Page 128 of Blood Curse

Bryony watched me for a long moment. “Good.”

“You weren’t asking me to do it.”

“I was checking whether you’d decided for me already.”

“I haven’t.”

“Then we’re still making decisions together.”

Mara folded her arms. “Painfully sensible. Both of you.”

“You sound disappointed,” I said.

“I was promised a dangerous king.”

“You got one. He broke the bed.”

Bryony’s smile lasted only a second, but it was real.

The Crown had given us a deadline and expected panic to do the rest.

I looked at its points. The bloodline needed a living human vessel and the Blood King. If one of us was removed before the ritual…

Bryony’s grip tightened. “Don’t.”

I looked at her.

“You thought about dying,” she said.

“I considered what the ritual requires.”

“We already had one plan built on your death. It trapped you for over a century and left the Crown waiting for another attempt. We aren’t repeating it.”

“If it saved you⁠—”

“It might not. Then you’d be dead, I’d still have this on my head, and Mara would have to explain to the court why their king lasted one breakfast.”

“I’d make it unflattering,” Mara said.

Bryony kept her eyes on mine. “Your death isn’t our strategy.”

The certainty in her voice left no space for the Crown to turn fear into obedience.

I had spent too long treating my own death as a useful answer. It had seemed clean when every other choice threatened somebody else. Cecily had paid for that certainty. Bryony had inherited the result.

“All right,” I said.

“That sounded painful.”

“It was.”

Her thumb moved once over the inside of my wrist. “Ask me what I want to do.”

I sat beside her. “What now?”

“Take away what the Crown uses. It wants a ritual, a court and people who obey without getting time to think. We can’t remove the Crown today, but we can make the rest harder.”

Mara lowered her arms. “The court came back by choice.”