The Viking Warlord's Angel

The church smells like my grandmother’s hands.

Beeswax and old pine, cold stone that never quite gives up its winter chill even in the height of summer, and beneath it all, faint as a memory, the ghost of incense from candles lit a hundred years before I was born. I have not stood inside these walls since I was a boy of twelve, forced into a collar too tight for my throat, swearing to God and my dead grandfather that I would carry the Ragnald name with honor.

I have not carried it with honor. I have carried it with blood.

But God, if He is paying attention today, will have to forgive me for what I am, because I am about to do the one honorable thing I have left in me, and I intend to do it thoroughly.

I stand at the altar my great-great-grandfather built with his own hands after a Skagerrak storm nearly took his fishing boat and his life in the same breath, and I straighten my collar for the fourth time in as many minutes. Erik, standing to my left in a suit that cost more than most men’s cars and still manages to look like a man wearing a suit for the first time, glances at me sideways.

“You’ve fixed that collar so many times it’s going to strangle you before she walks in,” he mutters.

“Better than the alternative.”

“Which is?”

“Fainting. In front of my own men. In my own family’s church.”

Erik’s mouth twitches. He has known me twenty years, has watched me put a blade through a man’s ribs without so much as a raised pulse, and yet here I am, forty-two years old, six foot eight of scar tissue and old sins, and I am one heartbeat away from needing to sit down.

Anders stands near the door, hands folded, doing what Anders always does — watching everything, trusting nothing, least of all the quiet Norwegian countryside that has never once tried to kill me.

Old habits. Soren and Nygaard are somewhere outside among the birch trees, invisible unless you know precisely where to look, because even here, even now, in a church so small and remote that most of Oslo has forgotten it exists, I do not take chances with the only thing in this world I have ever been afraid to lose.

The pews are almost empty. That was her request, and mine too, if I am honest — no crowds, no politics, no allies smiling with knives behind their teeth, no rivals pretending to celebrate while calculating what my marriage means for their own ambitions.

Just my mother in the front row, weeping quietly into a handkerchief that belonged to her own mother.

Just the men who have bled beside me long enough to be called something closer to brothers than soldiers. Just this old church, and the girl who is about to walk through those doors and undo, with terrifying gentleness, every hard thing I have built myself into.

We are already married. That fact sits warm in my chest like a coal I keep turning over just to feel it burn.

One week ago, in a courthouse in Manhattan that smelled like stale coffee and bureaucracy, a judge with tired eyes and no idea whose hand he was signing pronounced Serenity Knowles legally, unglamorously, wonderfully mine.

She wore a green dress the color of her better eye and laughed the entire ceremony because I could not stop staring at her instead of the judge, and I signed my name to that certificate with more pride than I have ever signed anything in my life — treaties, deeds, the documents that made me a king in rooms full of men who would gut each other over territory.

None of it meant as much as that piece of paper with her name pressed beside mine.

But my mother wept when I told her there had been no ceremony. Wept, and then narrowed her eyes at me with the particular fury only a Norwegian mother can summon, and informed me that no son of hers would be married without standing in his family’s church, in front of his family’s God, regardless of how many countries he currently terrorizes for a living.

So here I am. Terrified in a way no rival has ever managed to make me, waiting for the doors to open.

They open.

And every terrible, violent, calculating part of me goes utterly, blissfully silent.

She is impossibly small against the width of the doorway, red hair catching the low gold light slanting through the old glass windows, loose around her shoulders the way I love best, freckles scattered like something spilled and never quite cleaned up across her nose.

Her dress is simple — ivory, soft, moving around her like she is made of something the world has not yet found a name for — and her mismatched eyes find mine the moment she steps inside, blue and green, both of them shining, both of them completely unafraid of me.

She is the only person on this earth who has ever looked at me and seen a man instead of a warning.

I do not remember deciding to smile. I simply am smiling, helplessly, the way I always do when she is near, and somewhere behind me I hear Erik make a small, strangled sound that is either a laugh or the beginning of one, quickly swallowed.

She walks toward me alone — another of her requests, because her father is not here, has never been part of this, does not know this church exists, does not know his daughter married a man capable of leveling city blocks with a phone call.

That absence does not sting her. If anything, her spine straightens with every step, chin lifting, and I understand, watching her, that she is not walking toward me needing to be given away. She is simply choosing to arrive.

By the time she reaches me, I have forgotten every prepared word I meant to say.

“You look terrified,” she whispers, low enough that only I can hear, mismatched eyes bright with amusement even now, even here.

“I negotiate with men who would happily see me dead,” I whisper back. “None of them have ever made my hands shake.”

“Poor Viking.” She does not sound sorry at all. She sounds delighted.

