CROWNED IN SIN

POV: Marcus Ashford | Day 1, 3 AMMarcus Ashford knelt in the chapel at an hour when decent men slept, and prayed for the strength to do what God demanded of him.The candles cast shadows that looked like accusations. He’d lit them himself seven of them, one for each year since Matthias died. Since his son had been exposed as a deviant, a corruptor, the kind of unnatural thing that festered in kingdoms like rot in fruit, spreading outward until the whole harvest was poisoned.The church was cold. Stone walls that had stood for three centuries, witness to marriages and funerals and the specific kind of suffering that came with duty. Marcus had spent his entire life serving this kingdom. Serving God through service to the crown. And what had it earned him?A dead son.A throne that should’ve been his, given instead to his younger brother a man who’d been weak, emotional, easily manipulated. And when Aldric died under suspicious circumstances (poison, everyone whispered, though no one da

POV: Daemon | Day 1, 4 PMThe courtyard was theater.That was the first thing Daemon understood as he stood beneath the palace archway, watching the Montvale carriage roll through the gates in a cloud of dust that looked deliberately choreographed. Every movement calculated. Every gesture performed for the servants who watched from windows, for the guards who stood at attention, for the kingdom that needed to believe this was a love match instead of a political transaction.Elara Ashford soon to be, though the ceremony hadn’t happened yet stepped from the carriage with the kind of grace that came from a lifetime of being watched.She was smaller than he’d expected. Younger. The portraits had made her seem older, more imposing, but in person she moved like water fluid, dangerous, impossible to grasp. Her dark hair was braided in the intricate style of Montvale nobility, each strand woven with silver thread that caught the afternoon light. Her gray eyes swept across the courtyard with t

POV: Daemon | Day 2, AfternoonThe note arrived hidden in a loaf of bread.Thomas brought it to the morning room where Daemon was pretending to review trade documents with Elara, the two of them positioned at opposite ends of a mahogany table with sufficient distance between them to satisfy any observer. The princess was explaining tariff structures with the kind of focused intelligence that made it clear she’d spent considerable time studying Valdris’s economic vulnerabilities, and Daemon was doing his best to seem genuinely interested in anything that wasn’t the specific weight of dread expanding in his chest.Thomas’s face was carefully blank as he set the bread basket down. “Fresh from the kitchens, Your Majesty.”The moment he withdrew, Daemon’s hand moved toward it.“Don’t,” Elara said without looking up from her papers. “Not here. Not where anyone might see you react.”She was right. Of course she was right. Daemon forced his hand back to the document in front of him and contin