Prelude
Kissing Poison Ice
Content Warning: This story contains explicit sexual content (MM), blood, violence, strong language, and dark themes. Intended for mature readers (18+). All characters are adults.
Prelude
Before You
Maksim’s POV
Before you, there was nothing.
Not nothing like empty. Nothing like silence. The kind that fills every room you enter and follows you when you leave. The kind you stop fighting after the first century.
I have walked this earth for nine hundred and forty-three years.
I have watched cities rise. Watched them burn. Watched people fall in love and die for it, both at the same time, and I have watched from windows, from the dark, from the edge of rooms I was never meant to enter.
I do not fall in love.
This is not sadness. It is just fact. Like ice is cold. Like blood is warm. Just fact.
My kind has mates. I knew this. I had watched others find theirs — that sudden thing, that pull, that loss of control that I had always observed from a distance with something close to pity.
I did not want it.
A mate means weakness. A mate means something can hurt you. After nine hundred years of being unhurt, why would I want that?
I kept myself clean of it. Moved between cities. Kept to myself. Played hockey because it gave me something to do with the speed and the strength that would otherwise draw attention. Because I liked the ice. The cold. It felt like me.
I did not have friends. I had teammates. There is a difference.
I did not eat in front of people. I did not explain myself to people. I did not let people close enough to notice the things that were wrong with me — the eyes that shifted color, the temperature of my skin, the way I could hear their heartbeat from across the room.
I liked it that way.
I had a system. I had control.
And then I arrived at that rink.
And then there was the scent.
Honey and something warm. Something alive, electric, like a lit match near dry paper. It hit me the moment I stepped onto the ice and I almost stopped moving entirely, which would have been embarrassing.
I found the source without even trying.
Brown hair. Dark eyes. Big mouth. Loud. Chaotic. Already looking at me like I had personally ruined his day just by existing.
My chest did something it had not done in over nine hundred years.
I ignored it.
I am very good at ignoring things.
But then he walked toward me. Got in my space. Started talking — so much talking, this person could not stop talking — and the whole time, all I could do was look at him and feel that pull getting louder. Like a sound that starts low and keeps rising.
I kept my face blank.
I walked away.
I told myself one word and I have been telling myself that word ever since.
No.
Because I knew. The moment I identified what was happening, I knew exactly what he was.
My mate.
And I did not want this. I had nine hundred and forty-three years of proof that I did not need this, did not want this, was perfectly fine without this.
But he followed me. Watched me. Knocked on my bathroom door. Moved into my room like he owned it. Got into my space over and over with that voice and that scent and that absolutely infuriating grin that I could not stop looking at.
Before you, I had nothing.
And I was okay with that.
I think.
I am no longer sure.
