Chapter 5 #2
I'd screamed until it became something else. Not human. It was a roar that shook the house, that sent frost racing across every surface, that cracked every single window in every single room.
Ma had come running.
She'd stood in my doorway, staring at what I'd become, and I'd seen it—the exact moment whatever fragile thread of tolerance she'd had for me snapped completely.
"Monster," she'd whispered.
I'd tried to shift back. Tried to make myself small again. But I didn't know how. I was ten years old and terrified and trapped in a body that didn't fit, and all I could do was try to curl into the corner and shake while ice spread across the walls.
"He left because of you," she'd said, louder now. "You murdered those boys, not him. And now you're going to murder me too, aren't you?"
I whimpered, words unable to form in the monster’s throat. She'd backed away, hands raised like I was something dangerous she needed to ward off. "You're not my son. You're a curse. A punishment. I should have left you in the snow the day you were born."
Ma had grabbed the phone with shaking hands and dialed a number. "Come get it," she'd said to whoever answered. "I don't care what you do with it. Just get it out of my house."
She'd called me "it."
I'd still been a dragon when the Council arrived—two of them, calm and competent in a way that should have been reassuring but just made everything worse. They'd sedated me somehow, and the last thing I remembered before everything went dark was Ma's face in the doorway.
She hadn't looked sad.
She'd looked relieved. I’d never seen her again.
Emile and Alice had done their best. They were “trusted” but couldn’t shift, and their isolated farm meant I learned my dragon.
Learned to live with it. Emile had been hockey crazy and he taught me to play.
We didn’t really talk much about my dragon.
It was something I buried, and I’d go for months pretending I wasn’t the monster she’d called me.
I pressed my palms against the cold porcelain sink, watching my breath fog the mirror despite the steam pouring from the shower.
The cold had spread deeper now, settling into my marrow. My dragon coiled tight in my chest, protective and terrified in equal measure. It remembered what happened when control slipped. It remembered three boys who never got up. A father who walked into the snow.
I couldn't let that happen again.
Especially not around Cinder. God, especially not around him.
The thought of losing control near him—of that ice spreading like it had with my dad, of frost racing across his skin, of watching the horror dawn in his eyes the same way it had in Ma's—made something in me want to claw its way out and run until there was nothing left but distance and safety.
He'd saved a man's life tonight. Used his hands to restart a heart, his voice to cut through panic, his competence to anchor everyone in that ballroom.
And I'd stood there wanting to touch him, wanting to help, wanting things I had no right to want when I was a loaded weapon that could go off at any moment.
The photographers had been too close. The threat had felt too real. And my dragon had reacted the only way it knew how—by preparing to protect.
By preparing to destroy.
I hadn’t even felt it happening. The cold creeping in. The ice building under my skin. If Max hadn't pulled me away, if I'd stayed in that ballroom one more minute, if someone had pushed—
I didn't want to finish that thought.
My hands were shaking now, trembling so hard I had to grip the sink to keep them still. The steam from the shower did nothing. The heat couldn't touch the cold that lived inside me, the cold that was my dragon's first and last defense.
I needed to stay away from him.
It was the only way to keep him safe.
Cinder had made it easy, really. He'd drawn his line at the club, reinforced it on the plane, made it perfectly clear tonight that whatever I'd hoped for wasn't going to happen.
I should have been grateful and not wanted more.
Should have taken the rejection as the gift it was—a clean break before anyone got hurt.
Instead, I just felt hollow. And cold. So fucking cold.
I forced myself into the shower. It scalded my skin, turning it red almost instantly, but the cold underneath didn't budge. My dragon had locked down, protecting something that didn't need protecting anymore, unable to distinguish between physical threat and emotional devastation.
I stayed under the spray until my legs threatened to give out, then stumbled back into the bedroom and collapsed onto the bed. The hotel blankets were thin, useless. I pulled every single one over myself anyway, burrowing into them like I could hide from my own body.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand.
You out of the shower? Max's text glowed on the screen.
I stared at it for a long moment, then typed back: Yeah. All good. Going to sleep.
The lie came easily. Too easily.
Another buzz. You sure? I can come back.
I'm sure. Thanks, Max.
The dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again. Okay. But text me if you need anything. I mean it.
I will.
Another lie.
I dropped the phone and closed my eyes, trying to will warmth into my body through sheer stubbornness. It didn't work. It never worked. The cold would fade eventually—it always did—but until then, I was trapped in this strange space where my body functioned but didn't feel like mine.
Somewhere above me, footsteps moved across a ceiling. Somewhere down the hall, a door opened and closed. The hotel settled around me with all its anonymous sounds, and I lay there counting my breaths, trying not to think about Cinder two floors down doing the same thing.
Trying not to think about the way he'd looked at me in the ballroom before everything went wrong—that brief moment where I'd caught something in his expression that wasn't rejection or professionalism or careful distance.
Something that looked almost like want.
But it didn't matter what I'd seen or thought I'd seen. I had no business trying to talk to him at the club. It didn't matter that every instinct I had screamed at me to go to him, to check on him, to make sure he was okay after performing CPR in front of dozens of cameras.
Because I was dangerous.
And he deserved better than a man who could accidentally kill him just by losing control.
So I stayed in bed, wrapped in useless blankets, and let the cold do what it wanted. Let it sink deeper, let it lock my joints and slow my breathing and turn my skin to ice.
Let it remind me exactly why I needed to stay the fuck away from the one person I wanted most.
My phone buzzed again.
I didn't look at it.
Couldn't risk it being him.
Couldn't risk my resolve crumbling if he'd decided to check on me the way I was desperately trying not to check on him.
The cold pressed harder, and I welcomed it.
Because cold meant control.
And control meant Cinder stayed safe.
Even if it meant I stayed alone.