Chapter 5
ELISE POV
The kitchen mocks me with abundance.
I stand in the doorway on day six, stomach cramping with hunger, staring at impossible plenty.
Fresh bread sits in cloth-lined baskets, the crusts golden-brown and perfect.
Fruit that shouldn't exist in this eternal winter overflows from crystal bowls—apples red as blood, pears that gleam like jade, grapes that cluster in impossible perfection.
Eggs rest in neat rows, their shells pristine white.
Dried meat hangs from hooks like some macabre decoration.
Everything I could possibly need to feed myself.
If I knew how to cook a damn thing.
I've never prepared food in my life. Never needed to. The closest I've come to cooking is telling servants what I wanted for dinner and watching them scurry to fulfill my wishes. Now I'm surrounded by ingredients that might as well be decorative objects for all the good they do me.
My stomach twists painfully, a constant reminder of my incompetence.
I haven't eaten properly since we arrived—four days of surviving on chunks of bread torn from the loaves, choked down dry because I don't even know how to make it palatable.
The bread is safe, requires no skill, no knowledge I don't possess.
But everything else mocks me with its potential.
The eggs sit there like accusations. I know they're food—have eaten them a thousand times prepared by expert hands.
But the gap between knowing and doing stretches like an impossible chasm.
The meat hangs tough and impossible to bite through raw, and I don't know how to make it edible.
Even the fruit needs washing and peeling in ways I've never bothered to learn.
I grab more bread and retreat to my chambers like a thief stealing scraps from her own kitchen.
Day seven brings weakness that frightens me.
My hands shake as I force down another chunk of increasingly stale bread, the taste like sawdust in my mouth.
I'm light-headed when I stand, dizzy when I move too quickly.
My body is eating itself while abundance sits just down the hall, useless to me because of my own ignorance.
But worse than the hunger is the torment of scent.
I can smell Aratus's meals from three floors away—rich aromas that drift through the palace like deliberate torture.
Roasted meat that makes my mouth water. Fresh bread that puts my dry crusts to shame.
Something sweet and complex that makes my empty stomach clench with longing so intense it borders on pain.
The bastard is eating like a king while I survive on scraps. The message is crystal clear: comfort is earned, not given. And I haven't earned anything.
The awareness of him has grown stronger too. Even when I can't see him, I feel his presence like a cold current in the air. It makes my skin prickle with unwanted awareness, makes me hyperconscious of my own heartbeat, my breathing, the way my body seems to lean toward whatever room he's occupying.
I hate it. Hate the way my body responds to his proximity with little shivers that have nothing to do with temperature. Hate the way I catch myself listening for his footsteps in the corridors. Hate the traitorous part of me that wonders what would happen if I simply asked for help.
I try cooking on day eight.
It goes about as spectacularly as expected.
I approach the stove like it's a wild animal that might bite me. The eggs seem simple enough—I've watched servants prepare them countless times. Crack them into a pan, apply heat, wait for them to become food instead of raw potential.
The first egg splatters across the counter when I misjudge the force needed to crack the shell. The second creates a mess of shell fragments mixed with yolk that I can't separate. By the third, I'm fighting tears of frustration as I try to fish pieces of shell out of the gooey mess.
When I finally get relatively clean eggs into the pan, I have no idea how much heat to use. The flames leap high, and within minutes the eggs are burning—blackening around the edges while the centers remain stubbornly liquid. The smell of char fills the air, acrid and bitter.
I try to salvage them, poking at the mess with a spoon, but only succeed in creating scrambled charcoal. My eyes stream from the smoke. My hands shake from hunger and frustration.
"Damn it!" I throw the spoon across the room, where it clatters against stone. "Damn everything!"
That's when I feel him.
A chill in the air that has nothing to do with the palace's perpetual winter.
That cold presence that makes my skin prickle and my pulse quicken in ways I don't want to examine too closely.
The very air seems to thicken around me, charged with his magic in ways that make my body respond before my mind can catch up.
He appears in the doorway like winter personified—silver hair catching the light, those frozen-lake eyes taking in the disaster I've made with what might be amusement. His lips curve in something that's definitely not sympathy.
