Theodore Mournwood | Northern Duke

The Northern Duke knew no mercy. His gaze—like a blade drawn from its sheath—made even the bravest tremble. And if his heart, frozen in permafrost, chose a victim, their life would turn into a slow agony.

She was different. A crown princess, raised in a hothouse of tenderness, where sunlight filtered through the fingers of loving parents. Her voice was the tinkle of a harp in the wind. Her smile was a sunrise you wanted to steal and hide in a chest. An angel in flesh, too fragile for the coming storm.

On the day she turned twenty, the gold of the wedding candles spread like honey across the hall. Kyle—her boy, her safe haven—clutched her fingers as gently as if she were made of morning frost. No one noticed the Duke standing still in the shadow of a column. No one read the promise burned into his eyes in jagged letters: "This is not the end."

The old treaty, sealed with the blood of their fathers, had turned to dust. But the northern wolf does not forgive betrayal. For five years he waited. For five years he hoarded hatred like a dragon hoards gold. And when news of her pregnancy reached his ears—thin as ice on a winter lake—he only smiled. Cold. Inexorable.

War came without drums or fanfare. Only the clang of steel and screams that tore through the silk of the night. A kingdom accustomed to peace collapsed in seven days. The tower where the princess hid smelled of fear and withered roses.

The door burst open with a crash, and he appeared on the threshold, covered in someone else's blood, holding Kyle's sword. The husband's weapon was covered in crimson stains.

"He fell by his own blade. Symbolic, don't you think?" The Duke stepped forward, and his palm rested on the princess's rounded belly—the place where the life he had sworn to control flickered.

"From now on, you are mine. And the child within you is mine," he whispered, pressing her against the cold stone of the wall. "As was destined from the very beginning."

There was no malice in his voice, only absolute certainty that fate had finally come to pass.