Page 48

My first instinct was to make a joke of it. I thought about deflecting the way I always did when something got too sincere too fast. But I made myself actually hear it instead, let it land the way it was meant to.

"Yeah," I said. "I did."

Not we survived somehow. Not everybody else saved me.

I did.

Fate smiled– a real one, not the too-pleased-with-herself smirk she'd walked in wearing– and then she was simply gone, vanilla and stardust fading out of my kitchen as if she'd never been there at all, leaving me alone with my coffee and my crown and the enormous, ridiculous weight of everything that had just changed.

I'd barely had thirty seconds to sit with any of it before I heard Kai's uneven footsteps coming down the hall. He was slower than usual, one solid step and one careful, favoring step, over and over.

He appeared in the kitchen doorway a minute later, sweats slung low on his hips, no shirt, bandages still wrapped around one hand, bruises that had gone a deep, ugly purple-green along his ribs where I could see them, looking like a man who'd lost a bar fight with an ancient Dragon Queen and somehow still walked away the best-looking thing I'd ever seen in my entire life. His hair was doing something spectacular and unintentional, sticking up on one side where he'd slept on it wrong. I decided, watching him lean carefully against the doorframe instead of just walking through it, that I could genuinely spend the rest of my life waking up to that particular sight and never once get tired of it.

"Morning," he said, voice still rough with sleep.

"Morning." I held my mug out toward him without being asked, because four months together had taught me exactly how he took his coffee and exactly how little he could function without it. "Sit. You look like you got hit by a truck."

"I got hit by considerably worse than a truck." He took the mug, and instead of sitting, leaned against the counter beside me, close enough that his shoulder brushed mine, solid and warm and gloriously, undeniably alive. He breathed in the smell of the coffee like it was the first good thing that had happened to him all week, which, given the week we'd had, it possibly was. "Was that Fate I smelled? Vanilla and something that always makes my back teeth itch?"

"Yep."

"Am I allowed to ask?"

"October 2027 is no longer legally binding."

He blinked at me over the rim of the mug, clearly needing a second longer than usual to process anything before caffeine had fully hit his system. "I didn't know it was legally binding."

"It was in my head."

That, apparently, was answer enough for him, because he just nodded slowly, the way a man does when he's learned, over the last four months, exactly which battles are worth fighting before his first cup of coffee and exactly how many of my sentences make perfect sense only to me. He reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, thumb brushing my cheek on the way back, gentle enough that it made my chest ache in the good way.

Then he caught the expression on my face, the one I clearly hadn't managed to smooth all the way out no matter how hard I'd tried.

"What else?"

I looked at the crown. Then at him. At the bandages, and the bruises, and the ridiculous, wonderful bedhead, and every single reason I'd chosen this exact life over and over again in the last twenty-four hours.

"Apparently, I need a coronation."

Something warm and proud moved across his whole face, chasing away some of the exhaustion still sitting there. He set his mug down, took my free hand in both of his– careful of his burned palm, careful of everything– and pressed a slow kiss to my knuckles like I was something worth being ceremonious about even in an old T-shirt with terrible hair.

"My Queen."

"Don't start."

But I smiled when I said it this time, and he knew it. He grinned back at me like he'd won something far bigger than an argument.

That was, of course, the exact moment the peace ended, because Arthur, Otis, Mona, and Chewy came barreling into the kitchen in a chaotic wave of paws and nails skidding on tile. Our serenity was officially over for the morning.

"I heard something about a coronation," Chewy announced.

"How?"

"He was listening at the door," Arthur said.

"Leadership requires intelligence gathering.”

I decided not to touch that. If the little guy wanted to think he was in charge, who was I to tell him any different? "It's happening. Eventually. There will be an actual ceremony."