Page 47 of The Fanged One

He wondered if Linnea was still awake or if the day had taken its toll on her. He was so restless, and wanted to go back to the forest Tor and Arne had taken him to and run until he couldn't run anymore.

Go to her, his wolf said.

She wants space. I'm giving it to her.

You're sulking like a pup in the dark.

Fenris rubbed both hands through his hair. The wolf wasn't wrong, which made it worse. He had spent thousands of years in the dark with nothing to do except think, and one upset völva had undone the habit in a single day.

Every hour since Von's kitchen, he had turned Linnea's mood change over and over in his mind. Her laugh going bright and false. Her hands tucked into her sleeves. Her eyes sliding past him like he wasn't really there.

He could survive being feared because he had long practice at it. Being avoided by her was a new injury, and it had kept him sitting upright in the dark like a hound shut out in the snow.

The floorboards in the hallway creaked, and he lifted his head.

Her scent reached him first, cloudberries and honey. She stopped at the mouth of the hallway in her flannel pants and a sweater pulled down over her hands, her hair out and tangled against her neck.

"You're awake," she whispered.

"So are you."

"I could hear you brooding through the wall." She came around the end of the other couch and curled into its corner, her arms wrapping around her knees. "You didn't come in to sleep."

"No."

"Why not?"

Fenris looked at her in the thin gray light. There was a version of this where he said something easy, and they both went back to pretending. He was too tired and too old for it.

"Because you have been upset with me since we first went to Von's place, and I don't know what I did," he replied. "I went over it all night. Tell me what I did, so I can fix it."

Linnea's face crumpled, and she pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. "Oh, gods, Fenris. You didn't do anything wrong."

"You stopped looking at me."

"I know."

"You wouldn't touch me at all."

"I know." She dropped her hands into her lap and made herself meet his eyes, and the misery in her face made his chest hurt. "It was never about something wrong that you did. It's about what's wrong with me."

Fenris frowned. "There is nothing wrong with you."

"See, a statement like that is exactly the problem." A small, wet laugh escaped her. "You're a god, Fenris. You woke up, and within a day you were drinking coffee with Havi and Freya like it was a family reunion, because it was one. To you, that's a normal thing. Do you understand what those names are to a mortal? I grew up praying to Freya. Now she kisses my cheeks and tells me my wyrd is to stay with you and go and find Loki, and everyone keeps acting like that's reasonable. It's enormous, and I'm one völva who hasn't even finished her training."

"You called the gods down to a cottage in Otta on your second day of knowing me," he said, scratching his head in confusion. "That isn't nothing."

"Maybe not. It still doesn't feel like enough." Her arms tightened around her knees. "You need to understand where I'm coming from. I'm a wolf who has never shifted. Not once. Where I grew up, that made me less than nothing. My father treated me like a defect he was ashamed to own. My mother left, and part of the reason was me. The cult that took me kept me as a slave because the only value I had to anyone was the blood in my veins. That's a lot of years of being told what I'm worth, and it doesn't disappear because I learned some magic and people started being kind to me. Trauma is rude like that. It stays around."

Fenris wanted to do violent things to whoever had made her feel this way, but he kept his mouth shut and let her talk.

"So when you touch me as if I matter, part of me is waiting for the catch." Linnea's voice cracked a little. "I have a hard time trusting people at all, Fenris. Trusting someone in bed is worse, because that's where people are at their most vulnerable, and I have never once let myself be that with a man. With you, I wasn't even trying to be careful. I feel safe with you. I've never felt that way with any man in my life, and yesterday that scared the absolute shit out of me. So I pulled back. I needed space to figure out what I was feeling. That's all it was. It was never you or anything you did wrong."

The lounge was quiet except for the noise of the outside and the thrumming of Linnea's heart running faster than a scared rabbit’s.

Tell her, his wolf growled at him.

Not that. Not yet.