Ronan Hale:
It's been three weeks since the King died, and somehow, the world hasn't stopped surprising me.
I'm sitting in the old throne room—well, our throne room now, if you can believe it. Lucien insisted that since he's the King's son, the castle is rightfully his. He said it almost as a joke at first, but none of us laughed, and then we realized… it's true. This place is ours. We won it. We earned it.
At first, I was wary. This was the King's lair—the place of so many horrors, so many atrocities. But Lucien said, "If I leave it empty, someone else might fill it with darkness again." And he was right. Better for us to take it, to cleanse it of its past. So we moved in.
It's bigger than anything I've ever seen—grand halls, winding corridors, entire wings I haven't even explored yet. And servants—human servants.
Turns out the King liked to keep humans around, probably to feed on whenever he wanted. That idea still makes my stomach twist.
