Chapter 6
six
. . .
The frostlily was beautiful. She'd give it that.
A single long stem, wrapped in tissue paper. White petals that caught the frozen light from the mirror. A flower that bloomed only during Frostfall, that vendors sold for obscene prices along the main promenade, that lovers gave to each other on Solstice Night.
The note was folded beside it. Handwritten block letters, no signature.
Phoebe,
Your voice tonight reached me in a way nothing has in years. The way you held that last note during your first set, then took that small breath before the final phrase, that was for me. I know it was. I'll be here every night. Don't be afraid. You found your audience.
Your Truest Listener.
Cold sweat prickled at her hairline under the stage makeup. Her palms grew damp. The room had dropped ten degrees in the time it took her to read the card, and the frost on the mirror was still spreading its gorgeous, terrifying lacework toward the tissue-wrapped stem.
Thorne was beside her with his hands balled into fists and an expression she had never seen on his face.
Not blank. Not stoic. Something that looked like fury but colder.
Her body's threat response kicked in.
It didn't reach for the door or her bag.
It reached for him. A half-step closer, her shoulder nearly brushing his arm, her body making a choice her brain couldn't override.
The cold rolling off him should have driven her back.
Instead, it steadied her. The sweat at her hairline cooled, her breathing leveled, and she did not step back.
He was already moving.
He lifted his comm to his mouth, his voice clipped and precise: "Thorne to dispatch.
Dressing room seven, headliner venue. Unauthorized entry.
I need a forensic team and a lock recode, now.
" He didn't wait for an acknowledgement before switching channels.
"Overnight patrol, double pass frequency on the performer's residential block effective immediately. Confirm."
The confirmation came back. He was already at the door, examining the lock mechanism, his pale fingers tracing the seal without touching it.
His shoulders filled the doorframe when he turned to give the next order, and she watched the way his body organized itself around the task.
Every movement was stripped down to function, every word aimed at one specific outcome.
"I need a secondary scan layer at this threshold," he said into the comm. "Keyed to ping my personal frequency on any entry. Non-negotiable."
She stood in the middle of her own dressing room with a stranger's love letter icing over on her vanity and watched him work. The breadth of him when he turned. The precision in his hands when he tested the window latch. The cold radiating off him.
All of him was steadying her, and she was going to have to think about that later.
He finished his sweep and came back to where she stood. He was closer than protocol demanded, and his eyes were still that blazing silver-white, not fully settled back to their normal ice-blue.
"We will find out who left this and how they gained access." Flat. Certain. "Until we do, your comm stays on your person at all times. Not in your bag."
It wasn't gentle. It wasn't her old manager's practiced concern after incidents. This was colder and more solid, and it asked nothing of her.
She believed him. Completely, immediately, without the usual audit she ran on every promise anyone made her.
"Okay," she said.
He held her gaze for one more second. Then he stepped back, and the professional distance returned like a door closing, and he walked her through every entrance in the venue with his hand hovering near, but never on, the small of her back.
He went through testing locks and checking corridors, until the forensic team arrived and the dressing room was no longer hers for the night.
She did not ask about the frost.
Their walks became the rhythm of her days.
Mornings started with the cold sharp against her face, vanilla snow drifting on the footpaths, and Thorne always a half-step behind her as they crossed the quiet blocks to Ember and Kaelor's bakery.
The beverage stall on the corner where he ordered peppermint tea without asking, handed it to her without comment, and she wrapped both hands around the cup and let the warmth anchor her.
His cold beside her, the tea's heat in her palms, the silence between them.
Evenings became the walk home after the show, her body still vibrating from the stage, the festival lights strung overhead making the snow glow gold and rose.
Her heels on the path. His silent boots.
The particular quality of his cold after dark, sharper, cleaner, carrying that peppermint edge that she breathed in without meaning to and held in her lungs a beat too long.
She started watching him in profile when he wasn't looking.
The line of his jaw. The stripe patterns at his throat, faint silver spirals that caught the Pine's bioluminescence and threw it back in fragments.
His shoulders inside the dark uniform were broader than she'd registered from a distance, the fabric pulling slightly across the span of them when he turned to scan a cross-street.
The way his icy breath fogged differently than hers: finer, almost crystalline, dissolving faster.
One morning, three blocks into the walk, she caught herself humming.
Not a warm-up. Not scales or lip trills or the anxious patterns she used to self-soothe.
It was an actual song. Something old her mother used to play on Sunday mornings in the kitchen in Flatbush with the vinyl crackling through a speaker that cost twelve dollars at a yard sale.
She hadn't meant to let it out. The melody had just been there, sitting in her throat, and the quiet between them had felt like the space wanted filling, and her body had filled it before her brain could intervene.
"What is that?"
His voice, low and unhurried, not quite looking at her. Eyes on the path ahead.
"Nina Simone. 'I Loves You, Porgy.'"
He didn't comment. Didn't nod. Didn't say that's nice or I don't know it or any of the things people said when they were performing interest in her music.
He just kept walking, and the silence that followed had a different quality.
Denser. Warmer. Like it was holding the shape of the melody she'd put into it.
That evening, backstage, changing for the second half, she realized she'd spent the entire show choosing which song to hum for him on the walk home.
Not consciously. Not the way she chose setlists or arranged encores. More like the way her body had chosen to lean toward his cold instead of away from it.
She'd landed on Ella Fitzgerald. "Someone to Watch Over Me."
