The Lure of Their Graves: Book two of The Cursed Crown series (The Cursed Crown Duology, Band 2) - Softcover

Buch 2 von 2: The Cursed Crown Duology

Samotin, Laura R.

 
9781039007611: The Lure of Their Graves: Book two of The Cursed Crown series (The Cursed Crown Duology, Band 2)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1039007619 ISBN 13: 9781039007611
Verlag: Random House of Canada, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

In the heart-wrenching sequel to The Sins on Their Bones, The Lure of Their Graves forces Dimitri and Vasily to confront old ghosts and a new threat: political enemies-turned-suitors, all coveting Dimitri’s throne and his hand in marriage.

A crown reclaimed. A lover at risk. A kingdom on the edge of ruin.

Dimitri Abramovich may have won back the throne of Novo-Svitsevo, but even after defeating his former husband, the usurper Alexey Balakin, he seems no closer to securing lasting peace for his people. Enemies are closing in on all sides, and pressure is mounting for Dimitri to play the one card he has left in a bid for stability—offering his hand in marriage for a second time.

But Dimitri is still healing from the tragedies of the war, his return to the throne, and Alexey's years of torment. Vasily Sokolov is the only person with whom he feels safe, and giving up the comfort of their budding relationship feels unfathomable, even if it's the only way to sever the alliances being formed among the countries surrounding Novo-Svitsevo. So as Dimitri and Vasily reckon with political treachery, the lasting consequences of Dimitri's resurrection, and the sinister legacy of Alexey’s use of the Holy Science, they must also work to understand what it means to love each other even as they prepare to let each other go—which might prove the most difficult of all.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

LAURA R. SAMOTIN and her spouse live with two enormously large felines. When she’s not pursuing her academic research on military tactics, power politics, and leadership, she relishes her role as a full-time cat servant.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

ONE

Dimitri


Dimitri Abramovich pulled a fur blanket tighter around his bare shoulders, shivering in Rav-Mikhailburg’s deep winter chill.

He stared at the ceiling, his body leaden and his heart pounding against his ribs. Vasily was fast asleep, his arm thrown protectively across Dimitri’s lap. He hadn’t allowed Dimitri to sleep alone since they’d been reunited, and Dimitri was more grateful for it than he ever could have expressed. He hadn’t even needed to ask. Vasily had simply known.

The fire crackled in the corner of the room, the light casting shadows through the gap in the bed’s curtains, which they really should have drawn tighter to keep in the warmth but never did. Dimitri had had to dash out of bed one too many times, to retch into the sink in their bathroom, for them to fully close themselves in.

The gap provided enough light for Dimitri to see the cards he held in his shaking fingers.

He got stacks of them each day; embossed visiting cards with the names of nobles or foreign dignitaries who were seeking audiences with the Tzar. Ladushka would hand them over in the order in which she’d arranged the meetings. They meant nothing more than what his day would look like. He didn’t even need to take them, really—Ladushka just knew he liked to admire the stationery.

This time, though, three of them were different.

Three of them had portraits sketched on the back.

A beautiful woman with long hair and a knowing look in her eyes. A curly-haired man with a kind smile and a square jaw. An androgenous person with a curtain of hair threaded with jewels and a shrewd, sharp expression on their narrow face.

Aziza Timurova.

Lukas Marks.

Yullyan Sakvin.

The names that Ladushka had offered him along with these cards were seared into his memory. Three ways to avoid another war. Three ways to save his people. Mere weeks to act before someone else made a move and it was too late.

He shuffled the cards forward and backwards, as if that would make this better. As if there was anything that could make this better.

Vasily twitched next to him, mumbling something in his sleep, and Dimitri quickly slid the three offending cards into the middle of the pile, rubbing his thumbnail across the edges. He tried to breathe past the mounting panic, but it wasn’t helping.

Not when he kept looking down at the cards in his hand, and then at the man sleeping next to him.

