immediate, but as I stared down at her hand, I remembered her heat—and the tantalizing scent of blood and woman a few weeks before that, when her period had come.
Not her child. Not Bjarni’s or Modi’s. Not Saga’s. Not Magni’s. Our child.
She was carrying… our child.
Distantly, I found some humor in how concerned I’d been with keeping her safe from those of Hel’s creatures who would have gone to great lengths to sire offspring with she who could create life in the realm of death. Yet I had been the monster to impregnate her.
Ignoring her frozen muscles, I placed my hand on top of hers with firm pressure and buried my face in her hair. She carried a spark of me, of a man who had proven to her that there was nothing but darkness and horror in his veins.
No wonder she was scared.
We were both silent in the few minutes it took my knot to deflate. I forced my mind into blank nothingness, into that core of ice and mist, because I knew what I had to offer. What I owed her. Even if I couldn’t bring myself to move my hand from hers until my knot finally released her.
I pulled out with a low groan, allowing her to sit up and pull her legs underneath her. My semen flowed from her swollen opening.
I forced my gaze to hers. “If you wish to terminate… I will help you. I can ensure it is painless.”
Annabel’s eyes widened, both hands immediately fluttering to her abdomen. “What do you mean, terminate?”
“If you do not wish to keep… our child.” It took everything I had to force those last two words out. “You do not have to. I can… take care of it. Safely.”
Annabel stared uncomprehendingly at me for a full second. Then outrage and horror settled across her pretty features. “You are not touching this baby!” It was a snarl—fierce and underlined with the promise of violence. “I swear on everything there ever was and ever will be, Grim, if you try to harm her, I don’t care what it’ll do to me, nor the nine fucking worlds—I’ll kill you!”
I drew in a shuddering breath as her words sank in. Her protective posture. The snarl curling her lip. The threat.
“You want to keep…?” I breathed in again. Something felt tight and light in my chest. Painful. “Any child I sire… will be like me.”
She stared at me, still uncomprehending and her teeth bared, but uncertainty clouded her gaze. “What do you mean, be like you? Of course she will. She’s half of you. I don’t care if she’s cold, or—”
Her voice died mid-sentence, and then grief, understanding, and empathy cracked her face into a pained grimace.
“Oh, Grim. No. No, no, no.” She crawled to my side and cupped my face in her hands, those soul deep eyes searching mine. “Whatever you have done, whatever you have chosen to be… no. I do not fear the life we have created together. I want her with everything I am.”
I stared at my mate, trying to comprehend that emotion laid bare in her eyes, but it seemed… almost impossible. Because what I saw there was something I never dreamed I could have had. I’d hardly known it existed, until her.
She would have given me a family—a true one. Someplace warm and safe and mine. She would have filled my life with love and my dark and fractured soul with peace. I stared at her, and I finally saw what I had not been capable of recognizing before.
Somehow, some way, I would have found the strength to share her with her other mates, because Annabel had enough love to give herself wholly to all of us. Even now, she still loved me. She couldn’t help herself, though we both knew that I deserved nothing but her hatred.
But I had ruined everything. There would be no eternity of warmth and happiness—not for me and not for her. Only death and cold, dark regret.
I swallowed hard, trying to encapsulate the agony flaring through my mind and body as the full realization of what I’d done finally set in.
Annabel made a small noise, and then she pressed her soft, naked body against mine, trying to comfort me with her presence.
Even now, after everything I had robbed her of. Even now.
I wrapped my arms around her, loathing myself for accepting comfort that I did not deserve, buried my head in her hair, and clung to the woman I had betrayed