Page 8 of Loki's Enemy Mate

His face was red and stained with tears. From what I could see, he’d been at it for a while. And judging by that fearful look in his eyes, something inside him was broken.

“I’m sure your piece of shit father will come back for you. Don’t get all worked up. If anyone should be crying, it’s me.”

“He’s not coming back,” Heimdall replied. “It’s been over twelve hours. Even if he had to crawl back to the pack, he’d have returned by now.”

“Maybe Thor finally showed up and killed him.”

I could tell from the sudden look of fear on his face that he hadn’t thought of that. Whether it eased his pain or not was undetermined. Still, both options were equally grim. If Tyr really had abandoned his only son and the heir to the Skoll pack, that was pretty shitty. But if Thor and the Hati pack had finally killed Tyr, preventing him from getting help, then there was nobody in the world above us that knew we were in that hole.

Whatever the truth might be, it hardly mattered. The result was the same. We were stuck, and we were on our own.

“Look,” I sighed, realizing the dark truth. “Nobody is coming back for us, so that means we need to find a way out on our own.” He looked up at me, his lashes still wet with tears. “We can either look for a way out together and double our chances of survival, or we can kill one another now. What’s it gonna be?”

Heimdall just stared at me. I could see the gears turning in his head. Although, from the looks of him, he didn’t have many gears to begin with. The guy seemed the type to be all brawn and no brain. How could he have a brain at all since he followed all of Tyr’s tyrannical nonsense? He’d probably been trained to be a giant mindless dope from a young age.

“I don’t trust you,” he said at last, his eyes still fixed on me.

“Good. I don’t trust you either.”

“But I don’t want to die here.”

“Same.”

He took a deep breath, his shoulders heaving from the strain of his incoming answer. “Maybe… Maybe we should work together.”

Huh. Perhaps he wasn’t as dumb as I thought he was.

“A truce then? Until we get out of this place?”

He nodded. “A truce.”

“Swear on it.”

“I swear on my father’s life that I won’t attack you until we’re free of this place and back to the surface.”

I gave him a good once over before scoffing. “I’d swear on my father’s life, but Tyr took it away from him.” Slumping back onto the floor, I spread my arms out wide, taking in as much of the sunlight as I could. “But I’ll help you out of here even if I think your father deserves the most disagreeable death I can think of.”

He didn’t retort or snap at me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw his expression shift, but I couldn’t see it well enough in the dark to make it out.

“My name is Heimdall,” he said at last, filling the silence.

“I know who you are,Hamball,” I mocked. “And you know how I am. I don’t care about pleasantries. Right now, I just want to rest and heal. So shut the fuck up and leave me alone.”

“I thought this was a truce.”

“It is a truce,” I said, glaring up at him. “But that doesn’t mean I’m gonna be friends with you. I’ve sworn to kill your father for what he did to my family, and you put yourself between me and my revenge. That makes you the enemy too. Anyone who defends Tyr is just as disgusting as he is.”

“We’re not disgusting,” Heimdall shot back. “Just because we choose to livedifferentlythan you do–”

“And kill anyone who disagrees,” I added, cutting him off. “Funny how none of the Hati pack hasevertried to kill Skoll wolves just because they had different beliefs than us. And yet your father made it his business to not only force his beliefs on others, but to kill anyone who dared oppose him.”

“Your father attacked him! It was an act of war! My father was just defending himself!”

I clicked my tongue, shaking my head as I turned my face back to the sun. “How convenient.”

“If the Hait pack isn’t preparing for war, then why did they clean out the werewolf hunter bunker under that old woman’s house, huh?”

I opened my mouth to retort, but snapped it shut when I realized I didn’t have an explanation for that. I hadn’t stuck around long enough to see what became of Flynn and his family’s belongings. My first thought was that Thor would want to keep those silver weapons out of the hands of Tyr. But wheredid they go? And would they be used against Tyr should he move against them?

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