Page 77 of The Seducer
“I wasn’t. It doesn’t matter, you and I both know why I’m here.”
Squirming in her chair, Laura looked down. “Magni sent you, didn’t he?”
“He wants you to come home, Laura. He loves you.”
Her head shot up, and she looked at me with a little frown. “How do you know? He never spoke those words, did he?”
“Maybe not those words exactly, but that’s just because Magni isn’t exactly a big talker, is he?” I ran my hands through my hair in frustration, trying to find the right words to convince her. “He waited a long time for you Laura.”
“I know. It’s been almost six months since I left.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Oh?”
“Magni passed up five tournaments, waiting for you to turn eighteen.” I leaned forward. “Did you ever wonder why a man who was a given winner of any tournament he participated in would choose not to take part in them?”
“I just thought he wasn’t ready for marriage,” Laura said and blinked those pretty blue eyes.
“Then you’re naïve.” Leaning back again, I crossed my arms. “Magni lost his heart to you after that episode at the Gray Mansion.”
“I was just a child then; surely he didn’t think I was serious.”
“Do you know Magni at all? The man has always taken life too fucking serious.”
Laura creased her brows. “That makes no sense. That episode happened eight or nine years before we got married. I doubt he even remembers.”
“You asked him to marry you,” I reminded with my brow lowered. “It might’ve been the first marriage proposal from a female to a male in the Northlands, so yeah, he fucking remembers alright.”
Laura rested her elbows on the table and let her face fall into her hands. I waited until she looked up and spoke. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Then how do you remember it?” I asked and her eyes grew distant as she went back in time.
“We had been invited to the Ruler’s palace and my mother had done my hair and dressed me in my finest dress. I was so excited, but it turned out to be boring with nothing but adults drinking coffee and talking for hours. Desperate to see some of the large palace, I snuck out and went exploring. That’s when I found two men fighting. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know that it was Khan and Magni. I just spied on them, enthralled by how elegant they looked as their large, sweaty bodies danced around each other in swift movements. To me they were grown men. Looking back, Magni can’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen at the time.”
While she spoke, Laura was twirling a lock of her hair between her fingers. “Being a child watching something that I didn’t understand, I saw Khan provoking and kicking Magni to the floor over and over. It was scary to watch, and I was scared Khan would kill him.” Her eyes focused on me as if coming back to the present. “Magni always got up again, but I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t fight back. It made me want to cry.”
“That doesn’t sound like Magni,” I commented.
Laura smiled a little. “He must have been teaching Khan some special technique or something. In the end, it became too much for me to watch, and I knew I had to do something to help him. I wished I could fight off Khan myself. Of course that was impossible. There was no time to get my father since Khan was being really mean to Magni. That’s why I entered the room and pretended I was lost.”
“Clever!” I nodded my head. “What did they do?”
“Well,” she breathed, her eyes distant with memories again. “They stopped fighting at once. I think both of them were surprised to see a nine-year-old girl. I can remember Magni rushing to me asking me where my protector was.”
“Did you tell them that you had snuck out?”
“No, I was afraid of getting into trouble. I just told them that I had been looking for a bathroom when I got lost. Magni offered to take me back to my parents.”
“Is that when you asked him?”
Laura rubbed her collarbone. “He had such nice eyes, blue like mine, and I was so worried about all the beatings he had taken. Then it dawned on me, that this nice man would surely die if he entered a tournament, and I didn’t want him to die.”
I couldn’t hide a smile. “YoupitiedMagni?”
“Yes, so I begged him not to fight in a tournament, and I promised that if he would wait for me I would marry him.”
I laughed. “He never told me that part. Did he know you thought he couldn’t fight?”
