Page 45 of Valhalla is Full of Hunks
His eyes fluttered open before he carefully examined my face. “It was Jör saying you were his mate.”
It wasn’t a question, and there was no use denying it. Not when he was looking at me like he could read my entire soul.
And maybe I want him to.
“Yeah,” I replied, barely a whisper. “Maybe.”
Fen observed me for another moment before quietly replying, “He’s never said those words to me.”
Fuck.
“I-I’m sorry,” I rasped, panicking—once again—that I was unnecessarily crowbarring my way into these existing relationships. “I thought… You guys have been together so long, I just assumed—”
“I have also never said those words to him,” Fen interrupted. “The idea of having a mate has never crossed my mind before now.”
Because it was irrelevant to his destiny.
Desperately needing to redirect the conversation, I focused on forcing a midnight confession of a different color. “Why are you so stuck on getting into Valhalla?” I blurted out. “Who cares what happens after you’re dead?”
“It’s what we areowed,Iola,” he vehemently repeated, although he kept his voice low, for Jör’s sake. “We fulfilled our prophetic roles, endured eons of suffering before meeting the gods of Asgard on the field, and we sent those same gods to their eternal feast. We deserve to dine in Valhalla beside them.”
I frowned. The last thing I wanted to do was dismiss his anger, even if I was still confused by it. “Were youexplicitlypromised Valhalla after death?” I carefully asked.
He looked surprised by my question. “All of us are, and none of us. It is simply a fact that Valhalla is the afterlife for the greatest of warriors, handpicked by Odin’sValkyries.Fólkvangr is the field ruled by Freyja, reserved for the remainder who died in battle, and Helheim is for those who perished from natural causes. There are other afterlives as well, yet we are stillhere,even after death. To be denied entry toanyafterlife means we will never be at peace.”
The anguish on his face broke something inside me. While the way Fen forced me into this situation had been wildly inappropriate, I now understood the desperation behind his actions. However, I also saw how blindly he was following a singular goal—how achievingdeathhad become his sole purpose inlife.
And who would want that?
“What does peace look like to you?” I ventured, even as I swallowed down a larger question I didn’t dare ask.
Do you think you could ever find it here?
That you’ve already found it?
Fen dipped his head to softly trail his nose over Jör’s shoulder, inhaling the other man’s scent. The familiarity of the gesture was simultaneously adorable and devastating, and I instinctively cuddled Jör closer in response.
My movement resulted in Fen snapping his head up, and we both startled to find our lips only centimeters apart. Time ceased to exist. I was painfully aware all I needed to do was lean forward, and he would meet me halfway.
More than halfway, probably.
“I had children once,” he murmured, which was not at all what I expected him to say at the moment. “Skoll and Hati—two wolves with deception and hate in their veins. When the gods tricked me into bondage with tethers created from magical ingredients, Skoll and Hati attempted to free me. Their punishment was to forever chase the sun and moon across the sky—an impossible task never to be accomplished. Or so the gods thought. The day came when they caught them both, and all light disappeared from the sky. Only then did my shackles vanish, and Ragnarok began.”
When Fen spoke like this, I found myself drawn into his world, hanging on every word, and one thousand percent agreeing with his righteous belief.
It doesn’t hurt that he smells so damn good.
Unsurprisingly, his scent conjured up a pine forest after the rain—a remote place where no humans had ever set foot. My heart panged as I wondered how much of him felt wild at all anymore.
Leia’s monsters had once told me how incredibly jarring it was for them to wake up as men—to have to learn how to exist in bodies that were so unfamiliar. But they also mentioned these new forms had allowed them to experience both pleasure and pain in ways they never could before.
And to find each other.
These supposedly mindless monsters deeply mourned what they’d lost, but most made the best of their circumstances. By the time Leia washed ashore, they still hoped to break their curse, but mostly, they wanted to escape from the limbo they’d found themselves in.
To be given agency over their own lives again.
Possibly for the first time.
