Chapter 51
brYLEE
I taste the salt of my own tears before they even fall—brine and grief and something dangerously close to joy, all crystallizing on my tongue like the residue of an ocean I’ve been drowning in for months.
Blinking hard, I press the heel of my palm against my sternum, trying to physically hold myself together because if I don't, I might dissolve into the marble beneath this ridiculous gilt chair. The stone is cold even through layers of silk and petticoats, unforgiving as the reality of today.
“Deep breath, Princess.” Luka’s hand finds my knee, his thumb tracing maddeningly slow circles through the champagne-colored silk of my gown. His touch is warm, steady, an anchor in a sea that’s been storming for years on end. “You’re turning blue.”
“I don’t think I’m technically a princess,” I whisper back, though my throat feels like it's been lined with broken glass. “Not anymore. Or am I? How does this work? Do I get demoted? Is there paperwork?”
“You're whatever you want to be,” Kylian says from behind me, his fingers briefly brushing the nape of my neck—cool and steady and vexingly confident. I can hear the smirk in his voice, the one that’s gotten him out of—and into—trouble since we met.
“Princess. Queen of my particular universe. Obsession. Sexy minx in a very expensive dress. The options are endless.”
“Stop flirting during a coronation,” Ridge mutters from Luka’s other side, though there’s no real bite to it.
His head is on a constant swivel, searching for threats despite the fact he’s supposed to be off-duty.
Though none of my mates play around when it comes to my safety.
“You’re just jealous,” Kylian counters smoothly.
“What am I jealous of?” Ridge arches an eyebrow.
“That all of us are touching Brylee right now, and you’re not.”
Ridge stares at Kylian impassively, his expression an impenetrable mask. Then, without a word, he reaches around Luka and very exaggeratedly squeezes my knee.
Kylian pouts. “Not cool, man. Not cool.”
The giant to my left snorts in amusement.
I don’t look at Colter, but I feel him, always feel him, his presence like a banked fire, warm and watchful and impossibly patient.
He doesn’t say anything. He knows I don’t need words right now.
He knows I’m barely holding the pieces of myself in place, that one more sympathetic syllable might shatter the fragile dam I’ve constructed.
Instead, he simply grabs my free hand and rubs his thumb over my knuckles.
The repaired and revitalized throne room stretches before us, vast and glittering and impossibly ancient.
Vaulted ceilings soar forty feet overhead, all gold filigree and freshly painted frescoes depict the coronations of kings and queens past—my great-great-grandfather receiving his crown, my great-grandmother in her mourning blacks, my mother twenty years ago, radiant and young and alive.
The plain round windows have been filled in with stained glass depicting the kingdom’s history in ruby and sapphire and emerald, and now they paint the afternoon light into fractured jewels across the floor. Dust motes dance in those colored beams, suspended like tiny galaxies.
The pews are packed—nobles in their brightest colors, diplomats with their medals catching the light, reporters with their cameras flashing like distant stars—but I'm in the front row because Teddie insisted. Demanded. Threw a very un-kingly tantrum about it.
My sister sits where she belongs—near me, he'd said this morning, his voice still carrying that roughness, that fragility that makes my heart clench like a fist. Especially today.
A month ago, he couldn't sit up without help. A month ago, he was gray and sweating through sheets that nurses changed every hour, his body burning from the inside out, while the experimental cure warred with the karkinos in his blood.
I sat in a hospital chair that became my purgatory, holding his hand while machines screamed and my brother flickered like a candle in a hurricane. I learned the rhythm of his IV drip, the names of every nurse on the night shift, the exact pitch of the heart monitor that meant he was still with me.
Now he stands at the end of the aisle, waiting for the procession to begin, and he looks—
He looks alive.
The thought hits me like a physical blow, steals the breath from my lungs, and I have to bite my lip hard enough to taste copper to keep from sobbing aloud.
Color rides high in his cheeks—real color, not the fever-flush of illness.
His shoulders, once sharp enough to cut paper beneath hospital gowns, fill out the royal-blue uniform with something approaching strength.
