To Love a God Read online

  Copyright Evie Kent 2020

  Amazon Edition

  License Notes

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Any unauthorized copies or distributions can be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons or situations is unintentional and coincidental. References or mention of trademarks are not intended to infringe on trademark status. Any trademarks referenced or used is done so with full acknowledgement of trademarked status and their respective owners. The use of any mentioned trademarks is not sponsored or authorized by the trademark owner.

  Cover Designer: Covers by Combs

  Editorial: One Love Editing

  Paperback ISBN: Pending

  Contents

  Content Warning

  To Love a God

  Prologue: Oskar

  1. Nora

  2. Nora

  3. Loki

  4. Nora

  5. Loki

  6. Nora

  7. Nora

  8. Loki

  9. Nora

  10. Loki

  11. Nora

  12. Loki

  13. Nora

  14. Loki

  15. Nora

  16. Nora

  17. Loki

  18. Nora

  19. Loki

  20. Nora

  21. Nora

  22. Loki

  23. Nora

  24. Loki

  25. Nora

  26. Loki

  27. Nora

  28. Nora

  29. Nora

  30. Loki

  31. Loki

  32. Nora

  Epilogue: Nora

  Acknowledgments

  Looking for More?

  About the Author

  Dedicated to the villains I’ll always love.

  “… And while you are here, you shall rule all that lives and moves and shall have the greatest rights among deathless gods: those who defraud you and do not appease your power with offerings, reverently performing rites and paying fit gifts, shall be punished for evermore.”

  Hades to Persephone

  Hymn to Demeter

  Content Warning

  Please note that To Love a God includes content that may not be suitable for all readers. This is a dark paranormal romance. As someone who nervous-sweats over certain dark romance themes, I request that you know your own limits and discontinue reading should something take you beyond your comfort zone.

  To Love a God

  Lily of the Valley, #1

  Evie Kent

  I spent my whole life training to become a ballet dancer—a soloist, a star. Today, I’m a toy, a plaything, a distraction…

  An offering.

  A sacrifice to a caged god, to the Norse trickster.

  Loki.

  Trapped in a cave for the sins of his past, he waits for the end of days. Modern worshippers curry favor with gifts and trinkets, spilled blood—and women like me.

  Women who resemble his long-dead wife. We all have that look, you see. I’m supposed to be flattered that I remind him of a goddess in an age gone by.

  Fuck that.

  I’m furious.

  The ones who came before me were sweet, docile, compliant—just like her. But I’m not sweet. I’m not docile, and I will never be compliant.

  I am resilient. I am determined.

  I am—not—drawn to him.

  I will survive this.

  I will survive him.

  My name is Nora Olsen, and I will not die here…

  Prologue: Oskar

  The man on the other side of the bars was the Devil.

  I knew that.

  I had known that since I was a child. All those years, I stared at the black mouth of his cave, knowing, deep down, that something foul resided within the mountain. Now a grown man, I saw the hellfire inside him. The rage. The malice. The great capacity for cruelty, the kind that paired well with laughter and screams.

  Mama and Papa believed in the old gods. The whole village did, or they would have left the Devil to rot in his hole. I believed…

  Well, I believed in him.

  I believed in what he could do for my people, for the bounty he had gifted us for generations.

  But did I worship him like my parents and their parents before?

  No.

  I feared him.

  That was the only way with a villain like Loki—fear. Respect for his power, even muted by an ancient witch’s curse. Fear and respect… There was nothing else. No in-between. No civility nor friendship. No compassion. No love.

  Not for a thing like him.

  “Hello, Oskar.”

  I stiffened, still unaccustomed to the slithering rasp of a god—a trickster, a half-giant. They sent me today because my family had been his emissary since the beginning. Sons and daughters of the original village jarl all made the trek up to his cave, to the electrified bars erected some twenty feet beyond the gaping mouth. The curse encompassed the whole mountain; even if he broke through the bars, he could never walk free.

  The bars weren’t for him, anyway.

  Outside, the roar of a spring storm dulled against the stone, the moss, the scraggly, thorny underbrush that grew across his prison. Rain had hammered us all week, unrelenting, biblical flood-level downpour. It was the kind of storm you felt in your bones, and it dribbled off me now, fat droplets falling from the bottom of my jacket. Each one landed with a distinct plop on the cave floor.

  Each one made my heart race just a little harder.

  I sucked in a stuttering breath when his outline materialized in the shadows, more wild beast than man. Six months had passed since any of us set eyes on him properly, but we all knew he was there—forever here, trapped, doomed for eternity.

  Good. He deserved an eternity in here.

  The god emerged from the darkness like a prowling cat, taller than me by a full head, his flaming red hair tangling over his shoulders, his beard thick and matted. A half-mad gleam twinkled in his green gaze. Shirtless today; I didn’t dare look below his jagged collarbones to confirm if he was wearing pants. Disheveled. Unkempt. Forgotten.