The irony was not lost on her.
She hummed it three blocks in, and her voice did the thing again.
The same thing it had done onstage two weeks ago when she'd aimed her closing number at the shadow at the edge of the house where she knew he was standing.
Lower in her chest. More bare. Sustained where she'd usually trim, holding notes a fraction longer than the melody asked for, letting them breathe and spread in the cold air between them.
Her instrument was shaping itself to him, and she did not want to stop.
He walked beside her. He did not comment. His breath dissolved into fine crystals, and the snow fell around them, and she hummed Ella into the space between his silence and her want, and if he understood what she was doing, he gave no sign.
These walks were the realest, safest part of her day.
Not the stage. Not the dressing room. Not the late-night calls with her agent.The walks every morning and night next to him.
The realization scared her worse than the frostlily had.
He is doing the job he was assigned. She told herself that. This is duty. This is protocol. He would walk any performer home and order peppermint tea and sweep dressing rooms and stand in the eaves of every show.
Her own ear caught the lie before the thought finished forming.
Three nights later, on the walk home, the snow was falling heavier than usual, muffling the festival sounds behind them, the path quiet and dark between pools of lamplight.
"Miss Calloway?"
She turned.
A man stepped out of the shadows behind them.
Thorne took a step in front of her, placing his body between her and the human man who had appeared out of nowhere.
Phoebe recognized the man. He was the one with press credentials who'd been at every show since opening night. He gave her a professional smile, warm but not effusive, and held his hands up, empty, nodding at Thorne.
"Apologies for the ambush." His smile widened.
"I've been trying to find the right moment. I’m Gavin Hale, a freelance journalist. I'm covering the Frostfall cross-cultural phenomenon for several Earth outlets.
I'd love the chance to interview you, at your convenience, anywhere you'd feel comfortable.
Your work here is extraordinary, and I think the people back home deserve to hear about it from you directly. "
Thorne said nothing but kept his body between her and the man.
The journalist gave her nothing concrete to refuse. No pressure, no pushiness, no angle she could identify and bat away. Just a reasonable ask from a reasonable man in a reasonable tone.
Her defenses came up anyway. It was reflex. Ten years of David Sterling and the endless parade of people who wanted something from her voice had wired her threat detection to trigger on courtesy as fast as aggression.
But in front of her, something else was happening.
Thorne had gone still.
It wasn’t his usual stillness. Not the controlled, watchful quiet she'd been studying for weeks.
This was different. This was the stillness from the stage floor.
His body had locked into something that made the air between them drop several degrees, and frost was forming at the edge of his collar that hadn't been there thirty seconds ago, delicate and white against the dark uniform, spreading in slow spirals toward his jaw.
He was staring at the journalist, and his whole body was aimed at him.
The protectiveness rolling off him in the frigid air landed low in her belly.
She kept her face perfectly composed and smiled at the journalist. “I’d be glad to. Have your people reach out to the venue contact to schedule a meeting.”
“Thank you, Miss Calloway. Again, sorry to bother you like this.”
Gavin Hale smiled at her again and nodded at Thorne once more before he walked off into the snow.
Thorne did not relax. His cold stayed sharp, his jaw stayed tight, the frost at his collar did not recede. They finished the walk in silence.
At her door, she turned to say goodnight.
He was closer than she'd expected.
Close enough that she could see the frost still tracing its faint pattern at his collar, crystal-white against his pale skin.
Close enough that the cold coming off him raised the fine hairs on her arms through her coat.
Close enough that she had to tilt her chin up to find his face, and when she did, his eyes were not ice blue.
They were darker. Deeper. That storm-cloud navy she'd only seen once before when he'd brushed the tear from her cheek.
His gaze dropped to her mouth.
Her breath stopped.
He leaned in. A fraction. A degree. The distance between them halved without either of them taking a step, his cold and her warmth meeting in the narrow space and creating something that prickled across her lips and the bridge of her nose, and the skin of her throat.
His eyes were on her mouth, and she could smell him.
Peppermint and frost and that mineral-clean coldness lying underneath.
Her lips parted without her permission, and she felt herself lean.
He was going to kiss her. And she was going to let him.
She wanted it. There was only his mouth, inches from hers, and the cold that would taste like peppermint.
She watched his discipline catch up with him.
It happened in his eyes first. The dark blue flashed back to pale. The want gathered and locked away.
He straightened. Took a step back. He put distance between them with the same deliberate care he put into everything: the sweeps, the comms, the formal sentences, the careful words that came next.
"Goodnight, Miss Calloway."
He turned and walked into the snow. His dark uniform disappeared into the white in seconds.
She closed her door.
Her lips were still tingling where his breath had landed and his mouth hadn't, and the absence of the kiss sat in her chest with nowhere to go.
She pressed her forehead against the door and closed her eyes.
She'd been performing the not-knowing all season. Her body was done.
She wanted him.
She had wanted him since he held her on the stage floor with his arms locked around her and his heart slamming against her chest through their clothes. Possibly since he walked her home a year ago. Possibly before that.
She wanted him, and she had no idea what he wanted in return.
He almost kissed her, and then he didn't. She couldn't tell which was the truth. The not-knowing was going to eat her alive because the questions she'd been refusing to ask all season had finally arrived with nowhere left to hide.
What am I to him?
Why does he act like he would die for me, when I'm not even sure he likes me?