Page 58 of Reaper's Reward

I shrugged. “You can’t tell me that Maddox and Fenrir are the same.”

She could say it all she wanted, but I knew better. My husband, mymate, wasn’t anything like the man she once loved. I would bet my last breath on it.

Hel pursed her lips. She gave me the kind of look that adults give petulant teenagers. It was a look that said I wouldn’t understand until I was older. Thankfully, I wasn’t going to live to Hel’s age. My mortal life was limited. In that time, Maddox would continue to prove that he wasn’t Fenrir.

I didn’t know how to convince this jaded goddess that I’d chosen a better man. It wasn’t what they’d become that made them monsters. Fenrir had been a monster from the beginning. She’d said it herself. Fenrir had used her to become immortal.

He claimed that the woman he loved had turned against him. I knew that was only to get Maddox to turn on me. Fenrir had woven a story that fit his narrative, one that would convince my husband that I was the enemy.

Thankfully, it’d been a shoddy story from the start.

However, this rendered our plan useless. I couldn’t bring Hel before Fenrir and hope to gain any sort of advantage. Hel couldn’t talk to him. She couldn’t inspire love in him, because there had never been any love on his end.

The only one who’d ever loved had been Hel, and she was paying the price for it.

“You still have time to avoid the same fate,” Hel told me.

“I don’t have to avoid anything when fate is mine to write.”

Hel’s attention snapped to Persephone. The golden spring goddess laughed and vanished. I threw my hands in the air.

“Are you really going to bounce at a time like this?”

However, Fenrir’s fate thread had been freed from my grasp. His snarl rippled through the air.

“What do you think you’re doing with that?” His bodiless voice slammed into me.

No, that was his fate thread. It wrapped around me and plucked me off the ground. The thread tightened and tightened until I thought I might crumple. Hel cried out and reached for me with her human hand.

I tried to grab her outstretched hand, but Fenrir yanked me away. He fed me down the line so fast that the underworld turned into a blur. My hair rushed around my face from the wind. It made my stomach turn until he threw me to the ground.

I coughed and tried to keep the peanut butter pie down before lifting my head. The musty smell told me that I was still in Hel’s underworld, but I was no longer free. Fenrir crouched in front of me. He tucked a knuckle under my chin and forced me to look up at him.

Where was Maddox?

Fenrir and I were alone in this dark cell. My heart thundered. I had bare moments to take in Fenrir. Here, in the underworld, the fate threads I’d bound around him manifested in metal manacles.

I grinned.

Fenrir tightened his grip on my chin. “What do you have to smile about? I have your soul at my mercy right now. You should be very afraid.”

Maddox

I spun on Paige.

She’d taken me out of the cell with Fenrir. He wasn’t going to stay put if I wasn’t there to fight him. What had she been thinking?

“You’re not helping anyone!” I roared.

I flinched at the sound of my own voice. I shouldn’t have raised it. Paige deserved better. She deserved to be spoken to with respe—

“No. I’m not. That’s not why I’m here.” Paige tilted her head.

It was then that I noticed the flicker of anger in her eyes. It wasn’t at me, though. Her eyes roved over our surroundings, along the walls to the craggy ceiling and the darkness beyond.

“The cycle needs to stop,” she said. Her form flickered. She multiplied before my eyes, several images of her flying out only to snap back into her body. “None of us asked to be servants. We are souls with our own desires, and I wanted to live longer!”

I stepped away from my ex-wife. She turned angry eyes on me. The fire in them was accusatorial. It almost made me want to stand my ground, but I knew I hadn’t made life easy for her. She’d lost out on a lot as my wife.

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