by Nora Ash
Betraying Destiny
The Omega Prophecy III
Nora Ash
Copyright © 2021 by Nora Ash
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Any and all likeness to trademarks, corporations or persons, dead or alive, is purely coincidental.
Summary
Betrayed and killed by the god destined to love her.
He was meant to be her lover, but he would rather see the Omega dead than surrender to Fate’s snare.
* * *
No one escapes the Realm of Death, but if Annabel doesn’t find a way out, her mates will die along with her, and Ragnarök will leave nothing behind but darkness and ashes.
Her only hope is to win the heart of the god who killed her. But even if she can trick her way into his icy soul, can she ever love a man whose hatred for her reaches back to the moment of her birth.
* * *
BETRAYING DESTINY is a full-length fantasy romance novel that concludes Annabel’s riveting journey through Norse mythology.
Begin her and her five Alphas’ story with RAGNARÖK RISING.
Stalk Nora
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Contents
Summary
1. Annabel
2. Magni
3. Annabel
4. Grim
5. Annabel
6. Modi
7. Annabel
8. Annabel
9. Grim
10. Grim
11. Annabel
12. Grim
13. Annabel
14. Grim
15. Annabel
16. Grim
17. Annabel
18. Annabel
19. Annabel
20. Saga
21. Grim
22. Bjarni
23. Grim
24. Grim
25. Annabel
26. Annabel
27. Annabel
28. Grim
29. Annabel
30. Annabel
31. Annabel
32. Grim
33. Annabel
34. Annabel
Epilogue
But I want more!
What’s next on your TBR list?
Also by Nora Ash
One
Annabel
“Why?”
The word hung in the nothingness between us, expanding until it pounded in my temples and throbbed in my blood moving sluggishly through my veins.
“Why?” I repeated. The ice in my gut crawled through my body, numbing my arms, my fingertips… my chest. “Why, why, why?”
The last word came out as a wail, and Grim sighed, his lips parting slightly to expel his breath—the only movement on his granite features as he stared down at me.
Even in this place void of color, his eyes were mismatched—one light, one dark—and as bereft of emotion as the rest of his face.
“Grim!” Through the ice, through the agony pulsating in my chest where my matebonds hooked like barbed wire, fury rose. He had tricked me. He had taken me from my mates.
He had betrayed us.
My magic rose from deep in my body like a firestorm, and I shot to my feet as golden light blasted out of me and into him. “Why?” I roared.
Dark magic flickered like flames around Grim, absorbing my energy and leaving the god before me untouched.
I balled my hands into fists, narrowing my eyes as I reached for my magic deliberately this time. “Tell. Me. Why. Or I swear, I will blast you into next Sunday! Tell me right goddamn now.”
“You shouldn’t spend your magic needlessly,” he said, his voice soft even if the blank expression on his pale face didn’t change. “Hel is not a place to find yourself weakened.”
I lifted my arms and shot another blast of golden energy directly into his chest with a scream of rage.
Grim’s magic rose around him again, once more warding off my attack. With a wave of his hand, the air shifted around me, knocking me off my feet. I landed on the mossy ground with a grunt and found myself locked in place by invisible hands.
“Enough,” he said. “You will hurt yourself.”
“Why?” I ground out through clenched teeth. “Why do you care if I hurt myself? You killed me. I’m in hell, and you brought me here!”
“Hel,” he corrected. “You’re in Hel.”
“Really? You’re going to argue semantics with me now?” I hissed, squirming against my invisible ties. It did nothing, and I screamed with impotent frustration.
“It’s a bit more than semantics,” Mimir muttered from his place on the tree stump to my right.
I turned my head to glare at him. “And you! Are you in on this? Did you lure me here like some sort of grotesque bait?” Something dawned on me and I cussed, twisting back to face Grim.
“Loki! Loki sent me to you. He… He knew? He’s behind this? He’s the… Betrayer? Oh, God, he fucking tricked me! I can’t believe I trusted him!”
“It will do you no good to fret about what is done, Annabel,” Grim said.
“Are you fucking serious?” I snarled. “You killed me. You’ve doomed the entire world—your own brothers—and you’re telling me not to fret?”
Grim crouched in front of me, and something that could have been regret flickered across his features for the briefest of moments. “I have not doomed my brothers. Because of me, they will make it through Ragnarök. This prophecy of yours…” He gave Mimir a less than respectful glance. “They were foolish to place so much faith in you. Reckless to risk everything on a mortal’s strength, even if she has been touched by Fate. You ask me why? The answer is simple, Annabel: I will sacrifice anything and everything for my brothers. And so I did.”
