The Storm Trapped Me With My Estranged Viking Husband

The wind was a liar. It tasted of salt and distance, promising ships on the horizon, but the sea remained a vast, churning emptiness. Helina stood on the highest point of the cliff, letting the gale whip her thick, blonde braids across her face, the stinging strands a welcome distraction from the knot tightening in her stomach. Six months. Six months of this torturous vigil, watching the fjord for a dragon-headed prow that might never cut through the waves again.

Part of her prayed it wouldn’t.

Her hands clenched at her sides, nails digging into her palms. The dread was a familiar companion, a cold shadow that had settled over their longhouse the morning Lorenzo had sailed away. It was a dread of his return, of the suffocating silence that would once again fill the space between them, of the dark, assessing gaze that made her feel both seen and stripped bare.

But beneath the dread, a deeper, more shameful feeling festered: fear. Fear that a storm had claimed him. That raiders had taken his ship. That he was lying dead on some foreign shore, and she would never even know it. The thought was a sharp, physical pain, and she hated herself for it. She had no right to mourn a man she had driven away.

“You have a southerner’s soul, all soft words and scheming ambition,” she had spat at him, her voice echoing the accusations of her kin. Their fight had been brutal, a fire that consumed the fragile truce they had built over a year of arranged marriage.

His face, usually so controlled, had fractured with a hurt that was sharper than any blade. “And you have a heart as cold as the winter ice, Helina. You build walls so high you can’t see the man trying to build a life with you on the other side.”

He had been wrong. Her heart wasn’t cold; it was a raw, gaping wound. He had left her with his accusation hanging in the air, a final, damning verdict on their union. He’d sailed south for trade, for alliances he claimed would secure their future, but she knew he was running. Fleeing the chill of a wife who didn't know how to love him, who only knew how to fight.

Now, the wind bit at her cheeks, and she stared at the gray water, trapped between two impossible outcomes. His death would mean a lifetime of hollow freedom. His return would mean facing the man whose absence had carved an ache so deep inside her she could feel it in her bones. An ache that felt terrifyingly like longing.

Turning her back on the sea, Helina stalked away from the cliff’s edge. The wind could keep its empty promises. She retreated into the longhouse, the heavy door groaning shut behind her, plunging the vast hall into a dim, oppressive quiet. The air was thick with the scent of cold ash and him—a faint, lingering trace of leather and the foreign spices he favored that clung to the furs and timbers. His presence was an echo, a ghost that made the emptiness feel deliberate, like a punishment. This was their home, a space meant to be shared, but his absence had turned it into a cage of memory and silence. The thought of him returning, filling this space with his physical presence, with his dark, knowing eyes, was a looming threat that made her skin crawl.

She needed to do something with her hands, something to stop their trembling. Her gaze fell on her axe, resting against the central hearth pillar. Its polished head gleamed faintly in the low light. She picked it up, the familiar weight of the ash wood shaft a comfort in her palms. Crossing to the grinding stone near the entrance, she began the rhythmic work of sharpening the blade.

Scrape. Turn. Scrape.

The grating sound filled the silence, a harsh meditation against the turmoil in her mind. With each pass of the steel against the stone, a memory surfaced, unbidden. It was from before the fighting, from that fragile time when their arranged union had begun to feel like something more. He had watched her train in the yard, not with the detached assessment of a husband gauging his wife’s strange skills, but with an intense, focused curiosity. He hadn’t understood her need for the blade, but he had respected it. One afternoon, he’d brought her a waterskin without a word, his fingers brushing hers as she took it. The contact was brief, accidental, but a jolt of heat had shot up her arm. He’d held her gaze for a heartbeat too long, and in his dark eyes, she had seen not a southerner looking at a northern savage, but a man looking at a woman.

The memory soured, curdling into the bitterness of their last argument. The very strength he seemed to admire was what he’d thrown back in her face. His ambition, the drive that had intrigued her, became a weapon he used to call her stagnant, provincial. He was sailing to build a future, he’d claimed, a future for them. But all she had heard was that her world, her life, was not enough. That she was not enough.

She pressed the axe harder against the stone, her knuckles white. The blade was now honed to a razor’s edge, gleaming and lethal. She ran her thumb lightly over the steel, a hair’s breadth from drawing blood. It was ready. For what, she didn’t know. A fight, a reckoning, or simply the act of carving her way through another day. The controlled violence of the task had settled her hands, but her heart still hammered a frantic, anxious rhythm against her ribs.

A deep, resonant blast of a horn cut through the air, vibrating through the thick timbers of the longhouse and up through the soles of her feet. The sound was not one of her people’s. It was longer, deeper. Southern.

His.

The axe clattered from her numb fingers, striking the stone floor with a sharp ring that echoed in the sudden, ringing silence that followed. For a frozen moment, she didn’t move, didn’t breathe. It couldn’t be. The wind was a liar. The sea was empty.

But the horn sounded again, closer this time, a mournful, insistent call against the rising howl of the wind. A storm was coming. Not the slow gathering of clouds she had watched from the cliff, but a true squall, fast and violent. The sky outside the smoke-hole had turned a bruised purple-gray.

Her feet moved before her mind caught up, carrying her to the heavy wooden door. She pulled it open just enough to peer out, bracing it against a sudden, furious gust of wind that tore at her clothes and threw icy spray into her face. The air smelled of rain and ozone, thick and heavy.

And there, breaking through the churning, white-capped waves of the fjord, was his ship. The Sea Serpent. Its dragon-headed prow was unmistakable, a dark, menacing shape carved from black oak, its painted eyes seeming to stare directly at her. It moved with a desperate speed, racing the storm to the safety of the shore.

Helina’s heart, which had been hammering, now felt as if it had stopped altogether, a cold, heavy stone in her chest. Six months of waiting, of dreading and hoping and hating herself for both, were over. He was here. Not as a ghost or a memory, but as a physical reality of wood and sail and men, cutting through the water that separated them.

She watched, mesmerized, as the sky opened up. Rain began to fall, not in drops, but in solid, wind-driven sheets that blurred the world into a wash of gray. The ship was a dark spear aimed at the heart of their settlement. At the heart of her home.

He would make it to shore before the worst of the storm hit. He would seek shelter. Their shelter.

A cold dread, sharper and more potent than any she had felt before, washed over her. It wasn't just the fight she was afraid of anymore. It was this. The storm would rage for hours, perhaps days. The fjord would be impassable, the paths turned to mud. There would be no escape. Not for him. Not for her.

She let the door swing shut, the heavy thud sealing her in. The longhouse was no longer a cage of memory; it was about to become a crucible. The fire in the central hearth seemed to flicker, casting long, dancing shadows that felt like they were closing in. They would be trapped in this space, just the two of them, with nothing but a fire and six months of unspoken rage between them. The reckoning she had both feared and craved was no longer a distant possibility. It was here, borne on a salt-stained wind, and it was about to break down her door.