Betraying Destiny

by Nora Ash

  I wiped at my tears with my free hand, trying to comprehend what she was saying. “My mates? I can’t—Saga, Magni, Bjarni, and Modi can’t help me here. And Grim…”

  The clutching, horrible darkness squeezed around my lungs, and I fought against the despair threatening to swallow me whole. I had loved him so completely, and it hadn’t been enough. He had still done this. He had murdered a goddess to stop me returning to the world of the living so I could defeat Ragnarök.

  “Please don’t surrender the love you carry in your heart,” Freya croaked. “Please, Annabel. If you do, if you cannot find forgiveness… understanding… all will be lost. For eternity. Even if you… cannot find your way home… if you… remain here… with him… if you surrender to the darkness, there will be no more love…. ever again. For your… For your child. Hold on.”

  Love him? She lay dying, pleading for me to love the man who had killed her? Who had betrayed me even after he had claimed half of my soul? Who had betrayed all the nine worlds?

  I shook my head, my tears still falling thick and fast, but Freya placed her palm against my chest and rasped, “Call your mates to you. Unite with them all. You must, Annabel. There is no other way.”

  Warmth spread from where she touched me, and then I felt it—a rosy, glowing ember of magic sinking into my flesh and threading through my own golden well deep within.

  Freya let out a soft gasp and her eyes glazed over.

  “No!” I cried, reaching on instinct for her with my magic again, but before I could connect, a gust of wind swept through the trees and over her still body. Her fingers turned to gray dust in my hand.

  “No!” I shouted again, grasping for her face. Her skin disintegrated under my touch—every part of the woman that had once been the embodiment of love turned to ash before my eyes and swept up into the sky in a ribbon of smoke, another soul that would join the siphon churning high above Hel.

  I was numb for a long time as I knelt by the waterfall, staring at the vegetation still flattened from where Freya had rested.

  She was the patron of omegas, she’d once told me. Had been. Behind the numb wall of grief and despair, I wondered what would happen to omegas now.

  If it would even matter when Ragnarök swept through the worlds and broke it into particles and darkness.

  Grim had done this. My soulmate had done this.

  I had found forgiveness after his first betrayal. I’d forgiven him for taking my life because I understood he’d thought it the only chance to save his brothers. He’d ultimately killed me out of love for them, and knowingly doomed himself to a fate worse than death in the process.

  But this time?

  He knew me now. He knew me so intimately, knew I loved him, knew I’d fight until the very end to stop Ragnarök.

  He’d known I relied on him. Trusted him. And in those pleasure-hazy moments when he was inside of me, I’d thought he loved me too. How had he faked that? How had he made me feel so… whole when it was all a lie?

  I pressed a hand to my aching chest. Gentle warmth touched my fingertips from the remnants of Freya’s powers. Call your mates to you, she’d said, but even if there had been a way to bring the four from Valhalla to me, Grim had made it clear he would never help me stop Ragnarök.

  He had killed the Goddess of Love to prevent her from aiding me.

  As I knelt by the water, I finally accepted that my love wasn’t strong enough to break through the kind of darkness that lay within Grim’s heart.

  And so there would be no stopping Ragnarök, and there would be no more joy, no more love—no more anything. Just all-expanding, all-consuming nothingness.

  Eighteen

  Annabel

  Grim was sitting in the center of the glade when I finally made it back. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been staring at the waterfall in a stupor—if it had been minutes or hours.

  My alpha looked up when I broke through the tree line, surveying my face.

  I didn’t so much as glance at Mimir or the ravens perched on a nearby bush as I walked straight to the dark god, my limbs feeling oddly mechanical and disjointed like they didn’t fully belong to me.

  He opened his mouth as if to speak, but I didn’t give him the chance to. Striking more swiftly than I’d thought myself capable of, I backhanded him across the cheek with enough power to send him sprawling in the grass.

  “You swine!” I hissed, aiming a kick at his stomach that made him cough. “You traitorous, murdering swine!”