The tonic that Mischa made for him had lifted the cloud that had hung over his mind since the war, but in the months since Alexey’s death, Dimitri wondered if maybe even medication wasn’t enough to fix what was wrong with him. He put down the cards for a moment and reached for the bottle of pills he kept stashed under the pillow, popping the cork with his thumb. He had been exhausted every day—they’d all been—but he’d felt settled. Crawling into bed with Vasily every night had been a balm and a blessing, and he had felt steady for the first time since leaving Alexey’s side. But then it had all come creeping back in around the edges; nightmares about Alexey and what Dimitri had done, fear of what was coming, the knowledge that these shreds of peace he’d gathered up and pulled around himself like armor would never be able to last.

The pill leached the taste of raspberry and sugar under his tongue and took away some of the reflexive impulse that he still fought against to find a bottle of vodka. He focused on counting Vasily’s breaths, feeling the expansion of his ribs and the shift of his hips in his sleep, constantly seeking the closest contact he could with Dimitri even when he was unconscious. And instead of being here and focusing on the now, instead of grasping the moment that they’d all fought so hard for him to have, he was wasting it by falling apart.

He reached down and picked up the cards again, thumbing through them, balancing the stack against his dead arm so that he could flip through the three with portraits over and over.

Which of them would end up claiming him for their own?

Vasily would’ve gotten a line in between his eyebrows and demanded to know why Dimitri hadn’t woken him if his anxiety was building to a fever pitch, but Dimitri wasn’t about to interrupt yet another night’s sleep for Vasily. The spymaster was working more than any of them, flat out from the time he woke up until late into the night, his only break the time he spent wolfing down food or in bed with Dimitri. His court all spent so much time taking care of him, and what he was able to do for them paled in comparison.

He wanted to make sure they were safe forever, and he knew deep down in his heart that such a thing was impossible. That it wasn’t a promise he could make. That even though he had returned from the dead for them, even though he would give his life again for them, he didn’t have the power to change the whole world to ensure they never got hurt.

Especially since, to keep them all safe, he’d have to break Vasily’s heart. And his own.

A map of the continent was burned into his memory, along with the pins that Ladushka had stuck in three countries. Urushka. The Free States. Atreus.

Neighbors, potential enemies, possible allies. Ladushka had laid out the reality of their situation, her flaxen hair in a severe twist and her mouth pressed into a thin line. The Urushkins to the east—with their notoriously arid soil—were their biggest problem, with border incursions reported almost daily, a test to see how good their defenses were and whether a breach would go unnoticed long enough for an invading force to seize the agriculturally rich far east of Novo-Svitsevo. The likelihood that he would be able to muster a full force to defend their extensive border was slim, not when the army was still decimated from the war, but that land provided too much grain to lose, and if he allowed it to be taken without a fight, it would only invite the same from other enemies.

Like the Free States. His father had always doubted that the republic to their south would ever invade—it was too small and too rich to want to bother—but Vasily’s rebuilt spy network had intercepted messages from the president of the republic to the reclusive monarchy of Atreus, setting the stage for a request for a military alliance.

And why would they need that if not to exploit the instability of their neighbor to the north? Economic growth frequently begat military expansion because money could pile only so high before it spread outwards and pushed at borders. Here Novo-Svitsevo sat, not even two years out from a devastating civil war, with an unstable throne and a dead Tzar come back to life, full of resources that could be an asset to economic development. Full of metals and minerals that could make bombs—or anything else.

And full of practitioners of the Holy Science, a country with the kinds of knowledge that Atreus—with its closely held yet notorious manufacture of the magic that Alexey had unleashed on Novo-Svitsevo—was rumored to deeply covet. There were whispers that the monarchy consorted with demons, just as Alexey had done. And if magic required human conduits, there was now no other country with a populace more willing and able to serve. An invasion would absorb a resource of Novo-Svitsevo’s that the Free States had no use for, but together in an alliance with Atreus, they could leech Dimitri’s country dry.

Ladushka had laid it out for him in the same stark tones she always did, not masking her concern and desperation. And then she told him that there were three possible ways out.

All of them involved him...

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Verlag
Random House of Canada
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1039007619
ISBN 13 
9781039007611
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
449
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Yeepin GmbH
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