Chapter 6
ERIN
By the time Erin made it upstairs, she’d rehearsed six different ways to initiate sex with her wife and rejected all of them as ridiculous.
Option one: classic. Kiss her senseless, push her onto the bed, trust all the years of pent-up attraction to do the rest.
Rejected because: children. At least one of them would materialise in under ninety seconds, clutching a stuffed animal and an existential crisis.
Option two: humour. “Your Majesty, I’m afraid I’ve identified a critical security vulnerability and it’s located in our bedroom; I’ll need you to strip so I can investigate.”
Rejected because: Alex would laugh so hard she’d snort, and laughing and stripping probably wouldn’t be a sustainable combination, and also Erin might actually die of embarrassment halfway through the sentence.
Option three: blunt. “I miss you. I want you. Can we make time?”
Rejected because: terrifying.
She rounded the corner onto the corridor that led to their suite, boots soft against the old rugs, and tried to slow her breathing so she didn’t look like she’d sprinted up the stairs in panic.
It was ridiculous. She’d been naked with this woman more times than she could count. They’d weathered protests and scandals and actual attempts on Alex’s life. They’d had their sex life interrupted by everything from fire alarms to a toddler throwing up in the doorway.
And yet somehow, saying out loud I need this felt more vulnerable than any of that.
She’d settled on a sort of hybrid strategy by the time she reached their door.
Step one: check the room. Step two: hot shower, because she currently felt like she was wearing three layers of damp stress.
Step three: find Alex, lure her here under some plausible pretext involving documents or tea or both. Step four: lock the door.
Foolproof.
She opened the door.
The first thing that hit her was the heat.
Their suite was roasting. Not the comfortable, fireplace-cozy kind of warmth, but the aggressive, electrically-baked kind that dried your eyeballs.
The second thing was the smell.
Wet. Damp. A faint hint of singed fabric.
The third was the sight.
The triplets had built a snow fort.
Indoors.
“Oh, for—”
Erin stepped fully into the room and just… stopped.
Someone—several someones—had dragged every spare towel, blanket, and spare throw they could find into the centre of the room and constructed a kind of lopsided igloo against the side of the bed.
The duvet had been pulled halfway off the mattress to form a roof extension.
Pillows were stuffed into gaps. A chair had been requisitioned as a “defensive tower,” its back draped with one of Erin’s T-shirts.
And in the middle of this chaotic masterpiece, an electric fan heater wheezed away on full power, blowing hot air into the enclosed space.
“Triplets,” Erin said aloud, to no one in particular. “Future special forces or future arsonists. Jury’s still out.”
“Mummy Erin!” a voice shrieked from inside the fort. “Intruder!”
Three heads popped out of three different openings like some kind of deranged whack-a-mole.
Matilda’s face emerged through a gap in the duvet drape, cheeks flushed, hair sticking up wildly with static.
Frank stuck his head out from the bottom, near the floor, his light chestnut curls flattened on one side and suspiciously damp.
Florence peered out from a gap between towels, blinking like a mole blinking at daylight.
And next to Florence, far too calm, Hyzenthlay peered out as well, a book in her hands and an expression that said she’d like to apologise for absolutely nothing.
“So,” Erin said after a second. “This is… new.”
“It’s the snow cave,” Frank announced. “We’re training.”
“Training for what?” Erin asked.
“The blizzard,” Matilda said, as if it were obvious. “We have to learn how to survive in extreme conditions.”
“By… using up all the towels in the entire wing and attempting to cook yourselves?” Erin said.
“We were cold,” Florence said. “Hyzzie said we had to ‘simulate environmental stressors.’”
Hyzenthlay nodded, unrepentant. “If they learn to regulate their body temperature in a controlled environment, they’ll be more resilient later.”
“You’re five,” Erin said. “Why are you talking like a survival podcast?”
Hyzzie shrugged. “Mama J. listens to them when she folds laundry.”
Erin opened her mouth, then shut it again as her brain caught up with all the sensory information. Hyzenthlay was too smart for her own good.
The air was thick with humidity. The towels were visibly damp, some of them clinging darkly to one another where they’d soaked up water. The carpet underneath the fort squelched slightly when she shifted her weight.
And the bed—
She stepped closer.
The whole mattress was one big, sagging, damp patch. Someone had clearly decided that if they were going to have an authentic snow cave, they needed actual water involved.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “We’re going to go step by step here. One: where did the water come from?”
