Crown Me Yours — Chapter 5

Chapter

Five

Elara

og clings to the lower graveyard like a shroud, blanketing the servants’ grounds, so thick it beads on my lashes and turns the world intoF smudged silhouettes: crooked stones, stunted yews, a slanted fence.

And the two men lifting out a grave in the distance.

It’s the hour between worlds—the gray, damp seam in time right after dawn breaks—where the silence is so heavy it feels like pressure against the eardrums. Any stiller, and I might as well be dead… Sitting on the frost-damp grass, I watch the spades cut into the earth with practiced rhythm, dark soil piling into a mound. One man puffs white breath into the sky. The other wipes his brow, casting a pitying glance back at me, at the queen in the dirty dress who’s been sitting here a long while.

How much stillness does that bastard need to finally show himself?

When the men shoulder their spades and leave, my gaze drifts to the pink-streaked horizon. I made sure I came here at a good time, with the moon faded and dawn bringing enough light for Death to hide his bones.

Was he truly that gruesome to look at?

I squeeze my eyes shut, reaching for the grotesque memory. What I find feels softened by time, the terror of it strangely blurred. Skin pallid like a corpse’s, yes, but also smooth and flawless. Ribs exposed for certain, a body stripped down to its simplest truth. Is there a heart behind them? And if I somehow ever manage a glimpse, am I going to find it with its strings

ripped to shreds?

I sigh.

Wed him. Bed him.

Does the morning in the tower count? When I pulled the curtain? Or was that just lust with no intent? I don’t know, but I can’t risk a technicality.

Lying with him is probably a step in the right direction under the circumstances.

I stand, my knees popping in the cold. I cross the lower graveyard and walk up to the edge of the fresh hole. Dug for a kitchen maid, I overheard one of the men mention earlier. Poor thing didn’t even die of rot. No, she took a tumble down some stairs and snapped her neck. Pity.

The scent of loam and worms rises from the grave, its familiarity letting warmth settle under the cotton of my dress. I hitch up its skirts. My boot toes the edge, finding a foothold in the clay, and I slide down.

My soles hit the bottom with a soft thud. Walls of earth rise above my head, cutting off the view of the trees, the path, the everything, leaving nothing but a rectangle of gray sky above.

It’s colder down here.

Much colder.

I lie down, the back of my dress soaking up the dampness. Hands crossed over my chest, I am so still, forcing my breath into something dead- shallow as I stare at the sky. Come on now, you asshole… Nothing.

No scent of carnations. No chill sliding under my skirts. No shadow

thickening at my feet. No— Crunch.

The sound is slow but deliberate. A boot on gravel. Then silence. Then another crunch. Closer.

I don’t breathe. I don’t blink.

Dirt rains down from the edge, a gritty sprinkle that lands on my cheek.

A shadow blots out the gray sky. Vale leans over the lip of the grave, his black velvet coat absorbing the mist, his hair a dark halo against the morning light. He looks down at me, brow arched in supreme, unimpressed boredom.

“Feeling theatrical, Elara?” His voice is a low rumble that vibrates in the narrow space. “Or have you finally realized where your sense of fashion belongs?”

My molars grind back a scathing comment about the fashion of tendons dangling from bones. “I was waiting for you.”

“In a hole? Things that cannot be killed hardly belong in graves. It’s bad

luck.”

“I was told you like stillness.”

“Oh?” He tilts his head, a predatory gleam entering his eyes. “I must say, I liked the way you rolled your hips against me much better.”

Without warning, he jumps.

I gasp, instinctively flinching as he lands beside me, his coat brushing against my arm, the scent of carnations and ice instantly overpowering the

smell of the dirt.

And then he lies down.

The narrowness of the grave forces him to press against me, arm to arm, leg to leg. A gravedigger lying beside Death in a kitchen maid’s grave.

Hysterical.

I turn my head. Vale’s profile is sharp, pale as marble against the dark earth wall. He isn’t looking at me; he’s staring up at the sky, his hands folded over his stomach, mirroring my pose.

“Make your wish,” he says softly. “I have places to be.”

I watch the slow, steady rise of his chest. “I’ll make you a deal.”

He snorts. “You don’t have the currency for a deal.”

“Show me your true form,” I say, ignoring his arrogant bemusement.

