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I took a breath, looked around at every single person who'd bled, cried, fought, or eaten an unreasonable number of tacos to get us all standing in this room together, and said the thing I'd actually called everybody in here to say.

"Okay. I made a decision."

The whole shop went quiet.

Kai smiled.

I pointed at him. "Don't."

"Didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

"Absolutely."

I let that sit for exactly one beat before I got to the actual point. "We're having the coronation."

"We knew that," Zelda said.

"I wasn't finished."

I waited until I had every last eye in the room on me, and then I said the part that actually mattered.

"We're having my coronation."

Not Margaret's. Not some ancient script handed down word-for-word because that's simply how it had always been done, by women who'd never once been asked if they wanted it done that way. There would be traditions I respected. There would be Dragon Queen Magic, because apparently that part wasn't optional no matter how hard I glared at it. There would be whatever genuinely, unavoidably had to happen.

But everything else? That was mine to choose. Coffee. Family. My people, in my shop, on my terms.

"And if anybody tells me I have to wear something itchy because tradition demands it," I added, "I'm setting it on fire."

"Noted," Kai said, entirely too fondly for a man agreeing to arson.

He waited until the room's attention had drifted back to their coffee before he asked, quieter, just for me. "And the wedding?"

I looked at him. "Ours. Separate. We pick that together."

"Good."

"You do get a vote."

Something warm passed between us. A callback neither of us needed to say out loud. It was four months and one near-apocalypse in the making. We had earned it.

"Fate," I added, mostly for the room's benefit, "does not."

"Agreed," everybody said, more or less at once, with the enthusiastic unity of people who had all, at some point in the last few days, personally met Fate.

Chewy, predictably, had one requirement left standing between him and full enthusiasm for the whole enterprise. "Will there be tacos at the coronation?"

"We've discussed this."

"You said there could be tacos."

He had, apparently, filed that particular promise away with the meticulous accuracy of a very small, very determined lawyer.

"Fine. There will be tacos."

"I accept your reign," Chewy announced, with the gravity of a dog conferring an enormous honor.