  Maybe even broken.

  “We found one,” I remarked, fighting for nerve, for a bit of steel in my spine as I dug my phone out of my jacket. So far, we only had her passport photo and a few blurry screenshots from a security camera, but that was enough. “Our agent at the airport spotted her—recommended the usual hotel. Hans at the front desk suggested the park for sightseeing, take the hiking tours up to the glacier and all that. She’s… She’s here.”

  The demon slithered closer to the bars, his movements fluid, graceful.

  Unnatural.

  I held up my phone, shaking. Even with the brightness turned all the way down, its glare made Loki squint.

  “Closer, Oskar,” he rumbled, his voice rough—unused. Or possibly because that throat of his was shredded to bloody strips; we’d heard him screaming last week, shaking the mountain, his rage quaking through the village.

  Such reach.

  What more could he do without the witch’s shackles?

  Everything.

  I didn’t dare let him tell me twice, even if his outdated Norwegian was a little muddled sometimes. He did it on purpose—refused to modernize. Papa said he spoke every language in all the worlds, this silver-tongued father of lies. Able to deceive in thousands of dialects. And yet he refused to shirk the accent, the old-fashioned lilt and intonation when he spoke to us.

  Fucked with us, more like.

  “Closer,” he growled. Apparently a foot away wasn’t close enough. Swallowing hard, I gave him anoth
er two inches, then yelped when his monstrous hand shot out between the bars and snapped around my wrist. Something crunched when he wrenched me closer, bone or cartilage—something that hurt, but I bit the insides of my cheeks and stuffed it all down. He had no sympathy, no pity.

  No heart.

  I dragged my feet, fighting to keep away from the bars, from the live wires coursing through them. The electric shock was a recent addition when Loki’s previous guest proved to be just slim enough to wriggle through.

  Every inch of me trembled as he studied my phone with a cocked head and narrowed eyes. I knew for a fact that he tempered his hold on my arm, that if he so desired, he could break bone with a snap of his fingers. But the threat of physical harm wasn’t what made me shake—wasn’t what kept me up at night. His presence alone was enough, this primordial being capable of great horrors. Bringer of the apocalypse, catalyst of doom.

  Loki’s thin lips stretched into a predatory smile, his sunken cheeks and crazed gaze cast in a sickly white glow.

  “Bring her to me.”

  We all knew he would like her—she was just his type. Difficult to find. He had been without one for the last seventy-five years, his tastes so painfully specific that he had rejected twelve candidates before this damned soul.

  “Yes, yes, my lord,” I stammered out. I might not worship with the same reverence as my parents, but I knew where I stood on the food chain. Fear and respect.

  Loki released me with a shove, forceful enough to toss me backward. I landed hard on my tailbone, but again swallowed the burst of pain as I scrambled up. He wore the same wolfish grin, but his stare had hollowed, like suddenly he was whole galaxies away.

  Or just numb.

  I’d be numb after eight hundred years inside a cave.

  No sympathy though.

  Not for him.

  Never for him.

  Without another word, the Devil retreated into his own personal hell, swallowed by shadows, and his cold laughter followed me all the way down to the village. Even the torrential downpour couldn’t wash it away, couldn’t scrub me clean of his touch. In my dreams that night, I saw the hellfire in his eyes. I felt the iron grip of those large hands on my throat, twisting the life from my wretched body. I all but tasted his smile, cruel and sharp and barbed with thorns.

  And when I woke the following morning in a cold sweat, I pitied her.

  I pitied pretty Nora Olsen—and feared for what was to come.

  1

  Nora

  “Hey, babes, can you take our picture?”

  What happened to your fucking selfie stick? “Sure, no problem.”

  Seriously, this bitch had spent the last half hour jamming her knees into the back of my seat, and now she had the audacity to tap me on the shoulder and ask for a photo? Ugh. I’d left the city to get away from tourist bullshit, but I guess it was everywhere.

  Not that I had a right to be pissy about tourists over here when I was one, just one of the sheep wandering around with the herd, but this Scandinavia trip was supposed to be my opportunity to get away from people in general. After all the heartache and stress of the last year, the endless hours in the company studio working myself to the bone, my health faltering, moving all my stuff out of the apartment I thought I’d share with my soulmate for-fucking-ever, I deserved a bit of peace and quiet.

  But. Sure. I could take a picture on this brat’s phone.

  British, the pair of them. Two teen girls who had yammered at an octave only dogs could hear all the way from our bed-and-breakfast in Skog. I’d been able to block them out somewhat with my music for most of the trip, earbuds shoved in deep, but as we rolled into the parking lot in front of Fare National Park, our hiking guides already on their feet at the front of the huge bus, my ears hurt and my temper had reached critical mass. One more whiff of nonsense and I would go full New Yorker—that was a guarantee.