“Let me see Death, and I’ll make my wish.”

The easy arrogance evaporates, replaced by a cold rigidity. He turns his head slowly, and this close, I can see the tiny flecks of gold in his irises.

“You demand your wish, and I grant it,” he says, his voice dropping.

“That is the transaction. I do not perform parlor tricks for your amusement.”

“It’s not amusement. It’s…” Curiosity, probably, but that seems too morbid to confess. “It’s…knowing who I’m dealing with.”

“You’re dealing with the end of all things.”

He turns back to the sky, dismissing me. But he doesn’t leave. He stays there, the heat of his body—yes, heat—seeping through his clothes into mine. It’s strange. For all the coldness he can bring, near me, he sometimes seems to burn like a fever.

We lie in silence for a long moment. It’s surprisingly peaceful. The wind howls above us, but down here, shielded by the earth, it’s quiet.

“Why didn’t they see you?” I ask quietly, breaking the truce. “In the city. At the Gutter Lane house. My mother, Daron… They all looked right through you. But the kitchen girl…she saw you.”

Vale sighs, a sound of weary patience. “I am a concept, Elara. Even in this form, most minds refuse to perceive me.”

“But I saw you. I saw Vale.”

“Because I chose to let you see Vale,” he murmurs. “And once the curtain is lifted, it cannot be lowered. Not in this form.”

I nod in understanding. The kitchen girl saw him that night because he’d appeared to her before. No wonder she was scared. She didn’t see a steward or even a prince; she saw Death.

“The carriage driver who brought me here.” My mind wanders back to how he asked if I was alright. How Miss Hampshire mentioned the next day that talking to myself was not permitted. “He never saw you, did he?

Probably thought I was mad.”

“What else would you call a woman who cozies up in a grave beside Death?” Vale shifts onto his side, turning to face me just in time for me to see a twitch leaving his jaw. “Enough of this nonsense.” The annoyance in his voice is sharp enough to scrape. Vale’s eyes narrow, not in anger—not yet—but in that bored, predatory way that says he’s about to stop indulging me. “I didn’t climb into a grave to trade memories of carriage drivers. Ask what you’re clearly prepared to ask, Elara, before I decide you’re wasting my morning.”

The scathe in his voice pricks at me. The distance between Vale’s patience and his rage is unpredictable at best, but maybe I can still risk more questions? Learn about the power he wields and the rules that bind it?

I roll onto my side, leaving nothing but an inch between our faces, warm breaths mingling in the air. “The farm girl. Kael’s distant scrap of

blood.”

“What of her?”

“Did you kill her?”

“This again?” Again that shift in his jaw, barely there, but I catch it. “I cannot take a life like that.”

“You told me as much, but who knows?” I shift in the grave, the movement sending a small cascade of dirt down from the grave’s edge, but it mostly sprinkles on him. “You’re Death. It’s in the title.”

“Do you really think I busy myself with mixing poisons or pushing old men down stairs?”

I look at the dirt on the velvet of his collar, Corvin’s voice murmuring through my skull. He desires you. Use it. My pulse rises into my throat, but I simply let it pound there. Death is a man, he said so himself, and I now

understand what it takes to seduce one.

After all, he taught me.

I reach out, fingertips slowly brushing the dirt off his collar. “If it suits your plans.”

Vale hesitates, eyes narrowing, flecks of gold catching in the gray light.

“I am not a plague. I am not a blade. I am not the hand that pushes a child into a river.” His voice turns colder. “I am merely the one who collects the soul.”

Daron’s soul, and that thought drives a shiver along my arms. “You’re making yourself sound pretty innocent, considering you created a curse that’s killing thousands over the death of one ferryman. Even if he was your friend.”

His jaw clenches and unclenches. “Innocence is a mortal invention…as is guilt. I don’t decide how much sand is in a mortal’s hourglass—though I might tap it a little.”

I slide my fingers from his collar to the sharp line of his jaw, feeling for stubble where I only find polished river stone. “Tap?”

Vale’s throat works once beneath my hand, a swallow that shouldn’t matter and somehow does. His pupils flick to my fingers on his jaw, then slide back to my eyes with that lazy, infuriating calm he wears when he’s deciding whether something will be amusing or merely tedious.

