Coldsnap: The Billionaire Alpha's Fated Pregnant Princess (GL) Chapter 450 - …Curiosity Will Kill It

A/N: Construction Site accidental death warning

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Maybe I should have waited for the morning to ask these questions. I just... I have no control over my curiosity today, after weeks of ignoring things. But I also don’t have the control to lessen the speed at which I am letting myself fall into her orbit, either.

I’m not going to last, am I? Did I honestly think I had the willpower?

"Did you know that comrcial piping and HVAC installations are brazed, using silver alloy rods? Every werewolf on site during the rough-in phase certainly did. Kept nice and locked away at the upper level of the scaffold during that ti."

I studied her face. Searched for the grief and felt like I found it sitting quietly underneath everything else. Like sedint settled at the bottom of still water, ready to be lifted up and turn everything murky until it can settle again.

"When the safe box landed as it all ca down, it cracked open. On a pallet of cinderblocks. Brazing rods slung out and pierced his leg and apparently strongly lacerated right here on the back of his neck."

She reaches out and scrubs her finger near where skull ets spine. So softly, without any real pressure. But the part of I’m trying to silence kind of wants her to just grab on and squeeze while she’s there.

> The food isn’t helping yet. It needs to digest. Then I’ll be fine and calm and- <

"Between the Atlas and Axis. The C1 and C2. That’s what the report said. The witnesses claid he dropped and didn’t move, they thought he was already dead right then."

"...He wasn’t?"

"It was the leg wound. And the fact that everything crashed onto him, costing minutes of rescue ti. He bled out."

Twelve years is a long ti to carry anything. Long enough that it stops looking like a wound and starts looking like a feature. I guess it’s no different with seventeen years.

She doesn’t cry as her hand settles into petting my shoulder - and I never knew him, so I can’t for his sake. But I can only imagine hearing the details at that age. In the way that officials have about them, trying to be sympathetic and detached all at once.

"I’m sorry. He sounds... that all sounds frustrating."

A sound blasted from her mouth. One that existed, for a brief mont, in a state sowhere between a loud breath and a laugh. Her emotions... they confuse !

"He was. Imnsely. It’s difficult to stay angry at soone who died being a hero, but harder to forgive the other lacking parts. Because ultimately he was a good man. Just not where it counted for us."

I understood that deeply. My mother was inarguably cruel in her own ways to her family. Cold where it should have mattered to be kind, political where warmth should have been.

But she also held the kingdom together. Through three border conflicts with the Insects, the Avians, and the Lion Kingdom separately. Over the course of a period where my father hid in grief over my grandmother’s passing, long before I was born.

A story which was hard to believe then, and now. That the man that led our nation confidently, expected excellence no differently than his wife, was once no better than his daughter who hid in caves.

> Perhaps that’s just more of the private matters I was never allowed to see. It would have ant a lot to to see it. <

"You ntioned... that you shared angry words."

Kyrie’s hand curled around the back of my neck like I’d deeply wanted a bit ago. A mistake. All that does is just give a hundred more things to want.

"I ca out to him. He didn’t take it well."

She said it... understatedly. As if the fact of it was long since settled and anything lingering wasn’t worth having strong feelings over.

Maybe it had been. Settled in her heart. She seems like the sort of person that actually talked through her reality to people. To her family. Or argues through them, if she feels she is right.

anwhile, I never had any direct conversation about my sexual preferences to the people that should have been closest to . Because I was a Princess. I didn’t have the right to problematic preferences.

"You must have been strong back then, too."

"The funny thing is, I was. Because he made that way. I don’t think he was a hateful person about it, exactly. He didn’t call disgusting or threaten to disown ."

"But he had ideas about leaving a legacy. The biological imperative of producing offspring for our pack, no matter what. And he wasn’t that interested in hearing my answer when he brought it up. That his daughter found the entire concept of taking a male partner, even if just for siring..."

"Repulsive."

She grips tighter and steals a kiss. Too sudden, not long enough. I chase her retreating face a little with mine, but the hand around my neck - and a soft press of our still tightly locked hands, against the center of my chest reins in.

"...My fault. Hearing you say the word was just... like realizing I love you again. So humans might understand, but you’re the only one like I’ve ever t. That can get what I an. I’m incredibly lucky."

Her eyes dropped to the space between us as my head swam with all sorts of those neurotransmitters I’d read about. Oxytocin from all this holding and being kissed is likely the biggest culprit for what ails .

What I think is dopamine pleasure from the food is also still there, with the sll of it and her mixing together into one rewarding taste in my mouth. And there’s also definitely been a bunch of spikes in cortisol today that has wanting to overco her token resistance and end the... stressing threat.

"He told that biology works how it works. That personal feelings didn’t change the reality of what the pack needed. And I..."

The pause here was different from the others and it cleared my head briefly. More jagged. Like she was admitting to a piece that had never quite worn down despite... who cares, I just want to kiss her again.

"I told him that if any offspring of mine would be related to him, I didn’t want to produce them. Ever."

> Damnit. Should have done it and shut her up before she killed the mood.