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Chewy's whole body went still with the particular gravity of a dog approaching the only question that actually mattered. "Will there be tacos?"

"It's a coronation, Chewy."

"That wasn't an answer."

I looked at Kai, leaning against the counter with his coffee and his bandages and that stupid, wonderful grin still on his face. At the crown, sitting quietly and golden between the sugar bowl and my ordinary little drip coffee maker, at four dogs currently staging a very determined taco negotiation in the middle of my kitchen floor.

This. This was what being Queen actually looked like.

Not losing everything I loved.

Standing right in the middle of it.

I picked my coffee back up.

"Fine. There can be tacos."

Chewy let out a whoop that probably violated several ordinances. Aideen groaned somewhere deep in my chest. Kai laughed, low and warm, and came around the counter to press a kiss against my temple.

And the Dragon Queen decided breakfast was officially in session.

EPILOGUE

Three days after saving the world, I was back behind the counter at Marvelous Martha's Brew House & Bougie Bags, making a caramel macchiato for a woman who had absolutely no idea her barista had recently been dragged into another Realm by a corrupted Dragon Queen.

Honestly, it was perfect.

"You are not a barista," Aideen pointed out.

"I own the place. I can be whatever I want."

The bell over the door hadn't stopped jingling all morning. Still, by two o'clock I'd locked up early, flipped the sign to CLOSED, and let everybody who mattered pile into my shop instead—Kai, Maeve, Maisie-minus-the-triplets, Zelda, Theresa, Barney, and all four dogs, Chewy included, obviously, because Chewy was always included whether anybody meant to include him or not.

Everybody looked appropriately suspicious. Closing the shop early was not, historically, something that happened for good reasons.

"Is this about tacos?" Chewy asked immediately.

"Everything isn't about tacos." I rolled my eyes and sighed.

"To him it is," Arthur grumbled, with Otis boofing and Mona giving a woof for good measure.

Kai, leaning against the counter with his coffee, already had that particular look on his face—the one that meant the Mating Bond had tipped him off before I'd said a single word.

"Stop reading my mind."

"I'm not."

"You're thinking smugly."

He didn't deny it.

The crown sat on the counter beside the tip jar, gold and unbothered, right where I'd set it that morning, because if there was one thing in this shop that was genuinely, absolutely safe from sticky fingers, it was whatever sat within three feet of my tip jar. Best security system I owned, hands down.

Zelda eyed it like it might start charging people for espresso shots on its own. "Are you seriously keeping the Dragon Queen crown next to the tip jar?"

"Nobody touches the tip jar."

Nobody argued with that logic. Nobody could.