Page 58 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

“What are you doing here?” I demand, my gaze taking him in. The candlestick clenched in his hand—heavy, brass. Then I look at Aldric, knocked unconscious on the crimson bed. “Oh goddess, what have you done?”

He tears a hand through his messy hair, his other gripped white-knuckled around a brass candlestick, blood tipped. “I heard you cry out and I couldn’t…” He trails off, dragging that same hand down his face. “From down the corridor, where I was pacing, just torturing myself. I heard your cry from the royal bedchamber. And I imagined Aldric drunk on his violence, forcing himself on you. And I knew I couldn’t get around the guards, so I climbed from my room window onto the balustrade and scaled the wall to get to the balcony.”

His explanation does little to comfort me, knowing the treason he’s just committed. I look down at the weapon, and terror washes through me, cold and paralyzing.

Treason. From braining the king over the head with a candlestick.

I hunker near Aldric, quickly checking his pulse, his breathing. “He’s not dead,” I say, claiming some measure of relief.

Ren drops the weapon to the stone floor, taking my face between his warm palms. “I made a vow to you,” he says, his voice deathly low. “I told you there’d be no power in any realm that will stop me from ending him, Sera.” His throat hitches with a hard swallow. “I keep my vows.”

I release a breath, my exposed skin prickling with a chill. Death hanging over us both, I slowly draw higher onto my knees on the bed. I grasp his hands over my face, bringing them between us.

“Ren, listen to me,” I say, forcing his wild eyes on me. “Strip your trousers.”

Shock contorts his features. “Sera—” It’s half warning, half prayer, his gaze cutting to the king sprawled in the wreckage of his own wedding bed, then back to me, searching my face for something like madness and finding only resolve.

“If there’s no blood on these sheets come morning, no evidence that Aldric bedded his wife and consummated his marriage,” I say, my voice low, my words deliberate, “the king, humiliated, won’t stop at one execution. He’ll burn through everyone I love with a vengeance.”

I see my meaning register in his taut features, understanding moving across his face—the realization, the war, the same war that tore through him in the dark antechamber when he had to let me walk away.

“Sera…” he says, shaken.

My heart is pounding, but my voice is steady. “There has to be proof I came to this bed a maiden and left it a wife. Otherwise there will be questions raised, ones neither of us survives.”

Despite the conflict I find in his features, I see the lust come to life in his eyes, and I grab the string of his pants.His hand traps mine. “Lie back,” Ren directs, his voice a dark rasp. “Let me do it.”

I swallow, pushing back onto the bed, feeling Aldric next to me. My heart vaults into my throat. “Wait—” I slip off the edge, grabbing the chalice from the table. “Roll him over first,” I tell Ren. “Tip his head back.”

There’s only a brief moment of hesitation before he does so. Blood trails Aldric’s temple, staining his pale hair. A low groan falls from his mouth as I carefully line the cup up and let the laced wine funnel in. It drips down his chin, but he swallows instinctually, taking much of the laced wine down.

“This will ensure he stays unconscious,” I say, stroking Aldric’s throat, coaxing him to swallow the rest. “And that he’ll have little memory of any of this tomorrow. He’s vain enough to fill the gaps himself.”

Once done, Ren lets Aldric collapse sideways, boneless, onto the crimson silk.

The candlelight gutters lower, the still silence of the room gathering the tension between us, the dark of the room sheltering us.

I scramble toward the headboard, my nightdress torn at the shoulder, my chest heaving. For a moment we just stare at each other across the wreckage—the unconscious king sprawled between us.

Ren climbs onto the bed, closing the distance between us, where he sinks to his knees before me. “Are you sure,” he says, making a demand ofthe question.

“It was always going to be you,” I say. “Some part of me knew it the moment you fell on your face in that throne room and made me laugh. I’ve wanted it to be you ever since.”

His breath shudders out of him. His hands rise to my waist. “Say it again,” he breathes. “Say that you’re mine.”

“I’m yours, Renick Ashbourne.”

And the war leaves his face.

What replaces it is devastating—a tenderness so fierce it looks almost like grief, the look of a man who has been handed the one thing he never let himself pray for. His hands tighten on my waist. His mouth finds mine.

And he kisses me like the world is ending.

Because it is. Some version of it. The version where I belonged to Aldric solely—that world ends here, in this candlelit chamber, with a defeated king next to us and our hearts hammering against each other.

He lays me down on the bed.

He’s careful in a way Aldric would never be. Reverent, slow, his bloodied hands gentle as they map me, his mouth following, worshipping every inch of skin he bares. He whispers against me, broken and aching—that he loves me, that he’ll be tender. That he’ll make it feel good.