Truth: A Valkyrie Saga Book 3
Epilogue

After all of the shit that Regina put me and Blake through, I had silently sworn off ever falling in love. For a very brief amount of time, I had thought that I had loved Regina but in hindsight, I realized that I had just been infatuated with the idea of her and drowning in lust. From that point on I figured that lust was okay as long as I never took it farther than that. Real feelings were dangerous. I had Weapons, Strength, and Compulsion making me damn near invincible to everything except feelings. The only real defense against them was not developing them in the first place.

I loved my brother. I loved my clanmates. That was enough for me.

Or at least that is what I had deluded myself into believing. Ray had effortlessly shown me just how naive and clueless I had been.

Ray first breached my walls when she actually apologized to me after I had traumatized her with my Compulsion gift and she completely obliterated them when she painfully sacrificed her life force to save me in that moondust factory. I hadn’t known that females could be so selfless. Hadn’t believed that female Valkyries were even capable of empathy, compassion, and kindness because Regina and Queen Florence were the only examples I had to go by.

Ray had shown me an entire world that I was missing in the few short months that I have known her and somewhere along the way I fell irrevocably in love with her. She now held a very real way to completely obliterate me because she completely owned my heart.

Some part of me realized that love was a two-way street. That I now had the same power to hurt Ray as she did me, making her just as vulnerable as I was. But honestly, the thought hadn’t occurred to me because I knew I would never do anything to intentionally hurt her. It hadn’t occurred to me until the moment that Maddison said the word pregnant. But the look of pure devastation that rippled across Ray’s unique and beautiful features when she accepted that Maddison was pregnant with our baby nearly tore my heart out.

I was the reason Ray looked like she was literally breaking in two. I was the reason her face was pale and tears were streaming down her cheeks. I was the reason she was staring at me with shock, disbelief, and soul-crushing agony. I had seen her place her hands on Max’s Shield. I had witnessed the aftermath of what Derik did to her and saw the photos of her during that time. I had stood back and watched as she was whipped by a royal guard and not once did she look as broken as she did right now.

It was in her eyes. She was trying to hide it but I could see the pain in her eyes and I didn’t know how to make it better, I just knew that I would do anything to remove the pain from those beautiful green eyes. I would work day in and day out for the rest of my life if she could find some way to forgive me for putting her through this. Because even watching her go through it was breaking my heart.

Then, for an instant, the torment I saw infinitely deepened before it was replaced by an awful acceptance. Ray told me that I would be a wonderful father and then she did the unthinkable.

Ray said goodbye.

Not in so many words, but I knew Ray and I could see her decision in her gaze. She had decided that she was going to leave me. Leave Blake. White-hot pain, a hundred times worse than when I was shot in the chest, seared through me as that realization hit me full force. We still didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on with Maddison and I didn’t have the capacity to believe that she was actually pregnant with one of our sons. But the point was, that this shit show had just been dumped on our laps moments ago. And that was all it took for Ray to turn away from me. Mere moments and at least three broken hearts.

She had said she would never leave us. And I had believed her.

In the next instant, the air waivered with pure power, and a crack was ripped open behind Ray. Light radiated out of the crack and what looked to be layers of different colors stacked up against one another vertically with different textures and impressions lined the edges of the crack endlessly. Fear flooded my body at the sight of that crack and somehow I knew that it wasn’t supposed to be here. That it violated the laws of physics and nature. Somehow I knew that there would be immutable consequences because of its presence here.

I stepped forwards and tried to grab Ray and pull her away from the crack but my hand simply ghosted through her. I could still see her, but she was already beyond my reach. The image of Ray impossible bent so that she was both here, just inches away from where I was standing, and also infinitely far away at the other end of the crack. The image of her that I could not reach bent in pain and my fear was replaced by terror. In the next blink, the crack was gone as if it had never existed in the first place leaving nothing behind. Leaving no trace that it had just stolen my heart.

-- Connor Berg

A/N: Hello my beautiful readers! Please don’t hate me for this cliff I am leaving you on. But this is a conflict that will take more than a couple of chapters to resolve and this book is already the longest in the series at over 130,000 words. I want to thank each and every one of you for staying with me as I told Ray’s story. I love each comment and I read them almost obsessively. They really encourage me to keep writing and updating, so thank you.

Unfortunately, life has gotten a little hectic, with my dog being diagnosed with cancer, my sister having a beautiful baby boy, and my parents getting a messy divorce. In short, life has been keeping me on my toes and I haven’t started writing the fourth book yet. But I will! I promise there will be at least two more books in this series. Hopefully, I will get a chance to write more during my summer break and will start updating Ray’s story again late summer or early fall.

If you are still liking this story and enjoyed reading the first three books, I am going to ask you for a favor. Can you please leave a review of either one of the books specifically or of the series as a whole? Like the kind that you see on the back cover of books when they are published. I am exploring the idea of getting a publisher and I think honest reviews from people that have read the story will help me.

With Love,

-E.A. Baker

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