Page 20 of Blood Red Rage

“And Viking?” I stiffened. Draugr paused, not bothering to look back. “If you walk down these halls naked again, I’m telling the whole staff you’re trying to start a cult.”

I stood there for a long moment, breathing through my fury. Then, finally…I turned back toward my room. Toward Bryn. Toward the only war that had ever truly mattered.

Chapter 5

The door slammed so hard the walls seemed to flinch. The sound echoed down the corridor, violent and final, like a gunshot in a cathedral. And then there was silence, the kind that presses on your ears until you realize you’ve been holding your breath. I stood there frozen.

Bare skin prickling with cooling sweat. The sheet clenched in my fists like it could anchor me to reality. My heart was still racing, my lungs still burning from shouting, from fighting, from being kissed so thoroughly my mouth felt bruised in the best and worst way.

He was gone. He actually left, and it should’ve felt like relief but instead it felt like something essential had been torn out of the room.

I paced once. Twice. My feet hit the floor softly, but the room was massive and the sound still carried. The bed behind me looked like a crime scene of silk and shadow. His scent was everywhere, on my skin, in my hair, in the air. I couldn’t escape it.

Couldn’t escape him. My fingertips rose to my neck without thinking. The bite wasn’t just a mark. It felt… alive and warm, sensitive. Like a bruise that hummed. And beneath the sting was something else, something stranger. A pull, it didn’t feel physical it felt deeper than that.

A thread in my chest tightening and tightening, as if my body was reaching for someone it couldn’t touch. I swallowed hard, trying to force it down, trying to force everything down, because this was insane.

Vampires.

Mates.

I let out a shaky laugh that had no humour in it. If I told Steph this tomorrow, she’d either call an ambulance or throw a party. Except there was no tomorrow like I understood tomorrow anymore.

Something inside me had changed. I could feel it in the way my skin tingled, too aware of air and fabric. In the way my senses felt sharper, like the room had edges it didn’t used to have. In the way my body still thrummed with him even though he wasn’t here. And worse, in the way my heart kept whispering something my mind refused to accept.

Before Viking. After Viking. I pressed my palm to my sternum like I could physically hold myself together. Because I wasn’t the same girl who’d walked into Havoc tonight. That girl had thought she understood control. She’d thought her life was predictable. She’d thought men were games, but now I knew a man could slam a door and make the entire world feel unsafe. Now I knew power wasn’t a concept, it was a person, and he had his teeth in my neck.

I stopped pacing and stared at the door. I should run or at least I should try, but the truth was brutal because even if I made it out of this room, made it out of the house, made it to the street…I was sure that he would find me.

And part of me knew that wasn’t even the scariest part. The scariest part was that some traitorous part of me would want him to. Minutes passed, or maybe an hour. Time had melted into something useless.

I was mid-breath when I sensed him. Not heard him but sensed, like the air itself recognized him before my eyes did. My stomach dropped when the door opened.

Viking stepped inside like a storm given human shape. He wasn’t angry the way he’d been angry before, loud and volcanic. This was worse because he was quiet and controlled.

His hair was loose, hanging around his shoulders like he’d raked his hands through it one too many times. He’d pulled on trousers but nothing else. Tattoos covered his chest and arms like war paint, every line making him look less real and more myth.

He looked at me like he’d been forced to leave something precious behind and hated himself for it. He shut the door gently, that softness made my throat tighten.

“Are you done?” I asked, voice shaking despite my best efforts.

His jaw flexed. “No.”

I flinched, then steadied myself. “Then what do you want?”

His gaze lifted to my neck, to his bite. His eyes darkened with something like regret and hunger braided together.

“I shouldn’t have left you,” he said quietly.

I laughed once, sharp. “That’s what you came back to say?”

He moved closer. Not fast or threatening, but he moved like the room belonged to him and somehow, so did I.

“I came back because this argument isn’t finished,” he stated.

“That’s because you’re insane,” I shot back, chin lifting. “Because you think you can ruin my life and call it fate.”

His nostrils flared and for a second, the temper was there, the flash of one to a hundred, but then he swallowed it, and I knew somehow that he was holding himself back for me.