I Sold My Blood to Pay My Sister's Debt, and the Vampire King Who Bought Me Swore I'd Be His Queen or His Ruin novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Queen's Cup

Every head on the portico turned to the king.

Kaelen didn't answer her.

He took my arm and walked me through the great doors, out of the sun and into the dark of the keep, and the court parted to let us through.

He didn't say a word until we reached the tower.

Then he shut the door and said, "No."

"No what?"

"No, I'm not turning you."

"I know," I said. "It's in my terms."

"It's not in theirs."

He told me about the queen's cup while the keep went to sleep around us.

How the king drinks from his queen in front of the court until she's nearly empty.

How he opens his own wrist into a gold cup.

How she drinks it, and dies on the feast table, and wakes at midnight with teeth.

"Every queen of Varrow has been made that way," he said. "There have been four."

"And if a king refuses?"

"No king ever has."

"What happens to my blood if you turn me?"

He was quiet.

"It dies with you," he said. "Every drop. There'd be nothing left to taste."

"Then that's what she wants."

"That's what she wants."

I slept a little in the afternoon with the iron ring on a ribbon around my neck, because it wouldn't stay on my finger.

When I woke, someone had laid out a gown across the foot of my bed.

White.

The colour of the white steps, and of a sheet over a body.

I wore the black one again.

The feast hall was hung with red.

Every great house was there, the full court, crowded along tables that ran the length of the room.

There was a high table on a platform at the end, and in the middle of it, alone on a white cloth, stood a gold cup.

It was small. Smaller than I'd expected.

They put me at Kaelen's right hand again.

This time I had a chair.

Isadora sat at the first table below us, close enough to watch our faces.

Emmeline sat beside her in red silk, the first fine dress she'd ever had that she hadn't stolen.

Kaelen didn't eat.

I didn't either.

Near midnight the eldest councillor rose and struck a goblet with a knife, and the hall went quiet.

"The king will crown his queen," she said.

Kaelen stood.

He picked up the gold cup.

He held it up to the candles and turned it, so it threw gold light over the whole room.

Every vampire in that hall leaned forward.

I could hear my own heart.

I could hear his.

Then Kaelen Dravar opened his hand and let the cup fall.

It hit the stone floor of the platform with a clang that rang off the ceiling.

It bounced once, rolled to the edge, and dropped onto the floor of the hall, right at Isadora's feet.

He stepped on the rim of it as he came down.

It folded under his boot.

"My queen will die old," he said. "In her own bed. With her own blood in her. If any house thinks that's a crime, the doors are there."

For a moment, nobody moved.

Then Isadora rose.

She shook out her gold skirts.

She didn't say a word.

She simply walked to the doors, and Emmeline went with her.

The green lord rose and followed.

Then another house. And another.

Chairs scraped all over the hall.

When the doors finally closed, half the tables were empty.

The other half sat very still.

Kaelen looked at them.

"Thank you," he said. "Go home."

They went.

He took my hand and led me out the back way, up the turning stair.

He didn't stop at my floor.

He didn't stop at the tower either, not right away.

At the top of the stair he turned, with the door at his back, and looked at me in the dark.

"I can take you to your room," he said. "Thane is on your door."

"I know where my room is."

"Aveline."

I put my hand flat on his chest.

His heart was beating.

It had been beating since dawn.

It hadn't stopped once.

"Open the door," I said.

He opened it.

He kissed me in the doorway first, slowly, his bandaged hand on my jaw.

I didn't.

I pulled him inside by the front of his shirt and kicked the door shut myself.

He laughed against my mouth, low and startled.

"The contract is for my blood," I said. "Not this."

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