Coldsnap: The Billionaire Alpha's Fated Pregnant Princess (GL)-Chapter 442 - The Burden Of Being Unfashionably Late

Deliberate avoidance felt... subconsciously logical, at the time. I had a pup to worry about. I couldn’t risk learning things that would make me shut down.

Now with the deaths out in the open and directly on my conscience it felt like cowardice. Vrika isn’t here to berate me, so I have to do it myself.

> You’re stalling. <

I’d stopped three minutes ago in a little alcove between residential floors. A spot that held a fire extinguisher and emergency light. Just leaning against structural concrete with my own Tolerance off.

As heat leeches out of my back where she’d pressed a half hour ago. While warmth enters from my front, from holding my son - his own little bundle of *perfect* temperature now. I stare again at the name whose guilt stabs at me more than the others.

| Jessica Sullivan - Deceased |

A young photographer. Capturing my likeness that day with such genuine enthusiasm just to be on the temporary job for my interview. With a professional eye and easy laugh, I would have liked her even if I hadn’t learned she was Anise’s relative.

But I hadn’t even had the... I hadn’t *known* the way to Annex people into the system’s Pack Roster when we met. Like most of the others, she was added on a whim alongside the fortune of a pleasant experience.

In the last days in Vossden before I left, she actually saw me walking through the city. Embarrassingly, it was the night I was returning from that anime club meeting, so I got to show her a ’side’ of myself that didn’t really exist.

> Isn’t that all I show people? <

She took so many pictures and talked with me about them for almost twenty minutes before I could go home and clean up... and tempt Kyrie into exhausting herself trying to transform in a way werewolves were not meant to.

I held her hand for a lot longer than six seconds while talking earnestly about her relationship with her aunt. And while I was hiding in a cave, just like I’m hiding here right now in this stairwell, something happened to her.

"Would it have still happened had I done something differently?"

It’s not a helpful question. I know this. It’s a chain trying to bind me in a place I don’t want to be. However, that doesn’t mean the weight of it can be shrugged aside. Not without consequence.

> It will just crush all the flowers growing beside me if I’m not careful. <

I closed the roster, enabled my Tolerance, and rose to my feet. Anise was still three more floors down, in one of the residential blocks on the twenty-seventh that had been converted for long-term housing of... ’my’ people.

Claire had put out a vague enough survey in order to identify everyone coming to the tower who had seen the Pre-Claim notice. And of course, my sweet Alpha turned them into a higher social caste than those in the basement levels.

> Nepotism in the Apocalypse. Well, Lunarizon was always giving special opportunities to the Rimecoat members - full werewolf or Omega. So I guess nothing... actually changed. <

There was even a guard in the stairwell at the entrance when I arrived on the right floor. A special keycard lock the man had to use. And another guard on the other side.

"...Protected so well that they are almost prisoners, hm?"

My mumble came before the door I needed, ajar like it was inviting me when I located the right room number. I could hear the sound of movement inside. Not frantic or struggling, thankfully.

Just the sound of someone keeping busy because stopping wasn’t an option.

At least, as someone who just broke out of doing just that, it’s all I could hear in the noise of a sewing machine starting. I knocked and waited without looking around the edge of the door. Listening to the whir of a treadle slowing down.

"Come in."

Her familiar voice was steady enough. Maybe I’m assuming a lot about how she is answering to the knock of a potential stranger, but I’d call it a lot steadier and controlled than I’d ever heard it. The kind of tone that takes effort to maintain.

Anise stood right behind a table full of fabrics half assembled. New bolts of material were stacked against one wall in the living room turned workshop, but it looks like her focus is repurposing other items to make them more viable for the cold weather.

"Citra."

She doesn’t seem surprised, but it’s not exactly *relief* to see me either. I’m willing to bet someone warned her I’d be coming down. Probably Claire.

It did take me a half hour to journey the over four hundred steps, after all. With my constant little stops. Just like it takes me half a minute to close the door and step any closer.

"I should have come sooner. To say... to see you."

"You had a baby to take care of. Martha told me. She’s been... she has helped. A lot of us that were placed up here started to rely on her."

> Being *glad* that a witch is whispering words into the ears of your friend strikes me as not a usual thing to feel. Thanks to the aggressive connotations of that title in this world... <

"I was told it was a boy, is that him?"

Her pale blue eyes are slightly questing, even if there is something about them I can’t shake. They are clear. They aren’t hostile. But they are... off.

With the way it is wrapped in Kyrie’s jacket, she probably can’t see what I’m actually holding. It would be strange if she is up here, helping, and still hasn’t been told of werewolves. However, it was also strange for me to never realize about who could see our eyeglow.

I don’t know what she knows. About anything. I just see that the blonde seamstress is walking around the table carefully my way. That she has nothing visible in her hands.

Clothes that I’d seen her wearing the other times had mostly favored darker pieces, despite her bright hair and eyes. Or maybe to contrast them. That’s not the case now, where she wears only a very simple set of white shirt and pants.

Coincidentally, the color I wear... the nature of mourning in my culture. Seeming like the idea of fashion has died in her heart with the rough look of the fabric. And I can’t tell if that is because of the overall situation we face - or because of the single key part of it for her. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

"Asha. His name. It means hope."

"That’s a beautiful name."

Watching her nod slowly, with facial muscles tightening then releasing, I know. I know right then. Because that was the very same micro-expression I’d seen in the mirror before, on myself.

In a royal palace, when a servant finally mentioned that Ravi had not been by to see me in a while. It’s your heart and mind trying to strangle its own negativity, but failing to do it quickly enough.

It’s knowing that *something* is dead... and won’t be coming back.