Bought By the Jotunn (Monsters’ Bride Market #11)

Eseld

The Wastes don’t kill quickly.

They take a person apart piece by piece, starting with the extremities and working inward until there’s nothing left but a cold core and a fading mind.

First the feeling in my fingers went, then my toes, then the parts of my brain that remembered why walking mattered in the first place. The numbness crept up my wrists and ankles.

I let it come. I stopped fighting hours ago.

I pull off my glove and look at my fingers. The tips are white and waxy, the skin tight and shiny over tissue that’s dying underneath. I try to make a fist. My fingers curl halfway and stop. Frozen in a claw that won’t close or open.

I put the glove back on because there’s no point looking at it.

The army won’t look for me here. They’ll send trackers to the border towns, scouts to the mountain passes, bribes to the smugglers who move people across the lines. They’ll assume I’m running toward something. That’s what deserters do. They run toward safety, toward a new life, toward a future.

They won’t think I walked north until the cold took me. They don’t understand that some people run away from futures, not toward them. That the only peace I can imagine is the kind that comes with silence.

My legs give out without warning.

Not dramatic. Just a quiet disconnection between what I want and what my body does.

One second I’m upright. The next I’m on my knees in the snow with no memory of falling.

My legs ignore every command to stand. I look down at them as if they belong to someone else.

Some stranger who made the mistake of walking into the white.

I sit back on my heels. I should feel the cold biting through my trousers, but it registers as nothing. Pressure. That’s all.

My body has given up on sensation.

The sky is the color of old iron. Flat. No sun, no clouds. Just a gray ceiling pressing down on the white ground.

A good place to stop.

A good place to…

I close my eyes.

Thud.

My eyes open.

Thud. Thud.

The sound is rhythmic. Heavy. Vibrating through the ice under my knees. Too slow for a heartbeat. Too heavy for a man. The ice crust cracks and groans with each impact.

Bear, maybe. Or wolves. Something large enough to finish what the cold started. Teeth would be faster than freezing.

I search my body for the old responses. The quickening pulse. The surge of adrenaline that kept me alive through a dozen engagements. I find nothing. A vague curiosity about what kind of death has finally caught up.

The footsteps stop.

A shadow falls over me, the light disappears.

I look up.

He is massive. Eight feet of muscle and heavy fur against the sky. His skin is the color of deep glacial ice, not pale but rich and dark. Darker than I expected. His eyes are pale. Gray-white. Depthless.

A Jotunn. A frost giant.

They stay in the deep territories. The places marked on maps with nothing but warnings and blank space. They don’t come to the borderlands. Don’t come anywhere near the places where I’ve been walking.

I’m hallucinating. I have to be.

“Stupid human.”

The voice is low. Rough. Resonant in a way that vibrates in my chest. Real. Not a hallucination.

He crouches. Controlled, careful, the movement of someone handling something small and easily broken. His face comes closer. This near I can see the texture of his skin. His breath fogs in the air between us.

He reaches toward my face.

His hand is enormous. His fingers are almost as thick as my wrist. He could close that hand and I would be done. Faster than the cold.

I don’t flinch. I don’t look away. I’m ready.

“I came here to die.” The words scrape out of my throat, but steady. I want him to understand. I want someone to know, even if it’s a monster in the snow.

His hand stops. Inches from my cheek.

His face changes. His brow draws down. His gaze narrows. His eyes track across my features, reading me. My breathing. My pulse. The blue spreading across my lips. He’s assessing damage the way I assess structures. Finding the fracture lines.

“Not in my territory.”

He scoops me up before I can respond. His arm hooks under my knees, the other wraps around my back, and I’m against his chest and weighing nothing.

Heat.

Immediate. Everywhere. It radiates through his furs and soaks into my frozen side. I thought frost giants were cold. Winter made flesh. Ice for blood.

This one is a furnace.

My body responds before my mind catches up. Muscles unclench. Breathing deepens. I press closer without deciding to, seeking the warmth, desperate and shameless and beyond caring.

His arm tightens around me. His hand spreads across my back. His palm covers the span from my shoulder blade to my spine. His fingers flex against me once, twice, and go still.

His hand is shaking.

Not from cold. He radiates heat. Not from effort. He holds me like I weigh nothing. I don’t know what. His massive hand trembling against my back while he cradles me with a gentleness that doesn’t match his size or his voice or anything about him.

“Put me down.” I try to push against his chest. My arms won’t cooperate. Limp and useless against the fur of his coat.

“No.” He turns and starts walking. Long ground-eating strides. Each step carrying us further from the place where I knelt to die. “You will attract predators. I keep the territory clean.”

“I don’t care.”

“I do.”

The landscape blurs past. White emptiness scrolling by in a haze. The wind picks up and howls across the open ground, but his body blocks it. He has positioned himself between me and the cold. I don’t ask for the shelter and he doesn’t offer it. He just does it.

I press my face into the fur of his coat and I hate myself for it. My body wants to live. It craves the heat radiating from his chest. It does not care about my plans or my guilt or the dead I left in the mud.

His hand shifts on my back. His arm tightens, pressing me against his chest, and I can feel his heartbeat through the fur. Slow. Steady. Stronger than mine.

I look up at his face. He’s looking down at mine. Not watching the horizon. Not scanning for predators. Watching me. His gaze softens. His chin drops against the top of my head, pressing me into his neck.

I should fight. I should demand he put me down and let me finish what I started.

I close my eyes instead.