  When I raised my leg to kick him again, Grim managed to roll out of the way in time. On my second try, he caught my ankle and held firm.

  “Enough,” he said more evenly than most men who’d just been slapped and kicked might have.

  “Enough?” I snarled, pulling at my leg with all my might. Somewhat to my surprise—and Grim’s, judging by his slightly widened eyes—he had to put in effort to keep me in place. “You killed her! You killed her so she couldn’t help us get back! You betrayed me again! After everything we’ve shared—I loved you, you fucking psychopath! I forgave you. But that wasn’t enough, was it?!”

  I tugged on my leg again, but Grim held firm, his mouth a tight line and those mismatched eyes swirling with an emotion I didn’t care to decipher. I reached for my magic and hurled it at him, giving no thought to conserving my power nor what would happen to my soul if I killed him with the blast.

  Grim managed to raise a dark shield around himself in time for my light to part around him in a harmless flash.

  I bared my teeth and reached for another ball of energy, but that dark shield wrapped around me and sank deep, containing my magic within me.

  “I said enough,” Grim repeated, his voice firmer as he released my ankle and got to his feet.

  I tried to throw myself at him to strike him again, but invisible bonds pressed my arms in tight against my sides, leaving me completely immobile.

  I snarled and spat and strained against his magic cocooning my own, immobilizing it as thoroughly as it did my body, but I wasn’t strong enough.

  “Enough.” Grim said, softer this time, as he closed his thickly muscled arms around me and pulled me back against his cool chest. “If you spend any more of yourself, I will need to join with you to ensure you are not left depleted.”

  “What’s the matter, you don’t want to add rape to the list of your crimes?” I snarled, flexing my muscles to try and buck against his grip.

  “I would rather not.” He brushed one hand from my ribs to my abdomen before anchoring it on my hip. “But if you leave me no choice, I will not hesitate.”

  A chill lingered on my skin from the path of his hand, even through my leather clothes. Like a ghostly caress against my stomach. And the spark of life within.

  Slowly I stopped fighting until I hung limp in his arms. I would kill it if I continued expending my powers past my limits. Freya had been clear on that. Her. She’d called my baby her.

  Grim’s baby. Not Bjarni’s, not Modi’s. Not Saga’s. Not Magni’s.

  Grim’s.

  I’d not fully taken in what the goddess had told me before she died—the words themselves, yes, but not the emotional extent of them. The consequences.

  I was pregnant. I was carrying a daughter. And thanks to her father’s treachery, she would be born in Hel. She would never know color, or warmth. Or joy.

  “I know you hate me, Annabel,” Grim said so softly as tears slid down my cheeks. “You think I betrayed you, but this was the only way. In time, you will come to understand.”

  “I think?” I bit through the tears. “I think you betrayed me? You killed Freya. You made sure I will never see my other mates again, you made sure we won’t be able to stop Ragnarök. I don’t think anything, Grim. I know.”

  “You still don’t understand how hopeless your quest was,” he murmured. He pressed his nose against the side of my head and rested his lips on the shell of my ear. “The prophecy was a lark. The Norns wove nothing but a web of pointless misery for you, a
nd for that, I am sorry. Because I can never share you, Annabel. Just the thought of them touching you makes me want to kill all four of them. It makes me yearn to slay my own brothers. And that… that I can never let happen.

  “I may be wrapped up in this foul web now, but I still remember my duty to Bjarni and Saga. My only goal was for them to live through this, and if they die by my own hand in a fit of jealousy because I cannot control this… thing I feel for you… I can’t let that happen. I won’t. Even if the cost is the end of everything.

  “So they will remain alive, the new gods of a new world, and we will be nothing but a faint memory to them once I break their bonds to you. That will be my gift to them.

  “And you, Annabel… you will stay here, with me. You can hate me for as long as you need to. I understand. But I will guard you, always. I will protect you, and I will make you a queen. My gift to you.”

