Winter's Claim

Chapter Three: The Alpha of Ice

Bjorn Kessler did not wait to be invited to sit. He crossed the dining hall and took the chair beside my father like he owned it, like the room itself already answered to him, and my father let him.

Up close, he was worse than the doorway had suggested. Scars ran along his jaw, his throat, the backs of his hands, pale lines against skin that had clearly spent a lifetime somewhere far harsher than Ashwood's mild winters. He wore furs instead of formal robes, and he had not bothered to soften a single edge of himself for this negotiation.

"The contract," he said, to my father, without so much as glancing at me again. "Your daughter. The one promised to my brother."

"Yes," my father said. "Circumstances prevented the marriage at the time, but Aria has returned to honor the arrangement."

"You canceled the wedding," Bjorn said flatly.

"There was a complication. It has been resolved."

Bjorn's jaw tightened, just slightly, and I understood in that moment that whatever had happened to Viktor still sat somewhere unfinished in him. "My brother gave his word to this alliance. I'll honor it."

They spoke about me like I was a line item. Trade routes. Defense pacts. The specific value of an omega princess with a broken mate bond. I sat there with my hands folded in my lap because I had already learned, hours earlier, what happened when I spoke out of turn at this table.

"There is one matter," my father said carefully, "you should be aware of. My daughter was mated during the intervening years. The bond has since been severed."

"I can see the scar," Bjorn said, and I realized, with a small jolt, that he had noticed it the moment he walked in, even while pretending not to look at me at all.

"Properly severed," my father said. "No lingering ties. No children."

Bjorn nodded once, like that closed the matter entirely. "The contract stands."

"Three days," my father said, pleased. "We can have her ready to travel—"

"Three days," Bjorn agreed, cutting him off before he could finish. "She leaves with me. The wedding takes place in Frosthaven. My territory, my terms."

I could not stay silent through one more sentence of my own future being decided without me. "Don't I get a say in any of this?"

The table went still. My father's expression turned cold in the particular way that used to make me shrink as a child.

"You lost the right to object when you made a bargain and lost," he said.

I looked at Bjorn, expecting the same dismissal I'd gotten from every man in my life so far. Instead he was watching me with an expression I could not read at all, something between assessment and, unmistakably, mild surprise that I had spoken at all.

He did not defend me. He also did not agree with my father. He simply watched, silent, until my father told me to sit down and be quiet, and I did, because there was nothing else left to do in that room.

The negotiation finished twenty minutes later. I was not asked to sign anything. I was the thing being exchanged, not a party to the exchange.

Bjorn stood to leave, and at the door he paused and looked back at me, that same long assessing stare, like he was trying to work out exactly what he had just agreed to take north with him.

"Three days," he said again, and left without another word, his guards falling into step behind him.

My mother sat frozen at the table. My father gathered his documents like nothing unusual had happened at all.

"You will not embarrass me like that again," he told me once Bjorn's footsteps had faded down the hall. "Do you understand?"

I did not answer him. I stood, and I walked out, because I needed air more than I needed his permission to leave a room, and because some small, stubborn part of me had noticed that the man who terrified an entire negotiating table had been the only person at it who had actually looked at me like I was a person and not a line in a contract.

I told myself that did not matter. I was wrong about that too.