Chapter 40 | Ravinica

Chapter 40

Ravinica

WE RESTED ON THE FLOOR of Mimir Tomes, naked, locked in a pretzel of limbs. Legs outstretched, uncaring, using books as hard pillows.

I was completely exhausted and satiated. Continuing our tryst had only shown me more ways for Magnus to bend me and dominate me. It was everything I'd wanted and more. I'd never met a man who took such care to make sure we both felt exquisite pleasure.

Grim had been lost in a trance when we'd fucked. Even though he'd railed me against a tree and was huge, he'd been surprisingly gentle for how huge of a man he was. Almost like he was worried he'd break me.

Magnus had no qualms about breaking me. He enjoyed the opportunity.

As I rested my head on his chest, I traced a finger over one of the scars on his arm that was coiled around the back of my neck, draping his hand inches from my breast.

"How about this one?" I asked, my voice low.

I could have slept here, if it wasn't dangerous.

"Me. Again."

"So you . . . give yourself these scars?"

"Not all of them. Just the ones you've pointed at. It's part of my power. My blood amplifies my runeshaping, yet I have to draw that power to the surface. In this case, that means drawing my blood to the surface."

"Gods. Sounds painful."

He shrugged easily. "I've gotten used to it. I was born from pain and grief, silvermoon."

I glanced up at him, watching the bump of his throat lift and fall. "What do you mean?" I asked, brow arched.

"When my mother died, I was trapped inside her. Stillborn." His voice dropped to a throaty tenor. "I was literally ripped from her dead womb. Somehow, my blood had kept me alive inside her corpse."

"Freya fuck me," I choked, calling on the goddess of fertility. "Magnus, that's horrible." I hesitated to ask the next question, but he seemed in a content, answerable mood, so I pushed on. "How . . . do you know that?"

"From the scientists."

My throat tightened. "The scientists ?"

His nod planted his chin against the top of my head. "The first few years of my life, I was a test subject. Scientists wanted to figure out the mystery of my blood. No one came to claim me, thinking I was dead—and technically, I was —so the government took me for themselves."

Gods above , I thought. Just like Grim. This story gets worse and worse. I wanted to cry for Magnus, to hold him close and console him. But his emotionless way of telling the story took some of the hurt out of it.

Magnus didn't seem like a man who needed consoling.

"Did they ever figure out how your blood works?"

"I don't know. I was stolen away—broken out—before my memory started working. Rescued, really. Then left at an orphanage so I'd have some chance at a normal life."

"How did that work out?" I asked wryly.

He chuckled, his chest reverberating against my cheek. "You can probably guess. A ‘dead' boy at a home for whining, lively infants?" His chin nodded toward the table—or rather the floor, where our books had tumbled during our intense coupling. "My memory is spotty at best. Some kind of amnesia overcame me from that. I can't remember specifics. I have a feeling it was from my mysterious rescuer—mind-magic of some kind to try and soften the intensity of what I'd been through."

I followed his eyes to the books. "That's what you've been working on in here. Trying to find the man who rescued you?"

He nodded. "That was part of my mission. I have some leads now, though nothing concrete. I've been wrapped up in these books long enough. They've told me all they're going to tell me."

I hummed, nodding in appreciation. I could respect him knowing when it was time to quit. I was close to reaching that point myself. "What was the, um, other part of your mission, Magnus?"

"To identify the scientists who tested and tortured me as a whelp. That information is a bit harder to come by. Again, I think I've got some ideas."

Damn. I respected his decision, though it was hard for me to justify him giving up when he was so close. Had the records truly told him all they were going to tell him about his past?

Some things, even books can't reveal for you.

I wrapped my arm around him, squeezing tight. There were so many mysteries about this man I didn't understand, and wanted to unpeel. With each new discovery I made, two new questions sprouted up.

I still didn't know how his runeshaping power worked, even. Only that it seemed powerful enough for important people to want to get their hands on it.

I gave a silent prayer to the mysterious rescuer who saved him as an infant. I hoped he'd somehow find out who he or she was, so he could thank them.

Learning about Magnus gave me a better appreciation for him and his emotional state. Or his lack of emotions, rather. Not only was he literally dead inside, his life had been founded on tragedy and betrayal. It really put my own life into perspective—him and Grim.

"I know you don't want to hear it, Magnus, but I am so fucking sorry that happened to you." My words came out before I could stop them.

He returned my embrace twofold. "Don't be sorry, silvermoon. And don't pity me. You've given me something real, when everyone else in my life just wanted me for what I possess—what I can give them. My blood. My power."

His words brought tears to my eyes. I had to fight to keep them back. The lump in my throat grew to a point that it was impossible to speak over.

A moment later, he seemed to notice, taking the lead again. Nudging me toward the table, he said, "It's time you get back to it, eh? I might have found what I'm looking for, but you haven't. We've already wasted our first two hours up here."

"I'd gladly waste the next three with you right here, until the Huscarls come and kick us out."

I could feel his smile crinkling against my head. "I can't let you do that, love."

With a groan, I blabbed, "I know, I know."

