Winter's Bride - Candace Wondrak Page 0,24

lying through your teeth, brother.” He glanced over his shoulder, as if Morana was right there. She wasn’t, thankfully. I would not be having this conversation with my brother if she was still in the room. “She is something else, isn’t she?”

I had to blink at that, for there was a weight to his question I wasn’t expecting. I studied my brother, how he stood, how he still wore that smile… almost wistful in its grace. Something hit me: the heat that had come off Morana, the fire in her eyes and the color of her skin, the way her hair shined with gold.

“You’ve seen her before,” I muttered, feeling… something. Something I couldn’t describe. Was it jealousy? Was I envious of Ishan that he had seen Morana before, that he put himself into the lives of the humans in the kingdom? Maybe.

Or perhaps I was concerned that he would try to take her from me. After all, how many brides did I have, and not once had Ishan ever come to me so close to a wedding before. Many. Countless. This had never happened before, I knew, and that’s why I could not shake the feeling of unease from my gut.

Ishan let out a dramatic sigh, still grinning. “No point in lying to you, brother. Yes, I’ve seen her before. Many, many times, in fact. She is… she’s not like anyone else. You will have your hands full with her, I’m sure.”

I could not fight the suspicion rising in my stomach as I met my brother’s dark eyes. “Why are you here?”

“To wish you good luck with your future bride, of course.”

Narrowing my eyes, I said, “You’ve never wished me luck before.”

“I haven’t? Oh, what a terrible brother I’ve been, then.”

“What do you want?”

Ishan’s grin widened. “I’m not here to ask for anything, Abner. I’m simply here to wish you good luck.”

A deep sigh escaped me, and I got up, moving past my brother, bumping shoulders with him as I began to storm away. To my utter annoyance, he popped up right in front of me, and I stopped walking, glaring at him, feeling the ice prickle at my heart inside. “Get out of my way.”

“Why?” Ishan asked, cocking his head. Finally, that grin had fallen from his face. If I knew him well—which I did, for he was my brother—it wouldn’t be gone for long. “Did I upset you by wishing you luck?”

The frown I wore should’ve told him everything, but since he continued to play dumb, I said, “We both know you’re not here to wish me luck. You want something else.” There had been a time when he’d visit often, when he’d try to get me to come out of this castle and walk amongst the humans as he did, but that time had long gone.

Time. When you had nothing but endless time, everything changed.

He set a hand over his heart, and his grin returned, just as I knew it would. “I am hurt, brother, that you think I would only come here because I want something from you. Absolutely hurt to my core.”

I rolled my eyes, wishing he would just spit it out already and get out of here. I would much rather be thinking about Morana than dealing with my brother right now, anyway.

“But, now that you mention it, there is something,” Ishan went on, taking a step closer to me. Less than a foot between us, I felt his heat, just as I knew he felt my cold. His voice lowered to a bare whisper, “Morana is not like the others. She was not supposed to be taken. She took her sister’s place—”

“Yes, she told me that much.”

“Well, I doubt she told you that she’s held my favor since she was a child,” he went on, and I kept to silence, not knowing what to say to that. “What I want is for Morana to be happy. Whether that’s with you or not, I don’t know, but you should know I will be watching, and the minute—nay, the very second it becomes clear she will end up like the others, I will take her out of here. I will not see her freeze to death, not when she carries so much life still in her.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but in the blink of an eye, my brother was gone, leaving me alone in the long room once more, though I was not as I was before. No, a new weight