Chapter 77

Ronan's POV

Tamsin told me I looked nervous.

I told her to leave.

She did not. "You have fought rogues, founder guards, your own command architecture, and a seventy-year-old Chancellor with a knife."

"Severin is not seventy."

"That is what you are correcting?"

"It is easier." Lucien was sitting on my desk eating the food Maeve had ordered me to consume before the ceremony.

"I think the problem is that Mara can actually say no."

Cross said it lightly, but the truth of it settled my nerves better than reassurance would have. Mara could say no. She had another territory that would welcome her, work she could do without me, a mother she had found again, allies who respected her, and enough pow