Page 143 of Season Warriors & Wolves

A ton more bickering. A ton more screams.

Snow rounded her arms around my neck and rested her head on my shoulder, humming to herself while I walked both of us back to our bedroom. When the melody grew grim and the first touch of tears touched my skin, l halted my step.

I could not move as my heart slowly tore to pieces.

She sobbed silently, her head buried in the crook of my neck.

I lowered the both of us to the floor though we stood in the middle of the corridor, and gathered her in my lap, brushing strands of black silk shielding her face from me. “Snow?”

Her body shivered, her skin had gone colder than the touch of snow and slowly candles put out in the corridor while the air coated with a film of hoar frost.

Panic wrapped around my throat. “Love of mine, if you must break my heart, break it with reason. Tell me, I beg of you to tell me.”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I really don’t know, Kil.”

“Let me take it away. Please,” I begged. The pain, the anguish, the memory. All of it. Whatever she was still keeping from me, I didn’t want to know it anymore, only to destroy it.

She shook her head and her fingers clasped my shirt tighter. “How would that hurt any less?”

Gently, I pulled her face up and rested my forehead on hers. Tears streaked her pink cheeks and glazed her sun-coloured eyes to sweet honey. I ran my fingers over her face, down her nose, over her lips and around her eyes. With every stroke of my touch over her skin, her breathing evened out and her sobs bounced to chest aching hiccups.

She nudged my nose with hers and pressed her lips to my chin for a long moment before pulling back. “It drives me insane, you know.”

The littlest of smiles graced her lips and I breathed out some relief. “You’re never even taking a whiff of anything alcoholic. Grape juice even.”

She sniffled and then began to sob again for an entirely different reason. “But I love grapes. I can’t live without grapes. Grapes are all I have. I can kill for grapes.”

I shouldn’t have laughed, not really, because she cried louder, her face scrunched up with such sadness for her grapes. “Keep the grapes. All of the grapes.”

She was going to be so embarrassed about this later. I couldn’t wait.

When I had Snow inside the covers and turned all the candles in the room off, I slid beside her and gathered her body to me, pressing her back to my chest.

Just holding her brought some peace and calm back into me. Too many nights I’d spent holding just her memory. Nights that I would never allow to happen again.

Though, it seemed that her drunken endeavours had yet to end. She began squirming. Giggling and squirming, pressing closer and closer to me and shimmying her back right over—

“Love,” I groaned, gripping her hips and spinning her to face me. She took that as an invite of some sort and climbed half of her body over mine. I pushed her wild hair away from her eyes. “Suppose you’re not sleepy.”

“Not one bit,” the little temptress purred, biting her lip and looking at me like she was about to feast on my bones.

I caught her hands before they went to my one happy bone. “Don’t make me put you on the naughty corner.”

“Why?”

“Not when you’re like this. If you’re not sleepy, I can carry you around on my back like that lad Simon. And that is the only ride you’re getting out of me tonight.”

She sighed and leaned down to kiss my neck so torturously slow, her tongue trailing over my pulse before she dug her teeth on my flesh. Fuck. “A kiss then,” she said, cupping my face and licking my bottom lip.

“Sleep, you vixen.”

Her face scrunched up. “Kilian, if you do not kiss me right now I will die.”

The severity in her voice had me in tears from laughter. “What am I going to do with you, hm?” I kissed her lips. “I don’t even know what to do with myself anymore. So overwhelming. What do I do, Snow? What does one do to not go mad from happiness?”

“You’re happy?” she asked carefully, as if she didn’t already know that she’d been the one to show me happiness.

“Deliriously happy.”