His confession splits the night open and the cold slips in. My body betrays me first—breath stuttering, pulse racing, every nerve tuning to him like he’s the only instrument left after a shipwreck. He’s so close I can taste the iron of his sweat and the salt of older sins I’m not finished resenting.
“I hate that you’re good at speeches,” I say, because I need a weapon and humor is the one I sharpened myself. “If this is an audition for absolution, you’re overselling it.”
A corner of his mouth lifts, not a smile, more like a scar remembering how it happened. “If I wanted absolution I’d have gone to Katla and bribed her with honey cakes.”
“You don’t bribe Katla,” I murmur. “You beg and you bring your own shroud.”
He huffs, staying where he is, palms flat on the wood beside my head, not touching. The space between us is the thinnest thing I’ve ever tried to stand inside. “Say what you need to say, Astrid.”
“I could say many things.” I tilt my chin, forcing lightness into a frame that wants to shake. “For instance: if you lie to me again I’ll salt your porridge with laxative herbs and let the whole longhouse judge you by the noises you make.”
His throat works on a startled laugh that sounds like it forgot how to live here. “Gross. But you would.”
“Try me.” I could keep the banter going forever—little knives thrown at the ground to keep from looking up—but the truth is tugging at my sleeve like a child who won’t be ignored.
I drop my gaze to his mouth and then to the steady rise and fall of his chest, and finally I let the question out. “How do I trust that?” I whisper. “How do I know you’re not just saying what I need to hear?”
Erik’s smile is bitter—good, let it sting him too. “You don’t. That’s what makes this a choice instead of a certainty.” His forehead touches mine like a vow he’s afraid to voice too loudly.
“I can’t undo the manipulation. Can’t take back that I pursued you for calculated reasons. All I can do is stand here and tell you that somewhere between planning to claim you and actually knowing you, the strategy became real. The prize became a person. And the person became everything.”
The thing in my chest that’s been pretending to be a shield ripples like water under a thrown stone. I should pull away. Should catalog his sins and stitch my mouth closed with them.
Instead my hands move of their own treacherous accord, finding the heat of his chest, the hard thud of his heart beneath my palms. It’s not poetic—it’s a fist trying to punch through his ribs and reach me.
“I’m so angry at you,” I breathe. It comes out like a curse and a confession.
“Good,” he murmurs against my mouth, not yet touching, the word warm enough to fog the cold air between us. “Be angry. Rage at me. Make me earn every inch of your trust back. Draw my blood if you wish. But don’t leave me.”
Dark laughter slips out of me, brittle and sharp. “Careful what you offer. I carry knives in places you wouldn’t check.”
“I’ve checked,” he says, and the heat in his eyes is a promise and a plea.
“Check again. Boast later,” I say, but my fingers are already closing in his tunic, dragging him down because my pride can’t lift me anywhere I want to go as much as this does.
I’m not naïve anymore; I know what he’s capable of. I know what I’m capable of with him. And in the space between those knowings, something soft insists on surviving.
Something snaps. The kiss when it comes is combustible—all the anger and desire and confusion burning between us, a fire that eats the oxygen and leaves only hunger. He tastes like winter and fight. He groans into my mouth as if the sound has been caged for days, and I answer with my own, breaking the lock.
He lifts me as easily as if I’m a weapon he’s training with and not a woman who might still choose to ruin him. My legs wrap around his waist because my body remembers his body and loyalty has always been my flaw.
The world narrows to this: the press of the wall at my back, the iron bands of his arms, the way he holds me like I’m simultaneously fragile and fierce, something to be protected and provoked in the same breath. His mouth maps apology in a language I understand better than speeches; my fingers demand more.
My head thuds the wall when I tip back for air. I laugh, breathless. “If I end up with splinters somewhere unsayable, you’re a dead man.”
“Didn’t expect anything less,” he growls, and for once the threat sounds like a promise I want.
Under the burn of his kiss, something quieter opens. It looks like the little blue flowers that grow wild along the stream—the ones I once misnamed as forgive-me-nots because that’s what I wished them to be. Katla laughed and told me I had it backward.
Forget-me-nots, she said. Not forgiveness—remembrance. Tonight I decide I can hold both: remember the harm, release the weapon. I am not a ledger; I am a woman choosing what future to purchase with what pain. He’s proven he’ll spend himself making it right.
All of it crashes and crests, and when we break apart we’re both panting, foreheads touching, breath mixing until we taste like the same storm. I can feel the word forgive blooming in me like a secret I won’t say yet, not because it isn’t true, but because I want it rooted before I expose it to weather.
“This doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven you,” I warn, because I am not going to hand him everything without at least pretending I’m stingy.
“I know.” His answer is immediate, steady. Not a flinch in it.
“And I haven’t decided about the marriage.” The last word scrapes my throat. The future feels like a cliff we might leap or learn to build a bridge across.
“I know that too.” His hands flex against my thighs, not possessive—anchoring.
I kiss him again, softer this time. “But I’m not leaving.”
Relief hits his face—too bright, too honest. For a breath he’s naked with it, and there’s something tenderly foolish about this man the world calls strategist standing here unraveled by the smallest thread of my decision. Then his expression shifts, darker, hungrier, a tide pulling out to expose sharp stones.
“If you stay tonight,” he says, voice dropping to gravel, “I won’t be gentle. I’ll take you the way I wanted to in that boathouse—the way I held back because you were hurt and vulnerable. No holding back. No careful handling.”
Heat floods me so fast I feel lightheaded. It’s not fear; fear is an old god I’ve learned to starve. This is power, coiled and waking. I drag my mouth along his jaw, teeth barely grazing, and hear the way his breath breaks on impact.
“Promise?”