A Calculated Arrangement

I take wrecks for a living. I should have recognized one before I married him.

I knew the deal was coming. Two old families, a fifty-year-old pact, my father's signature dry on it before anyone bothered to tell me my name was the one inside. So I walked into that dying castle prepared. I had the money the Ravnholm name was bleeding for, terms ready to negotiate, and the kind of leverage that buys a girl a seat at her own table.

Then they handed me the cold one. Sten. The Greve nobody talks about. The brother cut from fjord ice, who looked at everything I brought to the table like it bored him to death.

Here's what I didn't know. The thing the whole frozen house knew before I did.

My money was never the point. The terms were never the point. He didn't step into this arrangement because his name needed mine. He spent a year in the dark, maneuvering, making sure no one else could be standing where I'd have to say yes. He wanted one thing out of all of it. Me. And he decided, somewhere along the way, that he would rather freeze to death an inch from me every night than let me see it.

So now we share a castle, a cold bed, and a war neither of us will admit we're fighting. He withholds. I push. He shuts every door I find, and I go looking for the next one, because cracking what everyone else called unsalvageable is the one thing I have never failed at. And somewhere under all that ice is a reason he turns his face from my mouth like it's the only thing that could kill him.

I'm going to find out what it is.
I find everything out eventually.
It's the one thing I'm better at than surviving.