Nelek

By Severine Wolfe

Neither one of them had been looking for romantic love. They were happy for acceptance.

Nelek has to confront a lot of demons after his years being held by the Ganelon, the biggest one if he wants Nikole, his aversion to being touched at all by anyone.

Their love for each other was never in question, only the ability to do anything about it. Join the two of them as they have to work hard to be together. They are not just fighting the forces around them, but their own fears and baggage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Severine Wolfe
• Release date: Dec 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005484545

Severine Wolfe

Severine Wolfe is a pen name. It's also a name I've used across the gaming world for nearly 20 years. I answer to, "Hey, Sev!" just as easily as my birth name.I am married and have four grown children and three grandchildren. I love to read and I read everything from treatises on philosophy to theories on the speed of light to the most bawdy of bodice rippers. My interests are varied but reading, knitting and gardening are my top three. Extreme knitting, not for the faint of heart.I've had stories running around my head for years and I'm just now letting them out to put themselves on the virtual page. I hope you enjoy the characters as much as I have over the years. You can contact me at [e-mail].

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Nelek

Urban Paladins Book 7

Severine Wolfe

Book Title Copyright © 2021 by Severine Wolfe. All Rights Reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review. 

Cover designed by Melody Simmons https://bookcoverscre8tive.com/ 

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. 

Severine Wolfe

Visit my website at www.Sevwolfe.com 

Printed in the United States of America 

First Printing: December 2021

ISBN-13 9781005484545

This is to the folks who kept asking me about Nelek and his story. He’s been patiently waiting for his turn since Quis Solvit. Thanks for your patience until I could completely figure him out.

Neither one of them had been looking for romantic love. They were happy for acceptance.

Nelek has to confront a lot of demons after his years being held by the Ganelon, the biggest one if he wants Nikole, his aversion to being touched at all by anyone.

Their love for each other was never in question, only the ability to do anything about it. Join the two of them as they have to work hard to be together. They are not just fighting the forces around them, but their own fears and baggage

ONE

I had helped Tristan bring her home. I had helped train her up. I’d taught her to drive. She’d understood me in a way Martin could never have. I’d taught her to game, how to live the upper middle-class lifestyle her new parents made available to her. She was one of the few people I truly didn’t mind touching me, even though she respected that boundary very well. She had learned how to accept the hugs and touchy feely shit our little cadre of Paladins handed out on a regular basis.

I knew I loved her, but I could never be what she needed because I could never, ever be intimate, with anyone, for any reason. No matter how badly I wanted it.

If wishes were horses, what riders we’d be, as the old saying goes.

I’d experienced too much shit, that even though I wanted to explore more with Nikole, I never could because the mere thought of it tied me up in knots.

I had been kidnapped by Ganelon, led by a Dark Witch, when I was ten. I had been sixteen when Allie had saved me, and Martin had taken me under his wing. He felt he was the best person since he’d discovered his sword when his guardian had tried to rape him just days after his parent’s death. At least it had been days and not hours. Lucky him.

It wasn’t that I was resentful that he hadn’t been raped as I had for six years. It was that I’d been completely unable to escape because no one knew to even look for me.

My father had taken me and my mother deep into wooded areas in northwest Poland and hidden us there. We never met neighbors. I never played with other kids. So, when my parents were murdered and I was taken, nobody noticed. Nobody cared.

The night Allie had captured the Ganelon who’d taken me and began his reconciliation everyone heard about what he’d done to me. I’d been shamed and horrified anyone knew and it took a while for that resentment to leave me, even after Martin had purified me.

To be honest, they never treated me differently, none of them. However, it was the emotion on a face or catching a glint in their eye. They pitied me and I did not want to be pitied. I’d survived when others hadn’t. That came with a whole different load of baggage.

Nikole knew though. She knew what it was like to be held down, penetrated, and violated to the depths of your soul. She’d even been gang raped, which I never had. Thank God.

But she understood me and my moods better than any of them ever could.

