Page 3 of Frost Bound

She’d never be prey again.

She blinked hard at the bright lights. It always threw her off. The proportions of the furniture were wrong, just a bit too big and angular. Torches lined the walls, and two fireplaces crackled on either side of the gilded room. Every surface seemed to shine with gold. She focused on the Giver, who loomed behind his immense desk, smiling, fangs bared.

Her pulse sped up, but she kept calm. He might be half frost giant, but he wouldn’t eat her. At least not today. She still owed him a debt. If there was one thing she knew about him, he was greedy.

He waved a large light-blue hand at one of his plush scarlet seats and she barely managed to suppress a flinch.

“Please sit. We have much to talk about.” His smile widened and it sent ice through her veins.

Gray skin, black claws, blood…

Dahlia shut down the memory trying to surface and strode farther into the room. She stumbled when she caught sight of her brother tied up and kneeling beside the Giver on the floor, his brown eyes filled with tears.

“I’m sorry,” Cosmos whispered.

Her knees wobbled and threatened to give out. She placed a hand on the velvet chair to steady herself before once again meeting the Giver’s gleeful black gaze.

“What is this?” she rasped, feeling like the world was about to collapse upon her.

“This is a sentencing, my dear. We’ll discover what your brother’s fate is together. Isn’t that exciting?”

Chapter Two

Neve

Three months earlier

“You must take aloviaye,” Olwen declared. The king’s oldest friend tapped his claws along the crystal table between them, a smirk pulling on the scar that cut across his cheek and into the left side of his bottom lip.

The newly crowned king of Loriia had known this was coming. Neve’s advisors had been hounding him to secure the frost kingdom with an heir since the last assassination attempt. His claws clicked faster against the carved wooden arm of his throne in frustration. They still hadn’t figured out who’d sanctioned it.

Astera. Vergllos. Beltisse. It could be anyone at this point.

Although he’d planned this discussion, Neve still felt nauseous at the idea of taking a foreign bride—aloviaye. Especially one that wassaloes—a human, someone so different from himself—small, breakable, pitiful,dangerous. There wasn’tan honest human among the kingdoms he’d visited when he was a child. It was why he’d lost hismommar.

The king locked his emotions down, feeling the telltale stir of rage at the long-past injustice.

“I agree with you.” He nodded to his cousin, Eyri, who was scribing the meeting. “I’ve held the throne for a year. It is time I take aniliave.” He paused. “Ahumanwife.”

His council erupted with cries of surprise and dissent around the rectangular table. He waited it out and smothered his flinch when his sister’s voice rose above the din.

“You cannot be serious!” she shouted. “That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. You hatesaloes.”

Neve clenched his teeth and took a deep, calming breath. His sister wasn’t wrong. They shared the same opinion of the Asteran people as a whole, but to blatantly question him outright in front of his advisers was inexcusable. Her heated remarks would make him look weak, and that was something he could not afford. The kingdom was on the brink of civil war with their own clan lords, and with the Asterans pressing in along the border … he had to make this sacrifice, and the council needed to side with him. For everyone’s sake.

Shut Lumi down now.

He leaned forward in his chair. “Do you want your kingdom to fall into war and ruin?” Neve asked softly, his voice as hard as steel.

Her lips pressed together, turning a pale blue from their normal navy. “No, of course not, but…”

“That is what will happen if we do not forge a truce with the humans of Astera.” He scanned the councilors in the room with a stern glare. “We have waged war for hundreds of years with thesaloes, and it has gotten us nothing but a small mine to the south, widows and orphans, and hatred. This stops with me. Ourpeople must move forward or we will not survive, and we might as well hand ourselves over to Astera’s greed now.”

Lumi swallowed hard and crossed her arms, disgust rippling across her face. “You would wed a human, bring one of those monsters into our home after what they did to ourmommar? What they did to you?”

His black claws scratched against the wooden arms of the throne. Even after all these years, Neve could still feel a phantom throbbing in his shoulders—where hiscaern’yeused to be. They’d maimed him by sawing off his shoulder horns and leaving him for dead. It was the least of his torture at the humans’ hands, and a bloody miracle he’d survived; his mother hadn’t been so lucky.

“She is precisely the reason why this needs to be done.” The words were necessary but painful to say. Saying he loathedhumans was too pale of an expression for the deep-seated rage, pain, and bitterness he harbored. But he was the king; he couldn’t afford to think like his sister did. He had a kingdom to rule, a people who needed trade to survive—trade that needed to go through Astera.

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