“Take it any way you like.”
“I’m serious, Jackson.Are you taking me to your palace with plans to seduce me?”she asked, wide-eyed.“I seriously think we’re too old for that kind of thing.”
“We’ll never be too old, darling youngster, but no I am not purposely enticing you into my lair,” he replied with a wicked laugh.“Although, now that I think about it, it’s not a bad idea.You’ve turned into such a recluse it might be weeks before anyone notices your absence.I would have plenty of time to wine and dine you, as well as punish you for your betrayal.”
“Punish me?”she gasped out in shock.
“Why not?You were a very naughty young elf who led me to believe you had genuine feelings for me.As it turned out you were a little fraud.Don’t you think you are deserving of retribution?”
“I suppose I may be,” she admitted cautiously.“I hurt you, a dear and devoted friend, and for that I am sorry.”
“Is that all I was too you?”he asked softly.
Crystalia paused, unsure how to answer.He was exceedingly important to her before she met Brad Timberline.How could she lie about that and sound truthful?He would know.Jackson always seemed to know when she was lying, although he’d rarely called her on it.Today she sensed he would and why shouldn’t he?He had nothing to gain by patronizing her and overlooking her faults.After all, he was considering marriage to another.She meant little to him, and she suspected this journey to his castle was intended to show her all she had missed by running off with another.
“Answer me, Crystalia.My patience is wearing thin.Do you deserve to pay for what you’ve done to me, to us?”
His tone was a blade of light in the frigid air, a final, surgical cut that left no ambiguity.Jackson’s hand gripped the reins of the sleigh.Crystalia could see the white tension in his knuckles, the minute tremor in his jaw as he forced composure onto his own face.The wind that battered the sleigh’s crystal shell was nothing next to the storm rising between the two of them: old hurts, unspoken debts, and the battered edifice of trust that had once been strong enough to withstand her wild and childish ways.Now, after decades, he asked plainly, and now she must answer for the way she left, brutally discarding all they’d meant to each other and adding another layer of ice to his already frozen heart.
She could not look at him directly, not yet.The shadows of his profile, backlit by the wild gold of the sun’s aurora on frozen hills, reminded her of the first time they had kissed—on a dare, at the Yule Ball, beneath the twinned moons of a New Year’s Eve long ago.So much had been innocent then.So much had been possible.
But the cost of what she had done—to Jackson, to herself, to the unnamed possibility of “them”—sprawled before her like the windswept, frozen tundra.
His words echoed:“Don’t you deserve to pay?”The sleigh’s runners sang on the glassy surface, a lonely sound that seemed to beg for an answer.In the hush that followed, every memory surged forth: the night she had run away from his arms, the rumors she had let fester, the gifts she’d never returned, the lies she’d never truly recanted.She thought she could outrun it—run away with a human, build a new life, make it real through sheer force of denial—but the North always called back its debtors.
She inhaled, slow and measured, and at last, forced herself to meet his eyes.
Jackson waited, his expression frozen in a mask of cool expectancy, but his gaze, a cold, crystalline blue, demanded the truth, and only the truth.Crystalia wondered, for a fleeting moment, whether he would forgive honesty or punish it.
She leaned back, drawing her knees to her chest.The silence stretched so thin it threatened to snap and spill everything she’d buried.“I...”Her breath steamed out, clouding the air between them.“I don’t know if I believe in punishment for ancient history, Jackson.I don’t know if it matters anymore.”
“Then you’re a fool.”He said it without malice, as if stating the obvious.“Time only makes the wound rot deeper.You would have me believe I am the only one who remembers?”
She flinched, and then gave a brittle laugh.“You’re not.I remember everything.”The taste of the first snow as they ran through the forest.The scent of his skin when they hid from the others in the frost caverns.She recalled the way his hands would tremble—never his voice, just his hand—when he let her see him angry.She remembered every word she had cut him with, every promise she’d let curdle in the air.
“So I ask again.Do you deserve to pay for what you’ve done?”
Crystalia studied his face, seeing the old Jackson and the new Jackson superimposed.The old Jackson had loved her with an earnestness bordering on derangement, had once built her an entire forest of crystal roses and shattered them one by one for her amusement.The new Jackson, she suspected, would grind each thorn into her skin if he thought it would make her feel something.
She drew the parka tighter around herself.“I suppose I do,” she said, each word a stone in her mouth.“I suppose I do.”
“So you admit you were undeserving of my heart.”
She held herself rigid, as if any movement might shatter the fragile pact of civility they’d managed to sustain.She wanted to deny it, to insist that love, and the breaking of it was too complex for such a simple explanation.But she could feel the weight of his expectation pressing down on her, the compounding interest of every debt she’d left unpaid.The truth was, she had always known she was somehow unworthy.She had simply hoped he would never say it aloud.
She’d suspected he was in love with her, but what did she truly know back then.She was just a slip of a girl filled with longing, waiting for something to happen, something she didn’t fully understand.Jackson didn’t break the rules, until he did…all of them, but by then it was too late.
Crystalia let her gaze wander over the icy plain, searching for the horizon, but the world was a hard, white infinity.There was no escape from this conversation; there never had been.“Maybe I was undeserving,” she said, her voice so quiet he might have missed it if not for the acoustics of the sleigh’s hollow.“Maybe I still am.”
He did not look at her, not directly.Instead, he watched the reindeer’s breath plume before them, the aurora’s colors writhing in the sky overhead.For all his poise, for all the centuries he’d had to master his emotions, Jackson was wounded still, and the wound would not close until she bled something true.
“I didn’t want to believe it,” he said, almost to himself.“I wanted you to prove me wrong.”
The sleigh crested the rise,and before them the world fell away to reveal the frozen fjord: a great scar across the tundra, the ice fractured and re-frozen in a thousand jagged mirrors.Lights from distant settlements flickered at the far edge, impossibly tiny.Jackson slowed the team, steering them gently to the edge of the lookout.He said nothing, but his intent was clear: she would speak, or they would sit here all night.The cold seeped in, numbing her toes, her knees, her heart.
There was deep sadness in his voice, disappointment as well.Clearly he’d wanted her repentance.Quite possibly he hoped to hear her say she’d been wrong.That the love she’d felt for Brad Timberline was naught but a passing fancy, a way to defy her parents and thumb her nose at the Elven community.
It wasn’t the case.She’d loved him with a fierce passion and at the time she had no regrets or concern for the folks she’d left behind.She wanted what she wanted and that was all there was to it.Would their love have stood the test of time?There was no way of knowing.It was over almost as fast as it had begun, and her hot star had sizzled and burned out quickly, just as her mother predicted.
