Iron Seas 03 - Riveted

likely. Had her sister truly believed that she wouldn’t survive outside of Hannasvik?
    “Källa.” It was a struggle to keep the hurt out of her voice. “I have been in the New World for four years .”
    “Well, now you can run back home, and I will continue protecting you all.”
    “Protecting us?” Annika shook her head in disbelief. The resentment in Källa’s voice didn’t surprise her. She’d been tossed out of Hannasvik, after all. She’d made a sacrifice that Annika had thrown back at her. But she was also with the man who posed the most danger to everyone in Iceland. “Do you know what Lorenzo di Fiore has done?”
    “Yes. Perhaps not all of it, but enough.” Her eyes hardened. “Who do you think that I’m protecting you all from?”
    Annika didn’t know. She didn’t understand any of this. “How is being here protecting Hannasvik?”
    “I met Paolo only a day after I left, Annika. He and Lorenzo were on the peninsula—he needed a volcano, and he’d chosen ours. So I convinced him to go south, away from Hannasvik, where the volcanoes are more active.”
    “And then you stayed with him?”
    “Lorenzo is ready to take all of Iceland over to help his father. I had to make certain that Lorenzo never looked in that direction.”
    Stunned, Annika stared at her. “You knew all of this about him and still had a son with him? You lay with him?”
    “With Lorenzo?” Disgust curled Källa’s mouth. “I lay with Paolo. I would as soon bed an orca as I would his son. There’s something wrong in him, Annika.”
    It wasn’t Lorenzo? Relief swept through her, lightening some of the weight around her heart. “Is he forcing you to stay here?”
    “No. I’m protecting you all, as I said. And Paolo, too. As I understand it, there are many men in the New World who would be glad to hurt him. Lorenzo worries that one of them might come for Paolo, if they knew he was here.”
    Because of the disaster that had killed Inga. “Why not kill Lorenzo?”
    “I promised that I wouldn’t until his father passed on.” Källa held her gaze. “I don’t want to see Paolo hurt, either.”
    And if she’d bedded him, she must believe that Paolo was a good man. “But Lorenzo knows you will kill him?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then why keep you on?”
    “I make Paolo happy. And because I know the island, and told him how to build the trolls. I was hoping to hurry all of this up. Until it is over, I’ll protect Paolo, watch over him.”
    “Why?”
    “Because Paolo is not always here to look after himself.” With a soft smile, she glanced down at her son. “Paolo is much like you, too, Annika—a dreamer. But his dreams are much bigger.”
    Though he and Lorenzo walked alone through the tunnels , David chose not to beat the man bloody, drag him up to the airship, and demand they return to Vik. David might have risked the guards. He wouldn’t risk Annika.
    In relation to the rest of the camp, these living quarters made up the southern leg of the three-sided layout. The snow tunnels led through several ice-walled chambers of the same size as the hearth chamber, with more tunnels leading offside to smaller, individual chambers. The sides of each chamber were only waist high but with the peaked center of the ceiling rising to a comfortable height. Most were empty, and though David didn’t remark on it, Lorenzo offered that he preferred not to be disturbed while sleeping—and which David took to mean that he didn’t trust anyone to be near him during that time.
    Paolo’s laboratory formed the corner between the southern and eastern sides of the camp, where the laborers and guards resided. The laboratory could have fit two of the hearth chambers inside,and another stacked on top. They’d dug deeper into the ice before laying the floor, and the blue ice walls rose twice as high. The effect was strangely beautiful—though the laboratory itself could have come directly from the New World. Slate boards had been nailed into the ice walls, with diagrams and calculations scrawled in chalk. Long tables held an array of equipment and glass tubing. Machine parts lay scattered beneath a drafting desk. Chickens clucked in a wire pen.
    A tray of half-eaten food teetered on the corner of one table, as if abruptly forgotten. Deeper into the laboratory, a man sat on the wooden floor, bent over the domed helmet in his lap. No shirt covered his upper body, revealing age-softened muscles. He wore no proper trousers, only a pair