The Summer Siege (Viking Omegaverse, #3)

by Lyx Robinson

“If we die in some ridiculous manner, you find me in Valhöll,” Ivar tells me. “So I can express my feelings about it. With an axe.”

perhaps once I collect enough pieces of familiarity, everything will feel less daunting.

They are chained and held in a Viking siege camp, and still they choose to obsess like this about my sinfulness?

I feel I am just like the crows – a scavenger perched over this precious scene, this time alone with her that is so rarely mine to enjoy.

The girl who claimed us as pack, all red eyes and sharp, hungry claws.

“The gods are under me and over me,”

“No need to hide from me,” he murmurs, making me flush.

Tall and dark and tattooed, the witch’s son who prowls around the dead.

there is no hiding how much I want her, when she’s perched upon the proof of it.

“You want me to fuck you?” I growl. “Say it.”

“I am not gentle,” I warn. Her eyes glint in the dark. “Nor am I fragile.”

Let her flesh bear testimony to this; so she might wear the tokens of her shadowy suitor, who waits in the dark only to snatch and devour her. Once this ends… she will remember that she was mine, if only for one night.

Let her feel this depth, even long after this ends.

She has not even shed a tear all week; so she turns to bestial violence, to unravel what she’s wound up inside herself so tight.

he’s watched them pet my hair and kiss me on the cheek after ripping out men’s guts in my name.

She pulls me against her in the dark, the love of my life outlined in starlight.

I whisper my vows against her mouth, because I can never say them enough, I love you, I love you so much,

Gods… if she only knew what a crack it made in my life, to meet her. There was the man who existed before that moment; and then the man who came afterward.

How beautiful she was in her agony; how soft in the aftermath.

Blood and violence, beheadings and sex. Two hundred Pictish men, kneeling at her command.

“Metal is the only language that men understand.”

The men cheer as I stride to her, but she is all I hear, all I see.

He’d let so many people touch his nakedness while I could not let anyone so much as look my way without needing my seax in my hand.

I need her to know she’s mine, mine, even as Ivar pounds his pent-up need into her.

“You want us so badly that you’ll burn the grove even as you walk through it.

I know they have true belonging, and I only have permission;

He gazes down at her reddened knuckles, his expression soft. Beyond his attempted stoicism, he’s deeply touched – any fool could see it.

So the boy begins to collect things he can keep in secret. A stash that can never tarnish nor be confiscated. These things are immaterial; they are memories, stories, scraps of knowledge he stores and repeats to himself.

I know I can never return to you. But maybe I’ll see you. Out of the corner of my eye. Maybe you’ll return to me.

I’ll never remember it by the time I wake, I’ll only remember that swell of elation, that yes, you’re here, you’re fine – how silly of us to believe that you were gone forever, when really you were here all along.

You’re not here, you’re not here, you’ll never be here again.

I know her; of course I know her. “Tamsin,” I whisper.

And they aren’t just a beautiful couple of revellers, fucking right in front me – it’s them, my erstwhile pup whose body I know as well as my own, and the Vanirdottir we share.

“And you’re still a greedy little shit,” I growl in his ear. “You wanted to knot her now? And keep her locked for an hour? I swear to you, Thrain, if you do that, I will fuck you right as you are. I’ll fuck you so hard she’ll feel your knot in her throat.”

That she would ask me questions while I’m sucking off her husband makes me grin – a difficult, uncomfortable thing when my jaw is split open around this monstrous thing.

Will you forgive me, my love… will you forgive me if I lay here like this? If I take this peace from her?

Ivar whispers against the shell of Thrain’s ear; does she know what I would do to her, if she were chained to my bed?

I would rather know him and never touch him, than not know him at all.

He would just ask me that like this? Between scrubbing his balls and his armpits? So are you ready for a life commitment?

“Fine! Would you be all right with it if I bit your fucking wife?” “Yes! I would.”

“I missed you.” I will never admit how those quiet words lift my heart.

“It’s easy to be a martyr when you already have one foot in the grave.”

I’m not sure I ever managed to be much of a man. I know for certain that I am not a man now.

“But He has hurt me,” I tell him. “How can I trust a father who has never been there for me? A father who says I must be silent and submit, while all the horrors in the world pile up around me? How can I trust some benevolent master I cannot even see?”

It’s impossible to imagine a world that does not carry his weight. But even when the world no longer bears it, I’m certain I will. I’m shaped by it, like clay marked by the imprint of a kneading hand; however invisible he may make himself, he has always been there, imprinted upon me. And I know he always will be.

“It seems like it is not a good year for kings.”

This is all I want. Softness, and to be alone with those who understand me.

It makes a smile drift at the corner of my mouth, to think that Tamsin’s claim may be so brutal, so final and unapologetic. It has changed how the world smells, how it feels.

“Only you would stage your claiming ceremony in the middle of a full-blown siege,” he says, amusement in his tone.

His every touch bears this reminder, that pain is only passing – that our bodies are meant for this, for the soft touch of a lover, the grasping hand that says I missed you, the warmth of summer nights and the taste of mead and merriment – that it comes back, it comes back, once you leave that dark cell behind.