Chapter 3 RULES ARE BASICALLY SUGGESTIONS

POV: Isabella "Bella" Frost First Person

He waves at my window.

He does not even look up. He just raises one hand toward the glass, casual and certain, like he already knows I am there and keeps his eyes on the fire column in front of him.

I step back so fast I knock my elbow on the wall.

This is what I get for watching.

I press my back flat against the wall beside the window and breathe. I was not watching. I was standing near the window. That is different. People stand near windows all the time without it meaning anything.

I lean forward just a little and look again.

He is working with the festival fire equipment in the side yard — tall gas-fed columns, each one throwing a clean flame three feet high. He moves between them with the kind of focus that is almost like stillness. No wasted steps. He checks each valve, adjusts a fitting, steps back and watches the burn, then adjusts again. There is nothing reckless about him. Every move says: I have done this next to things that can kill me, and I am still here, so I know exactly what I am doing.

One of the younger festival workers bumps a column and flinches. Ryder catches the equipment with one hand before it tips, steadies it, says something to the kid that makes him laugh instead of feel stupid. I cannot hear the words. I do not need to.

Then he reaches into his jacket pocket. He pulls out a photograph — small, worn at the edges, bent at one corner like it has been folded and unfolded a hundred times. He looks at it for a moment. Just one moment. Then he tucks it back and turns toward the equipment.

I do not know who is in that photograph.

I do not care, I remind myself.

I move away from the window and grab the porch railing on my way downstairs.

The railing freezes solid under my hand.

I yank my palm back and stare. A thick coat of ice covers the metal from my handprint outward in a perfect circle the kind of uncontrolled burst I have not made by accident since I was sixteen years old. Since the year I knocked a glass of juice off the counter and froze it midfall, just because I was startled. Since the year I understood, finally, that my emotions and my power were the same thing, and if I wanted one to behave, the other had to stay flat.

I have kept them flat for six years.

I stare at the frozen railing.

Then I go to the kitchen to make tea and grab the counter, and frost spreads from my fingertips across the tile in a slow bloom, and I say a word that is definitely not appropriate for a fifth grader.

Outside, through the kitchen window, I can hear Ryder laugh at something.

The frost moves three more inches.

I lift my hands off the counter. I press them together in my lap and breathe, slow and deliberate, the way I learned: in through the nose, out through the mouth, feel the cold settle back into your chest like water finding its level. It takes longer than usual. It has been taking longer than usual since last night.

Since he waved at my window without looking.

Since he left me coffee.

I am in serious trouble.

The rest of the day I stay away from windows. I answer emails. I eat lunch standing at the counter because sitting down would mean relaxing, and relaxing right now seems unwise. I make a list of everything I need from the grocery store so I have a reason to leave the estate tomorrow, when he is at the festival grounds and I can breathe normally again.

By six o'clock, I feel steady. Controlled. Back to my usual self.

Then someone knocks on my front door.

Not the back door. The actual front door. The one with the frost-covered handle that nobody has touched in months. Three knocks — not urgent, not polite, just present. Like a person who is not second-guessing themselves.

I already know who it is.

I stand in the hallway for four seconds. Five. I could not answer. I have not answered this door in a year. I could stand here in the dark and wait him out and pretend I am not home, which would be fully believable except that every light in the house is on.

He knocks again. Same rhythm. Still patient.

I open the door.

He is right there. Closer than the yard, closer than the driveway. Close enough that I can see the burn scar on his left forearm where his sleeve has pushed up, and the way his eyes catch the light — dark, direct, not performing anything.

He looks at me.

Not at my gloves. Not at the frost on the door handle. At me.

"Sorry to bother you," he says. "Do you have a pot I can borrow? Mine's still in the truck and I don't want to go digging."

A pot.

He knocked on my door for a pot.

I open my mouth to say no. To say I am busy. To say the three rules, which he is already slightly violating, specifically rule one.

He tilts his head, just a little. "You have the most interesting eyes I have ever seen."

He says it simply. Not as a compliment to charm me. More like a fact he noticed and felt like saying out loud.

My hand tightens on the door handle.

The cold hits me before I even register it — that sharp, spreading chill that starts in my palm and doesn't stop. I look down.

The door handle has frozen completely solid around my grip, ice crawling up the metal in the shape of my fingers, and I cannot tell if I am holding it or if it is holding me.

Ryder follows my eyes. He looks at the handle. He looks at my face.

He does not step back.