Page 76 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

It’s Aldric’s deep voice that breaks the silence.

“Seravyn, tell me. Now.”

He says this the way he says everything—flat, demanding, a king with a heavy crown—but his thumb comes up and takes the tear from my cheek with a care that doesn’t meet his arctic eyes.

His sleep tunic is parted open to reveal the sculpted valley of his bare chest.Nythera’s veil, the lexicon of the Thorn Court never planned for this, how I’d fall in love with the king I swore to kill, ending his cruel reign.

“The curse is broken,” I tell him.

I watch him take that in, confusion knitting his brows.

With a full breath, I brace myself, then I tell him everything in the dark hours. About the wolfsbane, the working, my mother’s Thorn Court task. All of it, the full confession whispered against his shoulder while Rensleeps in our bed.

I tell my tyrant of a husband that I’ve been trying to kill him for a season.

He’s silent a long moment, then a smug smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “I know. I’m well aware of the dominion you hail from, love. Why do you think I drank so many tonics in the morning? Having you was worth the risk.” He smirks. And then, quieter, with those pale eyes intent on me. “You were the first thing that ever dared to try. It’s why I couldn’t stay away from you.”

Fear grips my throat. “How could you know.”

He cups my cheek, his whispered breath against my lips as he says, “I’d like to think you’ve since stopped.” His smile stretches, knowing, devilish. “Unless this is going to be some sordid form of foreplay. I’d rather not die, my wife. Just kiss me till my heart bursts instead. I assure you, it will do just as much damage.”

Then his lips crash against mine, stealing any rebuttal or fight.

A cruel man is not remade by one night in a river. Though I may be in love with one, I’m no fool. I’ve read this palace’s ledgers of grief. I’ve counted his many sins. I know what it means that he sealed his mother’s wing rather than grieve her—a boy who chose cruelty over mourning, because someone taught him mourning was a weakness that gets you killed.

Whatever Aldric Vaelstrom is becoming, he has a long way to travel and a heavy debt to haul, and I intend to be standing over him while he pays it.

But he came into the water when I called.

And asked for nothing but to be allowed to want.

Even a goddess of thorns will bloom for that.

“Fuck, like that,” Aldric whispers across my mouth. Then he looks at Ren—really looks, no crown between them, no throne. “Should we wake him, to tell him?”

“The fool will live,” Ren says suddenly. “And the fool would like it entered into the record that he died for love and was resurrected before breakfast, because that’s the kind of story that earns free drinks for life.”

“Nothing in my kingdom is free,” Aldric says.

“Nothing in your kingdom was free,” Ren says. “New ruling. I hear the queen’s terribly soft-hearted.”

And Aldric laughs.

I’ve heard him laugh before—at cruelty, at other men’s ruin, loud in a hall full of fear. I have never heard this though, a short, startled sound, half against his will.

Ren’s whole face lights with the unholy triumph of making the king laugh. As if that were the decree all along, and he’s only now, at the very last, gotten around to fulfilling it.

We dress in the gray early light, and it should be awkward. It should be impossible, as there’s no etiquette in any realm for this. And yet, it’s quiet and easy and intimate. Ren’s fingers doing up the laces at my back while Aldric draws up my hair from my shoulders.

The palace waits, and the world waits amid it. My mother waits, and her unpaid blade, and adominion that sold me, and a lord in the east sharpening a revolt, and a court that would burn all three of us on one pyre if it knew what the river knows. Breaking a curse doesn’t break a kingdom. I know the difference.

But at the great hall threshold, before the path splits us into our separate lies, Ren catches my hand. Turns it over. Presses his mouth to the center of my palm, where the poison calluses are, where my craft lives in my skin—and he kisses the deadliest part of me, deliberate as a vow.

“I will come to you in the day,” he whispers.

Daylight and garden rooms. Laughter in abandoned libraries. He gives me the sun, because he is the only one who ever brought it into this palace in the first place.

And Aldric steps close on my other side, taking my chin in his ringed hand, and there’s still a darkness surrounding his pale eyes there in the gray. And I know he wouldn’t be him without it, and goddesses help me, I wouldn’t want him without it.