The Alpha's Rejected Luna and Her Secret Heir
A room with a low ceiling and a fire in it and rain on the shutters, in a country that has not existed for two hundred years.
A woman in a doorway with her hair down. A frozen river with a hundred people standing on it. A great deal of arithmetic, going on and on, the same sum in different orders, forever.
And under it, right down at the bottom, my mate, working.
She is not screaming. She is not fighting. She is doing what she has done in every drowned woman in this mountain, which is to go down and down and down through everything until she finds the one small thing at the middle, and I can feel her descending, patiently, hour after hour, through three hundred years of a dead man's furnitur