Page 57 of Fated to the Frost King

My throat tightened, but this time, I didn’t respond.

He reached into his coat, pulling out something that was more familiar than I wanted it to be. Sharp black edges gleamed in the low lighting, amethyst stones winking from the hilt.

He spun it in his grasp, leaning toward me. I backed away, only to hit the wall, but he didn’t advance. Instead, he pressed the flat side of the blade against my chin, slowly raising it so that my eyes met his.

For all I had missed my dagger, I didn’t want to get it back like this.

“An Unseelie dagger,” he spat.

That went without saying. All daggers were Unseelie. Still, my blood turned to ice in my veins when I nodded.

“When I saw this, I thought you were working with them.” His glacial tone was a jagged contrast to the mana crashing over my skin, burning me from the inside out.

He pressed the blade more firmly against my skin, forcing my head to the right, then the left while he studied my features, searching for something. Anything. A tell, maybe? At least I didn’t need to scrounge for a lie this time.

“I would never work with the Unseelie,” I said, holding his stare and allowing him to feel the full weight of my honesty.

He took a step back, the blade dropping from my chin.

“That might have been better than the truth.” He let out a bitter, dry laugh. “I would have hated you for it, but us despising each other is nothing new, is it? At least then we could have found a way to make the stone accept you. But as a Hollow? You’re completely?—”

He stopped himself just short of sayinguseless, but it hovered in the air between us all the same. Something flickered behind his eyes, gone so fast I could hardly read it.

Disappointment? Resignation? It stripped me bare in a way the anger hadn’t, sending tears stabbing at the backs of my eyes.

I didn’t have a defense that would hold, and we both knew it, so I said the only thing I could.

“Punish me if you will, but leave my family out of it,” I said quietly. “They didn’t know.”

He scoffed, shaking his head as another wave of fury rolled off of him. “Are you incapable of opening your mouth without lies pouring out?”

For the first time since the ceremony, anger crept in to chase away some of the despair. That was easy for him to say. When had he ever needed to lie? He openedhismouth and demands poured out and the entire kingdom fell over themselves to accommodate him or died for lack of trying.

“It isn’t like I asked for any of this,” I shot back at him, waving my hands in a gesture meant to encompass it all.

The stupid frigid palace and the circumstances of my birth and my useless lack of mana andhim.

Most of all him.

“And you think that I did?” he demanded, voice rising with every syllable. “Do you think that I went to sleep every night begging the Shard Mother to send me a Hollow bride so that together we could bring my kingdom all the way to ruin? Do you think any part of me wanted to marryyou?”

For all I had accused him of being a monster, I had never actually seen him lose his temper, had never heard him raise his voice. But he was furious now. Distantly, I realized I should be afraid, but all I felt was his bone-deep disappointment echoing straight through to my soul. Like he had been holding fast to a single thread of shining hope, and I had just severed it with my inadequacy.

It shouldn’t have hurt. I shouldn’t have cared at all. If anything, I should have taken pleasure in the way I had finally made him lose control, made him suffer the way this entire arrangement had made me suffer.

Maybe it was the marriage bond stopping me from relishing in my petty win for a change. But then, there were no winners here. Not me, not him, not the kingdom.

We all lost.

I squared my shoulders even as shame burned my cheeks.

“Then let me go.” It was a fool’s hope. The only way he would let me go was in a coffin, but I had to try.

“Let you go?” he echoed. Though his tone was controlled now, it was no less dangerous, a quiet lethality underpinning each word.

I swallowed, summoning my bravery.

“You said yourself that neither of us wants this. So fake my death, or say that I’m ill, or…” I trailed off, realizing the options were precariously few. “We could unbind ourselves and be free of one another.”

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