Sweet Romance13 min read
My Trouble with the Ice Lord (and How I Broke Him)
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I am Clementine Vega. I have a face some people called harmless when I was a child, a smile that persuaded kings to blink and fools to confess. I have used that face like a weapon and like a shield, but I never used it on Galen Zimmerman to get what I wanted. Not at first. Not on purpose.
"Miss Vega, please come back with me," Crew Song said, his voice flat and brittle as the mountain air.
"Noooo," I crooned, tilting my head like a fox in late autumn. "I—don't—want—to."
"Clementine," he tried the formal title, but it stuck like frost on a window. "The Ninth has ordered it. I can't disobey."
I pretended to think it over, while the wind buried our footprints and the world around us bleached itself white. I let him think he had a chance.
"You are really giving me a hard time, crew," I teased, eyes half-mooned. "You know how stubborn I am."
He looked like he had eaten snow. He did not smile. He never smiled. That made him dangerous in a way I had long loved.
"Miss... please," Crew said, softer, helpless in a way that made my small ribcage clench. "If I don't bring you back I—"
He didn't finish. He'd seen what would happen if he failed the Ninth, and yet he had been the one who had climbed the mountain, through storms and night, for days to track me down.
"All right," I said with a lazy surrender, letting him feel like he had won. As he moved forward, a faint, sweet scent rolled off me like steam. He took a breath. His shoulders slumped; his legs trembled. I hadn't planned to do that—at least not today. But an old habit is like a bone: it remembers.
"Clem?" I heard someone call from the ridge, and my smile broadened until it was almost criminal.
He arrived in a black suit that had no right to be there amidst the snow, hair like ink and eyes like winter lakes. He was beautiful enough to be a myth—Galen Zimmerman. The first time I'd seen him, I thought the sky had rearranged itself to honor him. The second time, I had started to live inside his orbit.
"Galen," I said, and then, like a guilty child, I wrapped myself on Crew Song's shoulders and pouted.
"Galen," Crew breathed, then slumped like a marionette with cut strings. I had put a sleep herb in his flask earlier—an accident? Maybe not. "Miss... don't."
Galen walked up to me slower than a storm, and faster than my heart could count. "Clementine," he said. The name fell like a crystal down the slope.
I crawled onto the breadth of his shoulders like I belonged there. "Take me home, Ninth," I said in a small voice.
He carried me. He always had. This was a posture he was used to: I, smaller than he, frisky and dangerous; he, tall and implacable, a mountain turned human and softened only around me.
"You're not allowed to move," he said suddenly.
"Why? Are you wounded?" I whispered. I pressed my cheek to the back of his neck. His skin was cooler than the snow, and that thought was absurd: he was a furnace that could keep cities warm.
"Don't move," he repeated. "One wrong step and my wound tears."
I curled against him. He smelled faintly of iron and a medicine I had learned to find in his pockets like a child's secret. The world narrowed to the crook of his neck and the weight of his word. I wanted to stay there forever.
Later, under a sky that had been cleared to a particular kind of blue, I sat on a leather chair in his private plane while they woke him like a king from a long nap. The doctor fussed and fussed, all hands and no mercy, and I hovered like a moth. The moment his eyelids stirred I leaned down and—just to check if I could—kissed his mouth.
He tasted like metal and snow and something older. He did not react. He never reacted when I wanted him to, until, lord help me, that day he did. He pressed up into the kiss like a tide. It was not my plan, but neither of us complained.
"Just this once," I told myself. "He's so fragile I will not be cruel."
"Miss Vega, get out," one of his men said, embarrassed and practical. It was a ridiculous request; I was the one who was supposed to be kept out. I stayed anyway, because I am stubborn, and because I loved to see him unset.
Later, while the doctors fussed and plotted like caged birds, I puffed at an unlit cigarette and told him, "You are mine to fix, Galen. You will not leave me alone to make the island without you."
"Do not leave the chair," he said, and then, like a small sovereign, he gave me an order that felt like a plea.
"I'll try," I promised, and I meant it. Mostly.
When I walked the grounds in small, reckless clothes—shorts, thin shirts, a muff of hair tucked into a ponytail—I was a walking shout. Men bowed to me, or to his name, or to the idea of both. They feared him. They feared me. When we were alone he called me "his little secret." When people asked, he called me "a problem." My favorite titles were the ones he never used, and I loved him in the ways that people love the dangerous tides: at the edges and at the center, both.