Martin wanted me to talk to someone, but who? I couldn’t explain Paladins to anyone, why I had been taken and how I’d clawed my way back to sanity. Only Nikole understood and sometimes I worried that I only thought I loved her because of that one thing, but I knew it wasn’t true. There were so many things to love about her. She was beautiful. Her dark skin, almost ebony, and all those tiny braids in her hair. I loved looking at them and hearing the click of the beads in her braids.

Her skin was so soft, especially after two years of Allie taking really good care of her. I didn’t mind touching her skin at all. But I never took advantage. I didn’t have her permission, not in that way, so I avoided contact because just one touch and I wanted to touch more.

Before I had discovered my gift of healing, I’d seriously considered entering the priesthood. I would not have to worry about such things. Going out with Brion and Gabriel had taught me that. What was with women coming up and just grabbing your junk? If I’d walked up to any of the ones who had done it to me, grabbed them by their privates, I would have been arrested. I’d stopped going out with them. The club girl scene was not for me.

I didn’t like parties, either. I liked working at the wood shop where I had apprenticed with an artisan wood carver. I’d been working there since Martin and Allie had moved out to the suburbs, years ago, and I loved the work I did making cabinets, bespoke wood carvings for new houses and the odd statue. It calmed my wounded soul as nothing else had until Nikole came along.

Now, she was getting ready to enter Rice University because she was a genius in math. She would be moving into Martin and Allie’s old apartment, which had been Ceilidh’s apartment and now just seemed to exist to house Paladins. I had been chosen to move in with her. Brion, Allie’s brother, was already there. We would be her protectors, like she needed one, but we were there for her none the less.

Allie and Martin had fully adopted her, even though she was nearly an adult because they loved her as much as their baby, Kate. Kate was nearly two years old and into everything. They had their hands full with that one. However, they worried more about Nikole moving into the city for better access to West U, where Rice University sat, and all of the wonderful resources to be had in the downtown area. She’d also be attending our old sword master’s school there to keep working on her martial arts and sword mastery.

Are you sure you don’t want to spend the first semester at home? Allie wheedled and Martin laughed. I mean, just until you’re sure…

Sure, of what, she never said, because it was just an excuse to keep Nikole home. Nik didn’t really want to leave either, but the drive each day would drive her mad.

I was the only one who called her Nik, and she always gave me that beautiful smile when I did. Positive reinforcement. I read a ton of self-help books on my e-reader. Nobody could see the covers or judge that way.

I’d spent my years with the Hayes’ reading up on psychology and how to deal with sexual abuse and none of it had really helped me at all. That was why I was sure that talking to someone wasn’t going to help, except, in a way, a very small way, it had. I had talked to Nikole. It had made me realize, concretely, that I was not alone in the world, that other people would know what I’d been through. She knew in a way few others could what I’d experienced and what I lived with on a daily basis.

Mom, you can’t miss me if I don’t ever leave, Nikole joked and sent Martin a pleading look. She wanted so badly to stay home with her parents that she was on the brink of caving in.

Allie, she has to take those steps away from the nest, Momma Bird, Martin said to his wife, pulling her into his chest and hugging her tightly. I could see it hurt him as well, but he knew it had to be done.

Brion came clomping down the stairs carrying a box to put into his truck.

I got this box from your closet, Nikole. Let’s get a move on.

Allie sighed and turned into Martin’s chest. Next thing he’s going to say is ‘we’re burnin’ daylight’.

We’re burnin’ daylight! Brion immediately drawled.

Allie broke away from Martin and ran to Nikole, pulling her into a tight hug. Nik oofed but smiled, hugging her mom right back.

Call us as soon as you get there, Allied ordered and they followed us out. Brion got into his truck, I got into my car and Nikole got into her car, all with our parking stickers for the apartment building garage. We had already parked our motorcycles at a storage lot near the apartment.

We left while Kate was napping because seeing Nikole leave would have broken the baby’s heart. I’d seen her cry when Nikole left to go anywhere, wanting to go with her sister. For not being blood, they were tight. Nikole would slaughter anyone who looked at Kate the wrong way. They loved each other as sisters should.

Last summer Nikole’s friend Mandy had been raped by her uncle in California. The poor girl had been violated for a week, and then came home worried she was pregnant. The man had stolen her virginity and her trust of family. She’d turned to Nik, knowing, somehow, that my girl would understand, and Nikole had, even going so far as to buy two pregnancy tests for her to take, then standing by her when she told her family and the police.

