Vastervik: Chapter 5

Content Warning:

This chapter contains a virginity examination by a familial authority figure, coercive control framed as protection, and self-inflicted genital pain as a learned punishment response.

Look after yourself first, and give this chapter a miss if this’ll be difficult for you.

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Casper smelled the alpha on his own skin the entire walk back.

The cliff path was familiar enough that his feet found the holds without his eyes, the smooth places between the sharp places, the flat rock where the thrift grew in dense pink cushions and the ground was stable. Fenrir ranged ahead. Sól stayed at his heel, close enough that her shoulder brushed his thigh on every other stride. The fish were gone. The fire was out. His tunic was damp against his back where he’d pulled it on over skin that hadn’t fully dried, and underneath the linen and the salt and the residual smoke from the driftwood, there it was. The alpha’s scent, warm and foreign, layered over his own like a hand placed on top of another hand.

He’d touched Casper’s arm. One finger, drawn from wrist to elbow, and Casper had sat there and let the goosebumps rise in its wake and not pulled away, as he should have.

He hadn’t pulled away.

The wind came off the headland and pushed his hair across his face. Casper tucked it behind his ear with fingers that smelled of fish guts and salt and, faintly, of the place where his skin had been close to Tobias Everett’s skin. He walked faster. Sól matched his pace without complaint.

Svartborg came into view as he crested the final ridge. All dark walls, dark stone, and three crooked chimneys sending their smoke sideways in the wind. The castle looked the same as it always did, the same as it had looked every evening of every year of his life when he came back from the sea or the cliffs or the cove, barefoot, carrying whatever the day foraging had given him.

He came through the garden gate. The vegetable beds were dark with recent rain, the kale heavy-headed, the herbs in their stone troughs releasing scent as the evening cool drew it from the leaves. He could hear voices from the kitchen. Agna, the cook, and one of the maids. The dogs peeled away from him without being told, Fenrir heading for the kitchen door where Agna kept a bowl of scraps, Sól disappearing around the side of the building toward whatever she did when she wasn’t guarding him.

Casper crossed the courtyard. The flagstones were cold under his feet. He was nearly at the east door, the one that led to the narrow staircase and his rooms on the second floor, when he heard boots on stone behind him.

“Casper.”

He stopped.

Leif Eiriksson stood in the doorway of the armoury. He filled it the way his father filled a room, with height and breadth and a certainty about his right to occupy space. He was twenty-seven, dark-haired where his father was fair, with the same wide jaw and the same way of looking at someone that made the looking feel like a verdict was about to be delivered. He wore a wool jumper with the sleeves pushed to his elbows and breeches tucked into boots that were caked with mud from the hill pastures. His forearms were brown from the summer work. A leather falconry glove hung from his belt.

Casper had known Leif since before he could form memories. They had been raised in the same household, eaten at the same table, been taught by the same tutors. Leif had carried him on his shoulders when Casper was small enough to be carried. Leif had taught him to gut fish, to read the tide charts, to identify the stars by their Vasterviksk names. Leif called him litli bróðir. Little brother.

Leif was not smiling.

“Where were you?”

“Swimming.” Casper held the edge of the door frame. The stone was rough under his palm. “At the south cove.”

“For three hours?”

“The current was good. I stayed.”

Leif stepped out of the armoury doorway. He moved the way all the Eirikssons moved, with that unhurried authority that came from growing up in a place where your family had been in charge for seven hundred years. He crossed the courtyard in six strides. Eight for anyone else. His hand closed firmly around Casper’s upper arm, and he steered him through the east door and into the corridor without breaking his pace.

The corridor was dim. Stone walls, no windows, the only light coming from a tallow candle guttering in a wall sconce. It smelled of damp wool and old smoke. Leif’s grip didn’t loosen. He walked Casper past the first landing, past the door to the library where the tutors kept the old maps, past the narrow alcove where Casper used to hide as a child, and into Casper’s own room.

The room was small, as castle rooms went. It was mostly taken up by a bed with a wooden frame and a mattress stuffed with wool. There was a chest for his clothes. A table under the window where his books were stacked in two piles, the ones he’d finished and the ones he was reading. The window faced the sea. The evening light came through it grey-blue, the colour of deep water.

Leif shut the door.

“The Everett alpha was on the south path this afternoon,” Leif said. “One of the shepherds saw him.” He let go of Casper’s arm. “Were you with him?”

Casper rubbed the place where Leif’s fingers had been. The skin was warm. It would mark. It always marked.

“He was lost. I gave him fish.”

“You gave him fish.” Leif repeated it flatly, already past the asking questions stage. “Casper. Sit down.”

Casper sat on the edge of the bed. The wool mattress compressed under his weight. The blanket was rough against the backs of his thighs where the tunic rode up.

Leif crouched in front of him. His knees cracked. Up close, Casper could see the sun damage on his cheekbones, the scar through his left eyebrow from a childhood fall on the harbour rocks. Leif’s eyes were grey, lighter than Casper’s. They searched his face.

“Did he touch you?”

“No.”

Leif held his gaze. The candle in the corridor threw a band of light under the door that crossed the floor between them.

“Lie down.”

Casper lay back on the bed. He looked at the ceiling. There was a crack in the plaster that ran from the window corner to the beam above the bed. It had been there as long as he could remember. It was shaped, if you squinted, like the coastline of the mainland, the long curve of the Norwegian fjords tapering to a point where the plaster met the stone.

Leif pushed the tunic up to Casper’s waist.