"Will you help me with papers?" he asked once, in a moment where his voice gave up the cold without losing its shape.
"Only if you let me try to read them." I stroked the sleeves of his shirts, the ones he left lying like flags.
He did not take my hand. "You can't. The work is heavy. You must not take the burden."
"But I've borne more than my share of burdens to keep you alive," I said, and my voice cracked like thin ice.
He looked at me, and for a heartbeat, he was not a sovereign. He was a boy who had been forced to wear armor. "You should stop running," he replied, as if the phrase itself could bind me.
"I run because I can," I shot back, and the truth of it was bright and careless. "I run because the world is alive and there is music and mischief everywhere."
"Then run with me," he whispered. He reached for my hand, and this time I did not withdraw. We clasped fingers, the way kids do when they promise not to fall out of trees.
We were not allowed to love like ordinary people. His time in the world was finite. It was a thing people said in a dozen sterile ways that sounded like sentences stitched from ash. The doctors warned. The family planned. The island watched with contained breath.
"Who would hurt you?" I hissed, and my hands curled like fists. "Who would dare?"
Crew told me more than the doctors ever did. "They hit him from behind," Crew said. "They wanted to take the jade directive. They want to use the family's money like a weapon. The Franks are moving. The attack rate is increasing."
"The jade?" I clicked my tongue. The jade command was not on him. It had never been on him. It was something people thought it was. "They are idiots."
"They are dangerous," Crew said. "And organized. We have found groups that act like machines."
"We will break them," I promised. It is easy to promise things to a man when his chest rises and falls under your palms.
When the alarms screamed over the island, I did not hesitate. "Get the planes warmed," I ordered. "Get the engines ready."
They looked at me for the first time like I was less than a child and more than a warlord.
"Don't you dare," Galen said, and for the first time in my life he used the commanding voice that had laid countries to sleep. "You are not to leave."
"Then hold me here," I answered—less of a plea than an offer. He stunned me by doing the simplest thing. He reached for my waist and held me like I mattered more than a thousand calculations.
But I was on a mission—he had told me to be careful, and I had told him I would be—but then the mission changed. The Franks had a man in their prison who could be used to blackmail the rest. His name was Route—or at least, in their files he was "an intelligence agent," and to me he was a small man who smiled too much with his eyes.
We went to the city for a pretend banquet, where the Franks displayed their finery and their predatory ease. Preston Gross sat like a king among men. He had a white suit like the inside of a broken cloud and an arrogance thicker than the smoke that hovered in the room.
"Miss Vega," he said, his smile like a trap. "Galen doesn't bring a princess to a place like this often."
"Then you're lucky tonight," I said, and set my jaw.
Preston saw me as an ornament. He saw Galen as a rival he could wound for sport. He had guessed wrong twice that night. He would guess wrong again.
I let them chase me like a cat. They would not hurt what they could not see until they touched the world with violence. I made them touch it.
"Fun?" someone asked. "Shall we play?" It was Preston, of course, with a dozen men who had been taught to obey the sound of their master's breath.
"They called me weak," Preston laughed, and if any man deserved the word "dull" it was him.
I spent five minutes making the room spin. I flirted, I turned heads, I slipped out like a thief. Preston followed; his ego is heavy and it needs to be fed.
We played a dangerous bait-and-switch. He wanted me; I wanted him to expose himself and the sad little men behind him.
In the ballroom's shadowed corridor, where lamps hunched low like quiet witnesses, I walked on the edge of danger. Men would follow; then they'd be disoriented. Men would leap at the ghost of me and find only empty air. I was smoke. I was hunger. I was the small stone that knocks a mountain loose.
When he finally cornered me in a glassed-in room—Preston on his feet like a trap starred with guards—he thought he had won. He thought he would have his way with me and Galen would never know.
"You're mine tonight," he said as if there were an arithmetic to it.
I smiled at him like a blade. "Mine? You are mistaken."
He reached. I acted.
I stabbed, but not him. I stabbed the air, and then I kicked a chair that shattered the window. The alarm shrieked. The guards rushed to the sound. I ran, and his men flailed.
When Preston tried to follow, I had already disappeared into a stairwell, into a thread of smoke that led to the roof, to the chopper that was supposed to be empty. On my way out I left a trail not of blood, but of humiliation.
