He needed to think, and that clearly wasn’t going to happen in Abendrot or the forest or the bloody borders of Malignant Felicity or anywhere that even slightly resembled a forest. The alabaster Alpha needed cold. He needed snow. Ice. Something that could freeze the unnatural seething emotions writhing in his chest until he could function right. Kershov had been tricked. Fooled like a . . . a fool, which was not only morbidly embarrassing but also extremely injurious to the grand glittering infrastructure that was his high and mighty Pride. Pride was everything to the ivory warrior—everything. And now it had been ripped away and thrown right back in his stunned face, gloating and laughing, sickening proof that the almighty tundra gangster was not as almighty has he previously believed . . .

“That bitch . . .” The words fell out of his maw with a few wisps of shimmering smoke. The air on these mountains blew bitter as a winter night, and the Frost Pharaoh hadn’t even hiked to the highest peaks yet. Every breath he took plumed before him like the huffs of a dragon. His footsteps made absolutely no sound as his snowshoe paws padded across moonlit snowdrifts. Ker honestly had no real goal in mind; he hadn’t spent time in these mountains long enough to have staked a claim in any particular cavern or hill. For now, wandering was fine. Wandering kept him focused—mostly. It was hard to think of betrayal and keeping oneself alive at the same time.

Growling quietly to himself, face warped into a demonic snarling mask, Kershov cut a path along the side of a steep rock cathedral. Eventually the glacial gladiator came to a narrow alleyway between two massive boulders. He stalked through it without question until his paws stopped at the lip of a cliff. Before him, a winter valley stretched to the horizon, curved as if to hold a sea of moonbeams. It was gorgeous. Calm. Too calm.

Bleached bone-colored hackles spiked like shards of ice all the way up Kershov’s spine. He threw his imperial cranium back and unleashed a monstrous howl that shook the bottomless night sky. He sang his rage. The stones rang with his voice.