The girl’s family was something else, not believing her until her older sister had come forward and told them the filth had raped her the entire time she’d lived with him when she went to Stanford. She’d been an adult where Mandy had only been sixteen. She’d not cared enough to warn Mandy or tell the rest of the family they were sending her to a predator.

Gabriel had taken care of that evil and never blinked. His call to champion victimized women was a strong one. I’d seen him go into his Paladin call too many times to ignore it.

Before I had left, Martin had taken me aside and given me strict orders to write everything down or Allie would kill us both, and to never, ever go to the Medical Center or any hospitals if I could help it.

We were the only two healers in the Paladin arsenal and so little was known about our gift that everyone wanted us to document each healing, even if it was a scraped knee. We got tons of practice with that thanks to the new generation of Paladins being very fruitful and multiplying.

Hell, even Tristan had three kids and a wife he adored. He’d been the biggest man whore who had ever lived, but he had handed down his rules. Never go back for seconds, and never get involved, and most important, no glove, no love. Club girls were looking for hook ups, not relationships, so it was an even playing field with them, plus, Martin had admitted to me, they were always ready, so you didn’t have to learn how to get them ready. He blushed so very nicely when he had explained things to me.

I was the last to pull onto the road, but it looked like Nikole and Brion were going to race to the apartment. I let them. I was still busy thinking about Nikole and how much I loved her and how it was supposed to work. Then, how impossible it all was. She deserved more than a broken man who could never give her the intimacy any sort of true relationship would require.

She had tried dating, with Gabriel and hadn’t really seen what it was all about. She hung out with us, she hung out with her girls, but she had never been outwardly interested in any boy, never talked about one, either. It was the only thing that gave me hope.

I don’t know why, but I continued to feel like I needed to hang back, take more time. As it was, I was almost moving backwards with her, moving into the apartment with Brion there, but the reason I was doing that was because he was working over one hundred hours a week as an associate at his uncle’s law firm and came home to shower and sleep. Allie and Brion both agreed that was the way of life for a young lawyer just out of school and new to the bar.

The wood shop I worked in was not too far away, no further than Martin and Allie’s home and I could easily be at home or on the Rice campus if I needed to be. Plus, my boss was cool about the time I had to take off for Paladin stuff. Even after the years I’d been with him, I think he thought I had a chronically ill family member I cared for. I let him because I couldn’t explain the reasons I had to hare off to Europe or Asia for Paladin stuff.

As I pulled into the parking garage and drove up, I wondered how all of this would play out. Would Nikole find college as oppressive as I had? I had gone to community college to learn human anatomy and physiology, as well as microbiology and nutrition to help my healing and understanding of what I was doing. Martin had just read a ton of textbooks.

We both religiously documented everything and gave it to Allie or Ceilidh for the archives and records available to all Paladins. Ceilidh and Martin had both received their swords with no knowledge of what they were even doing. Kay had made a guess, but she’d also had a ton of whacked out ideas, like we had to be chaste. A discussion with Martin would have set her straight on that.

She had sworn that no Paladin would ever be as ignorant as they had been, and she’d stolen every record of Paladins from the Vatican library and spent years studying what the Eastern Churches had on us. She usually got grants for a lot of her work in anthropology and study of ancient human worship systems. She’d written tons of textbooks on the subject.

We had two Eastern Paladins in our little cohort. Stepka in Russia and Italy, and Milos, here in Houston. Both were married to women they adored and Stepka and his wife Giulietta, a Roman Catholic Paladin, appeared to be ready to people the entire next Paladin generation by themselves. They had four kids already and Stepka said he was ready for a fifth. From Giulietta’s glare, I was pretty sure four would be their number.

Milos and Carrie had their two-year-old son, Jon, and Carrie had just announced she was pregnant with their second child.

Babies were the happiest moments among the Paladin community. Paladins around the world were always ready to train and foster any young Paladin. Even Iain Swann, Ceilidh’s father, was still training up his grandchildren and the children of other Paladins. He said he was too old to be out there chasing down Pikeys. He had his hands full with his two grandsons. Grant was Mischief personified.

