Wicked Chill (Wicked Evermore #3)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

The storybooks would make one think that all girls want the same thing: the fairy tale. A charming prince to love them, to provide for them. Rescue them. That might be how the story starts after the happy ending. But the fairy tales never tell little girls what goes on in the middle of the stories.

In the beginning, the storybooks promise magic.

A glass slipper. A spinning wheel. A single dance that changes your fate.

They whisper of once upon a times and happily ever afters as if love is a crown and marriage the throne.

The prince arrives at just the right moment, says all the right things, and somehow—without even knowing her name—he loves her.

But in the middle?

In the middle, the heroine gets pricked by a thorn. Fed a poisoned apple. Put to sleep while the prince goes off on his… let's call them adventures. Then the story skips to the end. The spell is broken. True love's kiss is given. Happily ever after commences. And the page goes blank.

In the middle, princes stray. At the center of it all, men lie.

They spend late nights out at taverns or at war.

When they're at home, they leave their dirty stockings on the bedroom floor before they climb in, rut on their tired wives, and then turn over on their backs to snore without checking to see if she achieved her pleasure. Most times she did not.

Damsels, princesses, and little girls were sold raw deals by fairy tales. If they learned the truth, it would not be to swoon over the prince but instead to make a play for his castle.

In a castle, the walls don’t wander. The hearth never lies.

The roof shelters. The layers of brick endure.

The structure will stand firm in the face of battle, never asking its inhabitants to shrink.

In the storybooks, the castle is never the villain.

It is always the safe haven for the fairy princess.

It offers its spine of stone and marrow of secrets.

A castle will keep a girl warm when the king grows cold.

Queen Raveena of Everfrost stood in the highest turret of Thornhall Castle.

The wind coiled around the turret like a serpent, hissing through frost-rimed stones, whispering rumors through the arrow slits.

Raveena stood against the biting cold, her cloak a shroud of midnight blue that snapped at her ankles.

Below her, the courtyards burned in golden torchlight, alive with murmurs of wedding proposals, of soldiers returning from war, of joy, of surrender.

Her fingers curled around the ledge’s worn stone, the ice beneath her touch slick and biting. She welcomed the sting. Far below, on the polished flagstones of the western walk, her stepdaughter smiled up at a charming young prince.

Snow White stood in a pearl gown embroidered with the silver thread of innocence.

A sash of deep sapphire cinched her waist, the same solemn blue as a morning sky.

Her sleeves, sheer and pale as snowdrifts, shimmered with frosted lace, while a single red ribbon crowned her hair—a pop of blood in a kingdom of white.

She looked every inch the na?ve maiden from a storybook illustration, all softness and virtue, as though she hadn’t spent the last three years quietly sharpening her smile into a blade.

She laughed softly, delicately, one hand at her throat, the other resting lightly on her suitor’s forearm—as though she hadn’t spent the last year after her father’s death weaving a net from pity and perfection.

Prince Charming stood beside her in all his golden glory—chiseled jaw, broad shoulders, trim waist wrapped in royal blue velvet that matched hers.

His smile gleamed with practiced brilliance.

His lips were the kind that made a girl wish for a curse just so she could bite them.

He looked like he’d stepped out of a stained-glass window, every inch the hero of a tale that rarely told the truth.

Raveena’s gaze narrowed, fixed not on the prince but on the girl clinging to his arm like she was the prize. She was playing the role perfectly; the grieving daughter, the dutiful bride-to-be, the unsuspecting heiress.

Raveena saw through it. Snow had been born to steal. She wasn’t after the prince. She was after the one thing Raveena loved most.

Not the man.

The castle.

Raveena tilted her head, watching them from her perch like a hawk considering prey. A prince and a princess. A storybook illustration. The stuff girls were told to long for, to train for.

Be lovely. Be docile. Be desired. Be chosen.

Chosen.

What a brittle, breakable thing.

Snow turned her face away, laughing into her shoulder just like Raveena had done with Snow's father years ago. She'd thought she'd caught the girl spying during her seduction.

With Snow laughing, that was when Prince Charming looked up.

His gaze swept the turret as if summoned, pausing until it landed squarely on Raveena’s shadowed perch.

He was too far to make out the color of his eyes, but Raveena felt the weight of them all the same—bright, amused, and burning with that awful male confidence that made women believe their every word in a grim fairy tale.

He tilted his chin, subtle, practiced. A man who had offered that same look to chambermaids and noblewomen alike. A smile curled at the corner of his mouth, slow and secret. It said: I remember how you tasted. I remember how you begged.

Raveena hadn’t begged.

Well—she had. Because nothing swelled a man's pride more than a husky plea. But she hadn’t meant it.