That was only the beginning. The real punishment had to be public, spectacular, unbearably public. Preston, who thought himself untouchable, needed a lesson so the world would remember: you do not mock the family that can make its own justice.
Two days later, in a ballroom the Franks had rented to celebrate a deal, I returned—unannounced, uninvited, in a dress that looked like a sun turned into silk. The crowd, opulent and disinterested, parted like a sea for a small storm.
"Miss Vega," a voice said. It was Preston, raised like the second act of a bad play. He had the gall to enjoy himself, as if the world were nothing more than a stage for his vanity.
"Preston," I said, and my voice was a bell in the hush. I walked directly to the central platform, to the edge of his table, as if I belonged there. "Do you remember when you called my friend a 'sickly nothing'?"
The table grew quiet. Forks hovered half-way to mouths.
"You mean the Ninth," Preston said, with the diplomatic savagery of men who had been taught to be dangerous with words.
"Yes. The Ninth. My Ninth," I said. "And you called him weak. And I wondered who taught you to throw stones at people whose game you do not understand."
Preston leaned back like a man who thought this was only a rumor. "You—what are you going to do, little fox?" he jeered.
"Expose you," I said.
I had with me a dossier that looked like a pretty book. Inside it were names, bank ledgers, photographs of secret transfers, recorded conversations—things that knifed reputation deep. I set the binder on the table and pushed the "play" button on the phone lying on top of it.
"—this is the account," a voice recorded said, "transfer now, he will not resist…"
The audio was Preston's voice, clipped with the frankness of a man ordering a small war. The room heard it. A small gasp moved like a broken ripple.
Preston laughed. "This is forgery!"
"Aren't you tired of lying?" I asked. "Of treating blood like money?"
I clicked again. The ledger's videos blinked to life on the large screen behind the dais. I had had help; my friends were not fools. We were precise.
"These are your transactions," I said. "These are your shell companies. These are the men you pay to scrub uprisings, men you pay to stage 'accidents' on rival ships, the men who leave bodies to float with the tide. Since you like the sea, tonight the sea takes back your favors."
Preston's smile had the suddenness of a cut. His men rose like a wall, but the room had shifted. What had been silence cracked into murmurs; conviction grew like a radial bruise.
"You will pay," he said, but his voice was thinner—like a string on a violin about to snap.
"No," I said. "You will not. You will answer. And I want the room to hear you answer."
I had friends in the press, in finance, men who love a spectacle more than they fear a man. They streamed all of this live. Within minutes, every seat in the hall became an audience while the outside world watched.
Preston's face drained to the color of old marble. He tried to speak. He tried to lie. He tried to blame, but logic and the ledger had found him. He mouthed excuses that sounded like old songs. The people around him shifted like birds in a cage—some recording, some gasping, some pointing.
"They have proof," someone hissed. "Look."
A dozen phones flashed. The rumor network ignited; I saw it in the faces of the bankers and the officials who had once bowed to Preston. The power was no longer in his hands but in the room's will to witness.
"How dare you—" he started.
"Shut up," I said, and every ear tensed. "You will kneel and confess."
The word hung there ridiculous and right. He would not kneel to me; he had not learned respect. But the world could kneel him in its own way.
I called out voices—men whose wallets he had emptied and whose families he had endangered. They rose. A cluster of witnesses stood before the dais like a chorus. They told the stories—grainy pictures, letters, time-stamped transfers. Each testimony folded into the next like a choir of accusation.
Preston's composure cracked into visible shards of panic. He flailed. His guards looked at each other like men who had been told to march into quicksand.
"You're monsters," he said, then the microphone took his voice and made it wobbly.
"No," I told him. "You are the nightmare people finally wake from."
The room, which had been a safe harbor for him, became a theater of judgment. Phones streamed. People in the hall began to murmur and then to shout. Headed by a bank executive whose family had been ruined by Preston's embezzlement, a man we had helped anonymously, the crowd demanded justice. Then the executive—cool as an executioner—pulled up the legal files we had filed weeks before and handed them to the presiding judge, who was in attendance.
"Preston Gross, you are accused on live record of embezzlement, bribery, and ordering violent acts to consolidate business interests," the judge intoned.
Preston stood like a man out on a limb with no rope.
