She always had been.
Kjell figured he had about twenty seconds before she reached the door, with a possible three-second margin given the worsening conditions. He knew that his order to Gunnar would have frustrated a royal who’d experienced years of people bowing and scraping. But even as that thought registered, he knew it was wrong. Freya had never been like that. At least she hadn’t been eight years ago.
A thread of shame unspooled in his gut. Yes, he’d made a mistake back then. But she hadn’t been faultless—and the memory of that sparked anger and resentment through muscles already corded with tension. A tension that, in the last few months, had been far too close to the surface. Now it rose and rose, too much and too quickly.
A slice of light exploded like a flashbang across his thoughts and suddenly he was sweating, an infernal dry heat drawing moisture from his body as surely as it had done from the dry clay earth. He squinted, dazed, into the midday sun, surrounded by shouts and screams, a child crying, thick smoke in the air, and blood...
His heart missed a beat and he forced a deep inhalation of air into his body, holding it still for six seconds, and slowly exhaled. He did it again, until his heartbeat was back under control and the icy fingers of a cold sweat retreated from his skin.
The crunch of snow outside grounded him.
It didn’t matter why she was here, he’d find that out soon enough. He just needed to be ready. Dragging his senses back under control just as he heard the creak of the wooden step outside the cabin, he turned to face the door, squaring his shoulders and steeling himself.
A moment later the door was pushed open and she was standing there, looking nothing like the girl he remembered.
It was her laugh. That was what caught his attention, despite the fact that he was sitting at the back of the lecture theatre. Even without it, he would have known where she was. After all, he’d followed her that morning from her dorm all the way to the humanities building.
But the sound of her laugh as one of the other female students whispered something to her cut through the chatter of the other hundred and twenty-nine students, excluding the three who were missing that morning with Freshers’ Week hangovers. He had helped compile reports on every single one of them and he knew more about these students than their own families.
Shaking off the strange sensation the sound had caused, he rubbed his chest, blew out a breath and bounced the rubber end of his pencil on his notepad. He shouldn’t be here. He should be back in Svardia, completing his officer training assignments.
He’d wanted to be a soldier for about as long as he’d known his father had been in the army. Brynjar Bergqvist had been an Överste in the Swedish army, but had given it up whenhe moved to Svardia after marrying Kjell’s mother.
While his typically quiet father had never said, Kjell understood how much he missed it and why, despite being offered a position in the Svardian Armén, his father had politely declined. Brynjar’s heart might have belonged to his Svardian wife, but his allegiance was to Sweden and its King.
Kjell had hoped that his being in the army might bring him closer to his stern, taciturn father, but he’d never know. Because he was shadowing some princess studying political science. He clenched his teeth, imagining his father’s reprimand at the frustrated bent of his thoughts.
She is not just some princess. She is the figurehead of your country and she is owed your loyalty and your duty.
Kjell straightened in his seat and scanned the audience as the lecturer entered the hall. Two points of entry and exit. The bank of narrow rectangular windows high up across the back wall had no line of sight, and he was four rows back and across from the Princess and could get to her in under three seconds.
Of course, Kjell’s job would be much easier if his hands weren’t tied by his having to be undercover. But the King had decided that he would prefer to give her the illusion of freedom—which required a CPO she had not seen before. So he had been pulled out of the army, having just passed basic with flying colours, and given six months’ intense training in close protection, then sent off to university in Switzerland to guard a princess with hair like molten chocolate and eyes that were hauntingly pale, like clear amber.
He felt his jaw tense again and purposefully relaxed it. During the prep for this position he’d watched every single bit of footage he could find, explored every part of her life on paper and online. In short, he’d done everything that someone looking to harm or leverage the Princess’s life would do.
What he’d gleaned was that Freya was an eighteen-year-old who led a very structured life. Although she had been heavily involved in royal duties from the age of fourteen, her school records indicated an excellence born of hard work as much as inherent intellect. Her extra-curricular activities were focused on helping others and she had absolutely no trace of scandal anywhere.
Unlike some of her European counterparts, Princess Freya seemed to have found genuine happiness in her title, as if she had been made to fit her role completely. Always perfect, always calm, and strangely open in a way that lessened people’s natural inclination to cynicism. As such, Kjell had fully expected to be bored out of his mind.
But nothing had prepared him for the impact of her in real life. Because while he’d surveyed her from the corner of his eye, watched her openly, stayed within two feet of her in the corridors, hallways and walkways of the university, she’d never once looked at him. Until this moment in the lecture theatre, when she leaned her head back, frowning just slightly as if looking for someone, and her eyes rested on his and caught them.
In that exact moment a crack formed in the tight leash he kept on his control. A fine hairline fracture of his armour that was barely noticeable. Like a stress fracture. But if it was struck repeatedly the damage would be irrevocable.
A cold blast of icy wind slapped him in the face, snapping him out of the memory and plunging him back into the present.
‘Close the door,’ he ordered, his voice harsh to his own ears, as he turned to toe off his damp boots. ‘You’re letting out warmth.’
He’d needed the excuse to look away, but it had been too late. In a second he’d taken in everything about her, the after-image still bright against his closed eyes.
She was still utterly beautiful. Freya wasn’t pale like some pampered European royalty. No, her skin was earthy, warm, and everything he’d ever wanted to sink into. Her eyes, hauntingly pale but bright and quick and...staring at him with hell fire.
A fur hat, the colour of espresso and dusted heavily with snowflakes, made her eyes look almost feline. They had always been utterly unique, a shade of brown so light it was haunting. The press, both local and international, had obsessively compared them to those of a fox.
Beneath the hat, long streams of rich mahogany-coloured hair would be swept up and bound against her head. It was a style she seemed to have adopted after the night of her sister’s accident which, thankfully, hadn’t been as serious as originally thought. Above a long elegant neck was a jawline that led to a chin you wanted to hold between your thumb and finger. Mainly to angle a face so beautiful it made you search it for flaws. But he’d looked for hours and never found a single one.
No, he thought. The flaws, the coldness that had shocked him had laid deep beneath the surface. As if that remembrance brought out the critic, he found her a little thinner, more angular, less...soft. The thought was so intense he’d almost sounded it on his tongue.
‘Pardon?’