Page 91 of The Frost Touched Queen

“I’ve upset you,” she whispers behind me. “I’ve upset you by calling up such a wound. One that hasn’t probably healed fully.”

“Do you believe yourself to be so in tune with me already?” I hear myself say.

“I know you enough to know when you’re upset.”

White-hot fury blinds me, coaxing me to turn around and raise my hand to go right to her throat.

“Yes, Katrina. I’m very fucking upset. Does my pain satisfy you? Does it feed your cruel heart?”

“Let me go, Levi. You’re hurting me.”

“I’m hurting you?! I’m hurting you?! Hear this, Katrina. I haven’t begun to hurt you.”

I expect villainous anger to coat her silver gaze, but all I’m met is with sadness. My fingers dig themselves deeper, yet she refuses to fight me. To defend herself.

It’s almost as if her guilt is genuine.

A lie, Levi! Just another lie!

Disgusted with her pretense, I pull my hand off her. Kat immediately starts coughing for air. My chest tightens when I see my finger marks on her pale skin. Not an hour ago I was worshiping her body, making her feel more alive than she had ever been before.

And now?

I was close to killing her with my bare hands.

The very woman who I was falling for.

“Go away, Winter Queen. Go. Run while you still can, for I cannot be trusted around you right now,” I plead, turning my back to her just so I don’t see the bruises I inflicted on her.

But to my bitter disappointment, she doesn’t so much as move.

“There’s more to the story, isn’t there?” she says, committed to her performance.

I scoff.

“Don’t pretend you don’t already know. Don’t pretend you have no idea what really happened to my parents. Don’t stand there and lie to me like that. It would fucking hurt less if you killed me.”

“Levi?” she starts, and when I feel her hand on my back, it cinches through the fabric of my coat, forcing me to step away from her.

“Don’t. I’m tired of your games, Kat. I’m so fucking tired of them.”

“What games?” she suddenly shouts, throwing her arms in the air to show her frustration.

I turn around and slice my eyes to her.

“Stop, Katrina. Just… stop.

“Not until you tell me why you’re being like this. We were having such a lovely day and then we started talking about your parents—” I flinch at the mere mention of them.

“There!” She points at my face. “That is real. That pain I know all too well. It’s suffocating and it drives us to be people that we are not. I know that pain. I feel it every day. I have done, for the past seven years. It’s more than grief. It’s the wound of an unforgivable betrayal. Of being hurt by the ones you trusted.”

My blinding hate of her is momentarily subdued with curiosity of who she is referring to—me or her.

“It’s because of them,” she adds, baffled. “Your anger has to do with your parents. But why? What could cause such fury to be born if the cause of their death was natural?” she asks, as if trying to piece together all the clues she has at her reach.

If I didn’t know better, I would swear her reaction is genuine.

“Tell me,” she orders, her puzzlement turning into obsession. “Tell me what happened to your parents and what part I played in it other than letting an old friend say farewell to another.”

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