“I can…nudge.” His exhale comes with the slightest weight pressing into my fingers, almost as if he’s sinking into my touch without wanting to make it too obvious. “Hours. A day. Rarely more. I can stretch a fraying

thread a little, or pull it taut so it snaps sooner—if it was going to snap, anyway.”

In an instant, images of a cherry-red splotch running down porcelain skip before my mind. “The library scribe.”

“He was so close to his end, it took minimal effort.” His tone is bored, but his body isn’t. Not with how his breathing quickens the longer I trace his jaw. “I merely made a slight…adjustment.”

Adjustment. I file the information away, alongside the hint that he can probably bring back the dead. Every limitation he admits to is a crack in an armor I’ll eventually have to pierce.

I slide my touch to his cheek, letting my thumb trace the corner of his mouth. “What happened to her, then? The farm girl.”

“What happened to her is that she will remain a farm girl,” he murmurs, his gaze sliding to my lips before it finds my eyes again. “And you will remain queen in her stead.”

The words land too neatly, too knowingly, to be casual. In her stead.

My thumb stills at the corner of his mouth, and for a heartbeat, the grave feels even narrower, the air thicker—because that’s not the language of a god who stumbled into a trap. Kael may have fooled him in the throne room, but Vale is not stupid. Oh yes, he knows exactly what Kael meant to

do.

What I am meaning to do in her stead.

I trace my fingers up along his cheek, slow enough that he could stop me if he wanted. He doesn’t. He lets my fingertips find his hair, those too- neat curls damp at the roots from the fog. I comb through them gently, then my fingers drift to his mouth, thumb tracing his lower lip.

He stays perfectly still, allowing the touch, but a dark, taunting smile curls the corner of his mouth against my skin. “Trying to distract me from that wish, little queen?”

“Is it working?” My thumb pads at his bottom lip like one would at a blade to test if it cuts, fingertips tingling with how fast my pulse grows.

“Maybe I’m just curious.”

He chuckles, but there’s a mean, vicious edge to it. “Curious.”

His hands shoot up, clamping around my wrists with bruising force. In one fluid, terrifying motion, he wrenches my arms up, pinning them into the dirt on either side of my crown. He rolls, his weight crushing the air from my belly, his hardness pressing against me.

“Curious!” he spits, the amusement gone, replaced by a gaze that burns cold enough to freeze blood. “Or cunning?” He dips his head, his nose brushing against mine, his voice dropping to a lethal whisper. “Do you think I don’t know what you’re doing? The seduction. The luring.” He tilts his head, his lips hovering inches from mine, tantalizingly close. “You think you can beckon me into your bed and make me vulnerable enough to bleed over that crown? Little queen, I won’t give you the reaction you seek.”

I buck my hips. It’s a brazen, reckless move, grinding the center of me straight up against the hardness straining beneath his trousers. “I don’t know, but something sure is reacting.”

“A biological imperative,” he snarls, pressing down harder to stop me from moving, which only increases the friction. “A flaw of the human form.

Do not mistake this as any progress on your goal, Elara, for I could fuck you right here, and it would merely be an itch scratched.”

“Then do it,” I challenge, lifting my chin. “Scratch the itch.”

He stares at me, chest heaving, sense warring with sensuality.

“Infuriating woman!”

He crashes his mouth down on mine.

It’s not a kiss. It’s a collision.

It’s teeth and tongue and a hunger so ancient it feels like it might swallow me whole. He devours me, his grip on my wrists tightening until I’m sure I’ll have bruises in the shape of his fingers. I kiss him back with equal desperation, arching into him, using the slide of our bodies to fuel the fire.

We grind against each other, the wool and velvet creating a maddening

barrier.

This better count… “Has it occurred to you,” he pants, his voice rougher with each grinding stroke, “that your beloved Kael was wrong? That whatever fairytale logic you depend on is nothing but the hopeful scribbles of a desperate man?”

For a split second, doubt blooms cold in my chest. What if he was wrong? What if I’m debasing myself, stripping my pride raw in a muddy grave, for a solution that doesn’t exist? But then, why is he so damn angry?

No, this is the way.

I yank my hands free. Before he can stop me, I shove my skirts up. Cool air hits my thighs, followed by the searing heat of his weight. I reach between us, my hand fumbling with the fastening of his trousers.