Men like Charming needed the illusion first. A little breathy desperation. A few well-placed sighs. They needed to feel in control, to believe they’d conquered something that had already laid itself bare.

It was the same game it always was. She’d played it before—played it well enough to win herself a crown, a castle, a kingdom.

Charming thought he was the most powerful player on the current game board.

The fool boy was playing checkers where every move was a straight line and every piece played the same role until it reached the other side.

This was chess—a game of queens. Queen Raveena was the powerful piece on the board. Moving diagonally, vertically, horizontally—any direction, so long as it served the game.

The king, for all his glory, was slow. Limited. One square at a time. If he fell, the game was over.

The king might end the game, but the queen decided how it was played. She moved in all directions, saw all angles, set the traps and triggered the end. Take her off the board, and the rest would crumble—slowly but surely. Not because the game was over. But because the fight had already been lost.

Raveena's first husband's death and her empty womb had revealed that pitfall. In the matriarchal Snow Kingdoms, it was the daughters who inherited. Raveena was a widow, not a mother. So her crown, the kingdom, her safe haven, would pass to the last remaining daughter.

Raveena had tried to shape the girl into a queen.

In those early days, when she still believed her belly would swell with a true-born princess to solidify her claim to Everfrost and Thornhall, she had been…

patient. She had offered Snow lessons in statecraft, in subtext, in how to wield a smile like a dagger and read a room with her eyes half-lowered.

The young princess had shrugged off those lessons with the ease of someone who believed she’d never need them. She’d birdwatched through strategy meetings. Replaced poisons and politics with ponies and pouting. She hadn’t wanted to play the game. Eventually, Raveena had stopped trying to teach her.

Right now, her stepdaughter was making a classic mistake. She'd taken her eyes off the prize. Princess Snow had her back to her intended. She reached up to a love bird in a tree to offer it a seed. While she did, the man who was supposed to be courting her licked his lips as he gazed up at Raveena.

Raveena should have turned. She should have stepped back into the dark. She should have reminded herself that she was a queen and not some half-starved mistress hoping to be seen.

But she didn’t.

She let him look.

Let him want her.

The wind caught her cloak and snapped it behind her like a banner, hair blowing loose from its pins in white, silken strands. She didn’t cover herself. Didn’t soften her stance. She stood there, high above them all, frozen and radiant and cruel.

Let him see what he’d touched and abandoned.

Let him remember what it felt like to be devoured by her lips.

Let him think, even now, that she might still allow him back into her bed, into her body.

Let him remember that she would do things that a little girl would never do, never even imagine a man would want.

If Raveena could tempt him, seduce him, possess him, marry him, she wouldn’t have to step down from her throne. The ceremony would change. The bride would change. A single name scratched from parchment, a crown passed not to the daughter but to the stepmother.

Raveena would do anything to keep this castle. Even get on her knees for him again. And when she dropped to her knees and got her hands on him, he would be the one begging her.

She would do it. She would do anything to keep this castle.

Its hearths. Its vaults. Its black stone halls that remembered her footsteps and echoed only for her. Its banners bearing her crest. Its magic woven through the very foundation like marrow in bone.

To keep the castle, she needed the prince.

To keep the prince, she needed to win him.

Prince Charming, for all his gilded grins and practiced touches, was no king. He was barely even a pawn. But pawns could still be useful.

They cluttered the board, got in the way, distracted, defended. They moved only forward, in simple, direct lines. Which made them predictable. Which made them easy to sacrifice.

Still, Raveena needed him to think he was the one leading the charge.

That was the true art of the game. Making a man believe he was in command while maneuvering him exactly where you wanted him.

A queen did not seize power with brute force.

She took it with elegance. With patience. With blood, when needed.

Snow turned back then, placing her hand gently on the prince’s chest. His smile shifted, dimmed as though a fire had been doused by, well, snow. He didn't look at Raveena like that: warmly. He looked at her like he was on fire and liked the burn.

That was fine. Lust would win out. It was with lust that he looked at her. Not Snow.

Snow looked up and caught sight of her stepmother then.

The girl offered her a shy smile, the same smile she'd offered when Snow had come into her home shortly after her mother's death.

The same smile she'd offered as her father said his vows to her new stepmother.

The same smile she'd offered after they'd laid her father to rest in the ice.

Raveena returned the same smile to her stepdaughter. One that was slow, deliberate, polished to perfection. It was a queen’s smile. All poise, no warmth. Not a greeting, not affection. The kind of smile one might give a rival across a ballroom—or a pawn across a chessboard.

The smile lingered just a moment longer before vanishing like breath against glass. Queen Raveena turned on her heel and headed back into the castle, her fingers trailing on the stone like the caress of a lover.

If she could not win the prince's heart, then she'd have to take the girl's. Take it by force. Better a kingdom stained in red than a crown lost to a simper.