His hands were efficient. Not rough, not gentle. He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of Casper’s loose trousers and pulled them down to his knees in a single motion. The air hit Casper’s bare skin. The room was cold. His skin tightened, the muscles in his stomach contracting.

Leif put a hand on his knee and pushed his legs apart.

Casper kept his eyes on the crack in the ceiling. Norway. The fjords. The point where the plaster met the stone. He’d traced that crack in his mind a hundred times. Two hundred. He knew the exact place where it branched, a hairline fracture splitting off toward the wall like a river delta. He knew the place where someone, years ago, had tried to patch it with lime, leaving a pale ridge that the damp had since darkened to grey.

Leif’s fingers didn’t enter him. They never did. He parted the soft folds of Casper’s slit with his thumb and forefinger, spreading the lips, and looked.

“You know why this matters.” Leif’s voice was low. Steady. The voice he used for the young horses when he was breaking them to the halter. “You’re the only one we have, Casper. The only male omega born to Vastervik in three hundred years. Do you understand what that means? What duties you carry?”

The cold air reached the interior skin of his slit, the delicate tissue that was not meant for an alpha’s eyes or pleasure. Casper could feel the soft wet membrane tightening against the exposure. He tried to close his legs, but Leif’s hands held him open.

“This,” Leif said, his thumb shifting, pressing the folds wider. Casper felt the thin stretch of the tissue that sat just inside, the fragile seal that marked him as untouched. “This is the covenant. Between you and the sea. Between Skalavik and everything that keeps us whole. Every boat that comes back safe. Every net that comes up full. This is what holds it.”

Casper counted by the pulse in his throat. One. Two. Three. The crack in the ceiling branched at the place where the lime patch met the old plaster.

Leif’s touch sent a pulse of warmth through Casper’s cunt. Faint, involuntary. He felt it move through him, a low current that gathered in the pit of his stomach, and for one bright, annihilating second he thought about pressing his hips down. Just shifting his weight. Letting Leif’s careful, reverent finger slip past the membrane it was so gently inspecting. He could feel exactly where the tissue would give. He could feel how little pressure it would take. And then it would be done, and the covenant would be broken, and the boats could sink or float on their own merits, and no one would ever need to hold him open and check again.

Casper kept himself still.

“You cannot let one alpha with soft hands and a London suit claim this.” Leif’s fingers shifted again. Adjusting. Making sure. “You understand? It doesn’t mend. It doesn’t come back. You cannot let seven hundred years of the covenant break because a rich man smiled at you on a beach.”

Leif let go. He pulled the trousers back up to Casper’s hips, tugged the tunic down, and stood. His knees cracked again.

“Good,” he said. The word came out soft, relieved.

Casper sat up. He put his feet on the floor. The boards were cold.

Leif leaned against the door frame and crossed his arms. The falconry glove swung from his belt.

“The city man is here for a contract,” Leif said. “He’s here because his family wants our money, our harbours, and the right to build on our coast. He’s not here because he’s interested in swimming or fish or cliff paths. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“His father is the same. They came to Nordhavn with a proposal full of English words for what they want to do to our infrastructure. Very polished. Very expensive. They want to build, and charge us for the building, and then charge us again for the maintenance. Edmund, the brother, he’s straightforward enough. A businessman. But the younger one.” Leif’s jaw tightened. A muscle moved beneath the scar on his eyebrow. “He looks at you, Casper.”

“Everyone looks at me.”

“Not like that.” Leif pushed off the door frame. He crossed to the window and looked out at the sea. The light was behind him now, his face in shadow. “The fishermen look at you because you are the Consort. Their families have looked to the Consort for safety for seven hundred years. They look at you the way they look at the sea itself. But this Everett alpha looks at you and sees something he wants to own.”

Casper said nothing. His hands were in his lap. The fingers of his right hand found the place on his left forearm where Toby’s finger had traced a line from wrist to elbow. The goosebumps were gone. The skin was smooth.

“You belong to the sea,” Leif said. “Not to an alpha. Not to a man from London.”

He stopped in front of Casper, reached down, and cupped the side of his face. His palm was rough and warm. His thumb traced Casper’s cheekbone. Casper could smell himself on Leif’s fingers. The private, salt-sweet scent of his own interior skin, still warm on the hand now cradling his jaw.

“You know I love you,” Leif said. “You’re my brother. Everything I do is to keep you safe.”

“I know.”

“So stay away from the Everett.”

Leif dropped his hand. He opened the door, walked through it, and pulled it shut behind him. His boots sounded on the stone stairs, fading, and then the corridor was quiet.

Casper sat on the bed. He listened to the wind outside the window. The distant clang of something metal in the courtyard, a gate or a bucket or a chain. Fenrir barked once, far off, a deep sound absorbed by the stone walls.

He put his hand between his legs. Not inside the trousers. Just his palm, flat, pressed against the fabric over the soft mound of his slit. Felt the warmth of his own hand against himself. He held it there. The pressure sent a slow, sweet pulse through the tissue, the same warmth he’d felt under Leif’s fingers, and his hips shifted against his palm before he could stop them.

He pinched the mound through the linen. Hard, his thumb and forefinger closing on the soft flesh, compressing the sensitive tissue beneath. The pain cut clean through the warmth and scattered it. His eyes watered. He held the pinch until the wanting stopped, until his body went quiet again, and then he let go. The skin throbbed where he’d gripped it, hot and tender. He’d done this before. He would do it again. The punishment always went to the place that had misbehaved, so the place would learn.

He pulled his knees to his chest and looked at the crack in the ceiling until the light faded and the room went dark.