All Chapters of Poison: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

KillianThe first thing they gave me that belonged to my father was his pin.Not the Crown. Not the ring. Nothing grand enough to deserve the way every person in that room went quiet when the box opened.A pin.Black silver, no bigger than the first joint of my thumb, with the old royal crest worked into the face of it. He wore it at funerals, at formal Council sessions, and at anything my mother had classified as important enough that you were not permitted to complain about the collar.I have watched her fasten it to him approximately a thousand times.Now a man from the ceremonial office was holding it out to me on a square of cloth.“Alpha King.”I looked at his hand.He waited.Everybody waits now. That is new. Yesterday people occasionally ignored me for their own survival. Today I have become the point at which rooms stop moving.Ghost shifted u

HadleyI made it six steps out of Killian’s office before I stopped, and Maddox nearly walked into the back of me.“What?”I looked back at the closed door. “The painting.”He stared at me. “What painting?”“The one behind his desk.”He looked at the door as though there might have been several paintings behind Killian’s desk and he had simply failed to notice any of them while trying not to commit regicide.“What about it?”“It’s mine.”That got him. His head came round slowly. “Yours?”“One of mine.”Aunt Elara had kept going another two steps before she realised we weren’t beside her. She turned round, black dress moving against her ankles, and looked between us.“As in yours yours?” Maddox said.“No, Ma

KillianThree days after we buried my father, the healer told me that somebody had made it difficult for him to call for help.Not impossible.Difficult.Apparently that distinction matters.I sat behind the table in the smaller Council room with Maddox on my right and Jaxson opposite, and twelve pages of preliminary findings spread out between the three of us.The Royal healer had underlined the same section twice.Suppression of wolf-linked neurological pathways.I read it again. Then again. It did not improve.“There was no damage to the throat,” Jaxson said.“No.”“No trauma to the skull.”“No.”“And his heart was healthy.”“Obnoxiously healthy,” Maddox said. “That’s the word the healer used at his last physical. I’ve seen the file.”

Hadley “I don’t know.” For five years I had imagined hearing Killian Vasiliou say those words to me again, and I had never once been able to decide what I wanted to do with them when they arrived. Not because I wanted an apology. Apologies are for things somebody can put back. And not because I thought three syllables could undo six days in a room with no light in it, because they can’t, and anybody who has been in that room knows they can’t. It was simpler and stupider than either of those. There had been a time in my life when I don’t know was not an acceptable answer unless it came out of somebody else’s mouth. I said it to him across a table in an interrogation room until it stopped sounding like language, and every single time he heard it as a door I was holding shut. Now he sat behind Uncle Alaric’s desk in a room with the lamps on and the rain going at the window and gave it to me without one word of qualification hung off the end of it. No accusation. No demand that I impr

Hadley Aunt Elara had been outside for twenty-three minutes before I stopped watching her for signs that she might bolt. Not literally. Elara Vasiliou has never bolted from anything in her life. She withdraws, with enough dignity that everybody else ends up feeling rude for having noticed, which is significantly worse, because it means nobody knows what to do with her once she has gone behind a door. Today she had let Kiana pull her into the west gardens by two fingers. That counted as progress, and I had been counting everything all week. The gardens had been turned into something halfway between a picnic and a small diplomatic event, because apparently nobody in this family is capable of putting food outdoors without involving linen. There was a table under the old plane trees, a white cloth, proper china, three kinds of fruit, little sandwiches with the crusts cut off and enough tea to drown Maddox in. Kiana abandoned her chai