“We did,” Julia said.
“And the snow’s going to keep going,” Hyz said quietly. “It’s going to make everything weird and different.”
Julia eased the car to a gentle stop near the entrance, where staff were already hurrying out with umbrellas and warm greetings. For a second, she let herself sit there, hands still on the wheel, the engine ticking softly, the snow pattering against the windscreen.
She glanced at the sky. The flakes were larger now, swirling in unexpected eddies. No sign of stopping.
“Oh no,” she whispered, so softly that only she heard it this time.
Not because they were in danger. Not because she regretted coming. But because she could see, suddenly and clearly, the way this could ripple.
Deliveries delayed. Staff stranded. Timetables shuffled. A thousand tiny adjustments, each one a potential stress fracture in Vic’s carefully built vision.
And beyond Vic’s spreadsheets, more serious things: locals cut off, emergency services stretched, people out there without the resources Balmoral had.
“Hey,” Vic said softly, laying a hand on her arm. “You okay?”
Julia drew in a deep breath, felt it touch the bottom of her lungs, and let it out again.
“Yes,” she said. “Just… recalibrating.”
“We’ll make it work,” Vic said. “We always do, right?”
Julia looked at her partner—hair mussed from the drive, eyes tired but bright, mouth determined—and felt a fierce rush of affection.
“Yes,” she said. “We always do.”
She squeezed Vic’s hand once, then turned off the engine and stepped out into the cold, into the swirl of snow and the murmur of staff and the looming stone of Balmoral.
Later, standing at a window inside, watching the flakes thicken, she’d remember that drive with a clarity that surprised her. The first snowflake on the windscreen. The flashing warning sign. Hyzenthlay’s calm, unnerving certainty.
The snow oracle had spoken.
The storm was coming.
Julia only hoped she could keep Vic from taking it personally.
5
ALEX
The first time the lights flickered, Alex was in the nursery watching her children turn a perfectly respectable armchair into a siege engine.
“Left flank!” Matilda shouted, standing on the seat cushion with a throw pillow raised above her head. “Hyzzie, you’re on reindeer watch. Frank, guard the biscuits. Florence, you’re… the negotiator.”
“I don’t want to negotiate,” Florence said, sitting primly on the armrest with a stuffed corgi on her lap. “I want to be a dragon.”
“Fine,” Matilda said magnanimously. “Florence is the dragon. I’m the captain. Frank is the biscuit knight. Hyzenthlay is… the snow oracle.”
Hyzenthlay looked faintly pleased. “I like that one,” she said, peering out of the window at the falling snow. “The snow says we should prepare for surprises.”
Alexandra sat cross-legged on the rug, leaning back against the base of a bookcase, and let their voices roll over her. The room was warm, the fire crackling merrily, the smell of hot chocolate from an earlier round of briberylingering in the air. A string of fairy lights twinkled haphazardly around the window, despite Vic’s attempts at enforcing “regal symmetry.”
It should have been impossible to think of anything beyond this moment. Four children. Her children—three of them, at least by birth—and the fourth woven into her heart just as tightly. Vic hovering, trying to manage them and failing in a way that made Alexandra’s chest ache with fondness. Julia sitting in an armchair with a folder balanced on her knees, making the occasional dry comment.
And Erin.
Erin was on the far side of the room, crouched by the door with one knee on the floor, her phone in one hand, brow furrowed as she spoke in low tones into her headset. The cords of muscle in her neck shifted as she nodded at something the person on the other end said.
