Read The Snow Queen's Captive for Free Online Page B

have grabbed her wrist and slammed her into the ice. He could have hauled her against it, or at the very least, snapped her arm. The look in her eyes said she knew all these things and was still taking that chance.
    Kai took the bag from her grasp and gave her a stiff nod of acknowledgement.
    A soft, sweet smile curved her face. “You’re welcome.”
      
    ~~ * * * ~~
     
    Being the snow queen was boring.
    She’d been here for two days. Kai still didn’t talk to her – not that she blamed him. No one else was around. There was no TV, no radio, no nothing but endless ice and snow and her pretty – if lonely – castle. At first she’d found it fascinating, but after two days of nothing but ice? She was bored out of her mind.
    Well…almost.
    She’d explored when she’d first arrived. The castle seemed to have endless passageways and hidden nooks and crannies that she could feel underneath the ice. It was like all she had to do was touch the ice and she’d know what was on the other side. The old snow queen liked her secrets, apparently, and had a hidden library, a laboratory of things that Charlotte knew nothing about, and a secret, hidden room deep beneath the rest of the keep that held the creepy mirror.
    She’d been bored by the books in the library, unable to read any of them. She’d cleaned up the laboratory and threw out anything that looked vaguely like eye of newt or wing of bat. That wasn’t her jig, evil queen abilities or not.
    But the room with the mirror? That shit freaked her out.
    Bad.
    The thing oozed magic. And not good, clean, wholesome magic. It oozed magic that made her want to take a shower or wash her hands. It made her feel dirty just to be in its presence. More than that, she felt watched when she stood in front of it, almost like there was someone else in the room. She’d been unable to sleep the first night, not with it in the room. So she’d covered it in ice that way she didn’t have to look into it, and toted it to one of the secret rooms, far in the back of the palace.
    And she’d abandoned it there. She was pretty sure the mirror was pissed about that, too. Every time she went through that area, she got a creepy vibe. Once, she was pretty sure she heard someone whisper her name.
    Yeah, no thanks.
    Unnerved, she erected another ice wall around the mirror room just because it made her feel better.
    The rest of the castle felt safe, though. And now that she had figured out how to use her powers, though, she’d set about fortifying the castle. Gone was the delicately wrought gate that looked as if it could break with one well-placed finger. Instead, it was a slab of solid ice, with spikes covering it from the outside. She’d been building the walls, too, turning the delicate, piped confections into something more monstrous and scary. It took a lot of ice and snow, and by the time she’d done no more than a foot, she was exhausted. But she didn’t have anything else to do, and the girl that was coming – the heroine of this fairy tale – was determined to kill her, so it was time well spent, Charlotte figured. So she worked herself into exhaustion and collapsed into her frosty bed each night.
    But it was still boring, quiet work, and it left her with nothing but her own internal thoughts. And those? Were kind of a mess at the moment. Chalk it up to the whole ‘death’ or ‘bad guy’ thing or just everything all at once? She wasn’t handling this well. She was lonely and unhappy. The only other person here was Kai and he hated her guts.
    Everyone hated her. She was the bad guy.
    Charlotte ate her dinner alone every night. Magical, flavored cubes of snow appeared on a dainty plate every evening. That made sense, considering her body temperature was more or less absolute zero. She ate them, even though she didn’t know what was in them or who delivered them. It could have been magic and she was all alone, or it could have been unseen servants that avoided her because they