Demoted to the Throne のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 31 - チャプター 36

The smell of homemade food was obvious, even from the front door before Selene stepped in, which was how she knew, with a furious certainty, exactly what she was about to walk into.“Grandma!”Her grandmother turned from the stove with the guilty speed of someone caught mid-crime, wooden spoon still in hand, a dish towel slung over her shoulder. Looking not one but like someone who had spent the last several days hooked up to machines that beeped whenever her heart raced even a tad bit too fast. "You're home early."“You’re supposed to be resting, in bed. Preferably deep in sleep.”“I was discharged yesterday. Behaved myself, apparently.” Hattie turned back to the pot like that settled it, stirring with more effort than the motion should have required, her free hand braced flat against the counter every few seconds, her simple way of relaxing through the stress. “The doctor said I could go home as long as I took it easy.”“How is preparing a full considered ‘taking it easy’?”“It’s ju

Alaric hadn’t slept properly since the conference trip, at first he convinced himself it was jet lag but even that die didn’t hold for long.He sat at his desk with the merger contract open in front of him, the same paragraph re-read for the fifth time without a single word of it landing, and let himself do the thing he'd been avoiding since the plane touched down — think about the bar. The weight of her, leaning in. The breath he'd taken right before his phone had ruined everything, sharp and sudden as a blade cutting a thread he hadn't meant to let get that long in the first place.He’d wanted to kiss her. That wasn’t a question anymore, wasn’t something he could file away like he did things he didn’t want to address. He’d wanted it with a clarity that unsettled him more than the wanting itself — and then his father’s call had come through, demanding an update on a trade negotiation that could have waited until morning, and he’d stood there in a hotel lobby listening to Silas’s voice

It was like a switch flipped overnight, and Selene had spent half of that morning trying to figure out what went wrong.Alaric was at his desk when she brought his coffee in — no sun today, she didn’t want to come off as “doing too much” just for the sake of it — he barely looked up from his laptop to take it anyway. "Thank you," he said, to the screen rather than to her, and that was the whole exchange. No comment on the Tanaka contract she'd flagged. No dry remark about her being three minutes early, which had somehow become its own small ritual between them, him pretending to be annoyed by her punctuality, her pretending not to enjoy annoying him."Everything okay?" she asked, lingering a beat longer than the coffee delivery required."Fine." He still hadn't looked up. "Busy day."It wasn't a lie, exactly, but it wasn't anything close to true either, and she knew. It was the clear difference between a door that had been shut and a door that had been shut at you. She hovered near the