Inside, everything had changed. She waited for shame to crash over her, for the sense of being used and ruined to crush her chest. It didn’t. She was vulnerable, yes—stripped open, known in a way she had never been before. But beneath that, something else stirred: a fragile, tentative sense of safety. No one here was mocking her. No one was calling her names. No onewas trying to hide her away because of how she looked. They had been greedy and selfish. They had not asked how to pleasure her, only how to spend themselves. But they had been honest about it. They had named their price and given her, for the first time in years, a choice. For now, that was enough.
As she drifted toward sleep, tangled amid their exhausted bodies, Snow White realized with a strange, quiet certainty, that she didn’t feel hollow. She felt… claimed, yes. Marked. But also anchored. This was her new world: raw, unpolished, at times overwhelmingly intense. But it was one she had stepped into with her eyes open. It would not always be kind, but it would be hers to navigate.
Chapter fifteen
The Softest Thing
Bythetimethefall faded into winter, Snow White’s life in the cottage had begun to feel less like a bargain and more like a strange kind of rhythm. They had given her some space, made room for her, an extra chair at the table, things kept tidier. They had built a small shed for Grimm to seek respite from the autumn winds and the coming winter cold, and would often pick up hay from a farm on their way home from the mines. Days blurred into one another: mornings of clattering bowls and sleepy grumbles, afternoons of silence while the men were underground, evenings of heat and laughter and the creak of the big bed under too many bodies.
She slept with them now as if there had never been a time she didn’t. It was easier that way; there were a few rooms and many beds in the cottage, but they often argued about who got to have her next to them at night; she was the softest thing in the house. She often woke pinned between two heavy forms, a thigh slung over her hip, a hand resting across her waist, the deep, even breathing of exhausted miners around her.
In the first weeks, she had startled at each touch. Now she recognized them by weight alone. Silas’s arm, heavy and lax, draped over her ribs like a warm blanket. Drew’s tentative knee nudging the back of her calf, as if he were afraid to take up space even in his sleep. Bennett’s fingers intertwined with hers, their palms sweat-slicked even in the cold.
The sex, which had seemed like everything that first night, became only one thread in the weave of their days. They still used her. They still pushed into her mouth and hands and body with a needfulness that sometimes left her head spinning. There were nights she had two of them filling her at once, or woke to Silas already moving gently behind her, his breath warm against her neck. But between those moments, there were hundreds of others that were quieter, softer, almost ordinary.
She learned, slowly, how to cook more than porridge. At first, the kitchen intimidated her more than the big bed. Pots and pans and herbs and sacks of flour seemed like another language she hadn’t been taught. Her first attempts were disasters—thick, burned stews that even the men, desperate as they were, had trouble swallowing.
Harry was the first to help. “Here,” he said one afternoon, rolling up his sleeves as he stood beside her at the rough-hewn table. “You’re murdering those onions.”
She looked at the pale, uneven cubes under her knife. “Are they supposed to be smaller?”
“They’re supposed to be less… sad,” he said, bumping her shoulder with his. “Watch.” His big hands moved with surprising deftness, fingers curling under as he sliced, knife ticking neatly against the board. The pieces fell uniform and finely chopped.
“You cook?” she asked, surprised.
“Ma worked in a tavern,” he said with a shrug. “She said no son of hers was going to burn water and starve his wife.” He grinned. “Haven’t got a wife yet, but the rest took.”
He didn’t push her aside, didn’t take over. He handed the knife back, wrapped his arms around her from behind, guiding her grip, and adjusting the angle of her wrist. “Rock the blade, not your whole arm,” he said. “You’re not swinging a sword.”
Her back instinctively arched as she pushed herself into his groin and her chest protruded further. She laughed under her breath and tried again. Her next attempt was better. Not perfect, but better.
“See?” he said. “You’ll have us all fat and lazy in a month.” He took her body language as an invitation and fondled her breasts while she continued cooking.
She doubted that. No amount of stew could undo ten hours a day underground. But each small success—bread that rose instead of collapsing, a rabbit stew that didn’t taste like ashes, porridge dressed with honey and dried berries—felt like a kind of magic.
During the days while they worked, the cottage was hers. She swept soot from the hearth, beat dust from blankets, patched worn shirts with careful stitches. She learned to scrub stubborn stains from miners’ trousers, dirt so ground in it seemed a part of the fabric. She hauled water from the stream, arms trembling the first few days and then growing stronger, the slosh of the buckets becoming familiar music. Sometimes she took their shirts down to the stream to wash, kneeling on the damp grass as the water numbed her fingers. She would spread the wet fabric over rocks to dry, watching the current tug at fallen leaves.
Always, Grimm grazed nearby, his dark shape a steady reassurance. “Are you happy?” she asked him once, running a brush down his side as he leaned into the pressure, eyeshalf-closed. He flicked an ear and nudged her shoulder with his nose, snuffling at her hair until it stood on end.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, smiling.
He was leaner now, his muscles defined from days of small, careful rides along the deer tracks she’d found. She didn’t push him hard; they’d both had more than enough running for their lives. Instead, they wandered happily: through stands of birch that glittered like silver in the low light, along the ridge where the land dropped away into a patchwork of trees. The men were kind to Grimm and tended to him as needed. Some even slipped him some carrots from the garden or let him lick the bottom of their bowls of oatmeal.
Above the neckline of her simple dress, under the rough fabric, the prince’s token always lay warm against her skin. Sometimes, when she sat on a rock to catch her breath, she would slip her hand under the dress and squeeze her fingers around it. It had warmed to her body, the once-cool silver, familiar now. She would thumb the worn edge, the tiny engraved falcon, and remember the way his fingers had pressed into her waist as he helped her down from the saddle. “It’s foolish,” she told Grimm. “Two years and more, and I still think of a boy I knew for less than an hour.” Grimm flicked his tail, uninterested in human folly.
“I have men who hold me every night,” she went on, looking at the river far below. “Who feed me, keep me warm, make me feel wanted. And still…” Still, at night, when the cottage had gone dark and the men’s breathing had deepened around her, her thoughts drifted elsewhere. There were moments when a hand brushing her hair off her face or lips grazing her neck made her wonder how that nameless prince might have touched her. Whether he’d have been more like Bennett—soft and careful—or more like Gage—rough and unflinching. Or something entirely different from them all. “Maybe I’m greedy,” she whispered onceto the dark. “Wanting all this and still wanting… more.” The cottage gave her a kind of freedom she’d never had in the castle. The bargain was blunt, etched into the fabric of her days, but there was a crucial difference: she could leave.
Once, over breakfast, she set down her spoon and said casually, “What would you do if I decided to go? If I said I wanted to see what’s beyond the next valley?”
Dax looked up from his cup, brow raising faintly. “We’d tell you which road not to take,” he said. “The one with the sinkhole. And we’d pack you food. Why?”
She shrugged, heart tight. “Just wondering.”
Silas added, “We’d tell you to head west. There is a castle not too far from here. The king is a wise and good man. I’ve heard stories of his son, Prince Jacob. His people adore him. You would be safe there.”
Harry, across the table, reached out to steal a slice of bread from her bowl. “We’d miss you,” he said, waggling his eyebrows to soften the admission. “Who else is going to burn the porridge exactly the way I like it?”
Bennett’s eyes dropped, hurt flickering too quickly to hide. Drew’s hand, resting on the bench beside hers, curled subtly closer.
