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The doors were right behind me. I could still feel them. One turn, one breath, and I could be gone. Gone like the wind, back down that quiet corridor where no one was looking at me like I was something out of a prophecy.

I felt my hand begin to slide from Lazaros’s arm.

And right there across the entire length of that hall, on his dais, was Atlas, who, the second he saw this, went very still.

His eyes found mine and held them, and even from there, even across all those heads and all that distance, I felt the exact moment he understood.

He saw it.

The way my nerve was failing. The way my weight had already shifted, half-turned toward the doors and the escape I desperately sought.

He rose from his throne.

“I can’t do this,” I breathed, the words tumbling out before I could stop them, my hand dropping fully from Lazaros’s arm. “Laz, I can’t. Look at them all. My heart’s about to come out of my chest, I can’t…”

“He will chase you, you know.” Lazaros’s voice was quiet, steady, threaded with something that wasn’t teasing at all. “If you run.”

I dragged my panicked gaze to his.

“Trust me. I know my brother.” His mouth curved, gentle now. “He will not care one bit who is watching. He will come down off that dais and carry you to that seat himself, in front of every lord and lady in the kingdom, and he will not so much as blink an eye while he does it.” His eyes flicked to the empty throne. “Because, as far as he is concerned, that seat is already yours. It was always going to be yours.”

I opened my mouth.

I never got the chance to answer.

Because Atlas did something then that no king of Theïkós had ever done before him. I knew that from the reaction of the crowd as they all gasped as one.

He didn’t wait for his queen to come to him.

He moved to claim her.

A second gasp went up across the hall, soft and astonished, spreading outward in the same rolling wave the silence had, as Atlas stepped down from the dais. One step, then the next, his cloak pouring down the steps behind him, his eyes never once leaving my face. And the crowd, that great glittering crush of nobles who had all risen to honor him, parted before him without a word. Each now falling back on either side to clear a path straight through the center of the hall.

A path to me.

He moved through it like a tide coming in, unhurried and utterly certain. Every step closed the distance between us while the entire kingdom watched their king walk down to fetch a terrified mortal girl frozen in his doorway.

There was nowhere left to run.

There was only him, crossing the last of the floor, the candlelight catching on his crown and his constellations. That dark, steady gaze pinning me where I stood as surely as any hand.

And the realization crashed over me, cold and sudden, somewhere in the half-second before he reached me.

Oh, shit.

He really is a king.

And he really, truly, and deeply…

Thinks I’m his queen.

“Don’t just stand there gawping like a startled deer,” Lazaros murmured at my side, his voice pitched low and threaded with something that was, for once, more encouragement than mischief.

“Show them, little soldier. Show them exactly who you are.” A pause, gentler still. “At least meet him halfway.”

Meet him halfway.

Such a small thing to ask. And yet, with the entire kingdom risen to its feet and every eye in that hall fixed on me, it felt like being asked to walk off a cliff.