Frank looked pleased with himself. “We made indoor snow.”
“How?” Erin asked, pinching the bridge of her nose.
“We put the cold tap on,” Matilda said. “And then we got the biggest jug and we poured the water onto the towels, so they’d be like snow. And then Hyzzie said we needed ‘air flow’ so we borrowed the heater.”
Erin followed the extension cord with her eyes, watching it snake from the socket near the dresser, across the floor, and under the edge of the fort.
“Please tell me,” she said, “that you did not pour water directly onto the heater.”
“We’re not stupid,” Hyz said mildly. “We know about electricity.”
“That’s why the heater is over here,” Florence said, pointing to where the fan wheezed determinedly into the towel cave. “It’s blowing the snow.”
“That is… not how snow works,” Erin said. “That’s how saunas work. Extremely flammable saunas.”
She crossed the room in three strides and switched the heater off, ignoring the chorus of protests.
“Traitor,” Frank said. “We were acclimatising.”
“You were marinating,” Erin said. “There’s a difference.”
She tugged the plug out of the wall for good measure, winding the cord up in quick, efficient motions. This was what her life had become: disarming improvised heat traps built by five-year-olds.
“Mummy Erin,” Matilda said, as if delivering the coup de grace. “You’re dripping.”
“I’m what?” Erin looked down.
Sure enough, there were darker patches on the front of her jumper where damp towels had sagged against her when she’d lunged for the heater. A trickle of cold water had found its way down the inside of her collar.
“I am,” she said flatly. “Great. Excellent. This is exactly the look I was going for.”
From the corridor outside, there was the faint murmur of staff voices. Somewhere in the distance, a door slammed, followed by the muffled thud of something heavy being dragged. The castle was adjusting to the power flicker, to the snow, to all the small cracks that weather always exposed.
Erin looked at the bed again.
A dark, irregular stain spread from the centre of the mattress, blooming outward like some sort of depressing modern art. The duvet sagged, the filling bunched. When she pressed down experimentally with one knuckle, water welled up.
Her brain did a quick, ruthless calculation.
Mattress: soaked. Duvet: soaked. Pillows under fort: damp. Spare linens: presumably involved in this fiasco. Drying time: days, at least, in this humidity and cold.
Her last remaining fantasy of bringing Alex up here to a warm, soft bed, collapsing together in a heap, evaporated like… well. Vaporised snow.
“Okay,” she said again, because if she didn’t keep talking, she might scream. “Let’s regroup. Operation Snow Cave is now officially over.”
Four small faces stared at her, varying degrees of dismay and defiance painted across them.
“It’s not over,” Frank said. “We still have to test the igloo’s structural integrity.”
“No,” Erin said. “You absolutely do not. The igloo has failed inspection. The igloo has been condemned. The igloo is a hazard to navigation and possibly international law.”
“What’s nav… nav… that word?” Florence asked.
“Never mind,” Erin said. “The point is: this is unsafe. You could have tripped over the cable, or kicked the heater, or gotten hypothermia because you literally soaked your socks in the name of science.”
“It’s not science,” Hyz said. “It’s experiential learning.”
Erin turned slowly to her. “Okay, Professor,” she said. “Help me out here. At what point did you think, ‘this is a great idea, absolutely no way will this end in an adult having a panic attack’?”
Hyzenthlay had the decency to look mildly guilty. “I didn’t think about the mattress,” she admitted. “I just thought about the adventure.”
Erin closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again. Adventure. Right. That was half her problem, wasn’t it? She’d signed up for one life—dangerous, structured, adrenaline-fuelled—and ended up with another one that was, somehow, all of those things and also featured people under three feet.
“You’re not in trouble,” Erin said, and meant it. Mostly. “Well. You’re a little bit in trouble. But mostly, you are going to help me fix this.”
“Fix it how?” Matilda asked. “With… with magic?”
“We are not summoning any spirits in this castle,” Erin said. “We have enough ghosts of monarchs past without adding whatever you lot would drag in.”
She straightened, awareness of the wider situation nudging at her. Power flickers. Snow. A schedule that even now was probably being ritually sacrificed in the kitchen.
“First,” she said briskly, slipping into problem-solving mode because that, at least, felt solid. “We get you four out of the damp clothes. Vic has spares for everyone. Then we call housekeeping and see what can be saved. Then we find somewhere to sleep that is not… this.”
“Can’t we sleep in the snow fort?” Frank asked. “It’s so cosy.”