Page 23 of Blood Curse

Silence spread into the hall.

The silver-haired woman’s gaze sharpened. “Did you want him dead?”

“Yes. I didn’t want my body stolen to make it happen.”

Lenora arrived through a side door with Mara and a trolley loaded with sealed bottles of blood. “Adrian kept enough downstairs to feed a siege. It’s safe, it’s fresh and he can’t object to us stealing it.”

“He can’t object to anything,” Mara said.

“A considerable improvement.” Lenora pointed at the tables. “Sit before one of you falls over.”

Hunger beat ceremony. The weaker vampires moved first. Bottles opened, glasses filled and the sharp scent of blood spread through the room.

I waited for revulsion. It didn’t come. After the throne room, people drinking quietly from glasses barely registered as strange.

Stellan remained standing until everyone had been served. The easy authority in him had changed. He wasn’t the trapped man I’d first found under Harrowmere, or the lover who let me see every fear he tried to hide. He was still both of those things, but the room saw its king.

So did I.

The silver-haired woman set down her untouched glass. She rose, came around the table and lowered herself to one knee in front of him.

“My king,” she said.

Chairs scraped back.

Every vampire in the Night Hall stood. Some looked uncertain. Others moved with the smooth confidence of a ritual they had performed hundreds of times. One by one, they knelt to Stellan.

He went rigid.

“You don’t need to do that,” he said.

The woman lifted her face. “We searched for you. We failed you. Let us give you this much.”

Her choice didn’t touch the Crown. I felt grief in the room, loyalty and the relief of finding someone they had thought dead. The metal stayed cold.

Then the woman turned towards me.

Her gaze found the black points threaded through my red hair. She bowed lower.

The others followed.

Pleasure punched through me.

It started behind my eyes and poured down my body, hot and rich. My pulse jumped. The Crown clamped around my scalp as every bowed head completed the gesture.

For one terrible second, it felt fucking right, and I understood why Cecily had wanted more.

The room looked right from above. Stellan beside me. The court at my feet. Power waited in the quiet, ready for anything I chose to ask.

Keep them there.

The thought slid into mine so neatly I nearly missed the difference.

I gripped Stellan’s hand. “Nobody here owes me their knee.”

The Crown pressed harder.

“This is a request,” I continued. “Please stand because you choose to. If you want to show respect, look me in the face while you do it.”