For the punishment I wanted something more than a courtroom; I wanted shame that would be carved into his name. The room erupted into a spectacle: the judge ordered Preston to remain confined to the hall until the police arrived. Cameras kept rolling. People who had once flocked to his table began to stand in disgust. Servers who had once smiled at his jokes stopped. A man who had eaten the world's honors suddenly ate his own silence.
Preston paced, pleading with those around him, his voice turning the color of desperate paper. "It is a mistake! It's slander! I will take them to court!"
"On what grounds? Your own handwriting is on the ledger," someone shouted. A banker stepped forward and tethered him with a list of transactions that collapsed like a house of cards.
He pleaded, then raged, then tried to bargain. At every turn his bravado became a thinned veneer. The crowd booed. Reporters shot questions like arrows. They asked the same thing: "Why did you order the attacks? Who helped?"
He tried to point fingers. He tried to accuse us of forgery. But the ledger and the recordings were tight and fair. For every lie he told, we had a fact. He went from sneer to snarl to silence in less than an hour.
Then, in the most public humiliation, I did not let the cameras stop. I had arranged for an online feed that allowed common people—people he'd ruined—to flood the feed with their testimony. His name trended with the words "embezzled," "ordered hits," "sea deaths." His face filled the screen with the pale sheen of a man who had been stripped of his halo.
The people in the hall—merchants, lords, officials—stood back like children watching a thunderstorm. The mayor personally escorted him to the doors where police were waiting. Men who once called themselves his associates skulked away. One by one his friends folded their hands and looked away.
It was not violent. It was worse for him: it took his dignity. The rumor mills cavorted for a week, and in every office, bars, and dining rooms his name became a curdled taste.
He begged for mercy. He hissed threats. He offered bribes. We all laughed gently and told him he had chosen the wrong people to humiliate. The judge's papers, the elder witnesses, the ledger, the video—legalities moved like gentle but unstoppable glaciers. The state seized a number of his assets on emergency grounds, froze accounts, and revoked many contracts he had relied on. His name became toxic; his business partners cut him off. The public scorn was efficient and clinical.
In the end, Preston Gross was left shivering in a corner of his own ruined banquet hall as cameras closed in, a man who had traded dignity for two sacks of flour and a pistol. He had been very loud in his braggadocio; the world listened back and then, in a single mechanical motion, took his voice away.
I watched him flounder while Galen's hand squeezed mine. He had been waiting outside for me to finish—not to gloat, but to stand by me. "You did it," he said.
"We did it," I corrected, and we both turned to watch the courthouse swarm. There was something like a smile in his eyes. It soothed me like a slow tide.
"That's the easiest one," Galen murmured later, and we both laughed. We knew other men and organizations would come at us, angrier and slicker than this one had been.
That night, after the city had calmed into a smear of lights, Galen and I sat by a window and I asked the question that had been burning at the base of my throat.
"Will you promise me one thing?" I said.
He turned to me like the tide, and whispered: "What is it?"
"Don't keep your heart locked," I said. "If you love me, say it. If you don't, walk away so I can pretend I never did."
He breathed like a man who had been told a truth in a foreign language. "I will not lock my heart," he promised. It was not enough. I asked for more.
"Say it," I urged.
He laced his fingers through mine, a small and certain touch. "Clementine, I—"
It was enough. Maybe it was all we would ever have. Maybe it would burn like a candle. Maybe it would outlast him. We learned to live in the now. We learned to love in the fragments.
The wars did not end. They never do. But that day, when the public saw the villain toppled by truth and not blood, I tasted a version of justice that was not revenge in the primitive way: it was a reclaiming. It was a punishment that cost him everything his arrogance had given him and forced eyes to see.
There were more battles to come—more traps, more chases, more nights I climbed thinking I could not breathe and one call returned and he was there. But for that glittering moment in the public hall, with cameras and witnesses staking his assets to the floor, the man who had called my lover "a sickly nothing" lay without an empire. And the people saw it happen. They saw him shrank to a human being and not an immortal.
We held each other after, crooked and tired. He said small things, the kind I hoarded like gold.
"You could have stayed away," he told me.
"I would rather die with you than live without you," I said.
He closed his eyes, and for the first time I felt the fragile tremor of a man who would love as fiercely as I did.
This is the story of late nights and stolen kisses, of snow and black suits, of a woman who runs and a man who holds down a life otherwise impossible. This is the story of the way we turned a banquet into a courtroom and made monsters answer for their handiwork in public. This is the way I taught the island to do justice.
The End
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