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 commercial 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 time."

I studied her face. Searched for the grief and felt like I found it sitting quietly underneath everything else. Like sediment 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 came 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 meets spine. So softly, without any real pressure. But the part of me 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 claimed 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 time. He bled out."

Twelve years is a long time 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 moment, in a state somewhere between a loud breath and a laugh. Her emotions... they confuse me!

"He was. Immensely. It’s difficult to stay angry at someone 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 meant a lot to me to see it. <

"You mentioned... 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 me a hundred more things to want.

"I came 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.

Meanwhile, I never had any direct conversation about my sexual preferences to the people that should have been closest to me. 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 me that way. I don’t think he was a hateful person about it, exactly. He didn’t call me disgusting or threaten to disown me."

"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 me in.

"...My fault. Hearing you say the word was just... like realizing I love you again. Some humans might understand, but you’re the only one like me I’ve ever met. That can get what I mean. 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 me.

What I think is dopamine pleasure from the food is also still there, with the smell 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 me wanting to overcome her token resistance and end the... stressing threat.

"He told me 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. <