I should say no. Should tell her this moment was madness, a single lapse in judgment that will never be repeated. Should lie to us both and pretend that touching her didn’t rewrite something fundamental in my chest.
Instead, I watch her disappear into the shadows and know with bone-deep certainty that nothing will ever be the same.
The guards arrive moments later, their captain scanning the glade with sharp eyes that miss nothing.
“My lord?” he asks. “We felt the disturbance…”
“A lost traveler,” I say, my voice steady as stone. “Nothing more.”
He nods, accepting the lie because he must, because I am king and my word is law. But I can see the doubt in his eyes, the way his nostrils flare as he catches the lingering scent of a human woman and an aroused fae male.
They escort me back to the palace in respectful silence, and I let them, because the alternative is shifting and running after her like a beast in rut. But even as I resume my place on the ice throne, even as I listen to my advisors debate border security and winter provisions, part of me remains in that glade.
Part of me will always remain there, frozen when she asked if she’d see me again and I couldn’t bring myself to lie.
The Yulebond stirs in my chest like a living thing, patient and inexorable as winter itself. It has waited three centuries for this moment, this woman, this impossible connection that could destroy everything I’ve built.
And for the first time in my immortal life, I’m not sure I have the strength to fight its call.
CHAPTER 3
JESSA
I dreamof golden eyes and winter starlight.
In the dream, he stands at the edge of a moonlit clearing, no longer the massive stag but something in between—man and beast, mortal and myth. His skin gleams pale as fresh snow, marked with intricate patterns that look like frost crawling up bare arms. Antlers crown his dark hair, not the heavy rack I saw on the road, but something more delicate, more deliberate. Like a king’s circlet made of bone and moonbeams.
“You came,” he says, and his voice carries the whisper of wind through pine boughs.
I try to speak, to ask who he is, what he wants, but no words come. Instead, I walk toward him across snow that doesn’t crunch beneath my feet, drawn by something stronger than curiosity, deeper than desire.
When I’m close enough to see the flecks of silver in those impossible eyes, he reaches for me with fingers that end in claws—not threatening, but reverent, as if I’m something precious he’s afraid of breaking.
“I’ve been waiting,” he murmurs, and when his fingertips brush my cheek, warmth spreads through me like honey in my veins.
I wake gasping, my heart hammering against my ribs and heat pooling low in my belly. The cabin feels too small suddenly, the walls pressing in, and I kick off the tangled blankets with shaking hands. Outside, dawn is just breaking through the storm clouds, painting everything in shades of pearl and rose gold.
But it’s not the light that makes me freeze halfway out of bed.
It’s the pattern traced in frost across my bedroom window—delicate, deliberate, unmistakably the shape of antlers branching across the glass.
“What the hell,” I whisper, padding barefoot to the window and pressing my palm against the icy surface. The frost doesn’t melt under my touch the way it should. If anything, it seems to pulse with its own faint light, like bioluminescence trapped in ice.
I pull my hand away, and the pattern remains, beautiful and impossible and definitely not something that forms naturally. Someone—orsomething—put it there. While I was sleeping. While I was dreaming of golden eyes and reverent touches and voices that sound like winter wind.
The rational part of my brain, the part that earned a master’s degree and spent years studying the natural world, scrambles for explanations. Temperature differentials. Unusual humidity patterns. Maybe I left something warm against the window that created the condensation.
But even as I cycle through possibilities, I know none of them fit. This isn’t science. This is something else entirely.
I dress quickly in yesterday’s jeans and a thick sweater, then grab my coffee mug and the bottle of Bailey’s I keep for special occasions. If I’m going crazy, I might as well be caffeinated and slightly buzzed while it happens.
The coffee maker gurgles to life, and I lean against the counter, staring out the kitchen window while I wait. The snow has stopped, leaving everything pristine except for…
My breath catches.
There, pressed into the snow just outside the kitchen window, is a single hoofprint. Larger than any reindeer track I’ve ever seen, with an unusual shape that makes my pulse skip. And leading away from it, toward the tree line, is a trail of similar prints, each one placed with deliberate care.
As if someone wanted me to find them.
