Chapter 2: The Morning After
Warmth.
That was the first, sluggish thought. A heavy, comfortable warmth pressed along Anna’s back, from shoulders to knees. The faint, clean scent of winter air and lavender—Elsa’s scent—filled her nose. She was in that delicious, gauzy space between sleep and waking, where dreams still clung like cobwebs.
She nuzzled deeper into her pillow, smiling. Her pillow was… moving. A slow, steady rise and fall beneath her cheek.
Not a pillow.
A forearm, slender and pale, was draped possessively over her waist, a hand splayed flat against her stomach. The warmth at her back was a full-length press of skin. Soft. Bare.
Anna’s eyes flew open.
The room was bathed in the pale, guilty light of early morning. She saw the familiar ice-filigree of her sister’s ceiling, the silk curtains. She was in Elsa’s bed. Her brain, still sticky with sleep, tried to cobble together a reason. A storm? A nightmare? But the hall between their rooms was clear, always. And they hadn’t done this since they were children.
Then she felt it. The distinct, tender ache between her legs. A deep, used satisfaction that echoed in her muscles. The kind that came from…
No.
Her breath hitched. She shifted, just an inch, and the arm around her waist tightened, pulling her back flush against the body behind her. A soft sigh ghosted across the back of her neck. Elsa’s sigh.
Memory was a blank, white wall. There was nothing after saying goodnight at her own door. Just this: waking up here. Naked. With Elsa, who was also clearly, unmistakably naked.
Careful, so careful, Anna lifted the duvet just enough to peek beneath.
Her own pale skin, freckled. The sharp angle of Elsa’s hip bone pressed against the small of her back. The dark red bloom of a mark—a love bite—standing out violently on the tender skin of her own inner thigh.
A sound leaked from her throat, a whimper of pure, undiluted panic.
She had to get out. Now. Before Elsa woke. She could slip away, pretend this was some sleepwalking accident, a weird, embarrassing fluke. She tried to ease the arm from her waist. Elsa’s fingers twitched, then flexed, holding on.
“Mmmh. Stay.” The murmur was low, husky with sleep. It was Elsa’s voice, but… not. It was layered with a dark, intimate warmth Anna had never heard.
Anna froze, her heart hammering against her ribs. She couldn’t breathe. She had to see. Gently, as if disarming a trap, she turned onto her back, the arm sliding to rest now on her abdomen.
Elsa was facing her, still asleep. Her platinum hair was a messy cascade across the pillow. Her face, usually so composed in rest, was relaxed in a way that seemed almost indecent—lips slightly parted, cheeks flushed. And there, on the column of her throat, just above the collarbone, was another mark. Angry. Purple. A perfect, damning ellipse of bitten skin.
Anna’s stomach dropped through the floor.
She remembered making those. The thought arrived fully formed, a visceral, bodily memory without a visual counterpart. The taste of cold skin, the desperate scrape of teeth, the muffled groan it elicited.
Oh, god.
She shoved the duvet back, the cool air hitting her skin, and scrambled out of the bed. Her legs were wobbly. She stood there, naked and trembling, staring at the wreckage of the bed. The sheets were tangled into ropes, a pillow on the floor. The evidence of a struggle, or… something else.
“Elsa.” Her voice was a dry crack. “Elsa, wake up.”
Elsa stirred, frowning. Her hand reached across the empty space Anna had left, patting the sheets as if searching. Her eyes fluttered open.
Confusion. Slow, morning blurriness. Then her blue eyes focused on Anna, standing naked three feet from the bed. She looked down at her own body, exposed. She saw the tangled sheets. She saw the marks on Anna’s thigh.
Elsa’s face went from sleep-soft to corpse-pale in half a second.
She didn’t scream. She didn’t move. She just stopped. Everything about her stopped. The rise and fall of her chest halted. The life in her eyes shuttered, replaced by a kind of hollow, frozen horror Anna had only seen once before—on a coronation day that went very, very wrong.
“Anna.” The name was a puff of frost in the suddenly chill air. A delicate rime of ice crackled across the bedside table, spreading fast.
“What…” Anna’s voice broke. She wrapped her arms around herself. “What did we do?”
Elsa’s gaze was locked on the bite mark on Anna’s skin. She lifted a trembling hand to her own throat, her fingertips brushing the matching bruise there. A full-body shudder wracked her. “I don’t… I don’t remember.”
“That’s not possible,” Anna whispered, hysteria clawing up her throat. “You have to remember. How do you not remember this?” She gestured wildly at the bed, at themselves.
The frost kept crawling, a silent panic attack made visible. It inched up the bedpost, whitening the silk.
“I went to sleep. In my room.” Elsa’s words were methodical, detached, as if reciting a report from a distant land. “I dreamt of… cold. And… and you. Warm.” She flinched, as if the word itself burned. “But that was a dream. This is…” She finally looked at Anna, her expression splintering. “Anna, what is this?”
They stared at each other across an acre of freezing floor, the truth too monstrous to say aloud. The physical proof was all over them, in their sore muscles and marked skin, in the intimate disarray of the sheets. But their minds were wiped clean, offering nothing but a yawning, terrifying blackness.
Someone had been here. In this room. In their bodies.
And that someone had done this.
Elsa pulled the duvet over herself, a regal, defensive gesture that did nothing to hide her terror. “You need to go,” she said, her voice regaining a sliver of its usual command, thin and brittle as an icicle. “Before the guards change. Before anyone…”
Anna nodded, a frantic, jerky motion. She snatched her discarded sleep shirt from the floor—it smelled like frost and something else—and yanked it on. She found her shorts balled near the foot of the bed. Every second felt exposed, dangerous.
She didn’t look back as she slipped out of the chamber, into the empty, silent hall. The stone was cold on her bare feet. Each step echoed the single, screaming thought in her head.
No memory. No memory. No memory.
Back in the room, Elsa sat rigid in the center of the ravaged bed, the duvet clutched to her chin. Her eyes were wide, unblinking, fixed on the closed door. The frost had reached the window, painting the world outside in a blurred, crystal haze.
She lifted her hand. A tiny, perfect snowflake crystallized in her palm. She stared at it, then at the love bite on her throat reflected in the ice of her bedside mirror.
A silent, desperate question hung in the frozen air.
Who were we?