Winter's Bride - Candace Wondrak Page 0,27

I ate. Ma would kill me if she saw the way I was shoveling food into my mouth in front of my future husband, a god, a king, and a handsome one at that. Quite literally, she might die.

Nodding once, I managed to wait until I swallowed what was currently in my mouth before saying, “It’s very good. Thank you.”

A sound left him, a sound of mock surprise. “So there are manners hidden in you.”

That earned him a glare. “You get my manners if you deserve them. You surprised me with this food, so I thanked you. Do not expect constant, eternal gratitude, Abner.” Perhaps I should bite my tongue, but I didn’t. His wives lasted twenty-five years at the most, so I was going to be myself, regardless of where I ended up because of it.

“I told you to call me Winter.”

“And I chose to ignore you, because Winter is not your name,” I told him, stabbing a strawberry before lifting it to my mouth. “It’s Abner, so that is what I will call you.” The strawberry was just right, not a hint of bitterness anywhere. Absolutely delicious. I couldn’t remember a time when I’d tasted a strawberry so perfectly ripe.

Those godly eyes narrowed in my direction, but I did not take back what I said.

“So, Abner—” If I was honest, I said his name that time just to annoy him, to irk him a little more. He might be handsome, but he was haughty as well, and that was something I could not stand. “—it must get lonely in this castle. Surely there are others who live here, not only you?” Spending the next twenty-five years locked in this castle with him and him alone… it sounded an awful fate.

Truly, Ember would’ve hated it here. Me? I guess we’d have to wait and see.

“There are only others here when I need them,” he informed me, dashing my hope of finding someone to befriend here. Surely it would grow old, stuck with him in this huge place? “When I do not need them, they are not here.”

I reached for my cup, taking a sip of juice. Squeezed from oranges, it tasted delicious. “Do you ever get lonely?” I answered my own question, “Of course you do. It’s why you take a bride every twenty-five years.”

His jaw ground, but he did not attempt to argue with me or tell me I was wrong in my assumption. Truly, there was no other reason he would take a human bride. Loneliness, the thought of starting a family, something like that. Why else would someone as magical and powerful as Winter himself want a human bride? And so frequently, too.

This led me into what I asked next: “What happens to your brides?” Some humans did not live long, it was true, but to have only twenty-five years left… it would put me just above my parents’ age, and they still had quite a few years left in them.

“I do not wish to talk about that,” he growled out, turning his head away from me, studying something on the floor, brooding, almost.

I studied him, knowing I’d upset him by asking. My curiosity was not something I could temper; he would have to either get used to it or get rid of me before my twenty-five years was up.

If he was alone in this castle, if there was no one else here, it meant his other brides were no longer here, either. Did he send them back home? Did he have them killed? I doubted any of them ran away—this castle was built on a mountainside, days away from any village if you were on foot. You were likely to freeze before then, if you were by yourself and didn’t know how to keep warm or hunt or any of that.

It was a mystery, wasn’t it? It was one I knew I’d have to keep pushing at, keep digging, for I needed to know what mess I had stepped into. Going into this blind did not seem smart, and though some might say I was foolish for taking my sister’s place here, for basically trading away the one thing I always wanted in life—my freedom—I wasn’t so sure.

“All right,” I relented, causing those silvery eyes to rise to me once more. “Then what do you wish to talk about?”

His brows creased slightly, as if he could not think of anything, as if he could not believe I’d given him the choice. “Must we talk? Can