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

POV: Marcus | Day 3, Early MorningMarcus knelt in the chapel at dawn, and the weight of his son’s ring suspended on a chain beneath his robes, pressed against his heart like a constant accusation was the only thing keeping him tethered to sanity.The chapel was empty at this hour. Just Marcus, the icons lining the stone walls, and the specific silence that came from a man alone with the magnitude of his failures. He’d worn the ring for six years, ever since they’d hanged Matthias in the square, ever since Marcus had watched his only son choke at the end of a rope while the crowd cheered for the purification of the kingdom.He could still see it. The way Matthias’s body had convulsed. The way his son’s face had turned purple, then gray. The way his eyes had gone wide with the specific betrayal of understanding that his own father had turned him in to the executioners.Marcus had told himself it was necessary. Matthias had been weak. Matthias had been corrupted. Matthias had been proof