Winter's Claim

Chapter Two: The Debt Comes Due

The Ashwood palace had not changed in three years, and somehow that felt like its own small cruelty. Same white stone. Same arched windows I used to stare through as a girl, planning routes out of a life that was never really mine to plan.

My mother reached me before I had taken three steps inside, her composure gone entirely, her arms locked around me so tightly I stumbled.

"You're home," she said, over and over, like she needed to convince herself.

My sister Wren slammed into both of us a moment later, twenty years old now, taller than I remembered, crying and laughing at the same time. For one dishonest second, standing between them, it almost felt like coming home meant something good.

Then my father's voice came from the end of the hall.

"Aria."

King Edmund Thorne did not hurry toward his daughter. He walked at the same measured pace he used for everything, hands clasped behind his back, and stopped a few feet away like I was a delegate arriving for negotiations rather than his own child.

"I see you've decided to honor our agreement," he said.

"The three years are up," I said. "I'm here."

His eyes flicked, briefly, to the scar above my collar. "A shame it didn't work out." He did not sound like he thought it was a shame at all. "We'll discuss arrangements in the morning. Be in the dining room at eight."

Then he turned and walked away, and that was the entirety of my homecoming from the man who ruled my life.

That night, my oldest friend Josephine slipped into my room the way she used to when we were teenagers plotting small rebellions.

"How are you holding up?" Jo asked.

"How do you think."

She sat on the edge of my bed and let me tell her everything, the ceremony, Celeste, the bond breaking, without interrupting once. When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.

"Do you know anything about the man you're supposed to marry?" she asked.

"Viktor Kessler," I said. "Second son of House Kessler. My father called him reasonable."

Something shifted in Jo's expression, gone before I could name it.

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing," she said. "Just be ready for tomorrow."

I did not sleep much that night. I lay awake thinking about a man I had never met, a stranger my father had chosen for me the way he chose trade routes, and I told myself it could not possibly be worse than watching Damon put a ring on someone else's hand.

I was wrong, but I would not learn how wrong until morning, when my father set down his teacup and told the table, almost pleasantly, that Viktor Kessler had died in battle two years earlier, and that the contract, being with House Kessler and not with any one man, had passed instead to his younger brother.

"His name," my father said, "is Bjorn Kessler. Alpha of Frosthaven."

I did not know the name yet. I would know it very well by nightfall, because the doors of the dining hall opened before I could ask a single question, and a man built like a mountain walked through them, ducking his head to clear a doorway built for anyone else.

His eyes found mine and did not move.

"You're Aria Thorne," he said, and it was not a question.

I opened my mouth to answer him, and every plan I'd had for how this conversation would go disappeared the second those pale gray eyes settled on me like he was already deciding what to do with me.