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“This is a disaster,” agreed yet another.

“And who do you imagine is ready to step into my brother’s shoes?” Cesca asked the first man coolly. “Are you suggesting a coup, Armand?”

The older man paled. “Of course not.”

“Last I checked,” Cesca said in the same cool tone, “no one is ever ready to take the throne. They are each thrust upon it by fate and must muddle their way through—or do you imagine that my brother felt ready to step into our father’s shoes while he was still in mourning?”

There was something about the way Saviero’s blue gaze hit hers then that made her breath catch. Just a little.

“Armand brings up a salient point, however inelegantly,” Saviero said into the sputtering. “You cannot be unaware of your reputation, Your Majesty. While your brother spent his life training for the role, you pursued other avenues.” She was tempted to ask him if it hurt to be that circumspect, but she caught herself just in time. “The King was about to marry because he knew that solidifying the royal family, and hopefully producing the necessary heirs in a timely fashion, would not only lock down your family’s bloodline but offer the nod toward continuity and safety that the people of the kingdom crave in their monarch.”

Now she wanted to know why it took him ten words to say things anyone else could manage in two. She didn’t say that out loud either.

“Quite right,” tutted Armand, in a blustery sort of way that clearly indicated that he was trying to make up for what he’d said before. “No one can change the fact that you are Queen now, Your Majesty, but what we can do is temper the situation.”

That did not exactly strike Cesca as fixing much of anything, but she kept her face blank.

“What you must do, Your Majesty,” said another of the ministers, this one with a thunderous scowl on his face, “is marry a man that the whole of the kingdom can agree is of impeccable reputation and stalwart, unquestioned commitment to the kingdom to balance out your own…” She raised a brow at the man, and he flinched.

The unpleasant Lord Frick sighed. “Excesses,” he finished, when no one else would.

“My excesses,” she echoed. She swung one leg slightly, dangling it over her other knee, and watched them all look at all of her bare skin, then away. “I can’t disagree with the PR strategy but I can’t imagine where you intend to find such a paragon. He would have to be a literal monk.”

No one spoke. Instead, they all sort of…shuffled a bit on their feet.

Then, one by one, each of the ministers turned away from her and stared down the length of the room toward the doorway.

Toward the man who stood there like some kind of conquering warrior when it was only Saviero.

Yet Cesca couldn’t help but stare that way herself, finding herself caught once again in that maddeningly deep blue gaze. “Oh no,” she murmured.

She wasn’t even sure if he heard her, but he nodded, decisively. “I’m afraid so, Your Majesty,” Saviero said quietly.

But something about the way he was looking at her made her feel…almost shaky.

“Saviero has dedicated his life to this kingdom,” Armand said, robustly. “He has served at the pleasure of the King, and when the King abdicated, he did not shrink from his duties, minimize the situation, or seek to advance his own position.”

The way anyone else would have, Armand included, was the implication.

“Yes,” Cesca said, and it was harder to keep her mask in place than it should have been. “Saviero is a saint. Everyone in the kingdom can agree.”

“Then it is settled,” Saviero said briskly, making Cesca feel breathless. Had she agreed? Was this really happening? Was she expected to…marry Saviero? He wasn’t even looking at her. He was sending that imperious gaze of his around the room. “If we are all agreed, ministers, I suggest that we get the queen ready for her wedding.”

And when he looked back at Cesca then, she felt it like a bolt of lightning. It hit her on the top of her head and reverberated down to her feet.

Saviero inclined his head in supposed subservience, though there was nothing the least bit submissive about the man. “If Her Majesty so decrees.”

She could refuse, she knew. Cesca was the fucking Queen and could do anything she liked. And it was more than a little tempting to throw a fit. To throw them all out, Saviero most of all. To figure out what had happened. To go and find her brother wherever he was, in whatever state he was in—she couldn’t believe it, she still couldn’t let herself believe it—but she also knew that if she did any of those things, it would cause an even bigger crisis.

And one thing she was well aware of, having caused more than her share of crises in the course of her life, was that letting them drag out was never the right call.

Not when there was a kingdom hanging in the balance.

The people of Liandero did not care about her feelings. They never had and they never would. She was not real to them. As her mother always said, she was a role. This was a stage.

Cesca had to believe that going along with this—going through the motions, putting on her show—until she could figure out what the hell had happened with her brother was her only option.

Because compounding the possibility of his death on top of his completely uncharacteristic abdication—assuming all of that was true, and she had to think it was, given the way these people were speaking to her when usually they preferred to pretend she didn’t exist—with more drama and scandal didn’t bear thinking about.