A Spare, a Bride Nobody Asked, and a Whole Lot of Formalwear
Friends. It's happening. What the Crown Costs, Book 2 of the Sorvaine Series, lands on 18 September 2026, and I have been sitting on this one like a dragon on a very emotionally repressed pile of gold.
If Book 1 was about a man learning to want something, Book 2 is about a man learning what he's worth — which is a much more expensive lesson, and this book makes him pay for it.
Meet Lucien: Crown Prince of Sorvaine, professional second-place finisher, holder of a title he'll have to hand back the moment his brother has kids. He has spent thirty years being the guy who stands very correctly in rooms and hating every second of it. He is precise. He is shy in the way that reads as cold. He owns exactly one pair of reading glasses and uses them like a shield.
Enter the arranged marriage. Enter Isabelle Vauclaire.
Here's the setup, and this is as far as I'll spoil you: the crown has a Vauclaire-shaped political problem, and the tidiest solution is to marry Isabelle Vauclaire — originally promised to Julian — to Lucien instead. So Isabelle gets passed from one brother to the next like a serving dish nobody remembers to ask about. Lucien assumes she's furious about the demotion. He is wrong, and watching him be wrong for several hundred pages is, frankly, the treat I'm offering you. She's not angry about the outcome. She's angry about how it happened. Nobody ever asked her. Not once.
The whole thing turns on a simple mix-up between two people who won't say the true thing out loud. He thinks she resents him. She resents being handed around. And the part where it finally comes right — the actual, earned, makes-you-put-the-book-down part — only comes when this careful, walled-off man figures out that the one thing he can do that nobody else in her life ever has is simply ask.
Also there's a wedding. A coronation. European tabloids being absolutely feral about the whole family. A Formula 1 brother blowing through town between races and clocking everything in about four seconds. A little sister who tells her brother she loves him and never once waits for him to say it back, because she doesn't need to.
A few things I can promise you about this book:
- Yes, it's a slow burn. Yes, I'm on record saying I don't even like slow burn. That's two books in a row now, which means either I'm a liar or these characters simply refuse to hurry, and honestly it's probably both. It starts, of all places, in the archives — two nerds bonding over medieval sovereign history before they'll admit to bonding over anything.
- Isabelle is composed the way a locked door is composed. When she finally opens, you'll understand why it took the whole book.
- Lucien contains multitudes. He is not just the quiet, careful version everyone sees — he's dry and funny and lights up about his research and is unbearably gentle with his little sister. I refuse to flatten this man and I'd appreciate it if you didn't either.
- The brothers. Oh, the brothers. That rift from Book 1 does not magically heal. It shifts, it aches, and it gets its reckoning — and it's about far more than either of them realized.
You do not strictly need to have read Book 1 to fall into this one, but you'll get more out of every glance and every silence if you have. And if you've been with me since Julian and Imogen — thank you. This family has completely taken over my life and I regret nothing.
Mark your calendars: 18 September 2026. Preorders, teasers, and me yelling about my own book are all incoming.
Come meet Lucien. He'd never say so, but he really needs the company.