Chapter 58 I’m Tried Vuk
Maureen Laurent
What a day it is…
I let the crown slip from my fingers onto the stone bench beside me. It clinked softly—too softly for something that felt like it weighed a thousand years. My head throbbed in time with my pulse, a dull, relentless hammer behind my eyes. The worst headache of my life, no question.
“You good?”
The voice came from behind, low and familiar. I turned.
Nyxara.
“Yes. Hello Nyxara…?”
“Hello, Luna.” She stepped out of the shadowed doorway and dropped onto the bench next to me without ceremony, her dark cloak pooling around her like spilled ink. Her gaze slid past me to the snow flowers glowing faintly under the moonlight—delicate white petals that somehow survived the Northern frost. “Congratulations on becoming Northern Dominion Queen. Looks good on you. Heavy, but good.”
“Thank you, I guess.” I rubbed my temple in slow circles, trying to knead the pain away. “You’ve done more than well. Exposing the rot at the heart of those men… those kids will never forget it. They’ll carry what you did for them forever.”
Nyxara gave a small, sharp exhale—not quite a laugh, more like air escaping something under pressure.
“I didn’t help them because they were hopeless.” She kept staring at the flowers. “I helped because my conscience wouldn’t shut up. It was like having a broken alarm stuck on loop in my skull. Loud. Distracting. Bad for focus. Bad for survival.”
She finally glanced sideways at me. Her expression was unreadable, the way it always was when she didn’t want anyone to guess what came next.
“Guilt’s inefficient. It slows decision-making, clouds judgment, wastes energy. I needed it gone. So I removed the source. The kids just happened to be standing in the middle of the mess I was cleaning up.” A tiny shrug. “Self-preservation with collateral benefits. That’s all.”
Silence settled between us, broken only by the soft hush of snow drifting past the balcony railing.
“However you put it,” I said quietly, “you saved souls… isn’t that right?”
“Of course…” She breathed the word out like it cost her something, then let the sigh finish the sentence for her.
A maid appeared then—silent as a shadow—carrying a silver tray. Two goblets of red wine that caught the torchlight like blood, and a small bowl of fresh raspberries, impossibly bright against the winter night. She set it down without a word and vanished again.
We drank. We talked. Not about politics or crowns or the blood still drying on the kingdom’s ledger. Just… things. The way long days leave echoes in your bones. The way silence can scream louder than any throne room argument. And then, somehow, Nyxara let something slip.
Not a name. Never a name. Just the shape of it: a relationship that had started soft and turned sharp. Promises that rusted overnight. Nights spent lying next to someone who felt more like a stranger every time they breathed. Love that had twisted until it cut both ways.
I listened. When she ran out of words, I lifted my goblet in a small, tired salute.
“Well… at least you’re well fed. Not bad, right?”
She blinked. Then barked a real laugh—short, surprised, almost startled out of her. I laughed too, and for a minute the balcony felt warmer, the snow softer.
Eventually she set her empty goblet down.
“I should go.” She stood, offered me the smallest, realest smile I’d ever seen on her face. “Try not to let that crown crush you before morning, Luna.”
Her footsteps faded down the corridor. I stayed.
I stared up at the sky—black and endless and full of cold stars—and breathed in, breathed out. The air tasted like frost and unfinished things. Sadness rolled over me like fog off the northern ice fields. Heavy. Quiet. I didn’t fight it. I just let it sit.
After a while I gathered the last few raspberries into my palm and walked back to my chambers.
Gold was already waiting—curled at the foot of the bed like a living furnace. I kicked off my boots, climbed under the furs without undressing, and pulled him close. His warmth pressed into my side, steady and golden. I ate the berries one by one, their sweetness sharp against everything else I was feeling.
Sleep came eventually, heavy and dreamless.
I woke to cold.
Not the ordinary winter chill that sneaks under doors. This was deeper—bone-deep, stealing my breath, making my teeth chatter before my eyes were even open. I curled tighter around Gold, dragged every fur and duvet over us, buried my face in his thick ruff.
Still cold.
The shivering turned violent. My fingers felt distant, numb. My toes might as well have been someone else’s.
I sat up, hugging my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms around my legs like I could trap my own heat inside.
“Okay… what the absolute fuck is going on…?”
The fire still snapped in the hearth, logs blazing, throwing orange across the room. The heat didn’t touch me. Nothing did.
This cold wasn’t coming from outside.
It was inside.
