Page 120 of Veil of Blood and Bone

She still bled, though.

I’m bleeding. It’s love against inevitability, tenderness against cost, and truth against the decay of the god’s reign.

“Will you tell me what happened? Please, Nicholas?”

Her pulse throbs when our skin touches and my attention latches to the side of her neck. I fixate, suddenly starving.

“How much are you prepared to handle?”

“All of it.”

My smile is grim. “Don’t ask for things you’re not ready for.”

“I’m ready and I want to hear it. From you.”

Her voice slides through the quiet space between us, velvet and soft, something made for prayer, and a body designed for blasphemy.

The dichotomy has always tantalized me.

“It’s pain,” I murmur at last. “And it’s love. It’s something older than memory.”

Restraint costs more than proximity. Unease still thrums inside her skin, but there is recognition along with it.

“The gods of Asgard aren’t divine, my ruin. They never have been.”

Even my low tone sends the light from the screen flickering, as though those same deities haunt this room. Listening.

“They were hungry. We learned to worship their hunger, but greed became too much to bear. You and I were enemies, first. We clashed against each other on the battlefield. Stubborn. Prideful. My order demanded I fight. You said it was with honor.”

Begrudgingly at first. Until we moved past those few exchanged words and acknowledged a hunger of our own.

Even then, there was something about her. Something my brotherhood hadn't prepared me for.

She was unlike any Visigoth woman I’d experienced. Hellevi fought with the power of the sun itself, her ferocity tempered by compassion.

Superimposed over Helene is the last time I saw her face as a mortal, and I glance down, but not before noting the tears blurring her eyes. They smudge green and gold and brown into an interwoven masterpiece.

She’d cried then, too.

Crimson dripped from the corner of her mouth, and from the wound in her gut, my ax buried too deep inside her to survive.

Oh. Shit.

My breath catches as Helene drags her nails across the calluses on my palm to anchor us both. She links our fingers together and her heat, her heart, becomes mine.

“You don’t feel like my enemy now,” she admits. “I’m not sure what you feel like yet.”

Laughter is bitter medicine. “I’m the one who struck a blow meant for another, and you turned into the hit. Only we were both mortal then. My blade took your life.”

I turn to her.

“In every lifetime, I will find you. I will love you. And I will lose you.”

There. The truth in its acrimonious glory, devastating and raw and real.

She’s silent for the longest time. Odin’s curse landed harder than any of us realized when we petitioned for Hellevi’s spirit to be returned.

I watch the words coil around her and sink through her, into her soul, a whispered promise of destruction. It’s one I’ve never managed to break.