Midwinter's Night by Michael Barnette

Heat Rating: Fire

Content Warning: GLBT-gay romance (also called m/m or yaoi)

A Seelie knight exiled for murder, a cruel enemy, and proof that true love never dies.

This title previously appeared with another publisher. It has been expanded from the original version and newly re-edited.

He stood by the double-paned window of his cabin and gazed out upon the fury of the blizzard. Winter had well and truly gripped the land in its frigid talons, and he knew it wouldn't let up until the warmth of spring returned. He sipped hot cider from the mug in his hands and tried not to think, tried not to feel.

There was only now. Only the screaming storm and the cup in his hands.

No past.

No future, either.

He sighed and shook his head.

But the inescapable memories were there, rooted in his head like some noxious weed he couldn't excise.

And they were always strongest when the winter winds blew cold as death's hands.

ìNo point in tormenting yourself with things you cannot change,î he whispered, voice harsh from little use.

It was a bad habit, talking to himself. But there wasn't anyone else to talk to these days. Even the traders that came up the pass in the late spring, and went down the pass in early fall, had stopped using the narrow track near his cabin. He couldn't even recall the last time he'd seen a fur trapper on his lonely mountain.

Thinking about the past was an even worse habit than talking to himself. The long winter nights--when the only sounds were the wailing of wind and wolves--seemed to bring out the worst of those memories, because it was then that he remembered her.

For a moment he stopped eyeing the blowing snow in the window and saw instead the reflection of a face he hardly knew. Pale and gaunt, the eyes once bright as summer leaves were dulled to grey; hair once the color of new forged gold had lost its shine and dimmed to the color of sun-bleached straw. He turned aside from the stranger he'd become to himself, preferring not to see the toll the years away from his homeland had wrought on his body.

He already knew the price he'd paid within his soul.