Page 36 of Bound to the Shadow Queen (Frostbound Court #2)
Draven
The estate was too quiet.
Deja vu clamped tight in my chest, sharp as the first icy breath I’d drawn at her sister’s manor weeks ago, when we’d walked into ruin and blood. The memory still clawed at me. Screams muffled by splintering wood, the scent of blood belonging to both fae and frostbeast.
But the silence here was different.
It wasn’t the abrupt lack of sound that came from death. This was older. A sense of abandonment.
She took a step forward, but I reached out for her arm. She stopped, confusion crinkling her nose. Whatever she saw in my expression had her glancing back and forth between me and the main house.
“Oh,” she said, worrying her lower lip. “I mean, this is not… unusual.”
I let go of her arm, my head tilting slightly as if that might help me to better understand what she had just said.
“Sometimes when my father is…traveling,” she drew out the word carefully, “for too long, the servants go home to visit their families.”
I blinked slowly.
“And this is something they often did? Even while you were in residence?”
She nodded and gestured for me to follow her up the moonlit path.
Fury raced through my veins in an icy wave. Frost laced out from my steps, coating the snow-laden hedges and the unlit torches in brittle ice.
The thought of her here alone, powerless, left to fend for herself in a house stripped of protective wards and without an ounce of mana…
I tried to bury the anger, but it only intensified, and soon the entire estate was a glacial tomb.
Everly crouched near the front door, shifting stones to search for something in the dirt. A key, most likely.
Her navy travelling cloak pooled onto the ground, dirt and debris collecting on its hem.
My mana surged, splitting the door into several satisfying pieces.
She glanced from the shards of wood at her boots up to my carefully neutral expression, then sighed. “Tell me, does the mighty Winter King break through all doors, or just the ones with perfectly good keys?”
“I’ll send someone to fix it, if you’d like,” I said coldly.
By the time I reined my mana back in, Everly was already climbing the stairs, barreling ahead without hesitation. I followed, frost trailing in my wake, until she pushed open the groaning door to what had once been her room.
It was small. Modest. And yet, unexpectedly full.
Moth-eaten cushions lay scattered across the floor, soft blankets folded in an explosion of mismatched colors, trinkets perched precariously on ledges and windowsills.
The shelves were overburdened, sagging under the weight of too many books covered in a thick layer of dust.
I didn’t know what I expected.
Something barren, perhaps? Or hidden, and wild like the Unseelie portal? But not this. Not a room so…normal. So lived in.
She went straight for the shelves, pulling volumes down, flipping through them, and tossing them aside with increasing impatience.
I silently watched her from the corner of my eye.
This had been her world once. Four close walls, paper and cushions to soften the isolation. Even a few dead plants sat in the corner, starved of water and light, that had likely once made the space even cozier.
The bastard daughter of a fae lord, tucked away while her sister lived halfway across the kingdom. I thought of her father, of how easily he had sent her here to vanish from sight. How the servants must have looked through her, until even they abandoned her.
How alone she must have felt.
And now?
Was it better, in the palace, where the walls gleamed brighter but pressed tighter still? Her suite was larger, yes. Filled with gowns and guarded by wolves. But still hidden away.
The answers echoed through the silence, pressing in tight enough to suffocate, not that my wife seemed to notice.
Her attention was glued to the book in her hands, her fingers hurriedly tracing the text faster than any fae should be able to read.
I stepped closer, peering over her shoulder at the book she’d dragged down. Curved handwriting lined the margins, small, looping notes that sometimes broke into sketches or little flourishes that softened the rigid script of the text itself.
The subtle, yet unrelenting scent of frostlilies and moonshade berries clung to her. It curled through my lungs, setting my pulse uneven.
I took a breath, steadying my pulse and the constant hunger that seemed to live beneath the surface of my skin. I despised it for its persistence, an ache that belonged to more than the bond alone.
I remembered too well where this led, the reminders that would flash across my mind. She belonged to me by law and by vow, but she had never chosen to be mine.
For the first time, I admitted to myself how little I wanted a forced, captive bride. It had never occurred to me that my fate-chosen bride would so badly wish not to be.
It wasn’t just that I didn’t want a wife who didn’t want to be with me. It was her. She had called my palace a cage and a shackle and worse, and now I saw that it was all she had ever known. One form of cage or another.
My jaw tightened, my hands flexed once before I forced them still.
Everly’s hand was frozen on the page, her fingers no longer tracing the text. She slowly turned to face me.
As she turned, a flush rose across her cheeks, like she was embarrassed for me to see this side of her.
“They’re just…notes,” she muttered. “Nothing important.”
I arched an eyebrow.
“Just how many of these compendiums do you have?” I asked, reaching out to brush a thumb over the smudged ink in one of the margins.
Her breath hitched, her gaze fixed on my hand.
“Only the one,” she said, closing the volume against her chest. “But I didn’t want to leave without checking these…just in case.”
Her eyes locked on mine for a rare heartbeat too long. That damned tether between us drawing taut, desperate.
Then a gasp sounded from the doorway, and Everly’s body went rigid with a shock strong enough to resonate down to my bones.
I bit out a curse. I let myself be distracted by her, and now we could both pay the price.