The Shadow’s Devotion: Loyalty, Betrayal, and the Price of Loving a King - Kiss of Blood and Crown Series, #3

Ten kisses. One curse. Two hearts that defy fate.

Before the bells, the palace doors open so the city can watch the chair behave. Rope is law. Salt is policy. A kettle breathes over banked coals while a mirror remembers it is only glass. This is how peace begins here—not with a coronation, but with a room that does its work.
Veres never wanted a throne, only walls that hold. Now the Captain-General is Regent by writ, expected to turn mourning into order while a city splits between people who eat and people who pray. His first decrees are bread, water, and watch rotations—use, not theatre. His first temptation is the man the crowd calls foreigner and traitor: Lirian, a river prince whose breath can wake an oath and whose mouth once made a council choose law over blood.
Mira, the mother-queen, prefers knives sewn into veils. Seros, the beloved brother, sells grief as a pose the market will buy. Priests dust stone and practice new verbs. Rumor climbs the colonnades faster than ivy. And under it all a clause carved into old rock turns in its sleep: in famine, in siege, or when a king wastes… only the beloved may lift the heart. Breath shared. Name offered. Dawn.
The inquest hunts poison; the streets hunt a story. The pyre takes a crown and the crowd calls omen. Veres answers with buckets, bread, and the hardest thing a soldier can offer: restraint. Lirian answers with absence that pulls like tide—and with a hand that finds his in the hour a city most wants spectacle. Between them runs a thin red line, humming at the wrist like a promise that refuses to choose between survival and tenderness.
Enemies-to-lovers, slow burn, high stakes—a Regent who won't trade lives for optics, a prince who won't trade breath for lies, and a city that keeps choosing kitchens over hymns. Here, law lives best in wood and hands; love survives best when it learns to be useful. If they fail, the markets burn. If they succeed, the stars might have to move to make room for a different dawn.