Chapter 10: The Whispered Pact
Anna didn’t remember the sprint through the corridors. Only flashes: the cold stone under her bare feet, the shocked face of a maid quickly averted, the burn of her lungs. She slammed the door to her chambers and twisted the lock, her back pressed against the solid oak as if it could hold back the truth.
Her body thrummed. The phantom sensation of the ice, the vivid, stolen memories of pleasure that were not hers yet were, made her skin feel too tight. She smelled of winterbloom and sex. With a cry of revulsion, she tore the remaining sleep clothes from her body, standing naked and trembling in the middle of her room. The mirror across from her reflected a stranger: wild red hair, flushed skin, marks that were not bruises but the ghosts of Frost’s possessive grip on her hips.
She needed it off. All of it.
She strode to the bathing alcove, her hands shaking as she poured bucket after bucket of heated water from the hearth into the large copper tub. Steam rose, fogging the cold air. She climbed in, sinking down until the water covered her shoulders, scalding her skin a furious pink.
She scrubbed. With a rough cloth and lavender soap, she scoured her stomach, her thighs, between her legs. The ache there deepened with the pressure, a taunting echo. She clenched her eyes shut, but the images were brighter behind her lids: Elsa’s face, not Elsa’s at all, twisted in a feral need; her own body moving in a way she’d never dreamed.
“Stop,” she begged the empty room, her voice a ragged whisper.
A laugh, soft and intimate, bloomed inside her skull. It won’t come off, little one. It’s in the marrow now.
Anna froze, the cloth dripping in her hand. “You.”
Me, Ember’s voice purled, a silken thread of smoke in her mind. And you’re trying to wash me away? How rude.
“Get out!” Anna hissed, pressing her palms to her temples.
But we’re sharing a body. It’s so crowded in here with all your guilt. It’s pathetic.
Anna slumped back against the tub, the fight draining out of her, replaced by a cold, heavy dread. “Why? Why would you do that to us? To her?”
Do what? Ember’s tone was faux-innocent. Love her? Want her? She’s mine. Frost is mine. You just… get in the way during the day.
“You left us like that. You humiliated her.”
I woke you up. I gave you both a taste. A preview. The voice shifted, closer, more conspiratorial. You’re curious. Don’t bother denying it. I can feel your pulse racing. You want to know what it’s really like. Not the mess you woke up to, but the beginning. The first time.
Anna said nothing. Her breath fogged on the water’s surface.
I’ll show you, Ember whispered, a dealer offering a drug. A real memory. Not the lies I fed you before to watch you squirm. The truth. How it started. The first touch, the first kiss… the first time she split me open on her ice and made me scream.
“No.”
Yes. The word was a command. Let me up for a while. Let me have the body, just for this. To remember it properly. To show you. In exchange, I’ll tell you everything. You can know what you’ve been missing all these years.
“You already have control at night,” Anna muttered weakly.
Daylight is different. The sun changes the texture of things. An hour. Just one. Let me feel the steam on this skin instead of the midnight cold. And you can see. Ember’s presence was a coil of warmth in her gut, seductive and terrifying. It was always her, Anna. From the very start.
Anna wanted to refuse. To scream. But the curiosity was a cancer, fed by the physical memories imprinted on her cells. She was silent for a long minute, listening to the drip of water from the tap, the crackle of the fire.
“One memory,” she whispered, surrendering.
Good girl.
The shift was not a falling asleep. It was a submersion. Anna felt herself pushed down, not into darkness, but into a backseat of her own consciousness. She could still see through her own eyes, feel the water’s heat, but the body was no longer hers to command.
Her hands lifted from the water. They moved differently, with a languid, aware grace. They skimmed over her breasts, the touch appreciative, not frantic. A low, pleased hum vibrated in her throat—Ember’s sound.
“The first time,” Ember said aloud, with Anna’s voice, but softer, richer. “It wasn’t in a bed. It was in the old ballroom. Three years ago. Elsa was so tired from council meetings, she fell asleep on a divan. I found her. Frost was already waiting.”
The room seemed to dim. The steam thickened, becoming the dust-moted air of a disused hall. Anna watched, a prisoner behind her own eyes, as the memory unfolded not just in her mind, but across her senses.
She was so beautiful in the moonlight, Ember’s voice narrated, a dreamy sigh. Still dressed in her gown, that frosty blue silk. I crept over. I’d been drawn to her for months in the night, this pull I didn’t understand.
In the memory-vision, Anna-Ember knelt beside the sleeping Elsa. Her hand—smaller, younger—reached out and brushed a strand of platinum hair from her cheek.
