For a breath, for a flicker, I forget how to stand.
Heat, impossible heat, rolls low through me, battling the cold biting at my skin. It is unwanted. Unexpected. Entirely ill-timed, and yet there it is… a spark threading through my ribs.
Fear follows swiftly. A deeper chill than the winter around us.
Because this is the male the people whisper about.The monster in the frost.The widower lord whose wife died screaming under cracked ice.
The male they say watched her drown.
Father trembles beside me, half from cold, half from the weight of what stands before us. I tighten my arm around him, even as Luceran’s attention never leaves me. Not for a second. The riders bow low, announcing our names, but it feels irrelevant. The room has narrowed to that throne, those eyes, that impossible tension coiling tighter with each beat of my heart.
His gaze travels over me slowly, assessing, like he’s searching for something.
I swallow hard against the dryness in my throat.
Gods help me.
I cannot tell if the thing I see in his eyes is danger or an invitation.
Those eyes narrow as if drawing me into their depths. Frost curls through the air between us, pricking along my skin as he leans forward on his throne, and I catch another glimpse of the faintly glowing runes on his broad chest.
For a heartbeat, the world shrinks to nothing but the sound of the wind howling through the windows and the heavy silence of the Fae lord staring straight through me.
His throat works once. A muscle ticks in his jaw, and every instinct in me screams to look away, to bow, to run, but I can’t. Something about him pins me there, caught like prey under a predator’s shadow. A silver deer, oblivious to the white wolf that hunts it.
Then, in a voice low enough to shake the frost from the columns, he asks.
“Who areyou?”
The air tightens.“I am Neve Devlin.”
My voice comes out steadier than I feel. It hangs in the frigid air, a small, fragile thing swallowed by this hall.
His eyes drag over me, slow as the turning of a season. From my old boots a size too small and worn at the seams, to the cheap fur clenched white-knuckled at my throat, to the ink stains on my fingers from too many nights at the ledger. Every inch of me is weighed. Measured. Judged.
“And what,” he says at last, “are you doing in my hall, Neve Devlin?”
The way he says my name steals the warmth from it.
I part my lips to answer, but Father stumbles forward first, dragging in a ragged cough of air.
“L-Lord Luceran,” he wheezes, bowing so low I’m afraid his spine will snap. “Forgive us. My daughter is…”
“Speaking for you,” Lord Luceran cuts in.
Father flinches.
Those eyes return to me, pinning me anew. My lungs burn with the urge to suck in a full breath, but the cold has teeth here, biting at every inhale.
“I… came with my father,” I say, forcing my chin not to duck. “He is not well. The ride from the farm…”
“I did not summon you,” he says to me, dismissing the explanation with a flicker of his gaze. “I summoned Bartal Devlin.”
His gaze shifts, just enough to skim Father. “You were due here last week.”
The words are quiet. No bellowing. No roar and yet they land like a hammer.
Father swallows. “My apologies, my lord. I… there was work to be done. The fields… the harvest…”
