way. Sunniva's fear nearly finished me, and I didn't even love her the way I love you. If you ever looked at me like that, it would end me. So I told myself I was protecting you, when half of it was protecting myself. Both were true."

Her eyes were wet now as she rose to her feet to face him. "Anything else?"

"Every choice you have ever had was made for you by somebody else." He dared to take one of her hands with his. "A cult took you and bled you because of what your blood was worth to them. Your father decided what you were before you could speak. Your mother decided you were a reason to leave. I wasn't going to be one more person deciding your life for you. I wanted you to choose me, or not choose me, with the whole truth in your hands and no bond dragging on you to tip the scale. You have had enough taken from you, and I wouldn't take this too."

"I see," she whispered. "Are you done?"

"No." He took her face in his hands. "I don't care that you can't shift. I've never cared, and I thought you understood that, but clearly, I have to repeat it. I'm the god of wolves, and I am telling you that the wolf you keep behind that wall is no doubt as beautiful and wonderfully stubborn as you, and whether she ever comes out is for you both to decide. You could stay exactly as you are for the rest of your life, and you would still be my mate. I would still want you."

She was crying now, the quiet kind, the kind that scared him worse than the loud.

"If we open those doors tomorrow and it goes wrong, if we can't free Loki, if Ragnarök comes early and the dark eats all of it, you and me and the whole of Yggdrasil, it won't change one thing I've said in this room. I will love you while it ends. I will love you whether you take the bond or you walk out of here and never let me touch you again."

He had run out of caution a day ago. The rest of it came out plain.

"You will always be enough for me, Linnea. I want you in any way you will allow me to have you. That's the whole of it. That's everything I have been holding back since the night you found me."

The wolf, which had held itself still through every word so it would not crowd him, let go at last.

Ours, it said, low and certain. Always was. Always will be.

Linnea stared up at him, her gray eyes huge and swimming, her hands fisted now in the front of his shirt.

"Mate," she whispered. "Mate?"

He had seen the shape of her magic since the first night, and the strange wall she raised with her own hands to keep her wolf locked away where her father could not reach it.

Now, with the word out of her mouth and hanging in the cold between them, the wall shook.

Mine, his wolf answered it, rising to meet her through the shaking wall. Ours. Come home.

42

Mate. I'm his mate. Linnea didn't know whether to fear that this was another trial.

No. Mine. Mine. MINE, her wolf insisted. I told you not to believe what you saw. He's MINE.

Fenris stood in front of her with his heart bare between them. He was not reaching for her. He was waiting.

"I pushed you away on purpose," Linnea admitted, the confession scraping its way out. "You want to know why I've been treating you like a stranger since the hall and the serpent's bowl? It wasn't Inga. I knew what I was feeling for you, and it terrified me."

"Little singer..."

"Let me finish, or I'll lose my nerve." She locked her arms down at her sides. "I can survive a lot. I've had practice. I survived my father and the cult and my mother's face at that table. The one thing I can't survive is having you and then standing one day in a world that doesn't have you in it. You're a god. I'm whatever I am. The math doesn't work, and I did it a hundred times on the way down here. I decided it was safer to step away now than watch you leave me later. I was trying to let you go."

Fenris took his time to reply, patient and measured, knowing they were in a moment that deserved reverence. "You want to know what I gave the serpent at that bowl."

The turn threw her. "What?"

"You watched me pay Níðhöggr a toll for your passage, and you thought I did it to you out of pity." Fenris shook his head. "I gave it the good years with Sunniva. The early ones, before she and our children thought I was a monster. I carried those memories into the dark, Linnea. They were the only warm things I had down there. They kept me company when there was nothing else at all."

Linnea's chest was too tight, her tongue struggling to form words. "You gave those away? Why?"

"I didn't need them anymore." He took one step closer to her. "You are always going to be the brightest thing I have in any dark that ever comes for me again. I don't need old memories to keep me warm when I have you in the world. So I handed the serpent the old light, because I have a new one, and if you choose me, I swear on Yggdrasil and everything hanging from it that I will never leave you or let you believe for a single breath that you are not worth every scrap of love my broken soul can still make."