  “Okay,” I said, kneeling on my seat and holding the blonde one’s enormous rectangle phone sideways to fit them both in. “Smile.”

  Neither did, but they both managed near-identical duck-lip smirks and fuck-me eyes—which I figured was their generation’s version of smiling for the camera. Whatever. I tapped once, twice, three times to give them options, then handed back the phone just as the bus came to an abrupt stop. The jerking motion knocked me into the seat in front of mine, which earned me a withering look from the gray-haired crone and her husband sitting there, the very same pair who had spent the whole ride stinking up the bus with coconut-scented sunscreen.

  I popped my sunglasses on my forehead, flashing an apologetic—albeit strained—smile, then grabbed my backpack off the seat beside me. Everyone on the bus was a tourist, people just like me who had fled to western Norway for the fjords, the glaciers, and the raw, natural beauty. This was just day one of my three-month jaunt across Norway, Sweden, and Finland. I’d then head down to Denmark to reconnect with cousins I hadn’t spoken to since I was a kid, the last tenuous connection I had to Opa and his memory. Today, a national park awaited me, world heritage status and all, its glacier and ice caves famous, and tomorrow was for kayaking on a lake the color of kyanite gemstones.

  Then off to Sognefjord, the king of Norway’s ancient fjords. From here on out, I had it all organized—every hour of every day, from when I woke up to when I crashed in my hotel bed, belly full of foods I’d never tried and mulled nonalcoholic drinks that would knock me out until morning.

  And best of all: I was doing it solo.

  At least, that was the plan.

  Yet I had somehow ended up on a bus with thirty other tourists, off to do a group hike at the suggestion of my bed-and-breakfast front desk clerk. He clearly hadn’t been listening when I asked for day-trip recommendations that didn’t involve a ton of other people—either that or he got a kickback from the company who organized the hikes out to the glacier.

  The guy was my age, maybe a little younger, but had already seemed jaded from years of customer service, so… probably both.

  Waiting for my fellow sheep to gather up their crap and get the hell off the bus was only mildly less frustrating than it had been waiting for people to deboard the plane in Oslo yesterday. I stood at the edge of the narrow aisle, an elbow propped on the seat in front of me, the British teens already deep into photo edits that we all had to hear about. With my backpack on and jacket zipped up, a rush of heat crept up my neck, adding fuel to the fire that was my mood.

  I’d been devastated since Opa died a few weeks before this past Christmas. I’d been fucking fuming since I found out Devlin had been screwing my best friend for six months before that but hadn’t had the nerve to break things off with me while I was in mourning. And now, two months later… Now I was sad and angry, and fucking tired, jet lag a cruel bitch I should have expected to get hit with harder. Sad and angry and tired and hot. I’d never traveled outside of the US before, rarely ever left Manhattan honestly, all my time devoted to my craft since I was a kid. Before this trip, I had spent ages researching, my ability to concentrate on anything besides the drama in my life totally razor-thin—but at least I’d tried.

  And May in Norway was supposed to be temperamental, so I had packed accordingly. This morning, the wind battered my adorable little hotel, whistling so shrilly through the rafters that I almost didn’t climb out from under the covers. The floor had been cold. The tiny shared bathroom freezing, the hot water limited. The dining room chilly. I’d layered up, dressed to stay warm for the day outdoors.

  Just a few hours later, as the herd finally started to filter off the bus, the wind had died, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the sun beat down like someone had placed a giant magnifying glass over this particular plot of land. Nowhere else. Just here. With me. Because of course.

  Trundling down the steep bus steps, I threw my hair up in a messy bun, then undid my jacket as soon as I separated myself from the rest of the group. A few others were also shedding layers, leaving them on the bus as our guides got us organized. G
iven how swiftly the weather had turned, I had no intention of leaving anything behind, but I did switch out my thick socks for the thinner ones I’d stuffed in my bag this morning. Without the wool climbing up my calves, my lace-up boots felt a little less secure, but they were designed to protect ankles in these sorts of situations, no matter the sock type—right?

  Because a ballet dancer was nothing without the tools of her trade. I had rolled, sprained, and fucked up my ankles in my twenty-four years more times than I cared to admit, and even though I wouldn’t be back in my studio—any studio—for at least three months, maybe more depending on my mood and my health after this trip, I refused to put my best assets at risk.

  Four-hundred-dollar hiking boots in mahogany brown, never used before an hour ago? Check.

  Aside from the lone car parked at the other end of the lot, it appeared we were the only ones headed up to see the glacier today. Our huge fire truck–red tour bus cut through most of the parking spaces anyway, but beyond that stood a treasure trove of natural beauty that I craved. After everything, I needed simplicity—leaves and dirt and rocks, steep hills that would make my heart race and my body ache and my mind quiet. I needed silence.