Nik and Brion were grabbing things from their vehicles when I pulled into my parking space. I grabbed the bags in my backseat and followed them into the building and down the hall. As we waited for Brion to open the door I looked at the door across the hall, knowing a Kane employee from Virginia was there instead of Shijo. Shijo was in Thailand, of all places, hunting down Triad and Tong members rather than Yakuza. He had learned caution, finally. I’d brought him back from death and told him I didn’t want to do it again. He was the one who had flared my talent into being, and I had spontaneously healed him back to life. Martin says it’s where the laying on of hands myth came from. He got that from Ceilidh. Anthropology had some uses, I guess.

Brion had given Nikole the master bedroom as it had its own bathroom while we had taken the two smaller bedrooms with a shared bathroom. We’d done that before when I’d lived here with them. My first wood carvings were all around the place and I smiled. Martin had put them all in pride of place. He’d always encouraged me to do what I needed to do, feeling it would help me heal from the years of abuse. It had helped, but it hadn’t fully healed the wound.

I watched Nik drag bags into her new bedroom and thought that maybe she could help in that healing. I just had no idea how.

I had my clothes and chisel set with me and got them put away.

I checked the kitchen fridge and pantry and shook my head. Brion had been living on take out again. I texted Allie and she sent me her grocery list and I put in the order to the local grocery and scheduled a pickup for a few hours later. If worse came to worst, there was an ice cream place across the street and Thai delivery on speed dial.

I knew this wilderness.

Nikole walked into the living room and fell on to the couch with a sigh.

I hate moving. I just want that noted for the record, she groaned.

Brion came in and threw a pillow at her.

Ha! I have to go into the office after helping you move, slacker.

She threw the pillow back. Shut it, Uncle Brion, then she gave him that wicked grin that always made me laugh. This time was no different.

Brion shook his head.

Watch her, Nelek, he nodded at me. She’s a hellion.

I’m telling Allie you said that, Nikole threw at him.

Brion’s smile faded, then he grinned, put her in a head lock and gave her a solid noogie. We were all laughing when he waved and walked out the door.

I flopped down on the couch next to Nik.

So, your first city high rise apartment… I grinned. She snorted.

I’m livin’ like white folk, now, she teased me back and grabbed the remote. Let’s relax and watch a movie.

I sat up and looked at her. Or… we could wipe all of Brion’s high scores on his PlayStation…

She gave me a conspiratorial smile and nodded. We spent the rest of the day, until time to get the groceries, beating all of the high scores in all of his games. Being a newbie lawyer was no excuse to not play on the odd hours you had off. I could already hear him howling.

I ordered Thai from the place downstairs and went to go pick it up as Nik set the table for us. Brion had already called and said he was having dinner in his cubicle as the research he’d been assigned yesterday had to be ready for a draft pleading in the morning. His uncle was working him like a slave, but evidently that is what apprentice lawyers did.

Nik was so ready for her beef with green curry over jasmine rice she was ready to climb in the container. I laughed and ate my very hot red curry with rice and vegetables.

We cleaned up then went back to beating all of Brion’s high scores, laughing the entire time. We did it on his Switch and X-Box as well.

We really were assholes, but hey, what were siblings for? Brion had always been the little brother. Now he was getting a taste of his own medicine.

Finally, Nik yawned and said she needed to talk to her girls and went to her room. I sat on the couch considering the box I’d trapped myself in.

I finally turned off the TV and went to my room and laid on my bed thinking. About Nikole. Always about Nikole.

How long I lay there I don’t know but I heard a light knock on my door and called for Nik to come in. She looked worried.

She sat in the armchair I had in my room since I didn’t like reading while laying down.

What’s up? I asked, genuinely interested in her, in her life.

She rolled her eyes. I knew that we wouldn’t be as close as we’re all going to different schools in different places, except for me and Nga, but it seems like we’ve all forgotten we were even friends.

What happened? I asked and looked over at her. She seemed sad.

Cecilia is busy worrying about rushing for a sorority, she looked at me. "I don’t even