When Loki's consort and soulmate marries his rival to save their son from a curse, a prophecy leads to consequences even the God of Chaos couldn't predict.
***
The Unseelie Goddess of War's revenge against Asgard's Dark Prince puts him in a no-win s...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
A week. An entire week since that hated ceremony. And still, no word from Alfheim or Shannon.
Every moment Aidan was asleep, I'd spent trying to find some way to break this fucking curse. I'd searched records that hadn't been opened since the dawn of Ylir, Odin's grandfather's reign as All-Father sixty-four thousand years ago. With desperate intensity, I dug backward through the depths of our archives. The current million and a half years from the Age of Ascension, all the way into seven hundred million years of the Age of Inquiry, to when our ancestors first developed the ability to use bifrost and portal energy. Even into brittle scrolls of the five hundred million years before that, comprising the Age of Enlightenment, and the first experiments into understanding the basis of our current science, before Asgardians were able to travel the nine realms at will.
Any and every possibility I explored. No matter how crazy it seemed. I even asked Healer Moja if a complete blood transfusion would break the link.
There was no way I could accept Aidan had only thirty-five days of life remaining. Surely, that Norns-cursed ceremony had gone off without a hitch and he was safe now? Shannon would have done everything in her power to ensure that outcome. I knew she would.
Yet, I couldn't risk it. Not my beautiful little boy.
Frustrated, tired, and depressed, my eyes held the telltale heat of forming tears. On top of my worry for Aidan, Shannon's absence was a hollow ache that no distraction could fill. Our empty bed held no heat—no laughter—no comfort. I couldn't help but recall those weeks of desperate searching last year. Even knowing where she was this time, the feeling remained to haunt me.
It seemed Aidan was picking up my mood. He kept pushing away the spoon or spitting out his lunch with irritable frowns and flailing of those cute chubby arms. I struggled to get food actually into his little mouth, instead of on his face, shirt, hands, hair, and table. Both of us would be in tears shortly.
"Come on, my little man. You won't get big and strong like your Uncle Thor unless you eat your food," I coaxed, holding a spoonful of pureed carrots.
Aidan usually liked carrots.
Not today.
His hand managed to hit the spoon perfectly. It flipped out of my fingers and splattered my face and cleavage. The cold, sticky, orange mess started to slide between my breasts.
A tear traced a path down my flushed cheek, followed by another, and another. My eyelids closed as a soft exhale left my lips.
Why is this so bloody hard?
A deep chuckle came from the doorway. "Do you think he aimed it like that?" Thor asked.
Swiping at my eyes with a hand, I used a flick of power to clean myself. There was no need to advertise my frustrated anguish. "I don't know, but he wins this battle of wills today." I conjured a pile of the circle-shaped cereal Aidan liked to chase around on his tray and got rid of the blended carrots.
