Page 66 of A Darkness So Sweet

“I don’t want to—” Maia stopped talking at the glare he nearly leveled her with. The hatred in that chilled her to the bone.

Arvid took a menacing step forward, the threat clear in his movements. “Get out of my home, human. You deserve to be back at the surface where you belong. I’d prefer your keeper to do it, but I’m not above angering Ragnar just to see you gone.”

Another troll close by yelled, “We don’t want you here!”

“Your kind isn’t welcome!”

“Thief!”

“Murderer!”

Maia’s heart hurt. Her chest quite literally ached as she ducked a little closer to Hulda. But she wasn’t fast enough.

Someone launched a stone at her, catching her right hip hard enough to sting. Gasping, she whirled away from the pain, only to put herself right in the way of yet another stone. This one caught her shoulder, leaving a mark of grit against her skin and a red scrape where her flesh had torn. Shock had her reeling a little too close to Arvid.

The jeweler snarled with more anger. “Are thosemyearrings in your ears?”

Oh, no.

Had Ragnar gotten them from this man? She clapped her hands over her ears, trying to get as close to Hulda as she could. More rocks found their way to her skin, though, and she didn’t want the old woman to get hit. So she tried to step around Hulda, only to find more trolls on the other side. There was nowhere for her to go.

Fear made her freeze. She wasn’t proud of it. Part of her still said that if she just gave them what they wanted, they would leave her alone. She could lick her wounds in the shadows after they were done with her, whatever that looked like. She survived because she had to. There was no other choice. Surviving was what she was good at.

A rock launched through the air, and she could see it was going to hit her in the face. Squeezing her eyes shut, she prepared herself for more pain as she lifted her arms to protect her head.

But the pain didn’t come.

Blinking her eyes open and dropping her arms, Maia stared at the lavender-colored hand in front of her face. It took her a moment to realize Ragnar hadcaught the rockbefore he dropped it onto the ground at her feet. His shoulders were rising and falling with rage as he stared at the crowd surrounding them. Without a word, he put his arm around her and turned toward their home.

Hulda took a deep breath, the sound little more than a wheeze before she said, “Be careful with her, Ragnar.”

He growled, “I wish everyone would stop telling me that,” before dragging her through the streets. He said nothing else. Not while they walked. Not when he opened the door. And certainly not when he thrust her into the waiting darkness beyond.

She worried he would scold her. Or perhaps that he was like the others who had decided to be done with her. But that thought was trailed by an edge of rage, because how dare he? He’d given her hope. He’d made her feel like this could work, even though she should have known that was a lie.

Breathing hard, she turned on him the moment he shut the door. “Did you know?”

He remained with his back to her, his attention on the closed door. “I did.”

“Is that where you were? When you came back that day in the kitchen? Were you outside of Trollveggen, in the party that found out my people collapsed an entrance?”

“I was.”

Her entire body hurt, like he’d been the one to throw the stones at her. “What did you do to them?”

He still didn’t turn. But she could see the way his shoulders curved in on him. “I killed them, with all the other trolls in our war band. I skinned them alive and left them to die in the trees. So that when your people found them, they would be half dead and soon on their way into the realm beyond. They would be like monsters to your own people, omens of the deaths that would soon find them.”

Maia’s stomach churned with the brutality of the image. His people did not know how to forgive. That much she was certain of. But then she remembered all the trolls who had died here too, and the awful ways they had done so even as Ragnar had fought for hours to save them.

“What are we going to do?” she whispered, feeling more broken and defeated than she had since the day she’d married him. “Your people and mine hate each other. There is no coming back from this kind of hatred. I cannot even walk your streets, and you cannot leave this place without my kind trying to kill you. Or you killing them.”

He turned at her words, staggering toward her like a man who had seen a ghost. But then, just when she thought he would reach out to shake her or yell at her for dreaming like she had, he fell to his knees before her. Ragnar’s head came up to her chest when he was like this, his size was so much greater than her own. He was so infinitely gentle as he brushed his fingers against her hip.

“They struck you here?” he asked, his voice so quiet she almost didn’t hear it.

She nodded, words sticking in her throat.

“And here.” He touched the red mark on her shoulder where the stone had scraped her. “They never should have touched you. This is my fault.”

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