I bared my teeth at him in another snarl. “You killed their mate! Do you not understand how a mateclaim works? They will die!”
“No, they will not. I took you through to the Realm of Death with your body intact. They will hurt, and they will suffer, but they will not die. Once Ragnarök has swallowed the nine realms, once the end has come and gone, I will be able to break their matebonds to you.
“They will be free, Annabel. And alive. Find comfort in that.”
“But I will still be dead,” I whispered, and finally the ice and fury seeped from my body like melting snow, leaving only the torment of my four bonds and an aching hollowness surrounding them. Tears pricked at my eyes, overflowing as the truth of what I’d lost finally set in. “I will never see them again. I will… be here? Alone? For eternity?”
“Yes,” he said softly. A chilly touch ghosted against my cheek, making me recoil before he pulled his hand back to look at the wetness coating his fingertips like the physical display of my grief was puzzling to him. “There was a time you would have done anything to be free of your Fate. Given anything—maybe even your life. Perhaps with time, you will come to see your new existence as freedom. Perhaps not. But it is your reality, Annabel. The sooner you come to accept it, the less you will suffer.”
I screamed in his face. It came out as a hollow wail—a sound as devoid of power as I felt, bound and trapped in Hel.
Dead. I was dead.
There was supposed to be peace after you died. I hadn’t thought much about any afterlife before I was kidnapp
ed by Viking gods and sucked into living myth, but I’d had this hazy knowledge that once I took my last breath on Earth, there would be peace.
But this? This was anything but peaceful. This was agony, despair—rage and sorrow. I felt too much, hurt too much. How could this be death? How could this be the end when my body and soul still reverberated with emotion as powerfully as when I’d been alive?
Flashes of last night blazed through my mind, of the waves of lust and love I’d felt in the arms of my mates. So strong. So… unbreakable. At least, that was what it had felt like. Unending. Unyielding.
But I’d been wrong. Verdandi had been wrong when she wove my thread with my mates’. One of the men destined to claim me had chosen another path, and this was the result.
At least the Norn had been right about that part. Any diversion from our Fate and there would be nothing but misery for me.
“I don’t understand,” I whispered, my voice breaking with the grief still thick in my throat. “Why not let us try? Fate chose us for a reason. If you’d felt what it was like when we faced Loki and Nidhug… the strength of our combined power… That is why Verdandi believed in us, Grim. We… We could have won. We could have saved the world, but you chose… this. You’ve chosen death. Destruction. Ragnarök! You think your brothers want this? That they’ll be happy in a world of nothingness? Matebond or not, you’ve doomed them. You did that.”
Grim rose to his full height. Even through this world’s lack of colors, I could see his eyes glowing as he stared down at me. “You are wrong. You did not have the power to withstand what is to come, and you did not have the power to protect my brothers. You may rage against me if you wish, Omega. You may curse me, and you may refuse to accept your fate. It changes nothing.
“Once Ragnarök has eaten the world, I will break your bonds to my kin and the ties to your old life will be gone. Eventually you will succumb to the numbness of death. You won’t yearn any longer. You will just… be. Here. For eternity.
“There is no point in arguing. There is no point in asking me why. You are never leaving Hel, Annabel. Never. And your so-called mates are better for it.”
Two
Magni
Pain.
I cried out as my chest cavity split in two, and my eyes flew open while I desperately tried to fill my collapsed lungs with air. I expected to see an enemy above me and a blade in my chest, but there was nothing but the ceiling slashed with ribbons of light.
Roars of agony mixed with my own, and through the haze of torment I sensed them—my brothers in soul.
I tried to reach for them, to come to their aid, but I only managed to roll onto my side before the hole in my chest sent me sprawling with another agonized sob. I reached for my ribs, some half-coherent instinct urging me to stem the bleeding, but my fingers met nothing but my skin. There was no gaping wound, no blood, and no weapon embedded in my flesh.
“Anna!” Modi’s broken cry sliced through my confusion and rendered me ice-cold. Annabel.
I searched inward through the painful hole to that place where my bond to my mate had anchored me since I clamped my teeth on her neck during her first heat. Nothing.
“Annabel!” My roar mixed with my brethren’s as I forced my body to move and my eyes to focus. I let my panicked gaze sweep the room, but all I saw was Modi, Saga, and Bjarni on the floor, grasping their own chests and crying out for our mate.
She was gone.
“No. No, no, no!” She couldn’t be. She was just there. Finally, after so many weeks apart, she had returned to me. She couldn’t be gone. She couldn’t.
I fell to my knees on the skins where she’d slept, my hands skimming over them as if I would somehow find her there. There was still an indent of her small body, and they smelled like her, and us, and sex.