When he smiles at the archbishop, I see the boy who used to climb the ancient oak in the east garden with me, who used to braid my hair when our mother was too busy ruling to remember we were still children, who used to whisper secrets in a language we made up because we were bored and brilliant and desperate for connection.
But he's not a boy anymore. Today, he becomes king.
I feel the shift in the room before I see it—a tension like electricity before lightning, the collective intake of breath from three hundred witnesses.
My eyes find Caran three seats down, separated from our group by a row of foreign dignitaries in their elaborate robes.
He's beautiful in the way that makes my chest ache, all pale skin and unruly hair and eyes that hold entire constellations of sorrow. He sits rigidly, hands folded in his lap so tightly his knuckles are white, and I wonder if he's counting the minutes until this is over or memorizing every second because he’s terrified it’s the last time he’ll see Teddie smile.
Things have been broken between them. Shattered, really, in the way that only secrets and fear can break.
Teddie paced his recovery suite at three in the morning, worrying his thumbnail raw over whether Caran would even attend today, whether he should attend, whether any of it mattered when the chasm between them seemed unbridgeable.
“I don’t even know if I want him to come,” Teddie had said, his voice cracking like ice on a thawing lake.
He’d been wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt that hung loose on his recovering frame, pacing in front of the window that overlooked the royal gardens.
“Or do I? I don’t, right? Or maybe I do.
I don’t fucking know, Bry! Tell me how I’m supposed to feel.
Is it… Is it okay for me to forgive him? After everything?”
I'd grabbed his face in my hands then, felt the sharp angles of his recovery beneath my palms, the new hollows in his cheeks that hadn’t filled in yet, and told him the truest thing I know.
“You deserve happiness, Teddie. You both do. I forgive Caran. He was trying to protect you in his own stupid, misguided way. But you need to decide if you do. That’s not my choice to make.
But I’ll tell you this…” I’d waited until his eyes met mine, until I saw the fear and the hope warring there.
“Don’t let pride or fear steal your future. We’ve lost too much already.”
Now Caran's eyes lift, catching mine across the distance.
He smiles, small and private and achingly hopeful, and I smile back, trying to pour every ounce of encouragement I possess into that exchange.
Pride beams in his gaze when he directs it back at the throne, at the man he loves, who is about to become king.
I think…
I think they’ll be okay.
At least, I hope they will.
“Damn.” Ridge scratches at his jawline, now freshly shaved and somehow still managing to look dangerous in formal attire. His eyes narrow nearly imperceptibly toward the south entrance. “I’m surprised they showed up.”
I follow his gaze to the Nóthos delegation settling into their assigned seats, and my stomach twists.
“I’m happy they did,” I whisper back, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. “It means they’re just as committed to peace as we are. Or at least, they want us to think they are.”
“I know they want peace,” Ridge mutters, folding his arms over his chest, his attention never wavering from the newest arrivals. “But seeing them here is making me antsy.”
“I’m breaking out in hives,” Kylian adds, scratching erratically at his arm.
“This won’t be like last time,” Luka says quietly. “I trust the princes. They seem to truly want peace.”
I want to believe him. I really do.
But the last time a Noth was in this throne room…
A shiver reverberates through me at the reminder, ice tracing my spine. I’ve told myself time and time again I won’t think about the attack that killed my parents. Not now. Not today. But the memory comes unbidden anyway—the smoke, the screaming, the way my parents’ eyes glazed over…
Stop, I tell myself. Breathe. Today is for Teddie.
The Nóthos delegation sits like a shadow among the celebration—dark suits where others wear color, stern faces where others smile, their newly appointed ambassador a woman with silver hair and a scar bisecting her eyebrow, who looks like she’s seen things I can’t imagine.
She meets my eyes without flinching. No hostility, but no warmth either. Just assessment. Calculation. The weighing of strengths and weaknesses.
Stefan sits beside her. He does offer me a smile, though it’s tentative, strained, riddled with a weight I can’t even begin to comprehend.
The ring around his irises glows a little brighter today than it has before.