Frost’s eyes snapped open. Pale blue, but burning with an intensity Elsa never allowed.
“You’re here,” Frost had said, the words a cloud of frost in the cold air.
“I couldn’t stay away.”
Frost sat up. Her gaze was hungry, scanning Ember’s face, her simple sleep-shift. “You’re real.”
“So are you.”
Then Frost’s hand was on the back of Ember’s neck, pulling her in. The first kiss was not gentle. It was a collision of need, a silent acknowledgement of years of hidden wanting. It was teeth and icy tongue and a gasp that was all Ember.
“I remember the taste,” Ember murmured now in the bath, Anna’s tongue tracing her own lip. “Winter and power.”
In the memory, Frost broke the kiss, her breath ragged. “What are you?”
“Yours,” Ember had answered, the truth tumbling out before she could shape a lie. “I think I’ve always been yours.”
It was all the permission Frost needed. Her magic erupted, not in fear, but in desire. A blanket of living frost spread beneath them, cool and soft. Frost pushed Ember onto her back, the thin shift riding up her thighs.
“She was ruthless,” Ember whispered, her hands now sliding down Anna’s stomach beneath the bathwater. “She didn’t ask. She knew. I was soaked for her already. My little cunt was aching.”
The language, raw and filthy in Anna’s own voice, sent a shock through Anna’s trapped consciousness. But she couldn’t look away.
In the ballroom memory, Frost’s fingers hooked into the waist of Ember’s smallclothes, tearing them aside with a brittle sound of ripping cotton. The cold air hit Ember’s exposed flesh, and she moaned.
Frost’s fingers, skilled and sure, found her immediately. They plunged into her, not one but two, icy and unforgiving.
“Gods!” the memory-Ember cried out, back arching off the frosty blanket.
“You’re so hot,” Frost growled, her face buried in Ember’s neck, her fingers pumping. “You burn for me. Let me cool you down.”
She scissored her fingers, stretching the tight, fiery heat. Ember sobbed, her hips bucking, chasing the delicious, shocking friction of the cold inside her. It was pain and pleasure fused, a claiming that felt ancient.
“Then she made her first cock,” Ember said, her voice growing thick with relish. Anna felt her own body responding, a traitorous heat pooling low despite the steaming water. “Right there in her hand. A smooth, perfect length of ice. She held it, showing it to me. I begged for it.”
“Please,” memory-Ember had whimpered, her legs falling open wider. “Frost, please, I need it.”
Frost positioned the glistening tip at her entrance. “This is mine. You are mine.”
She pressed forward.
The stretch was brutal, magnificent. Ember screamed as the ice penetrated, filling her with an impossible, spreading cold that ignited every nerve. Frost sheathed it to the hilt in one relentless thrust, then stilled, watching the tears of overwhelmed ecstasy streak from Ember’s eyes.
“Tell me,” Frost commanded.
“I’m yours! I’m yours, I’m yours!”
Frost began to move. Slow, deep, devastating strokes that rubbed the icy length against a spot inside that made Ember see white. The sound was obscene—a wet, sucking slush as her body tried to accommodate the cold intrusion.
“Fuck me!” Ember chanted, her nails clawing at Frost’s clothed back. “Fuck your little Ember! Harder!”
Frost’s rhythm became punishing, her hips slamming forward, driving the ice deeper with every thrust. Ember’s climax built like a avalanche, a pressure so immense she thought she would break.
“I’m gonna come!” she shrieked. “Frost, I’m gonna—”
The orgasm shattered her. It was a violent, convulsing thing that ripped through her core, milking the icy shaft inside her. Frost rode her through it, her own release a silent, powerful clench of magic that made the ice pulse and glow.
In the bath, Anna’s body shuddered, a weak echo of that long-ago climax. Ember panted, a smile on Anna’s face.
“That was the beginning,” Ember said, her voice returning to the present, though laden with the past. “Every night after that was a new discovery. A new way to belong to her.”
The memory faded, leaving Anna raw and exposed in the steaming water. The factual, visceral truth of it was worse than any vague suspicion. It was detailed, carnal, and undeniable. It had been going on for years.
Ember’s control didn’t waver. She lifted a hand, watching water droplets slide down Anna’s forearm. “Your hour is just starting, little one. And there’s so much more to see.”
Anna tried to scream, to push her way back to the surface. But Ember only settled deeper, a contented predator in the driver’s seat of their shared flesh. The deal was struck. The daylight was hers. And Anna was merely a passenger, forced to watch as the lines between them, between waking and sleeping, between sister and lover, melted away in the steam.