“Family?” Drew pressed once, curious.
She stared at the fire until its afterimage burned behind her eyelids. “I left home,” she said. “I don’t have much of a family.”They didn’t push. Or if they wanted to, they respected her silence enough not to. At night, when she lay amid the tangle of limbs and breath, she sometimes imagined what would happen if she told them the truth.
I am Princess Shay,she would say.My mother is the queen. She tried to kill me, twice. A man you’d probably respect once held a knife to my throat because she told him to. If you keep me here, you’re harboring a fugitive.In her mind, their faces changed: Dax’s mouth thinning with worry, Harry’s laughter faltering, Gage’s scowl deepening. She pictured them bundling her onto Grimm, patting his flank, giving her bread and jerky and careful directions to the nearest border. She wasn’t ready to risk that. Not yet.
So she lay there instead, listening to the steady breathing of six men who had slowly, improbably, grown used to her presence. And she told herself that for now, for this season of her life, this was enough.
Chapter sixteen
Unanswered Questions
Byearlyspring,thesnow had retreated to the highest ridges, leaving the forest floor spongy and green. New leaves unfurled on branches, fragile and bright. Birdsong returned in earnest. In the cottage, a similar softening had taken place. Snow White was comfortable. She would have denied it if anyone had accused her of it out loud. Comfort, to her mind, seemed almost like a sin. But there was no denying that she knew the sounds of the house now as well as she had once known the echo in the castle halls. She knew the creak of the third stair, the one Drew always skipped. She knew the whistle of wind through the chink near the chimney and how to stuff it with old cloth when the wind howled too loudly. She knew which boards squeaked near the bed, which ones were safe to tread on when she needed to slip out to get a glass of water at night. She knew the rhythms of six men’s tempers and tendernesses.
And they, whether they knew it or not, had begun to orbit her the way planets orbit a sun. Small gestures gave it away.
Harry, as always, gave his devotion in jubilation. “Look at you,” he’d say when she came in from the stream, skirts hitched,hair damp and cheeks flushed from the cold. “Like some forest spirit. We don’t deserve you.”
“Stop,” she’d say, swatting at him, but she’d be smiling.
When she burned the first batch of bread he’d taught her to knead alone, he didn’t tease. He tore off a piece of the darker crust, chewed it thoughtfully, and said, “Could be worse. It’s still better than Gage’s cooking.”
Gage, passing behind them, rolled his eyes. “You’ve never tasted my cooking.”
“There’s a reason for that,” Harry replied, winking.
In bed, Harry had become less of a frantic grab for release and more of a steady source of warmth. He lingered after, one hand playing absently with her hair, murmuring ridiculous things against her temple.
“If any of us had half a brain,” he said once, “we’d be courting you properly. Flowers every week, fancy dinners, the whole lot.”
“You can’t even manage not to track mud into the house,” she pointed out.
“True,” he conceded. “But in another life…”
She didn’t let him finish that sentence. Another life was a dangerous thought.
Drew developed a habit of taking her hand. It happened first by accident. They were walking back from the stream, she with a basket of damp shirts balanced on her hip, he with an armful of firewood. The path narrowed, muddy on one side, steep on the other. She slipped. “Snow!” he cried. His hand shot out, fingers catching hers, steadying her.
They both froze. “Thank you,” she said, breathing a little harder than the stumble warranted.
He nodded, cheeks pink, but didn’t let go right away. His fingers were calloused but gentle around hers. After that, it happened more often. Sitting on the bench after dinner,shoulders touching, his hand would creep over to find hers. At first she thought it was only nerves, something for him to fidget with instead of his own sleeves. Then she realized he liked the contact for its own sake. It wasn’t sexual, not really. There was no immediate lunge for her body afterward. It was just… closeness. A quiet reassurance that he was there, that she was real, that between the chaos of shifts and shared nights, they existed in the small, calm moments too.
Bennett seemed to worship her. He was always nearby. If she went to fetch water, there was a good chance he’d be in the yard chopping wood. If she mended shirts by the fire, he’d be at the table whittling something, stealing glances at her over the shavings. She caught him more than once halfway across the cottage with his mug, clearly having stood up to refill it and then forgotten his purpose because she’d smiled at something Silas had said.
He never quite found a reason to ask her for more of herself outside the bed. But in small ways, he gave her the kind of attention she had never gotten from anyone but her father. “Are you cold?” he asked one evening, noticing the way she’d rubbed her arms.
“Just a little,” she admitted.
The next day, he came back from town with a bundle of wool in his arms. “I thought,” he said, almost dropping it in his haste to get the words out, “maybe you could make yourself a shawl. Or I could—no, you probably don’t want me knitting—I just thought…”
She laughed softly and took it from him, pressing a kiss to his blushing cheek.
Even Dax softened at the edges. He began to ask her questions at odd times. Not probing ones about her past, but small, practical ones about her. “What do you like to read?” heasked once, catching her with a book in her lap when he came in early from the mine.
She blinked at him, finger marking her place. “Stories,” she said. “All kinds, fantasy, romance, stories about characters who are one way at the beginning of the book and entirely different at the end.”
“That sounds… complicated,” he said.
“It is,” she replied. “That’s what makes it interesting.”
