The Snow Prince - Raleigh Ruebins Page 0,71

Stifled me forever. Cursed me, truly and definitively, even though she had cursed herself in the process, too.

But she was still my mother. And finally, her stranglehold on me was gone.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had love like you have,” she said simply as I let go of her, taking a deep, shaky breath in.

“Not with dad?”

“I loved your father more than I’d ever known I was capable of loving,” she said. “But I wouldn’t have given up everything for him. I wouldn’t have given up Frostmonte if he’d asked me to.”

“But you’re giving up Frostmonte now,” I said.

She gave me a single nod. “Because I do love you, Sebastian,” she said. “No matter what stupid things I have done.”

She walked out of the room, her heels clicking on the stone and the sound echoing as if we were in a cave.

She turned right before she left the room, giving me a stare that was somewhere between confusion and defeat.

“I was wrong,” she said simply with a shake of her head. “Being different was always… our downfall, when I was a child. But now being different doesn’t seem to lose you any respect at all.”

“Because it’s not really that different,” I said. “Love is love, isn’t it?”

She took a deep breath. “It is.”

She was gone a moment later. I stood in the room for some amount of time, unable to process things that I never thought I would hear.

I felt like a zombie when a few of my mother’s assistants and dukes walked in, my mother by their side.

Paperwork was shoved in front of me. I scanned it and saw that it was all exactly as my mother had promised. No fake-outs, no tricks. Everything I was signing said exactly what she had said.

I was becoming king.

Right now, I was becoming King Sebastian Nigel Fairleigh Ambrose of Frostmonte.

And it felt so damn different than I ever would have expected. The act of it was so simple. No fanfare. Normally, when a king was crowned, the whole world knew about it. But this was silent, just the few of us here in the castle.

And when everything was finished, I felt… nothing.

Not much, anyway. One moment I was a prince, and the next I was a king. The world kept turning.

The only thing in the world that I wanted was to see Henry.

My first act as King Sebastian was to drive back down the mountain and knock on Henry’s door.

The moment he opened it and I saw his damn beautiful face, I grabbed his hand.

“C’mon,” I said, tugging him.

“What?” he said, smiling. I realized that he had a beer bottle in his hand and was only wearing sweatpants and green and blue striped socks.

“We gotta go. Get in the car. There’s something I need to show you,” I said. My excitement was building now. It was as if I was a zombie before, but the moment I’d seen Henry, something deep inside me had activated.

“I don’t even have shoes on,” Henry said. “Give me a sec.”

He appeared again a minute later, this time with a flannel and a pair of boots on. He looked so beautifully unkempt, almost as if I’d just come over when we were fifteen and asked him to come have a snowball fight.

Being the King of Frostmonte didn’t change a damned thing. None of the important things, anyway.

I wrapped my arms around Henry and pressed my lips to his. He tasted lightly of the winterberry beer he’d been drinking and he smelled like…

He smelled like home. Nobody had ever had that effect on me other than Henry.

He hummed softly against my mouth, then sighed as he pulled back, his eyes searching mine.

“Thought you were in a big rush,” he murmured, leaning in again to kiss my temple.

“Yeah, but you do things to me,” I said. I slid my hand under his jacket, gently squeezing the side of his body.

“I love doing things to you,” he said. “And when you do them to me. But I also am more than a little curious what you’re trying to drag me to do.”

“Right,” I said. “Right. Okay. Into the car.”

In another minute we were strapped in, and I started heading back up toward the mountain. Henry was mostly silent.

“You’re not even going to ask where we’re going and why?”

He smiled softly at me. “Based on the direction, I’m pretty sure we’re heading to the castle.”

“But you’re not curious why?”

“No, I’m massively fucking curious,” he said. “But I also know you’re not