Like something I’d buried—some grief, some fear, some piece of myself I’d locked behind duty and smiles and a crown—had finally cracked its cage. And now it was flooding through me, turning my blood to ice.
You don’t get to bury things forever. Eventually they thaw. And when they do… they come back colder than they left.
I pressed my forehead to my knees and whispered into the dark:“Not tonight. Please. Not tonight.”
But the cold didn’t listen.
It burrowed deeper, past skin, past muscle, straight into the marrow. My whole body shook in violent, uncontrollable waves. Gold whined again—low, worried—and nosed at my arm, but even his furnace warmth felt distant, like heat behind thick glass.
I couldn’t stay like this. Couldn’t just lie here and freeze from the inside out.
I rolled off the bed in a tangle of furs and limbs. The drop to the floor jarred my knees, but I barely felt it. My hands slapped against the cold stone, then I was crawling—elbows dragging, breath coming in ragged gasps—toward the room heater in the corner. The iron thing glowed faintly orange, a small sun in the shadowed chamber. I pressed my palms flat against it, then my forearms, then my cheek. The metal seared hot against my skin, but the relief was fleeting, superficial. The ice in my veins didn’t care about surface burns.
I stayed there for what felt like forever—curled against the heater like a wounded animal—until the shivering eased just enough that I could force myself upright. I staggered back to the bed, climbed in, pulled everything over me again. Gold immediately burrowed close, heavy and solid.
And then it broke.
The tears came without warning. First a hitch in my throat, then a quiet sob that cracked open wider, louder. My chest heaved. Hot salt spilled down my cheeks, soaking into Gold’s fur. I tried to swallow it back—Queens don’t fall apart like this—but the dam had already burst. Sobs turned raw, ugly, wrenching. My whole body curled around the pain like I could protect myself from it, or maybe hold it all in one place so it wouldn’t spread further.
I didn’t hear the door. Didn’t hear footsteps. Just suddenly Vuk was there—bursting in, cloak still dusted with snow from whatever late-night patrol or errand had kept him out.
“Maureen—what is it?”
He dropped to his knees beside the bed, hands hovering for a second like he wasn’t sure where to touch without breaking me more. Then he was on the mattress, pulling me against his chest without waiting for permission.
“I’m cold…” The words came out small, fractured between sobs. “So cold…”
I clung to him—fingers twisting into his shirt, face buried against his neck. His arms locked around me, one hand cradling the back of my head, the other rubbing slow, firm circles down my spine.
“What’s going on?” His voice was low, urgent, edged with something close to panic. “Talk to me, little moon.”
“I don’t know…” Another sob tore out. “I just—I just feel like crying. I’m so sorry… I’m so sorry…”
“Little moon, stop.” His grip tightened, not hard, just steady. “You’re scaring me. Hey—hey, stop crying. Stop apologizing.”
But I couldn’t. The tears kept coming, years of held-together pieces finally unraveling all at once. The crown. The blood on the throne room floor. Nyxara’s quiet confession. The kids’ hollow eyes before they were freed. The way I’d smiled through every council meeting while something inside me quietly starved. All of it poured out in wet, gasping waves against his shoulder.
Vuk didn’t try to fix it.
Didn’t shush me or tell me to stop.
Instead he made me warm with his hellfire warmth.
He shifted us both until I was half in his lap, my face still buried against the crook of his neck where his pulse beat steady and hot. His cloak—still carrying the sharp bite of outdoor frost—fell open around us like wings. Then he wrapped me tighter, one arm banded across my back, the other cradling my head so my ear pressed directly over his heart. And gods, that heart… it thundered like a forge. Heat rolled off him in slow, living waves—hellfire, not the clean burn of a hearth but something older, wilder, forged in whatever shadowed place he’d come from before he swore himself to this frozen court.
The cold in my bones hissed in protest, then began—slowly, grudgingly—to retreat. Inch by aching inch. My shivering eased from violent tremors to faint tremors to nothing more than the occasional quiver. My fingers, numb and clumsy, finally uncurled enough to fist in the front of his shirt. I breathed him in—smoke, leather, pine, and that faint metallic tang that always clung to him after he’d been working steel or blood.
When the last of the ice finally cracked and melted away, leaving only exhaustion in its place, I fell into him. Not gracefully. Just collapsed forward like a marionette with cut strings, trusting he’d catch me. He did. Always did.
“I feel tired, Vuk…” My voice came out small, cracked, barely louder than the dying crackle of the fire. “So tired…”