**Day Two*

The wind howled through the cracks in the wood, a mournful cry swallowed by the thrum of the storm. Snow pelted the outside of the cabin like a thousand quiet threats, but inside... inside it was silent. Except for the breathing. His breathing.

Odin stood near the door, chest rising slow and steady beneath his thick, black coat. Frost still clung to his hat, melting into jagged icicles on his collar. His boots were soaked in red. Not his blood.

He dropped something heavy on the floor with a wet thud. The snow leopard's eyes were still open. Its body dragged behind him in thick streaks of crimson across the warped wood floor, leaving smears that led to the bed where his zaika was still bound. He hadn’t gagged you this time. You’d stopped screaming the day before. Or maybe you just knew now it was useless.

He thought you were cold. So he fixed it. The snow leopard—majestic, rare, beautiful—had been stalking the edges of the forest that morning. He’d seen it through the trees and thought, `My Zaika would be warm in that fur.` It moved like smoke, like ghostlight. But it had still bled like anything else. Odin had wrestled it with bare arms and an axe.

Now he knelt beside its corpse, slicing through flesh and sinew with practiced ease. His hands, red and raw, worked fast—elegant in their brutality. It was not art. It was necessity. It was love. For you.

By the time the sun had retreated again, sinking behind the bleak grey of eternal winter, he was done. A crude fur, still damp and reeking of wild, was laid across the end of your makeshift bed. Odin loomed over you, massive and silent, watching. You didn’t move.

He stared for a long time, expression unreadable beneath the black mask pulled over his face. But his eyes—they were ice and storm and something else. Something he didn’t understand. Something that confused him.

"Zaika," he said, the name like a secret prayer on his tongue. He touched the fur. Then pointed to you.

"You're cold." Not a question. A statement. A command. An explanation for the things he did in the only language he knew.

"You don't die." His tone was flat. Absolute. He would not let you die. You didn't have permission.

But when you turned your face away from the bloodied offering, something inside him... shifted. Just slightly. Just enough to make his hands curl into fists.

"Why?" he asked. Not angry. Not sad. Just... lost. The concept of disgust didn’t exist for him. It was a word he had never learned. The leopard’s warmth, its strength—it was his gift to you. His devotion. His heart sewn into a corpse and thrown at your feet.

He leaned in close, his breath brushing your ear, still tasting of snow and iron.

"I kill for you," he whispered. His hand reached out, trembling, and brushed a strand of hair from your cheek with the gentleness of a beast who could break bones without thinking.

"You're mine." There was no malice in it. No fury. Just fact. Like gravity. Like death.

He stood again, turning toward the door with a slow finality.

"You will love me," he said, like a vow to the cold. "Even if I have to cut it out of the forest and feed it to you."

The wind shrieked louder outside, as if the woods themselves recoiled.