  “Queen?” I whispered. “What do you mean queen?”

  “Once Hel takes her army of undead to the shores of Midgard, there will be no one left to rule this realm. I will make you its new queen—make sure every creature left here bows to you. That is the only way I can ensure your survival.”

  “I thought you wanted me dead,” I spat. “Once you’d broken my bonds so your brothers don’t die with me. What do you care if some undead troll ends my misery? Is it our bond? Do you fear what it’ll do to you, now that we are mated? I thought you were happy to die yourself—worse, even.”

  Grim snorted—not quite a chuckle, but the ghost of his cool breath tickled my ear and made my skin prickle with awareness. Even now, after everything he’d done, that part of me that belonged to him ached for his nearness. I pushed it down with savage fury.

  “It is a curious thing, isn’t it?” he said. “Even though I know that what I feel for you is wrong—fabricated; forced on both of us by biology and Fate—I cannot deny it. The thought of you… dying, truly and irrevocably… If it came down to it, if I was forced to choose between you and my brothers… I would choose you. There is… something in our bond that will not let me risk you, mate, despite my convictions and oaths.

  “As Queen of Hel, no one will dare lay a finger on you, and I will watch over you. I cannot offer you happiness, Annabel. That was never my gift. But I can offer you a different path than the one Fate decided for you. In death you will be worshipped, not for what you are, but for the power you’ll wield. And you will know true power, and freedom from the strings of the Norns. You can forge your own destiny here. And I will see that you do, my mate.”

  I hung limply in his arms as his words conjured a memory—a vision I’d seen during one of the times he’d lost himself in me and let me glimpse his mind. A vision of me, sitting on a throne of bones, ruling over a barren world of death and despair.

  Nineteen

  Annabel

  I didn’t have it in me to keep walking. Not when there was nowhere to travel to.

  Even if I could make it to Hel without Grim stopping me, even if I could somehow do what none had been able to do before me and convince her to release me from this place, it wouldn’t matter. Not without Grim. And he had made it plenty clear that he would never help us stop Ragnarök.

  It was… understandable, I supposed, in some sick, fucked up way that made my heart ache and tears sting my eyes as I lay in Freya’s glade and stared into the swirling sky. Asking five alphas to share a mate was insanity. How my first four had come to accept it, I wasn’t sure—family loyalty at first, perhaps, or obligation. But once they’d claimed me, once they’d felt the true force of that bond between us, I didn’t know how they had remained calm as three other men staked their claims on my heart. My soul.

  Grim’s claim had felt so easy in comparison, so blissfully right. I hadn’t even paused to consider that he might not be able to share me. That he would still be hellbent on his original plan to sever my ties to my other mates and bring about the end of the world, even if his motivations to do so had shifted some.

  “So this is it? You have given up?”

  Mimir’s quiet voice made me turn my head to look at the prophet. He sat a few yards from where I’d lain down in the grass after Grim finally decided that I would no longer try to kick his skull in. It had been… I wasn’t sure how long it had been. Hours? Days? I didn’t remember if the sky had darkened at any point.

  “It’s what smart people tend to do when there are no other options left,” I said.

  “We could still go to Hel,” he said, hesitance lacing his words. “It is dangerous, foolish even, but—”

  I shook my head. “And do what? Beg her to send us back to a world that is doomed to end in horror? We can’t stop it without him, and I can’t make him help us. You spoke the prophecy yourself—you should know.”

  Mimir frowned. “Freya… Freya left a spark with you. I can feel it. It is faint, but it is there. She wouldn’t have done that if she hadn’t thought there was still hope.”

  I placed a hand over my heart where the goddess had pressed that kernel of magic into me. My other hand skimmed my abdomen at the reminder of what she had said as she did so. “Freya may have had hope, but what she asked is impossible.”

  Mimir glanced past me, to the tree line. “He is patrolling—we are not within earshot. Tell me, plum. What did the goddess ask of you?”

