Come a Little Closer

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"You killed my father."

Lucian Winters said it the way other men fire a pistol: once, cleanly, with the whole weight of his arm behind it. His gloved hand closed around the throat of the man in the chains, and the leather creaked.

The man in the chains smiled.

The lowest cell of the Frostline Guard had been built to hold things that were not supposed to exist. It was a steel box sunk forty feet into frozen rock, lit by a single amber strip that hummed like an insect. Meltwater ran along the floor and pooled around the prisoner's bare feet. Iron cuffs bound his wrists above his head. Iron rings circled his waist and ankles. He was stripped to the belt, and the cold had done nothing to him at all. Steam lifted off his shoulders, off the ridges of his stomach, off the black curls plastered to his forehead.

Kaelen, Prince of the Ashfall Reach. Heir to the Ember Conclave. The dragon the border soldiers had spent six weeks hunting, and who had walked into their nets with his hands already held out.

"I went to a great deal of trouble to be captured by you," Kaelen said, and his voice scraped pleasantly against Lucian's palm. "I would hate for you to waste it on a misunderstanding."

"I took you at the border."

"You took what I let you take."

Lucian's fingers tightened. Beneath his thumb the pulse in that throat ticked slow and even, a pulse with nowhere it needed to be. His own heart was running at twice the pace, and he despised it for that.

"What were you doing at the Frostline?"

"Ah." Golden eyes, bright as struck coins, drifted over his face, unhurried. "As for why I am here..."

"Answer me."

"You expect me to answer a man who is afraid of me?"

"I am not afraid of you."

"Your scent says otherwise, Commander."

The room went very quiet. Lucian had spent eleven years learning to keep his face still in front of generals, ministers, and men who wanted him dead. He kept it still now. But behind his eyes, something cold and blue began to turn.

He had been born with it, the way some people are born with perfect pitch: the Winters gift, the psychic edge that had made his family lords of the north for nine generations. With a thought he could slide a needle of pure will into another man's mind and open it like a letter. With a little more, he could burn the thing out until nothing was left but breathing flesh.

"Enough of your arrogance," he said softly. "I can hear what you are thinking. If you won't tell me the truth, my mind will find it, and then it will burn out your nerves and leave you an empty shell."

"Is that so?" Kaelen tilted his head against the wall, exposing more of his throat, as if he were offering it. "Then you had better come a little closer."

Lucian should have stepped back.

Instead he leaned in. The blue light in his eyes sharpened into a blade, and he drove it into the prisoner's mind with everything he had.

Nothing happened.

It was like pushing against a mountain. The blade went in and met warm dark water, vast and deep, and then something in the water opened its eyes. The pressure rolled back along the thread of his own power like a tide, and for one terrible heartbeat Lucian felt a great gold presence turn and regard him with the patience of a creature that has all the time in the world.

"It's a secret," Kaelen murmured against his ear, so close that Lucian felt the words rather than heard them. "I can only tell you."

"What the..."

The chains snapped.

They did not break so much as surrender; the iron simply stopped being strong. A hand caught Lucian's wrist, spun him, and drove him backward across the steel table in the center of the cell. His shoulder blades hit the metal. The air left him. Before he could draw another breath Kaelen was over him, one forearm braced beside his head, one knee planted between his legs, the heat of that enormous body pouring down like sunlight through a window.

"How dare you," Lucian said. It came out rougher than he intended.

"Commander." Kaelen's gaze dragged slowly from his mouth to the gold braid on his collar and back up again. "Your psychic power does not work on me. And this rut needs your personal attention."

"Get off."

"If I had not played along while my rut left me weak, how else would I ever have gotten this close? How else would I have held you?" The golden eyes lowered. His breath was warm on Lucian's jaw. "I did not come to the Frostline to fight your army. I came willingly, for one reason only. To enter your domain."

Lucian's gloved hand found the revolver at his hip. The barrel pressed hard into Kaelen's ribs.

Kaelen only laughed, low in his chest, and the sound went through Lucian like a struck bell.

"Fifteen years," he said. "Fifteen years, and I did not recognize your scent until you reached the borderlands. Then it hit me like a wall. Snow and iron and something underneath, something that smells like a thunderstorm about to break." His nose brushed the line of Lucian's cheekbone, light as a question. "You really do not remember."

"Remember what?"

"Fifteen years ago."

The room tilted. For a split second, so brief that Lucian could have sworn he imagined it, he was not lying on a steel table at all. He was standing in a field of white, and the cold was in his teeth, and something small and hot and bleeding was breathing against his hand.

His heart stopped.

Could he be...

"Stay back," Lucian said, and did not know which of them he was saying it to.

Kaelen's smile went soft and dangerous at the edges. He lifted his weight a fraction, just enough to let Lucian feel how little he needed to stay.

"You are not going to kill me, Commander," he said quietly. "Not tonight."

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