The priest — an old family friend, silver-haired, unbothered by rumors he has surely heard about the man standing before him — begins the ceremony in the low, familiar cadence of Norwegian I have not heard directed at me since I was small enough to be frightened of thunder instead of causing it. Serenity does not understand a word of it. She told me beforehand she didn’t need to.

“I already know what I’m agreeing to,” she said, tracing the collar of my shirt with her fingertip, entirely too pleased with the way it made my breath catch. “I agreed to it a long time ago. This is just you finally catching up.”

She was not wrong. She has never once been wrong about me.

The priest speaks of covenant, of home, of the responsibility a man carries when he takes a wife into his family — and I think of five years ago, bleeding out in an alley from a blade meant to end me, certain in the dull, fading way of a man who has accepted his own death, that I would die there without a single soul in the world who would truly grieve me.

Then there had been red hair and mismatched eyes and hands entirely too gentle for the amount of blood they were covered in, and a voice telling me, with the absolute unshakable authority of a girl who did not yet know who I was, that I was not permitted to die on her.

I did not die. I have never quite managed to leave her side since.

“Ragnar.”

My mother’s voice, thick with tears, pulls me back to the moment — to the ring in the priest’s palm, waiting for me to take it, to the woman in front of me watching me with a softness that makes every hard year of my life feel almost worth surviving, just to arrive here.

I take Serenity’s hand. It is so small in mine it should be laughable — this tiny, freckled hand that feeds my men, scolds my snipers when they skip meals, tends wounds my enemies gave me without ever once flinching, and holds, somehow, more absolute authority over me than any weapon ever forged.

“I already promised you everything I have, a week ago, in a room that smelled like bad coffee,” I murmur, low, only for her. “Let me promise it again properly. In front of my god. In front of my mother. In front of men who would kill for me and would just as easily die for you.”

Her breath catches. Good. It is only fair — she has been stealing mine for five years.

“I vow,” I continue, and my voice, the same voice that has calmly ordered men’s deaths without a flicker of hesitation, embarrasses me now by trembling, “that there is no version of me — not the boy who knelt in this church once before, not the man who has done things I will never confess to a priest, not the king every rival fears — that does not belong to you. You saved a stranger bleeding in an alley and somehow ended up saving all of him. Every terrible piece. I will spend whatever life I have left trying to be worth that.”

Her eyes fill. One blue, one green, both equally devastating to me.

“You already are,” she whispers, and slides the ring onto my finger with a steadiness I do not deserve, given how badly my own hands are shaking. “You have been since the alley, you enormous, dramatic Viking. This is just everyone else finally catching up.”

Half the church laughs. My mother sobs harder. Erik, behind me, mutters something suspiciously close to finally under his breath, and I decide, magnanimously, to let him live.

I say my vows back to her in English, because she deserves to understand every word without translation, without softening, without room for doubt. I tell her, in front of my god and my mother and men whose loyalty was bought in blood and kept through fear, that she is the only person alive who has ever made me want to be gentle. That the empire I have built with my hands means nothing beside the weight of her ring on my finger. That I would burn every alliance I own to ash before I let anything in this world make her unhappy for even a single day.

I do not tell her, because there will be time later, quiet years of it, that she has already started rearranging me from the inside out — that my men adore her more than they have ever adored me, that my house has started smelling like her cooking instead of gun oil and cedar, that I have become, without noticing the transition, a man who negotiates less with fear and more with the terrifying, devastating question of what she would think if she found out.

When the priest finally pronounces us — again, redundantly, gloriously — husband and wife, I do not wait for permission to kiss her. I have never waited for permission for anything in my life except, apparently, her.

She laughs against my mouth, delighted, and the sound of it echoes off four-hundred-year-old stone that has heard funerals and confessions and the quiet desperate prayers of men far more devout than I will ever be, and I think, absurdly, that this small church has never once held anything as dangerous, or as soft, as what I feel for the woman in my arms.

Behind us, my men — killers, all of them, every single one capable of ending a life without hesitation — applaud like fools at a village wedding.

Soren and Nygaard have abandoned their posts among the birch trees just long enough to appear in the doorway, and even they are smiling, which is, for either of them, roughly equivalent to weeping openly.

My mother catches my face in both hands as we pass her, presses a kiss to my cheek, and whispers, in Norwegian, that her father would have been proud. I do not trust my voice enough to answer her.

Serenity’s hand finds mine as we walk back down the aisle, out into the pale gold light of a Norwegian afternoon, and I think — not for the first time, and certainly not for the last — that I would face every enemy I have ever made, every blade meant for my throat, every war still waiting somewhere over the horizon, without a flicker of fear.

But if she ever looked at me with disappointment instead of that soft, wicked amusement she wears so well, I would not survive it.

Thankfully, my tiny, beautiful wife has never once looked at me that way.

I intend to spend the rest of my life making certain she never has reason to.