“Elara…” he warns, but his hips betray him, pushing forward into my hand.

I only get two buttons undone. It doesn’t matter. I shove my hand inside, fingers wrapping around the velvet-hot steel of him. Come on… “I want you inside me.” I tug, struggling against the tight fabric, managing to free only the head of his cock before the waistband traps him again. “Please.”

He groans, a broken, desperate sound as his head drops, his resistance crumbling. “No…”

I lift my leg, hooking it around his back with a yank toward me.

“Vale…”

“Damn you, Elara!” He rubs the exposed head of his cock against the damp silk of my undergarments, finding the seam, finding the friction.

“Fuck…”

“Inside!” I cry out, frustrated, bucking up, trying to capture him. “Put it inside!”

Vale humps me more frantically, a rhythm born of pure, unadulterated need. It’s messy and desperate, the friction searing through the thin fabric. I claw at his coat, trying to pull him down, trying to force the alignment, but he’s too strong. Too fucking stubborn.

He slams his hips against mine once, twice, harder— And then, with a guttural shout, he unravels.

I feel the heat of it, wet and sudden, spilling over my stomach, over the cotton, soaking into my underdress, but never touching the inside of me. He shudders, his forehead collapsing onto my shoulder, his breathing loud and harsh in the quiet grave.

He lifts his head, looking at the mess between us—the wasted seed pooling on my skin. And he laughs, a dark, dry sound.

He rises, adjusting his clothing, leaving me exposed and sticky and unfulfilled. “Close,” he whispers, the mockery returning to his eyes, though they’re still glassy.

I shove my skirts down, fury igniting in my chest like a flame tossed onto straw. “You fucking bastard!”

“Hardly.” He straightens his coat, chin adopting an arrogant tilt, and turns to place a boot on the wall of the grave. “You gave me permission to scratch an itch, so I scratched it.”

“My wish!” I shout when he readies to hoist himself up, leaving me covered in the proof of his mockery. “Is for you to marry me!”

Vale freezes. His boot slides off the clay. He stands there, staring at the wall of dirt mere inches from his nose. Slowly, painfully slowly, he turns back around. The mockery is gone. In its place is a stillness so profound it feels like the air has been sucked out of the grave.

“What?”

“You heard me.” I scramble to my feet, ignoring the dampness clinging to my body, the trembling in my legs. “You will become my husband.”

The air crackles. The temperature drops ten degrees in a heartbeat, frost instantly blooming on the roots protruding from the grave walls.

“You dare?” Vale’s face twists, his lips curling back from his teeth. “Of all the things you could ask for—gold to fill this pit, an end to your brother’s pain, perhaps even a resurrection once he finally rots—you try to chain me?”

A jagged line of darkness splits his cheek, revealing the gleaming white of a skeletal jaw. The green of one eye doesn’t just darken; it rots away, dissolving into a hollow socket. He flickers—man, Death, man—as if his godly rage can’t be contained by human skin.

“I will not bind myself to a mortal!” he roars, the sound letting dirt rill off the walls. “I am eternal! I will not play house with a fleeting spark of life that will burn out before I even blink!”

“You have to!” I shout back, fear warring with a wild, desperate hope.

His hostility…it’s too much. It’s too defensive. If marriage meant nothing in this, he would laugh. He would agree and let me age and die while he

watched, bored.

But he’s furious.

“I refuse!”

“You can’t refuse!” I step into his space, chest heaving, adrenaline flooding my veins. “Does it interfere with another wish? No! Does it break the direct wording of the curse? No!” I shout, breathless. “Does Death keep his word?”

He flinches. The supernatural rage falters, hitting the immovable wall of his own rules. The black fades from his eyes. Pallid skin weaves over bone.

Then, a cruel, twisted smile slices across his face.

He leans in, his lips brushing my ear, cold as the grave itself. “Fine,” he whispers, the word a scratching sound against my skin. “I grant your wish. I

will marry you.” He pulls back to look at me, and the malice in his gaze makes me want to scream. “I will play your husband for twenty, maybe thirty miserable years. I will watch you wrinkle. I will watch your beauty rot. And when that last kernel of sand finally drops”—his hand comes up, gripping the back of my neck, not tenderly, but like a master claiming a hound—“I will take your soul, and I will drag it down to the deepest, darkest pit.”