Ledge (The Glacian Trilogy #1)

by Stacey McEwan

The cold is cruel, but it is not alive. It can consume you, extort you, and convince you to do unspeakable things. It can turn your enemies into body heat, and your friends into the coats you steal from their backs. The cold does not live, but there can be no ridding yourself of it.

If there is nothing else she has learned in her lifetime, she has at least learned the best way to keep warm, and that is to dupe the mind.

She has learned the might of silence. It is the prelude to fear. It is the absence of company. It is the moment before the monster takes you into his claws. She abhors it.

She thinks of the silence of her cabin and wonders, too, if perhaps she does wish for the wait to end. Perhaps she is tired. Perhaps there are worse things than death.

Tight places, her grandmother taught her, need more thought than force. There’s a way out of here, it’s just hidden.

“Did it scare you, Ryon? Tell me, what will you do if I kiss you again?” He grabs her wrist and pulls her down the path. “I will bury myself inside you, Dawsyn. And yes, it scares me.”

She looks exactly like the woman he first saw in the Glacian palace – like a warrior, like destruction. Like she should be his. Or he should be hers. He cannot help the lowering of his head, or the way his nose slides along her jaw. He cannot stop his lips from finding hers, like missing pieces connecting. And in every second that he knows he should stop, leave her be, he also knows he cannot possibly let her go. Because she is his. And he is hers.

The world seems big to you, but to us, who see it from the sky, it is miniscule.

She is small in his hands but not in his mind, where she takes up every crevice, every corner, filling him entirely.