I’m not sure the suppressants are working for him quite as well as they did when he arrived, an issue I’ll have to confront at some point. But not today.
The war has paused. That's the most anyone can say. The treaties sit unsigned in diplomatic pouches in my brother’s study, the borders remain tense as drawn bows, and the history between our kingdoms still bleeds in too many places.
But for today, for this hour, the guns are silent. The bombs aren’t falling. My brother gets to be crowned without the soundtrack of artillery thundering in the distance.
It's enough. It's everything.
We’re doing what we can to uphold our end of the agreement with the Noths. Teddie thinks he might have discovered the location of the esteemed scientist, Dr. Daimon, and her team of alphas. Mother hid her pet project well, so we’ll have to see.
This is the third lead. Earlier searches didn’t pan out. But for the sake of Stefan and his brothers, I hope this one does.
The music swells—our national anthem played on sixty-seven strings, the same arrangement that’s been used for three centuries—and Teddie begins his walk down the aisle.
The crowd rises like a wave, a rustle of silk and wool and held breaths, but I'm already standing, already trembling, already lost in the sight of him moving with purpose instead of stumbling with weakness.
He nears me, and for one perfect moment, his eyes catch mine.
We made it, that look says. We’re here. We’re alive. We made it.
I think of our mother's funeral six months ago, how I had to be strong when all I wanted to do was collapse.
I think of how sick Teddie became, even after being administered the cure, the long nights where I bargained with gods I don't believe in, promising everything I had if they’d just let him stay.
I think of crying over his bedside, of doctors with grim faces and gentle hands who administered a bolstered dose from Stefan, of the morning I walked into his room and found him sitting up on his own, asking for toast with blackberry jam, and how I’d had to leave the room to sob with relief in the hallway.
I think of the future, unspooling before us like golden thread, fragile and bright and terrifyingly possible.
“By the power vested in me,” the archbishop begins, and his voice carries the weight of centuries, the authority of generations, “and by the will of the people, and in the name of the Divine…”
Luka grabs my hand in his and idly begins to play with my fingers, his touch grounding me.
Ridge, on Luka’s other side, gives me an assessing look, but I simply offer him a wobbly smile, one that eloquently says, I’m fine, just emotional; don’t fuss.
He rolls his eyes but reaches across Luka to squeeze my elbow briefly, his version of comfort.
“I crown thee, Theodore Castor, King of Hypso, Defender of the Realm, Protector of the People—”
The crown descends, eighteen-karat gold catching the light from those stained-glass windows, throwing prisms across my brother’s face, and his head bows beneath its weight. Not just the metal, but the responsibility, the history, the lives of millions resting on the cradle of his skull.
The archbishop’s hands tremble slightly—he’s old, older than he was at my mother’s coronation, older than the infantile peace between our kingdoms—and for a heartbeat, I’m terrified he’ll drop it.
But he doesn’t. The crown settles, and Teddie rises.
When he turns to face the crowd, the roar is deafening. It shakes the stained glass and rattles my ribs and vibrates in the hollow of my throat. It sounds like triumph. It sounds like survival. It sounds like a future I wasn’t sure we’d ever get to hear.
“Long live the king!” someone shouts—freaking Harper, I think, though my ears are ringing—and the room takes up the cry, voices layering over voices until the throne room becomes a cathedral of sound, a monument to hope.
“Long live the king!”
Teddie looks at me, crown gleaming like captured sunlight atop his blond curls, tears streaming down his own face unchecked and unashamed, and smiles.
It’s the smile from our childhood, from hiding in the tree branches and our secret language, from the hospital bed when he first opened his eyes and saw me there.
I smile back, wrecked and renewed, surrounded by my mates and their steady, stubborn love, watching my twin step into his light while I finally, finally, stand in mine.
“Long live the king,” I whisper, and the words taste like promise. Like prayer. Like the beginning of everything we almost lost, and everything we're brave enough to keep.
The cheering goes on, and Caran is on his feet, shouting with the rest, his face transformed with joy.
And I let myself believe, just for this moment, that everything might actually be okay.