Slowly, I pulled away from him to get onto my hands and knees, planning to get to my feet.

He grabbed my arm before I could stand, yanked me back, and slammed a kiss over my bruised lips. I hummed in his mouth, eyes closed, until he pulled back.

"Thank you, Ravinica. For being something real."

I gulped, searching his face and silver-flecked gray eyes. "Thank you for being you, Magnus. Don't let these bastards win."

His smile returned, another genuine one. "Never."

I stood to my feet and groaned exaggeratedly toward the table, picking up the books along the way.

"Don't sound so disheartened," he called out. "You're close, aren't you?"

"Agonizingly," I said.

I pulled out my three-page, taped-together family tree from the middle of a tome I'd been using as a bookmark. From there, I found a pencil and got to work, poring over the texts.

It took me a while to find the next name for my list, and the soft, heavy breathing of Magnus behind me told me he was snoozing. It made me smile as I jotted down some notes and got ready to write another name.

The name was underneath the coupling of Fell McKordan and his wife, who was related to one of the four families I had pinpointed as the ones to cause my ancestors the most grief.

It had all started with a few maids, butlers, and royals in King Dannon's court. Friends of my ancestor on my mother's side from that time during the Middle Ages.

The records Vikingrune Academy kept were impeccably complete. So finely woven together, I was amazed. Through family names and anecdotes about those times—stories from people inside King Dannon and Queen Amisara's court, which covered two giant tomes entirely—I had traced back my lineage as far as it would go.

Now, I was back in the present, bringing those family names to modern times. It was miraculous, what I'd found with a few months of focused searching and studying.

Of course, it could have all been hearsay. I could have been wrong or led astray with a mistaken name, even though my gut was telling me I was right—that these were the families who had caused my family name to become less than nothing.

Some of my ancestors had been burned as witches. The Inquisition had gotten some of them. Yet, also just as miraculously, my bloodline was resilient. When one was burned, two more children had been left in secret as babies, only to pop up later in the tomes and histories as rebels and rabble-rousers of their own.

Some of my family names splintered off with aunts and uncles and cousins, into separate bloodlines I didn't bother following. Otherwise, my family tree would easily be thousands of people and hundreds of pages long.

As it stood, I had nearly two hundred names on the list—more than thirty belonging to my own name, with the rest covered by the ancestors of our family's tormentors.

And now, this. The last few names—a matter of finding out the sons and daughters of these families, writing them down, and creating my Vengeance List.

I read a few lines in the tome under the short inscription about Fell McKordan. Absentmindedly, my finger followed down to his offspring. I wrote a name under Fell's name on the family tree, keeping my finger jabbed in the tome so I wouldn't lose my place.

It was only after I had written the name and returned to the tome that I double-took to what I'd written.

Magnus Feldraug.

I blinked. A wave of dizziness washed over me.

"Wait . . . what?" I breathed in a whisper.

No, no, that makes no sense. Something isn't right here.

On instinct, I looked over my shoulder. Magnus was still sleeping, head lolled back on a few stacked books. Body naked and beautiful. I must have had him on my mind and accidentally written his name down.

I returned to the tome. Spent the next ten minutes backtracking a few generations . . . and came to the same conclusion.

My heart slammed in my chest as I read the name in the tome, and then reconciled it with the name on my hand-written family tree.

Magnus Feldraug, son of Fell McKordan.

My mouth fell open, jaw practically hitting the floor.

In a rush of turning pages and a spinning mind, I moved onto other names still blank on my list.

When I blinked, my eyes were blurry. The text around my fingers in the page darkened from a splotch—a tear, fallen from my cheek unbidden.

I wrote the next name down after reaching the end of the line, the end of the history as it currently stood.

My mouth dropped further.

No, no, no. It can't be!

Within the next hour, I had completed my research. My study was done, and I had four names to work with.

Magnus Feldraug, descendant of a maid from King Dannon's court, who gave birth to a lady-in-waiting generations later, and an eventual princess. The maid's family had been the one to coin the phrase "bog-blood," referring to my family as its precedent.

Grim Kollbjorn, descendant of a soldier in King Dannon's service, who became a knight and birthed an entire line of religious warrior-zealots who betrayed the old gods and became the heralds fighting against the "swamp-born stain on the land." This family alone had burned countless of my ancestors.

Sven Torfen, descendant of a nobleman in King Dannon's court, an advisor who eventually housed the largest wolf shifter pack in the world, and became paramount in hunting down half-bloods in later years, to cleanse the world of impure runeshapers. They had been closely aligned with the bear shifter zealots.

Arne Gornhodr, descendant of an arms dealer who dealt with King Dannon's court and helped provide him weapons to fight against the elves in Midgard, and also provided the other families with firepower to eradicate the half-bred people associated with those elves.

I was dumbstruck, looking at the very bottom of my family tree, unable to wrap my mind around it. The realization didn't dawn on me for minutes, and it shattered my heart in a million fractured pieces and sunk me to the depths of despair.

The people I had come here to learn about and assassinate, for their family's involvement in the destruction of my bloodline, were the men I had fallen for.