Total pages in book: 135
Estimated words: 125422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 627(@200wpm)___ 502(@250wpm)___ 418(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 627(@200wpm)___ 502(@250wpm)___ 418(@300wpm)
Outside, the evening light slants over the broken stones. Soldiers clean weapons near a collapsed tower, some whispering prayers in Finnish to the fading sky. They sound lost and hopeless.
I run a hand over my hair, smoothing it back, forcing resolve into my spine. I know who I am and who I need to become. I’ve stepped into a role I never imagined for myself, but I’ll meet this challenge head-on.
For my father, for my brother, for the realm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
DEATH
“Tuoni,” Torben says as he steps out of the hall, his staff in one hand, his spellbook in another. “Is this blizzard your doing?”
He nods at one of the few windows in this damned castle that wasn’t broken during the battle. Snow slams against the thin panes, whirling like a hurricane outside.
I raise my chin. “Sometimes, the weather does what it wants.” Then, I hurry off down the corridor before he has a chance to analyze me any closer.
Truth is, it is my doing. For the last two days, ever since Hanna in her Goddess form arrived, I’ve been doing my best to quell my nerves, but now, I feel it’s a losing game.
I’m anxious.
About going upstairs to my wife and fucking her memory back into her.
Naturally, I can’t tell the old man that, given Hanna is his daughter and all. I also wouldn’t want him to think I’m not the confident, controlling God he thinks I am and knows me to be.
But this storm is a betrayal of my true feelings.
This morning, Hanna took her breakfast in my bedchamber—we have been sleeping in separate quarters. She noted the shattered skull mask in the corner, something I haven’t bothered to clean up. What’s the point in a ruined place like this? But she was curious about my anger. She suggested that perhaps I needed a better place for my emotions to go.
Of course, I only had one thing in mind, and I told her that. There is no use mincing words around Hanna, no matter what version of herself she is. I always got my emotions together, arranged in an order I understood them, through sex and sex alone.
“Alright,” she had said over the cup of coffee she had barely touched. “Tonight then, come to my bedchambers, and perhaps you can make me the wife you need again. If not that, at least it might spare you another broken mask.”
And so, here I am, climbing the stairs to her room, sweat gathered at the back of my neck, feeling as if I’m about to face another battle, this one hewn by sweat and skin, lust and pleasure. One where I want us both to win.
I knock at her door, and she tells me to come in.
I open the door to see Hanna standing by that window again, the blizzard flowing in and covering the room in a thin layer of frost and snow, as well as coating her dress and hair.
“Aren’t you cold?” I ask as I close the door behind me. “You know we can board up the window.”
She shakes her head, her ethereal face lit by the flickering torchlight. “I am perpetually warm. The snow feels nice this evening. Is it too cold for you?”
“Nothing is too cold for me,” I tell her. “I am Death.”
She gives me a small smile and gestures to her dress, one of Louhi’s I haven’t seen her wear yet. It’s dark green and adorned with tiny black skulls from some small rodent with horns. Goat rats, perhaps. It’s a little too macabre for the Hanna I know, but right now, it suits her.
“You look lovely,” I tell her. Especially when she still has a bit of her radiance to temper the darkness, though I must say, it seems to be dimmer than before. That gives me hope. Her humanity is thrumming just beneath her glowing skin.
She raises her brow as if to say, shall we?
I have to wonder what she knows of sex. Surely, she remembers us together if she remembers everything else. Will her body know before her heart does?
I approach her like a young colt, skittish and shy, two things I have never been in my life. I am nervous, actually fucking nervous, about coming on to my wife.
She stares at me from across the room expectantly, her eyes dancing between the molten copper of the new Hanna and the old Hanna, deep brown and warm.
She knows I’m her husband, her king, her lover. She knows our history.
And yet, she still looks at me like I’m a stranger.
I plan to fuck that right out of her.
“Come here,” I command, unfastening the collar of my cloak and letting it fall to the floor. Time to take control.
She stiffens slightly, cold air rushing in through the broken window, but I don’t think her posture changed because of that.