The Ice Prince by Sandra Marton

money. Still, she’d apparently found her life boring and abandoned her husband and Draco when he was a toddler.
    His father might as well have done the same. He was too busy whoring and gambling to pay attention to his son. Draco’s early memories were of big, silent rooms, most of them stripped of what had once been elegant furnishings. The few servants who remained, overworked and underpaid, ignored him.
    He had been a solitary and lonely child; it had never occurred to him other children might have had different existences from his.
    One winter, his father stayed sober long enough to figure out that the last of what he’d still referred to as his staff had abandoned ship, leaving nine-year-old Draco to fend for himself.
    The prince had given his young son orders to bathe and dress in his best clothes. Then he’d taken him to a school run by nuns.
    The Mother Superior, who was also the principal, had eyed Draco and wrinkled her nose, as if he gave off a bad smell. She’d tested him in math. In science. In French and English.
    Draco had known the answers to all her questions. He was a bright boy. An omnivorous reader. From age five he’d sought solace by immersing himself in the few remaining volumes in the once-proud Valenti library.
    But he’d been struck speechless.
    The nun’s voice had been sharp; he’d been able to see his own reflection in her eyeglasses, and that was somehow disorienting. Her coif had made her round face with its pointed nose look like an owl’s.
    She had been, in his eyes, an alien creature, and he’d been terrified.
    “Answer the Mother Superior,” his father had hissed.
    Draco had opened his mouth, then shut it. The nun glared at his father, then at him.
    “The boy is retarded,” she’d said. Her fingers had clamped hard on Draco’s shoulder. “Leave him with us, Prince Valenti. We will, if nothing else, teach him to fear his God.”
    That was the theology he’d received at the hands of the sisters.
    The other boys had taught him more earthly things to fear.
    Beatings, on what was supposed to be the playground. Beatings at night, in the sour-smelling dormitory rooms. Humiliation after humiliation.
    It had been the equivalent of tossing a puppy into a cage of hungry wolves.
    Draco had been skinny and pale. His clothes were threadbare, but their style had marked him as a member of a despised upper class, as had the way in which he spoke. He was quiet, shy and bookish, with the formal manners of a boy who had never before dealt with other children.
    It had been a recipe for disaster, either unnoticed or ignored by the sisters until one day, almost a year later, when Draco had decided he could not take any more.
    It was lunchtime, and everyone had been on the playground. Draco saw one of his tormenters closing in.
    All the hurt, the fear, the emotions he’d kept bottled inside him burst free.
    He’d sprung at the other boy. The fight had turned ugly, butwhen it was over, the other kid was on the ground, sobbing. Draco, bloodied and bruised but victorious, had stood over him.
    His reputation was made. And if keeping it meant stepping up to the challenge of other boys from time to time, beating them and, occasionally, being beaten in return, so be it.
    The Mother Superior had said she’d always known he would come to no good.
    The day he turned seventeen, one of the senior boys decided to give him a very special gift. He’d come to Draco during the night while he slept, slapped a hand over his mouth and yanked down his pajama bottoms.
    Draco was no longer small or skinny. He had grown into manhood; he was six foot three inches of fight-hardened muscle.
    With a roar, he’d shot up in bed, grabbed his attacker by the throat and if the other boys hadn’t pulled him off, he might have killed him.
    The Mother Superior asked no questions.
    “You are,” she told Draco, “a monster. You will never amount to anything. And you are unwanted here.”
    He hadn’t argued. As far as he