Page 57 of His Impossible Elf Mate
“Axel, please… I need to know.”
He sighed against me. “You’re going to be angry with me, but you need to know I would have done anything to save you.”
“I didn’t need saving, Axel. My energy was only low from the healing. I gave too much.”
His patient eyes met mine. “That was true, at first, anyways. The others helped replenish your energy some. Then you just wouldn’t wake and we wondered if there was something else going on. We decided we needed a Seer.”
A pit of dread formed in my stomach. “No.”
“I’m sorry. They said she had a direct line to your goddess and could help. Before I knew it, she was on her way.”
“She came here?” I straightened, worming free of Axel’s grip. I looked around our modest home and saw it from her eyes. For a brief moment, I felt a sense of shame in the home I had made with Axel, before anger came flooding in that she had come to our home and made me feel such a way. Not only that, she had seen me so vulnerable.
“Yeah, and just in time. I don’t know what was happening to you wherever you were, but it was bad, T.” Axel kissed me, his lips lingering, his eyes closing as if even the memory pained him.
“I can only assume this help came at a price,” I said once Axel moved away. Wrapping myself around him, I tried to assure him I understood, though I would not have made the same decision in his position.
Axel winced. “I had no choice.”
So it was very bad. What could they have asked him for?
“I’m sure it felt that way, yet I would not have left you alone. Somehow I would have found a way.”
“T, you were going gray on the bed, hardly breathing. I thought you were going to die and your mom was already on her way when she made the deal.”
“What deal?”
“We only get a year together before you have to go home and make an heir.”
“No.”
“It’s what the parliament demanded. We don’t get to pick.”
“They don’t get to dictate my life for me. I choose you. I love you. Our future is not theirs to decide.”
“I love you too, which is why I agreed. You alive somewhere else is better than you dead and gone. I couldn’t take it. You were fading and…” Axel broke into deep, heaving sobs.
“Shh dear one. They will not take me. I am yours forever. They just don’t know it yet.”
Axel eventually wore himself out by enthusiastically showing me how we would spend our year, by riding my cock until he came and then sucking me down.
Quite the homecoming.
Once I was assured he was in a deep sleep, I left our home and went to the lake, where I knew Ívarr would be waiting for me.
“How is he?”
Long gone was the elf who did not believe in my relationship. He was now a staunch supporter. I knew I could get him onto my side, especially since I believed he had a connection with the witch/midwife,Michaella, and would want to be in Sweetwater for the long term.
“Exhausted. Guilty, though he is not at fault—neither of you are.”
“It was an impossible situation. We truly feared for your life and Axel only went to your mother for answers, not the aid she gave.”
“Do you believe there is a way out of this fool’s bargain?”
“Undoubtedly. Especially since you are the one paying the price, not Axel. You did not agree to the terms set, so how can you be made to abide by them?”
“So you will help me fight, when the time comes?”
