He shook his head. “Tis not losti, that is what does irk me. A Viking warrior can ignore losti. I have felt it before and did shove it aside when it meant getting a thing done. No, my upset comes from—“ he broke off. “I have no wish for the poison of the fated mates, but I find myself unable to fully resist it. I cannot resist you. You are inside of me, and even when we are apart, with you is where I long to be.”
She looked down at him, and for many moments nothing was said accept by the birds in the trees. But then she whispered in his own tongue, “Hvart elskar pu mik?” Do you love me?
He had not thought of it that way. Love in his mind, ‘twas but a word featured in the songs of the traveling skald, and then mayhap, only because it made human women swoon and offer their wares to its singer after the great feast, at which he performed.
He did not care for this love, did not want to believe in its existence, but as soon as she asked him this question in his own tongue, he knew the answer to be yes. And under the communication contract, he said, “Yea, I am in love with you, but I fear you are still in love with another.”
Another long silence passed, in which his fated mate sat, looking as if he had slapped her.
He hefted himself from the water and sat on the bank beside her just close enough for him to feel the heat from her body, but not close enough for their skin to meet.
“I am aggrieved this has happened, too,” he told her. “But now that I have put a mind to it, I believe I have been in love with you for a great number of moons. When we did first come to this place and you would not mind-speak or leave our bed closet, my aunt did give me words I might use to break the fated mates spell and send you back to your own time on a scrap of fabric. Yet, did I not use them. They remain pinned to my winter fur.”
She turned to him, with tears brimming in her eyes. “So even when I was crazy-depressed and not talking to you, you never considered using it?”
“No, and that is how I have come to realize now how much I truly love you.”
He braced himself for her anger, but it never came. Instead she did the one thing that could hurt him the most. She started crying.
Quiet tears fell down her face, and she rocked back and forth with her hands around her stomach.
“I am sorry you still love the other wolf,” he said, his heart growing stony with regret for confessing his feelings. “But I still cannot let him have you.”
“No, I don’t love Rafe,” she said through her tears. “I mean I love him but not in the way of mates. I love him like you love Randulfr. As a dear friend. Only imagine if you and Randulfr weren’t both friends and the girl version of him asked you to mate before her heat night.”
“That would be impossible,” he answered. “Girl and boy wolves from different houses have no reason to become as fast of friends as myself and Randulfr.”
She dismissed these words with a wave of her hand. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. But in my time period, girl and boy wolves go to school together. In fact, we don’t do anything but receive tutoring in the same place for nine full moons straight, six hours a day or more, from the time we’re six winters to the time we’re eighteen. So please try to expand your mind just enough to understand Rafe and I could have become as fast of friends as you and Randulfr. And if you were in my position, it would have been easy to mistake that friendship for love, especially if you lived in a time when fated mating was fairly uncommon.”
She laid her hand on his arm now. “The day I hugged Rafe—it wasn’t because I still wanted him over you, it was because I felt like I had betrayed him. It was because I didn’t understand then what true love is. But now I do.”
Now it was she who reached for his hand and laid it over her heart, covering it with her own. “Because of you. You’ve given me a family and the way of life I yearned for, and now you’ve given me your love. I love you, too, Fenris, more than I ever thought possible and to the end of time and back.”
His heart swelled to hear these words fall from her lips, but he still did not understand: “Then why do tears continue to fall from your eyes?”
She squeezed his hand against her chest. “When I was a pup of four winters, I was living in a small wolf settlement, somewhere in Washington, I think. My mom went into heat when she was only fifteen, and she and my dad didn’t have much money. Plus, they were overwhelmed with having to take care of me.”
“Did they not have family to help them with your raising?” he asked.
“Wolf families from my time aren’t like wolf families from your time. We don’t all live together like you do. And if a she-wolf chooses to mate with a wolf her parents don’t approve off, they disown her—kind of like how you banish wolves from the village for crimes.”
He shook his head. “That is not like our way at all. As king I only banish if the crime is grievous. If it be but a mating unapproved, the family must accept it and continue on as a family.”
“Yeah, that’s really not how it works in my time. In my time, if you go into heat like my mother did and go running straight to the wolf who sells drugs to humans as his main hustle, then they pretty much kick you out. But my mom found out quick how uncool living with a drug dealer could be. ” She shook her head. “My first memories are of trying to stay quiet and make myself very small, so they wouldn’t get mad at me, but it didn’t help. They were always angry, yelling at each other, yelling at me, or behind closed doors, doing something I would only later come to understand was fucking.
“But one day it all came to a head. They got to yelling at each other so loud I went and hid in my room and covered my ears, but it was still loud enough for me to hear my dad tell my mom that either she got rid of the kid or he was going to leave her.”
“Yea, I see,” he said, nodding. “Your parents parted ways because your father did not wish to do his duty. In our village, when this happens, we send the young wolf on an ocean voyage, which is oft enough to make him see the lure of hearth and home. But I would guess you do not have such a practice in your time and it must have caused you great sadness when your parents parted.”
She looked up him. “They didn’t part.”
He shook his head, confused. “Then why does this memory continue to sadden you to tears?”
“Oh, my gosh, you can’t even fathom, that’s so…” And to his surprise, she began to have tears again. “My mother chose him. She left me by the side of the road and drove away with him. That’s how I came to be in Wolf Springs, that’s why I don’t have a family of my own, and that’s why it moves me to tears when you say you’re never going to let me go. I didn’t know until now how much I needed someone who would never let me go.”