Page 76 of The Fanged One

"The other half of the problem was you," her mother charged on, gesturing at her. "I mean, a daughter who couldn't shift? Do you have any idea what that was like in a pack like ours? The shame of it. Skari's whelp, broken from birth, and every wolf in the clan was looking down on me. There was your brother as well, too proud to take the place he was born to, too full of his own principles to put this family where it should have been. I looked at the three of you, did the math on how long I could keep stomaching it, and left. I never regretted a day of it."

She drew back into herself, neat and done, and those gray eyes, Linnea's eyes, settled on Linnea's face with the flat indifference she might have shown a stranger's child across a train carriage.

"I still don't care," Inga said with a lift of her shoulders. "That isn't why I sat down. I wanted to give you closure, in case you ever wondered whether the reason I left was you, so here it is: You were the reason I left. Skari was only ever the excuse. I could have tolerated him and dealt with Tor's attitude. You were the last straw that broke me, and I had a choice. I chose me."

Linnea couldn't breathe. There was only a roaring where her thoughts should have been. From somewhere far away, Sunniva was laughing softly at something Fenris had said.

Out, her wolf demanded. Out. Now. Get us out.

Linnea stood up and went for the door because if she stayed in this hall one second longer, she was going to break apart on the floor in front of all of them. She would rather be eaten by the wraiths in the woods.

Linnea got out the door, and the cold hit her lungs, forcing her to gasp for breath. The relief of being out of the hall lasted exactly as long as it took the shouting to reach her.

Tor and Arne stood twenty feet down the slope with Skari, and all three were yelling. Tor's voice cracked raw in a way she had not heard since they were children, Arne's hand on Tor's shoulder, holding her brother back from a thing that would cost him everything.

Skari saw her, his lip curling. "There she is. The runt that ruined her mother and made a coward of my son. I died for you, girl. Your brother put me in the ground over you. You should be the one rotting down here, not me."

There it was. The thing she had braced against her whole childhood, said out loud at last in her dead father's voice.

Linnea strode toward him, all of her hurt and rage burning her up, and did the one thing she had never managed to do while he was alive. She lifted her chin and looked her father dead in the eye. She didn't flinch or make herself small the way she always had.

"You can fuck right off, you piece of shit. I hope whatever horrors that live in this place torment you for all fucking eternity for how you treated your own children," she said and spat in his face. "The only thing wrong with me is the fact that I came from your flaccid little cock."

Fuck the wolves that whelped us, her wolf said, with a snarl.

Skari's face went slack in shock. She didn't stay to watch it turn to rage. She had had enough of that for a lifetime. She walked into the gray, her boots eating the ground, her eyes fixed ahead, dry and burning.

Linnea walked into the dead country alone and let out the scream that had lived in her chest her whole life. The power of it tore out of her, lashing off branches and chunks of bark from the black pines. She screamed until she emptied her lungs and fell forward to vomit up last night's bread.

Behind her, the hall full of the loved and the hated carried on without her.

Let it.

Every last one of them could have their reunions. Inga could go back to not caring. Skari could rot in whatever hole Tor had dug for him. Fenris could hold Sunniva's hand until the end of the world.

They could all fuck right off.

37

Fenris lowered himself onto the bench across from his wife, and the years came down on him all at once.

The woman across the table was as small and dark as the day he had married her, unchanged by death. Between them lay centuries of words, and he didn't know where to start.

Sunniva looked at him without flinching. That alone took the ground out from under him, because the last time he had stood before this face, flinching was the only thing it had known how to do.

"Husband," she greeted softly. "I have waited a long time to tell you I'm sorry."

Fenris had pictured this meeting in the dark of his binding more times than he would admit to anyone, and in none of those imaginings had she been the one to apologize.

When the gods came with the vision of the end of the world, and Gleipnir already forged, he had looked at his wife, who could no longer meet his eyes across their own hearth, and decided that if even she could not bear the sight of him, he would do the best thing by her and leave.

"You have nothing to be sorry for," he said, and it tasted like a lie. After all this time, he didn't want to hurt her feelings.

"Please, listen to me, Fen, because I've had a long time to learn this, and you have had longer to get it wrong."

Sunniva reached across the table and took his hand in both of hers, and he let her. Her thumb moved slowly across his palm, like it had in the time before touching him seemed to repulse her.

"I have watched it from the outside now, with nothing to do down here but understand. When I was alive, I could only see it from behind my own eyes, and they were afraid." Her gaze caught his and didn't waver. "You were never a monster, Fenris. You were my husband. You were kind to me and gentle with our children, and not once did you threaten us with your wolf side."