Within an hour, my feet are bleeding in my ruined boots. Within two, I'm tearing away the bottom of my dress for makeshift bandages, not caring anymore about modesty or propriety. Within three, I'm falling farther and farther behind despite my best efforts.
Every time the distance between us grows too great, the temperature drops even further. His magic reminding me that cold is his domain, that I exist only at his sufferance.
"Please," I call when I fall for the dozenth time. "Please slow down. I'm trying?—"
"Try harder," he calls back without turning around.
By midday, I'm stumbling more than walking. My hands are so numb I can't feel them anymore, my feet are agony in their frozen boots, and my breath comes in harsh gasps that turn to ice the moment they leave my lips.
But I don't die. Don't even pass out, though every step feels like it should be my last.
By evening, when we finally reach the palace gates, I understand something I've been refusing to see all along.
I am not human. Not fully. Not anymore.
Human women don't survive what I've survived. Don't walk twenty miles in subzero temperatures wearing silk and velvet. Don't endure three days of cold that should have been lethal.
I am something else. Something changing. Something that belongs to the terrifying, beautiful creature who stands waiting for me at his palace doors.
The palace itself is impossible—black stone and ancient ice twisted together in architecture that shouldn't exist. Towers that scrape clouds. Walls that shimmer with barely contained magic. Courtyards visible even from here, filled with ice sculptures that move like living things.
It's beautiful. Terrible. Everything I've been taught to fear about the Fae made solid and eternal.
And it's going to be my home for the rest of my life.
"Welcome to the Frost Court," Aratus says as the gates open on their own. "Welcome home, Elise."
I look up at him through eyes blurred with exhaustion and tears I don't remember shedding. He's still beautiful, still terrible, still utterly inhuman in his perfection. But now I can see something else in his frozen-lake eyes.
Satisfaction. Like a hunter who's finally driven his prey exactly where he wants it.
"I hate you," I whisper.
"I know," he replies. "But you'll learn to love me anyway. They always do."
He lifts me effortlessly, carrying me through the palace gates like a bride crossing a threshold. My last coherent thought before exhaustion claims me is wondering if any of those other women he mentioned were given a choice in the matter.
Or if they all started just like this—broken, desperate, and finally ready to become whatever he wanted them to be.
CHAPTER 4
ARATUS
DAYS 4-5
I giveher the east wing because I want to watch her struggle.
Three rooms connected by ice-carved archways—bedroom, sitting room, bathing chamber. Everything she needs if she's smart enough to figure it out. Which she isn't. Not yet. But intelligence isn't the lesson here. Humility is.
I lean against the doorframe as she limps into the bedroom, those expressive brown eyes taking in the space with the kind of calculation I've seen her use at dinner parties. Cataloguing assets, weighing options, looking for advantages that don't exist anymore.
The massive bed dominates the room—dark wood frame draped with white furs that cost more than most humans earn in a lifetime. Fireplace ready with wood stacked in perfect symmetry. Basic furniture arranged just so. A wardrobe filled with necessities she hasn't discovered yet.
Everything she needs to survive comfortably. Nothing she's earned. Yet.
"Where are the servants?" Her voice is hoarse from three days of cold and climbing, but it still carries that imperioustone she's perfected over twenty years of never being denied anything.
"There are none."
