Page 121 of Fated to the Frost King

She blinked, turning to look out the window. Draven and I both followed her gaze to a ruined building bathed red in the moonlight.

“So, on foot it is, then, at least to the nearest village.” My voice sounded far away, even to my own ears.

Or maybe they were only clogged with the blood crusting over my skin.

“Then we’ll need to clean up first.” His gaze flitted over me, jaw clenching before he looked away. He managed to look nearly as clean as he had directly after his bath, save for the few wounds that were already all but closed up. “The blood will only draw more monsters.”

I took a moment to study him, the deep lines on a face that was even paler than usual. His mana echoed faintly around the manor house with the wards he held in place.

He wouldn’t have let the wards around the palace drop when he wasn’t there, so he was maintaining both—after he had traveled across half the kingdom with me in tow and then disintegrated countless hoards of monsters.

He would hurl himself from his towers before admitting it, but his strength was waning. He couldn’t afford for us to draw more beasts into our midst.

“We should sleep here for the night.” I felt like a monster myself for suggesting that my sister sleep in a house full of dead servants and her husband’s half-eaten corpse, but we hadn’t come this far just to be eaten on the way home.

Wynnie squared her shoulders, tightening her grip on my hand.

“I’ll find us some rooms that are…clean.” Of body parts, she meant, monster and fae alike.

She dropped my hand, hesitating only a moment before she turned away from the corpse in the hall, drawing upon the infinite well of strength she had always possessed.

I tried to focus on that strength, on the determined spark in her hollow eyes, the life that still coursed through her veins, instead of the prickles of dread that wouldn’t quite leave me.

I wasn’t convinced this was over. But I would pay the price of saving her in blood, time and time again, if I had to.

My hair would not come clean.

I sucked in a breath through my mouth, trying not to inhale the scent that had only festered in the heat of the steaming bath.

Three times, I had drained and refilled the tub through the system of pipes and crystals that fed water through my sister’s home, just like the one at my father’s estate.

But the water was still tinged pink. And my hair was still matted with things worse than blood.

My mind raced from one horrifying image after another, moving portraits that played out each new nightmare on an endless loop with sounds that would haunt me for the rest of my life.

The maid’s scream, the sound of ripping flesh, Yorrick’s lifeless eyes, the weight of the Tharnok, the tug at my wrists as I wrenched my dagger free from the Wretch’s flesh, the look on my sister’s face as she wiped the remains of her valet from my skin.

I wanted to be sick.

I scrubbed harder, trying to control my breathing as my fingers got stuck in the mess, trying not to wonder if it was part of a Tharnok, or the Wretch, or the valet, or the maid...

Trying not to think about the male who had thrown himself from the balcony or wonder if I would have done the same in his place.

Bile rose in my throat, and I tore through the congealed mess, ignoring the pinpricks of pain. It didn’t help. There was so much more.

My skin crawled with each new texture, each new visible sign of the horrors of the day. I kept scrubbing. Furiously scrubbing.

Why hadn’t I stayed with Wynnie? Argued when she showed me to a room with my husband and left to wash with the assistance of her maid. I needed her.

I needed to remember that she was alive.

I reached for the bar of soap. It was stickier than it should have been, less effective than I needed it to be. My hands shook. Nothing was working.

Frost damn everything.

I hadn’t held myself together this long to fall apart now, with Draven just on the other side of a privacy screen. It was just hair. It didn’t matter. It didn’t.

Except, I saw my mother’s hands again. Remembered the comforting way her nails scraped along my scalp. The way she braided each lock, infusing it with all the love she rarely spoke aloud.

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