Her Viking Wolves(4)

Speaking of which…

“Why are you yelling at me?” I ask, staring at my feet. “It’s not like Kyle is doing a much better job. I don’t even see him here.”

Evelyn looks around with a frown. “He’s probably in your brother’s rooms playing that damn Viking Shifters game of yours.”

I perk up. “Really? You think so?”

My aunt’s eyes slit so hard, it seems like it should be accompanied by an angry sound effect. “It’s not anything to be proud of, Tiara.”

Another thing I don’t love about my aunt. She insists on calling me by my full, super-ridiculous name as opposed to “Tee” like everybody else.

“I’ll go find them,” I offer, hoping to mollify her…and make my escape. Playing She-Wolf’s bestselling game to date with my twin and my fiancé seems like just the thing to save an otherwise useless night.

“You do that,” she says. “But come right back afterwards, and bring that damn brother of yours, too. All this money we paid for this party and we got the Prince of Detroit missing in action.”

I leave her grumbling, and make my way up the stairs to my brother’s wing of the house on the second floor. It seems unfair that she’s mad at Clyde, even though he’s done almost every single thing our dad has ever asked of him, including setting his nerdy sister up with one of his best friends from college.

And as for Kyle, the truth is he barely knows me. I remember our ten months of dating as mostly IM conversations with the occasional date thrown in. With me mumbling my way through answers to his questions, and him responding with what I can only guess is some kind of special North Dakota brand of relentless cheer. The truth is, I don’t blame him for preferring to spend time playing my video game with my cool-as-hell brother instead of hanging out with me at our engagement party. I know that’s what I’d rather be doing right now.

I can hear the game blasting as I approach Clyde’s door, along with the groaning of fallen shifters. One round, I decide. One round of Viking Shifters and then I’ll go back down to the party and try like hell to pretend I’m a shifter princess and not a super-awkward videogame developer in disguise.

Throwing the door open, I call out “Okay, I’m playing the…”

Only to stop dead in my tracks, the word “winner” falling pitifully from my mouth.

Because yes, the video game is on. But the groans aren’t coming from the game.

They’re coming from Kyle, the Prince of Dakota, who my brother, the Prince of Detroit, currently has bent over one of his gaming chairs. And he’s doing something to him that would definitely get us banned on several console platforms if we ever dared feature it in any of our shifter games.

Clyde’s eyes go wide and he abruptly stops his enthusiastic pumps into my fiancé’s backside when he sees me standing wide-eyed in the doorway.

But Kyle’s eyes are closed and he doesn’t notice me, or maybe he’s just too far gone to care.

“Oh fuck! Oh God, don’t stop, baby! Don’t stop!”

“Kyle,” my brother says.

“You fuck this ass so good. Oh baby, you don’t know how much I’ve missed you. How much I’ve missed this!”

“Kyle,” my brother says again, his voice a shade louder.

“What? Why did you…” my fiancé whines as he finally opens his eyes…and registers my presence in the doorway.

Now it’s his turn to trail off.

“…stop?”
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2





Viking Age Norway, Many Centuries Ago





“FJ…”

The gray eyes of Fenrisson, Ever the Man, come open in an instant, the woman’s whispered voice still ringing in his ears. She does not call him by either of his true names, however, neither Fenrisson nor Fenris Next. Instead she uses his barn nafn—his child name—the one he is called by none but his mother, siblings, and Aunt Alisha, a woman who left their land along with her three young and her fated mate nearly twenty winters ago—the last time Freya’s lights could be seen in their land.

Yet it is this name he has woken to ever since the coming of Freya’s mating lights. The lights his Aunt Bera, the pack’s wise woman, predicted so many winters ago. The lights she said would usher in an enemy unlike any they had ever known.

“Come they will under Freya’s purple lights in the five-and-thirty winter of our Fenris not yet. An enemy who will kill many of our wolves and give final harm to Olafr’s human. And will they the future of our Fenris and his queen take.”