Heat seared through me.
Agony. Pure and complete. It wasn’t the gentle prickle of warming frozen fingers, but the full-body shock of plunging ice into boiling water.
His palm was a brand, burning through skin and muscle down to the bone beneath.
I couldn’t breathe, didn’t need to breathe, but the reflex kicked in anyway, a gasp tearing from my throat.
I wrenched backward.
The wolf held on. His brow furrowed. “What the hell is wrong with her?”
The crowd murmured. The auctioneer’s smile had gone fixed and terrified.
Then the Raven King stepped forward. He didn’t speak, didn’t move to intervene, simply let his gaze sweep the room, heavy and cold as a grave slab.
The wolf released my wrist and stepped back, his aggression withering under that silent stare.
I didn’t wait for the moment to break.
I stepped off the platform, walked through the crowd without looking at them until I stopped in front of the Raven King. He didn’t move. Simply waited.
For me. For my choice.
Instead,I reached into my bodice and pulled out the bride-token, a carved wooden coin, worn smooth by the nervous fingers of a thousand women before me.
The symbol of a woman’s right to choose at auction. Small comfort, but the only one this place offered.
I pressed it into his gloved palm.
“I choose the cold.”
His lips curved.
It wasn’t a smile. It was a warning.
His gaze held mine, and for a moment I thought I saw something flicker in those depths, surprise, perhaps. Or recognition.
“Then you have come to the right place, little bride.”
The alleybehind the Bride Market was narrow, dark, and stank of piss and rotting vegetables.
I’d asked for a moment of ‘privacy,’ and the Raven King had been gracious enough to not ask questions.
I crouched behind a stack of broken crates, fingers shaking as I fumbled with the leather pouch at my belt.
The small box inside was carved from whale bone, or so the black-market dealer had told me.
Inside lay a scattering of dried petals the color of a winter sky. Ghostbreath, they were called. Flowers that grew only in graveyards, only on the plots of those who had died with unfinished business.
I picked one up with trembling fingers.
It was tissue-thin and fragile, and it smelled faintly of old roses and copper. I placed it on my tongue. Let it dissolve.
The effect was immediate.
Artificial warmth flooded my veins. It was not real heat, nor the burning agony of the wolf’s touch, but a simulation of it. A mask.
My heart kicked into a stuttering rhythm against my ribs. Too fast. Too hard. The heartbeat of a frightened rabbit, not a calm woman.
