She didn’t need to. The game was in play, and she was certain she'd already won.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Graham stepped out of the stall with the slow, silent ease of a man who'd spent too long in other people’s shadows. Once again, straw clung to his coat. The scent of horses and leather curled thick in his nose. Cold air licked at the back of his neck. It was nothing compared to the fire crawling just beneath his skin.
He watched Raveena walk away through the open stable doors, the sway of her hips a practiced weapon. But it wasn’t the sway that held his gaze—it was the slight stumble in her step. Barely there. The smallest hitch. But he saw it.
That hitch in her gait, that was him. His doing. His touch, his mouth, his refusal. Her body was still singing with need, still craving what he had denied her. He knew the signs; he’d spent years learning them. Raveena didn’t stumble unless someone had gotten under her skin. He was the only one who had ever managed to do it.
Just like he saw the tension in her shoulders, the way her spine held too straight, too proud—like armor polished to hide the cracks. Her gown clung to her like smoke and snow, the silver embroidery catching the fading light, casting flickers offrost across the stone walls as she moved. She wore elegance like a blade, beauty like a challenge. A queen through and through.
He also saw the softness beneath it all. He knew the taste of it, the texture of it. His flesh knew the tremble of her breath against his neck, the desperate clutch of her fingers in his hair, the way her body would melt under his.
That softness was his. Had been, once. Still was, he thought, with a wolf’s certainty that didn’t care for courtly games or royal arrangements.
But now she was offering it to a prince in order to keep a crown. They'd been here before. Had this exact same argument that had split them apart.
She hadn't changed. She was playing politics again. Making bargains with men who wore crowns they hadn’t earned. Betraying him—not with love, not with lust, but with strategy.
Graham should have hated her for it. Instead, he burned. Because even when she was scheming and lying and handing off her body, he knew he had her heart. Sluggish, cold, dark thing that it was. It belonged to her, but she had given it to him.
He didn't doubt she would discard the prince after she got what she wanted. He was still unclear what exactly had happened to end the last king of Thornhall. Graham supposed that's why the princess had sought him out upon his return.
He still wanted to tear down every banner in Thornhall and claim Raveena like he’d claimed her body. Still wanted to crawl beneath the thorny façade and find the wild girl from Fenvalen who had whispered his name in the dark.
But she was walking away. Again. And he wasn’t sure if he wanted to follow her… or drag her back.
“I see you had trouble the first time I asked you to kill her.”
Graham said nothing. His silence was an answer in itself.
“Do you think you can follow through now? After hearing how little you matter to her?”
Graham stared at the princess. Little Snow White had grown up in these last few years. The soft-faced girl with pigtails and ribbons was gone. In her place stood a woman who could gut a man with her words and bury him with her smile.
She was cold. Clean. Calculated.
She reminded him—far too much—of her stepmother.
He wasn’t sure whether that was Raveena’s doing or something deeper in Snow’s bloodline. He doubted ruthlessness could be taught. But maybe it could be caught, like frostbite.
Graham moved away from the stall where he'd hid at Raveena's approach. He had felt her arrival before he saw her—before the sound of her boots crunched over the snow-packed ground, before her silhouette appeared in the stable’s shadowed archway.
Some instinct always alerted him when she was near. A shift in the wind. The flap of a moth's wing in a new direction. The fall of a snowflake that melted when it hit the ground. He was attuned to her in a way that went deeper than logic, older than memory. Just as the women of Everfrost were said to have ice in their veins, the men of Fenvalen were said to carry the blood of wolves.
Graham had scented his fated mate the moment he first laid eyes on Raveena. Had known it for a fact the first time he’d tasted her. Had erased all doubts the second her inner muscles had grasped his cock in an orgasmic chokehold. He belonged to her, and gods help him, she belonged to him.
Except she didn’t see it that way. Raveena wanted a throne beneath her and a crown above. Graham only wanted her hand in his. Right now, he crossed the distance to her stepdaughter, preparing to engage in a plot to thwart those efforts.
“She still thinks she’ll win,” he said.
Snow’s lips curved faintly. “She always does. She thought she'd keep this castle after she murdered my father.”
Graham made a noncommittal sound at the princess's accusation. It wasn't that he didn't put murder beneath his queen. He knew she was capable. He just couldn't puzzle out how murdering the king before securing a place outside this castle for his daughter would win Raveena what she truly prized.
He let his gaze wander back to the open stable doors. Raveena’s scent still lingered in the air—snow lilies, frost, and that warm spice that only rose when her blood was up. He’d had his head between her thighs not long ago, breathing her in as he debated whether or not to slit her throat.
If she did go through with marrying that weak-jawed excuse for a prince—if she let Charming touch her again — Well, then Graham might just have to honor the deal he'd made with the snow princess.
