Page 2

Everly

T hree.

The word moved through me like the slow crack of ice.

I was frozen in place, couldn’t swallow or breathe as she stared into my soul like she could see every last one of my secrets, and had already condemned me for them.

I fisted my trembling hands at my side, the sharp tips of my nails threatening to break through the skin of my palms.

“Approach the throne,” the king demanded.

A panicked laugh bubbled past my lips in response. He wanted me to approach the throne? To walk willingly to my death?

No .

If death wanted me so badly, it would have to come for me.

It wasn’t until a gasp echoed through the room that I realized I had spoken the denial aloud.

I wasn’t sure why they were so shocked. Icy chunks of heiress were still scattered on the floor in front of his throne, and they expected me to offer myself to the same fate?

I shook my head at the thought. If I was dead either way, the Frost King could withstand the minor inconvenience of crossing the room. Or his power could, anyway, since he was more than capable of freezing me at a distance.

When I still didn’t move, a muscle ticked in the king’s jaw, ice and wind angrily whipping through the Great Hall once again.

“Visionary,” the word was a low growl that carried through the cavernous room. “Are you certain you aren’t mistaken?”

The petite fae nodded, her face still an eerie mask of calm, but for the barest twist of her lips. From disgust? Amusement? The expression disappeared before I could decide.

The Frost King’s eyes didn’t leave mine, even as he waved his hand in signal to his guard.

“The room is dismissed,” the guard announced.

What did he want with me that he would hesitate in front of the audience who had just watched him execute two of their own? I swallowed down another wave of panic, but still held my ground, hardly registering the rush of bodies all but trampling each other to leave through the narrow walkway.

When there was a small break in the mass exodus, I took a careful step into the gap, making to leave like I didn’t know perfectly well that his dismissal hadn’t applied to me.

A cracking sound echoed through the room as a wall of ice appeared directly in my path. I skidded to a halt just short of slamming into it. The arrogant ass had only wanted me to approach him for the sake of his own ego.

Surprised whispers echoed off the walls, the other females parting around me with all the caution one might treat a curse.

Their steps were more frazzled now, their heels loudly clack, clack, clacking against the marble floors as they rushed to freedom, and away from potentially invasive walls of doom.

Of course, when I stepped around my wall to try to follow them again, another sheet of ice rose up from the floor, then another, as if he were taunting me.

“The king has demanded your presence,” a guard intoned unnecessarily, his dark eyes peering down at me from over the ice.

I took a slow, steadying breath, letting indignation chase away the vestiges of my panic, willing myself not to lose control. That would be a mistake, even now, with so little left to lose.

I cleared my throat. “If the king wishes to be my executioner, he is welcome to approach me to that…end.”

Welcome was a stretch, but it wasn’t as though I could stop him.

There was no one in the kingdom whose power could rival that of the king, and I had none at all.

Even in death, there was no escaping him. The Frostgrave Battlefield stood to this day. Corpses of both Seelie and Unseelie served as glacial sentries at the border between the Winter Court and the Wilds, entombed in ice made of pure mana that refused to thaw.

I had never gone to see the frosted graves of my cousins and aunts and uncles, but the images haunted me all the same.

Was it poetic that I would meet the same fate? To become an icy monument for a war I didn’t get to choose?

When I still didn’t move, the king scowled.

“Check again, Visionary,” he seethed. “She lacks both the wit and basic common sense her position requires.”

I blinked, turning from the wall of ice to face him, certain I had somehow misheard.

“What?” I hated that the single confused syllable only gave weight to his assessment, but he couldn’t be implying what I thought he was.

The Shard Mother wasn’t that cruel, was she? Hadn’t she already ruined enough of my life?

But unless the King’s Visionary was now portending his maids, I couldn't imagine what other position he meant…even if it was ridiculous because, no , I was not his bride. I couldn’t be for so, so many reasons.

My gaze sliced over to the seer in question. If she saw the treason of the first two, she had to know what I was. Didn’t she?

Or were there limits to what she could See ? Regardless, her expression didn’t waver.

“My visions are never wrong, Your Majesty.” There was just the slightest hint of mocking in the title, an undertone to their interaction that I didn’t understand.

My heartbeat picked up once more, indifferent to my efforts to calm it.

This wasn’t salvation so much as a stay of execution. How long would it take him to discover what I was? To realize he was shackling himself to his enemy?

One wolf growled and stalked closer, while the guard closed in on my other side. The sound of claws and boots clicking on the marble floor ricocheted around the nearly empty room and through my skull.

I desperately tried to think of something, anything to get myself out of this, but there was nothing I could do.

When the guard reached for me, I backed away too quickly, my heel catching on a chunk of ice.

A curse hissed past my lips as I slipped and landed hard enough on my backside that I saw stars.

I tried to scramble to my feet but stopped short when I realized that it wasn’t ice I had tripped over at all, but a frozen chunk of the shattered heiress. Her forearm lay broken on the floor at my feet, fingers skittering from where I had stepped on it.

Nausea roiled through me, twisting my gut.

The king truly was a monster. He let out a growl, a low, feral sound more suited to a frostbeast than this glittering ice palace.

“Apologies,” I snapped. “Have I lost my footing on the pieces of flesh adorning your ballroom? How very careless of me.” I was too panicked to care how angry I made him now.

My throat was closing in. This was a literal nightmare—a palace of fresh corpses, wolves that wanted to eat me, and a king who would use me for breeding while he looked at me with disdain.

And that was just the best case scenario.

The king let out an exasperated sigh, like my aversion to severed limbs exhausted him.

“If I dispose of this one, will another appear?” he asked his Visionary, rising from his throne and stalking toward me like one of his wolves.

“No.” The Visionary’s response was dry.

The king didn’t react, but ice erupted beneath me, curling into crystalline spines that shoved me upright. They weren’t sharp enough to draw blood, but close enough to threaten it.

I gritted my teeth as they shifted again, slipping beneath my boots just enough to glide me forward. I wasn’t walking so much as I was being delivered, like an unwilling offering the altar didn’t particularly want, but would settle for anyway.

King Draven’s piercing gaze stayed locked on mine, daring me to disobey again.

And shards-damn me, but it made me want to.

The force of his mana thickened in the air, growing heavier with every heartbeat. It was subtle at first, like the pressure in the air before a storm, then it swelled into a tempest that crashed over me again and again.

An avalanche of winter slammed into my senses—crushed juniper and snow. It clawed through my throat and burned in my lungs, thick as frostbite and unyielding as the king himself.

There was no escaping it. No escaping him.

“You have precisely one hour to pull yourself together,” he growled, and the deep timbre of his voice rattled my bones. “At which time I will expect you to refrain from embarrassing us both at our wedding.”

A dagger formed in his grip, borne of frost and superiority. He tilted the hilt under my chin, less as a threat than a display of dominance. The cold scraped along my chin, sending a tremor through my veins. He leaned in the way he had done with the first female he executed tonight.

His tone was a soft contrast to his words, the quiet whisper of steel as a sword is drawn. “And don’t even think about running. There is nowhere you can go that I won’t find you, and there is nothing I won’t do for the sake of my kingdom. Even marrying you .”

With that, he dropped my chin, turning to his guard. “Escort her to the queen’s suites. My wolves will clean this up.”

Bile rose in my throat at the picture my mind formed. I couldn’t even bask in the hollow victory that I had, in fact, forced the king to leave his throne.

I might have won the battle, but I sure as hells had lost the war.