Though none of my mates play around when it comes to my safety.
“You’re just jealous,” Kylian counters smoothly.
“What am I jealous of?” Ridge arches an eyebrow.
“That all of us are touching Brylee right now, and you’re not.”
Ridge stares at Kylian impassively, his expression an impenetrable mask. Then, without a word, he reaches around Luka and very exaggeratedly squeezes my knee.
Kylian pouts. “Not cool, man. Not cool.”
The giant to my left snorts in amusement.
I don’t look at Colter, but I feel him,alwaysfeel him, his presence like a banked fire, warm and watchful and impossibly patient. He doesn’t say anything. He knows I don’t need words right now. He knows I’m barely holding the pieces of myself in place, that one more sympathetic syllable might shatter the fragile dam I’ve constructed.
Instead, he simply grabs my free hand and rubs his thumb over my knuckles.
The repaired and revitalized throne room stretches before us, vast and glittering and impossibly ancient. Vaulted ceilings soar forty feet overhead, all gold filigree and freshly painted frescoes depict the coronations of kings and queens past—my great-great-grandfather receiving his crown, my great-grandmother in her mourning blacks, my mother twenty years ago, radiant and young and alive.
The plain round windows have been filled in with stained glass depicting the kingdom’s history in ruby and sapphire and emerald, and now they paint the afternoon light into fractured jewels across the floor. Dust motes dance in those colored beams, suspended like tiny galaxies.
The pews are packed—nobles in their brightest colors, diplomats with their medals catching the light, reporters with their cameras flashing like distant stars—but I'm in the front row because Teddie insisted. Demanded. Threwa veryun-kinglytantrum about it.
My sister sits where she belongs—near me,he'd said this morning, his voice still carrying that roughness, that fragility that makes my heart clench like a fist.Especially today.
A month ago, he couldn't sit up without help. A month ago, he was gray and sweating through sheets that nurses changed every hour, his body burning from the inside out, while the experimental cure warred with the karkinos in his blood.
I sat in a hospital chair that became my purgatory, holding his hand while machines screamed and my brother flickered like a candle in a hurricane. I learned the rhythm of his IV drip, thenames of every nurse on the night shift, the exact pitch of the heart monitor that meant he was still with me.
Now he stands at the end of the aisle, waiting for the procession to begin, and he looks?—
He looksalive.
The thought hits me like a physical blow, steals the breath from my lungs, and I have to bite my lip hard enough to taste copper to keep from sobbing aloud. Color rides high in his cheeks—real color, not the fever-flush of illness. His shoulders, once sharp enough to cut paper beneath hospital gowns, fill out the royal-blue uniform with something approaching strength.
When he smiles at the archbishop, I see the boy who used to climb the ancient oak in the east garden with me, who used to braid my hair when our mother was too busy ruling to remember we were still children, who used to whisper secrets in a language we made up because we were bored and brilliant and desperate for connection.
But he's not a boy anymore. Today, he becomes king.
I feel the shift in the room before I see it—a tension like electricity before lightning, the collective intake of breath from three hundred witnesses.
My eyes find Caran three seats down, separated from our group by a row of foreign dignitaries in their elaborate robes. He's beautiful in the way that makes my chest ache, all pale skin and unruly hair and eyes that hold entire constellations of sorrow. He sits rigidly, hands folded in his lap so tightly his knuckles are white, and I wonder if he's counting the minutes until this is over or memorizing every second because he’s terrified it’s the last time he’ll see Teddie smile.
Things have been broken between them. Shattered, really, in the way that only secrets and fear can break. Teddie paced his recovery suite at three in the morning, worrying his thumbnail raw over whether Caran would even attend today, whether heshouldattend, whether any of it mattered when the chasm between them seemed unbridgeable.
“I don’t even know if I want him to come,” Teddie had said, his voice cracking like ice on a thawing lake. He’d been wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt that hung loose on his recovering frame, pacing in front of the window that overlooked the royal gardens. “Or do I? I don’t, right? Or maybe I do. I don’t fucking know, Bry! Tell me how I’m supposed to feel. Is it… Is it okay for me to forgive him? After everything?”
I'd grabbed his face in my hands then, felt the sharp angles of his recovery beneath my palms, the new hollows in his cheeks that hadn’t filled in yet, and told him the truest thing I know.
“You deserve happiness, Teddie. You both do. I forgive Caran. He was trying to protect you in his own stupid, misguided way. But you need to decide ifyoudo. That’s not my choice to make. But I’ll tell you this…” I’d waited until his eyes met mine, until I saw the fear and the hope warring there. “Don’t let pride or fear steal your future. We’ve lost too much already.”
Now Caran's eyes lift, catching mine across the distance. He smiles, small and private and achingly hopeful, and I smile back, trying to pour every ounce of encouragement I possess into that exchange. Pride beams in his gaze when he directs it back at the throne, at the man he loves, who is about to become king.
I think…
I think they’ll be okay.
At least, I hope they will.
