no, no!” She couldn’t be. She was just there. Finally, after so many weeks apart, she had returned to me. She couldn’t be gone. She couldn’t.
I fell to my knees on the skins where she’d slept, my hands skimming over them as if I would somehow find her there. There was still an indent of her small body, and they smelled like her, and us, and sex.
But this didn’t feel like when she had left for Midgard and I’d been a walking zombie waiting for her return. I’d still been able to feel her bond, painful as it had been. Now… Now there was nothing.
My Annabel was gone.
I don’t know how long I was out for. I had a faint memory of passing out and assuming I was dying the way an Alpha should have when his mate was ripped from him. I’d been so relieved.
But when I opened my eyes, I was still staring up into the same blasted ceiling as before, and my chest throbbed with dull, consistent agony.
Someone grasped my shoulder. Saga. He leaned over me to search my eyes, gray gaze bloodshot and dull.
“What is this nightmare?” I rasped. “We should be with her. We should be dead.”
“We should be,” he agreed. “Which is why she can’t be gone, Magni.”
I scoffed. It came out as a pained wheeze. “This is what death feels like.”
“But we are not,” he insisted. “So she can’t be. There has to be… some way to bring her back from wherever she’s been taken.”
I wanted to tell him that he was grasping at straws, but I couldn’t get the words out. If he was right—if there was even a sliver of a chance that she wasn’t dead—then I would rather tear myself to shreds with my bare hands than give up on her.
So long as my painful clump of a heart still beat, I would never give up searching.
I nodded feebly. “If there is, we will… we will find it. We will find her. The others—?”
“Still passed out.” Saga grimaced and pressed a hand to his chest for several breaths before he managed to steel himself and turn to the room. “You get Modi up. I’ll get Bjarni.”
I grunted an agreement, though it took me several minutes to regain enough strength to get to my feet.
My brother was sagged on the stone floor a few feet from the skins we had slept in. It looked like he had tried to go for the door before the agony of our loss had rendered him unconscious. I knelt by his side and placed a hand on his shoulder.
“Modi,” I rasped, shaking him with what strength I could muster. “Modi. We need you. Annabel needs you.”
He jerked on the floor, a long whimper escaping him before his consciousness floated back into his reluctant body. “Anna?” he croaked. “Anna!”
“Shh.” It was the first time I regretted what I had done to my brother. Somewhere behind my own misery, I knew that if I had not brought Annabel to Trudheim—if I had not introduced her to him—he would not be in this much pain.
At that moment, I couldn’t give less of a shit about prophecies and Norns and the godsdamn end of the world. All I knew was agony, and that if I had chosen differently, my proud brother would not be sobbing on the floor, calling for his mate like a lost child.
“We’ll get her, baby brother. I promise. We’ll find her and we’ll bring her back.” I spoke the words with more confidence than I could feel through the hole in my chest, but as I watched Modi struggle for breath, I knew we had to. There was no other choice. If she had been dead, so would we. There were no ifs, and, or buts about it, so she had to be alive. And if my mate still breathed, if even a shred of my beloved still existed, then we would reunite with her no matter the cost.
I rubbed Modi’s shoulder and back with long, calming strokes until he could breathe steadily again. A few feet away, Saga embraced his blond bear of a brother. Bjarni’s face was pale and drawn with lines of grief as he processed the sensation of loss still tearing at us.
“Who took her?” Bjarni finally rasped.
“We don’t know,” Saga said, his mouth drawing into a grim line. “Nor how. How did someone steal her from our bed?”
“She got up just around dawn,” Modi said with a frown. “Said she