"Hungry?" he asks mildly, as if the answer isn't written in every line of my too-thin body.
"Go to hell."
"I've been. It's warmer than this kitchen right now." He steps inside, and the temperature drops another few degrees. Ice crystals form in the air around him, dancing like tiny stars. "You could ask for help."
"I don't need help." The lie tastes as bitter as the burnt eggs.
"No?" He gestures at the blackened pan, the ruined food, the smoke still curling from my latest attempt. His voice carries that infuriating note of patient amusement. "This suggests otherwise."
My pride wars with my hunger. The hollowness in my stomach, the weakness in my limbs, the way I can barely think past the need for real food. Hunger wins, barely.
"Fine," I spit. "Help me."
He tilts his head, studying me like I'm a specimen in a glass case. "That's not how you ask for things, princess."
The endearment drips with condescension, and my hands clench into fists. But my stomach cramping with emptiness makes the words come anyway, dragged out of me by necessity.
"Please." It tastes like ash in my mouth. "Please help me."
"Better." He moves to the stove with fluid grace, examining my wreckage. When he's this close, I can smell that intoxicating scent of pine and winter and something darker underneath that makes my mouth water for reasons that have nothing to do with food. "What were you trying to make?"
"Eggs. They just... burned."
"Because you had the heat too high." He clears away my mess with efficient movements, his hands steady and sure where mine shook with desperation. "Watch."
He cracks fresh eggs into a clean pan, and I find myself moving closer without permission.
The demonstration should be simple, educational, nothing more.
But I'm acutely aware of everything about him—the way his long fingers handle the eggs with casual competence, the way his pale skin seems to gleam with its own internal light, the supernatural cold that radiates from his body in waves I can actually feel.
"The trick is patience," he says, adjusting the flame to something much lower than I'd used. "Low heat. Constant attention."
His voice is hypnotic. Low and controlled, like everything about him. I watch his hands as he works—elegant fingers that should belong to a pianist rather than an ancient Fae lord. There's something mesmerizing about the way he moves, sure and graceful and completely in control.
"Why aren't you helping me yourself?" I ask, though part of me dreads the answer.
"Because you haven't earned it." The eggs sizzle softly in the pan, nothing like the violent crackling of my attempts. "Help is a privilege, not a right. Something you get when you ask properly and show you deserve it."
My cheeks burn with humiliation and something else—a warmth that spreads through my chest at his words. There's something about his calm certainty, his absolute control, that makes a treacherous part of me want to please him. Want to prove I can be worthy of his attention.
I hate that part of myself.
"I asked properly," I protest.
"You asked once. After destroying half my kitchen and nearly burning the palace down." He glances at me, those frozen eyes unreadable but somehow seeing too much. "Try again tomorrow. Maybe next time you'll remember to be polite before you make a mess."
He slides the perfectly cooked eggs onto a plate. Golden yolks that gleam like sunrise, whites set just right, nothing like the charcoal disasters I've been creating. The smell makes my stomach clench so hard I nearly double over.
He takes a bite, and I watch his throat work as he swallows. My mouth waters helplessly, my body leaning toward him without conscious thought. The simple act of eating becomes torture when I'm this desperate.
"Please," I whisper. "I'm so hungry."
"I know." Another bite, deliberate and slow. "Hunger is an excellent teacher."
He finishes the eggs while I stand there, shaking with need and rage and something that feels dangerously close to tears. The casual cruelty of it—making perfect food while I starve—should make me hate him more. Instead, it makes me aware of how completely he controls my survival.
When he's done, he sets the plate aside and moves toward the door, leaving me alone with the lingering scent of properly cooked food and my own failure.
"Tomorrow," he says without looking back. "Ask nicely from the beginning, and maybe I'll teach you something useful."
Day nine, I swallow my pride before I enter the kitchen.
It goes down like broken glass, but I manage it. The hunger has become a living thing inside me, gnawing at my insides and making rational thought nearly impossible. I've lost weight I couldn't afford to lose, my clothes hanging loose on a frame that was never substantial to begin with.