Page 153 of Valkyrie Unknown

He was pushing his luck.

Azzie put a hand on my arm before I could shut him up. “As long as he’s not attacking us, ignore him. Do you hear that?”

I heard the absence of nature, despite us being in a forest. I heard the hum of magic. Their breathing. Finn’s quiet huffs. I doubted any of those things were what Azzie meant. “No.”

“What are you?—?”

I silenced Finn with a glare. “We can finish that fight now if you’d like,” I said.

He clenched his jaw.

“Zeke?” Azzie shouted.

The forest vanished, replaced with a long hallway. Zeke stood in front of one of three visible doors, and the ends of the corridor vanished into shadows.

“Hey, A. Are you real?” Zeke asked.

Did we have to do this again?

“Hey, Zee,” Azzie said. “I’m real.We’rereal.”

Before I could ask why we weren’t playing twenty-questions—not that I was complaining—Finn stepped past us, and gripped the back of Zeke’s neck as he dipped his mouth toward Zeke’s.

Zeke pressed a palm to Finn’s chest and pushed him back before they could kiss. “Why are we all in here?”

“Tania told me we all paid the fee, so we’re all participants in the trial.” I suspected my story was the shortest, and I was itching to leave or to fight something—or both.

“Why would she do that?” Zeke was still staring at Finn. “Despite having an agreement that this was for Azzie. I can’t imagine she’d survive long if she did this to all of her clients.”

Tania’s infuriating words slipped into my thoughts.There were agreements in place before Azrael reached out.“Unless she has a different client who made the request before us.” My gaze landed on Finn.

He looked all around himself, as if searching for someone else, then at me again. “You think I asked her to lock me in a nightmare of my own worst fears with the man I love and the two people who want him dead?”

Love?

“Love?” Confusion bled into Zeke’s expression. He stared at Finn, mouth open, and not looking anything like he wanted to sayI love you too.

“Thatiswhat you said…” Azzie’s voice was softer. She gave a hard shake of her head. “Finn set me up, to either die in here or be trapped.”

“No.” Finn’s hard refusal didn’t erase my desire to pound him. “I just want you out of our lives, not dead.Ididn’t do anything to get us all stuck in here. In fact, now that we have everyone, Azzie can take us out of here.”

“Why would she—?” Zeke shook his head. “What did I miss?”

I had similar questions. Why did Finn believe Azzie could heal herself? How did we move from the forest to the middle of a hallway? What had I written off in the past about Azzie that was more?

Azzie dragged in a deep breath through her nostrils, and scrubbed her face. “I woke up in a room with Loki. That didn’t last long. Then I was in the apartment Davyn and I had before we got here, and it was like we never came here.”

“Which was why she stopped to fuck him?—”

“And then Finn burst in and killed him.” Azzie talked over Finn.

Wait. She said that before. There was no possible way Finn had beaten me. “Like fuck he did.”

“I killed afakeDavyn. While Azzie was fucking him.”

Loki? Me and Azzie? This was a lot to process.

She wasn’t done, though. “We couldn’t get out of the apartment, despite the fact that Finn said he walked right in. He has a lot of opinions about what I should be able to do, by the way. Then we were in, I don’t know, a sitting room? I heard— He continued to be an ass. We found a woman he called Sadhbh, and he fawned over her, while I fought off Berserkers in the middle of some battle in the forest and she said he’d promised not to bring me here.”

---