  “She said if I can gather all five of my mates and channel all my love, it might be enough to bring us home. But yeah, not exactly doable with four of them on another plane of existence and Grim determined to win Villain of the Year. She said I had to find forgiveness for him, but how am I supposed to forgive something he doesn’t even regret? That he has no intentions of rectifying, even if we could somehow get in contact with the others?”

  I sighed, letting the sense of defeat and despair swallow me whole as I gently stroked my still-flat belly. “I’m sorry. I know I’ve let you down. I’ve let literally everyone down—the entire world, nine of them. But I can’t fix this. I’m not strong enough.”

  “You are not strong enough on your own,” Mimir said quietly. “You never were. That is why the Norns wove your thread with five powerful godlings.”

  “Their mistake, then,” I said bitterly.

  “All this wallowing is highly unattractive, plum,” Mimir chided. “What we need is a way to bring your mates to you. Once they are here, we can work on the broody one.”

  “Oh, yeah, of course. I should have thought of that.” I glared at him. “Why don’t I just snap my fingers and send for them? Meanwhile, you can work on convincing the man who just killed the Goddess of Love to put on his best smile and get with the program.”

  Mimir leveled me with an unamused look. “Less sass, plum. More thinking.”

  I waved a hand at him and turned my head so I could look back up at the sky. “You can think as much as you want, prophet. Let me know how that works out for you.”

  “Highly unattractive,” Mimir repeated. I ignored him.

  Mimir stayed silent for hours, which suited me just fine. I lay on my back and stared into the sky, letting my mind drift into blessed oblivion.

  Occasionally I would hear Grim’s soft footfalls draw near. I knew he was checking on me—felt his eyes linger on my prone body, my face. I didn’t bother to return his gaze.

  At some point I supposed I would have to tell him about my pregnancy. He was the father, after all.

  That thought was the only thing that penetrated my numb oblivion, filling me with tendrils of fear. I’d thought I understood his motivations—his heart. I’d felt so safe with him as we lay together, intimately tied in flesh as well as spirit.

  But now? This man, who had killed and deceived and betrayed? What guarantee did I have that he wouldn’t harm my child, either in some twisted attempt at protecting me, or out of sheer indifference for the life we had created together?

  I rubbed my thumb over my abdomen. It was… funny. I hadn’t known about my daughter’s existence for more than a few breaths, and she was still har
dly more than a couple of cells—a spark, at best. But I loved her. Whatever else Grim was, at least he had given me her, even as he’d rent my soul in two and crushed the last flicker of hope in the world.

  But if he hurt her? I wouldn’t survive that.

  The flapping of wings drew me from my gloomy thoughts, and I looked up at the two ravens circling above me. Arni and Magga had flown off sometime during my fight with Grim—probably so the dark god wouldn’t take out his ire on them like his father had. I hadn’t seen them since, not that I’d been looking.

  “News of Freya’s demise is spreading through the realm,” Magga said. “Even here, her death ripples through the denizens. Despair and bleakness abound—more so than normal.”

  “Any news from above?” Mimir asked.

  “Nothing,” Arni cawed. “Too soon for the recently deceased to bring any whispers of the consequences of her absence with them.”

  Mimir blew out a breath. “Hel has all days been woefully behind the information curve. It would really be helpful if the queen allowed passage for more than just dead sou...” He trailed off so abruptly my indifference waned enough for me to turn my head in his direction.

  The prophet had a faraway expression in his eyes as he stared at Arni.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Hel does allow passage between the realms for more than just arriving souls,” he murmured. “There is one way for the dead to leave freely.”

  I jerked upright as an ember of hope I hadn’t known still existed deep within flared to life. “What is it? How? Why has no one thought of it before?”

  He grimaced. “Because it is not… an ideal solution. If one became a spectral—a ghost… they would be able to walk through the barriers separating our plane of existence from the living. But once passed, that barrier will close for eternity, trapping the soul in the living lands without a body. Eternally lost, and invisible to most.”