But this didn’t feel like when she had left for Midgard and I’d been a walking zombie waiting for her return. I’d still been able to feel her bond, painful as it had been. Now… Now there was nothing.
My Annabel was gone.
I don’t know how long I was out for. I had a faint memory of passing out and assuming I was dying the way an Alpha should have when his mate was ripped from him. I’d been so relieved.
But when I opened my eyes, I was still staring up into the same blasted ceiling as before, and my chest throbbed with dull, consistent agony.
Someone grasped my shoulder. Saga. He leaned over me to search my eyes, gray gaze bloodshot and dull.
“What is this nightmare?” I rasped. “We should be with her. We should be dead.”
“We should be,” he agreed. “Which is why she can’t be gone, Magni.”
I scoffed. It came out as a pained wheeze. “This is what death feels like.”
“But we are not,” he insisted. “So she can’t be. There has to be… some way to bring her back from wherever she’s been taken.”
I wanted to tell him that he was grasping at straws, but I couldn’t get the words out. If he was right—if there was even a sliver of a chance that she wasn’t dead—then I would rather tear myself to shreds with my bare hands than give up on her.
So long as my painful clump of a heart still beat, I would never give up searching.
I nodded feebly. “If there is, we will… we will find it. We will find her. The others—?”
“Still passed out.” Saga grimaced and pressed a hand to his chest for several breaths before he managed to steel himself and turn to the room. “You get Modi up. I’ll get Bjarni.”
I grunted an agreement, though it took me several minutes to regain enough strength to get to my feet.
My brother was sagged on the stone floor a few feet from the skins we had slept in. It looked like he had tried to go for the door before the agony of our loss had rendered him unconscious. I knelt by his side and placed a hand on his shoulder.
“Modi,” I rasped, shaking him with what strength I could muster. “Modi. We need you. Annabel needs you.”
He jerked on the floor, a long whimper escaping him before his consciousness floated back into his reluctant body. “Anna?” he croaked. “Anna!”
“Shh.” It was the first time I regretted what I had done to my brother. Somewhere behind my own misery, I knew that if I had not brought Annabel to Trudheim—if I had not introduced her to him—he would not be in this much pain.
At that moment, I couldn’t give less of a shit about prophecies and Norns and the godsdamn end of the world. All I knew was agony, and that if I had chosen differently, my proud brother would not be sobbing on the floor, calling for his mate like a lost child.
“We’ll get her, baby brother. I promise. We’ll find her and we’ll bring her back.” I spoke the words with more confidence than I could feel through the hole in my chest, but as I watched Modi struggle for breath, I knew we had to. There was no other choice. If she had been dead, so would we. There were no ifs, and, or buts about it, so she had to be alive. And if my mate still breathed, if even a shred of my beloved still existed, then we would reunite with her no matter the cost.
I rubbed Modi’s shoulder and back with long, calming strokes until he could breathe steadily again. A few feet away, Saga embraced his blond bear of a brother. Bjarni’s face was pale and drawn with lines of grief as he processed the sensation of loss still tearing at us.
“Who took her?” Bjarni finally rasped.
“We don’t know,” Saga said, his mouth drawing into a grim line. “Nor how. How did someone steal her from our bed?”
“She got up just around dawn,” Modi said with a frown. “Said she had to relieve herself. I… fell back asleep before she came back. In fact… I fell back asleep within seconds. It was impossible to keep my eyes open.”
“You think someone drugged us to get to her?” I asked, my own brows locking into a matching frown.
“More likely used magic,” Saga said.
“Son of a bitch!” Bjarni snarled, grief turning to fury in the blink of an eye. “She promised Loki she’d free him. If
she did and he repaid her by snatching her, so help me—”
“But if he was the Betrayer, why not allow Níðhöggr to eat us alive?” Modi asked. “It would have been much easier than…. this.”
“Loki does whatever will gain him the most,” I said, not quite managing to keep the disdain for my new brothers’ father from my voice. “He could have taken her for reasons we have no understanding of.”
“Where is Grim?” Bjarni asked.
It wasn’t until then I realized we were short one Lokisson.
“He left while we were with her last night,” Saga said. “He has no way of knowing she’s gone, so likely he’s somewhere in Valhalla, sulking.”
“Perhaps he has seen something,” Bjarni said, the hope in his voice infectious enough to make my heart pick up speed.
“Then let us find him,” Modi said. He pushed off the floor and got to his feet. “And after, we will find whoever thought it wise to steal our mate, and we will make him pay.”
Three
Annabel
The sky was as gray as the rest of the world when the nothingness of dreamless sleep released its grip on me.