Winter's Claim

Chapter Five: What the Ice Hides

The wedding was set for the turn of the new moon, three weeks away, and in the meantime Bjorn gave me a task I had not expected: I was to accompany his healer through the pack's sick house, since word had reached him, apparently through Ingrid, that I had trained in healing during my years at Emberfall.

"You don't have to prove anything to them," Bjorn told me, the morning he informed me of the assignment, standing in the doorway of my chambers with his arms crossed like he was uncomfortable being anywhere near this conversation.

"I'm not doing it to prove anything," I said, which was mostly true. "I don't like being useless."

Something in his expression shifted, just slightly. "Viktor used to say the same thing," he said, and then, like he'd revealed more than he meant to, he turned and left before I could ask him anything else about his brother.

The sick house work suited me better than I expected. Frosthaven's healer, an older woman named Petra, was blunt and impatient but warmed to me quickly once she saw my hands knew what they were doing. Word spread through the pack faster than I expected too, the omega princess who actually worked instead of sitting in the keep waiting to be crowned.

Mira did not let the shift in opinion happen quietly. I found my belongings disturbed twice that week, herbs I needed for a burn treatment gone missing the night before I needed them, and once, a rumor reached me through Ingrid that Mira had told several pack members I was only playing at usefulness to trick Bjorn into trusting me before running back south.

"She's dangerous," Ingrid warned me one evening, the two of us sharing a meal in the kitchens after most of the keep had gone quiet. "Not because she's strong. Because she's patient."

"What does she want?"

"My brother," Ingrid said simply. "She's wanted him since before Viktor died. She thought when the contract passed to Bjorn instead, it would open a door for her." She studied me over her cup. "It didn't, though. Not the way she hoped."

I did not ask what Ingrid meant by that, though I thought about it long after we parted ways, and I thought about it again three nights later when Bjorn found me still awake in the sick house, checking on a child with a fever that refused to break.

"You should be resting," he said, low, from the doorway.

"So should you," I said, without turning around. "It's the middle of the night."

He was quiet for a moment. Then, unexpectedly, he crossed the room and crouched beside the child's cot, checking her pulse himself with hands that seemed impossibly gentle for something so large and scarred.

"She'll be all right," I said. "The fever's breaking. I just wanted to be sure."

"You didn't have to stay," Bjorn said.

"I know."

He looked at me then, really looked, the way he had at my father's table, except this time there was none of the cold assessment left in it. "My brother would have liked you," he said quietly. "He always said the arrangement felt more like a business deal than a marriage. He would have been glad it turned into something else."

"Is that what this is turning into?" I asked, before I could stop myself. "Something else?"

Bjorn did not answer right away. He stood, and for a moment I thought he would leave without responding at all. Then he said, roughly, like the words cost him something, "I didn't expect to want it to be."

He left before I could say anything back, and I sat there beside a sleeping child in the cold, my heart doing something I had sworn to myself it would never do again after Damon.

I did not know yet that Mira had spent that same week passing information south, quietly, carefully, to a rival Alpha who had been waiting for exactly this kind of opening. I did not know that the next full pack gathering, the one meant to formally present me as Bjorn's intended Luna, had already been marked by Silas Drake as the perfect moment to strike.

I only knew that for the first time in three years, I had said something honest out loud to a man, and instead of using it against me, he had answered with something honest of his own.